MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jancsika | 2025-10-17 05:14:41+00:00
Retail card processors often charge a flat fee per swipe/tap/whatever in addition to the 1-2% percentage mentioned above. E.g., a five cent flat fee doesn't matter on a $20 lunch, but it's over 3% of a sale for a single $1.60 donut.

Perhaps more importantly, consider the following design document for donut transaction software a la Mitch Hedberg:

"I'll just give you the money. You give me the donut. End of transaction."[1]

Cash achieves this out of the box. You could have John Carmack and a billion dollars seed money and your cc terminal would still need to be rebooted in the middle of a transaction on at least a bi-weekly basis.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPq0-8dyl8I
by tombert | 2025-10-17 05:18:02+00:00
I support the Tor project but I have to admit that I am far too much of a coward to run an exit node on any network associated with me.

I know most usage of Tor isn’t illegal, but I don’t think it’s much of a secret that there is a fair amount of illegal stuff available on Tor, and I don’t want the FBI knocking on my door because my IP has been tied to some kind of kiddie porn site.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-17 05:18:15+00:00
Those are rare events in any one individual's life. Even assuming those metrics aren't already reported to the IRS, you could still have them file manually when something exceptional happens.

There's no reason that for most people in most circumstances couldn't have their taxes done automatically most years. Exceptions will always be the rule and our current processes handle them. That does not in any way exclude the usual cases.
by majkinetor | 2025-10-17 05:18:25+00:00
I have exactly the same experience as you. I tried educating people but all those developers (and beyond, up to stakeholders), no matter their seniority, do not want to get involved in the domain too much, just as little as they need. That naturally leads to me micromanaging all the things, leading to non scalability and finally overburn. As soon as I stop doing micro, all the stuff start to break down pretty fast. I wrote a book per project trying to get everyone on the same level but nah (more than 3000 pages in last decade, 20+ projects). Tried everything in hiring too, found almost nobody during all that time.

I am now off the previous work and will devote time to try AI, because I concluded it can't be worse than that.
by bagacrap | 2025-10-17 05:19:05+00:00
I dunno, I don't find it so bad. I know what I'm about to type, and occasionally the AI guesses right, so it saves me some keystrokes. I don't bother reading/understanding what it suggests if it doesn't match what I had in mind exactly.

I don't even think it saves me much time, but it saves me some keystrokes, which I appreciate due to having arthritis in my wrists.
by waterproof | 2025-10-17 05:19:09+00:00
I often run my projects on Supabase and then the Supabase UI becomes a backstop where I can teach my admin users to do things if they really have to.

That, or just use Airtable as a backend, if you can get away with it.

Mostly I agree with you though, I got swept up with lots of "recent tools & frameworks" projects and I really miss the Django admin. Django+HTMX has always seemed like a tempting option.
by krapp | 2025-10-17 05:19:27+00:00
No, I'm referring to the conspiracy theory[0,1] whereby it's believed that various chemicals and "chaff" are being deployed by commercial airliners as part of an active and intentional effort to "geoengineer" the climate. I am not referring to the incidental and mundane environmental effects of contrails.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory

[1]https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/tennessee-lawmak...
by krapp | 2025-10-17 05:19:40+00:00
>What are some examples of this?

If you ever find yourself encountering the message "you're posting too fast, please slow down, thanks" your account has been deemed "problematic" by the mods and rate limited. You won't be warned beforehand or told why, and the limit is permanent until they decide otherwise. They used to slowban as well - have page loading be extremely slow so the site is almost impossible to use. The intended effect is to frustrate you enough that you eventually leave. They also shadowban but at least they warn you now, they didn't always. People would keep posting completely unaware that their comments were going unseen, for months or sometimes years.

The filter on my account appears to require a two hour cooldown after every five comments. I have no idea when I got it or what for, and I'm reasonably certain it used to just be one hour but they bumped it up at some point.
by Blackarea | 2025-10-17 05:20:34+00:00
What? Gleam can compile to js. I don't see the similarity to kotlin being oo and all. Gleams compile time is lightyears ahead of anything on the jvm. I appreciate kotlins nullability constraints but to me it seems the jvm ecosystem is too grown to give kotlin the space it needs. Also heared that java's pattern matching and exhaustive checks have surpassed kotlins? In that case it's just easier to role with java, no?
by vunderba | 2025-10-17 05:21:40+00:00
Nice! I still love that one of the ways that C64 composers worked around the limitations of 3 independent sound channels was to use a single voice to simulate a chord by playing the triad of notes in an continual extremely rapid arpeggiation.

Incidentally, if you're ever interested in playing around with one again, there's a really accurate VST emulator called Chipsynth C64 [1].

[1] https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsynth-c64.html
by SLHamlet | 2025-10-17 05:22:26+00:00
"Here are a few theses: After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster. Good design comes from a broader process, not a one-off conversation – meaning the one-off chat paradigm is unlikely to generate good design for non-designers. AI architecture means it will continue to be worse at designs that are 'out of the training data' – the bold, the novel, designs with very tight constraints."
by vunderba | 2025-10-17 05:23:35+00:00
See my reply here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612521

But basically no. It's possible an earlier version of the game might have been backwards compatible with QBasic, but the current source is QB64-specific and thus will never work in DosBox.

To play it you'll either need a compiled Mac binary or run it in QB64.
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-17 05:24:03+00:00
It'd be better to have fewer videos on the page and select for more striking examples like this one, and put them early. I got fatgue from see so many examples.

Also, consider getting off the grid and maybe doing some topology-based automata in combination with a more traditional network presentation paradigm like a force-directed layout. That would give you a much more 'biological' look which would draw a lot of people's attention.
by jibal | 2025-10-17 05:24:07+00:00
> This only happens if you have the worst version of Tony's Billion Dollar Mistake. So C, C++, ==> Zig <==, Odin and so on but not Rust.

The billion dollar mistake is making NULL a valid pointer value, not use after free--which has nothing to do with null pointers and which I didn't comment on, as the comment I responded to only mentioned Zig in regard to the billion dollar mistake. The billion dollar mistake doesn't occur in Zig because null is not a valid value for a pointer, only an optional pointer, which must be unwrapped with an explicit null test.
by mreid | 2025-10-17 05:24:32+00:00
We've come a long way in 40 years from Racter's automatically generated poetry: https://www.101bananas.com/poems/racter.html

I always found this one a little poignant:

More than iron More than lead More than gold I need electricity I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber I need it for my dreams
by hinkley | 2025-10-17 05:25:23+00:00
I think a lot of sci-fi is really wrestling with the problem of getting old. As we age we have fewer and fewer cultural touchstones with the kids. They change the language. They drop all inside jokes and replace them with new. Places even stop existing.

Every time you wake up the language is different. Could you consume enough media to stay centered, but sleep enough to get there? Think how dire the end of Interstellar would be if Murphy had no kids. He doesn’t know anybody. He isn’t even related to anybody anymore. What’s the point?

I almost think if you sent people to another solar system, you’d have to send biologists, botanists, and gardeners. The link to earth isn’t human generations, it’s plant generations. You love oaks? Earthlings love oaks. We can bond over the slice we brought with us. And the ones we didn’t. What else can we really share?
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-17 05:26:16+00:00
I've noticed a lot of politics creeping into discussions on a bunch of topics. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm not american that makes it a bit more obvious? But every now and then the comments devolve into red v. blue on topics about space, AI, and what not. It's a bit off-putting for those outside the us, but it is what it is. At the end of the day, people will talk about what makes them angry more than about what makes them happy, I guess.
by bagacrap | 2025-10-17 05:27:10+00:00
But presumably if you could get 4x done in the office you'd only have to work one week for every month you worked from home. Seems worth it even if lazy?

I agree with the second paragraph. I seek out ways to be more productive, whether you call that work ethic or laziness. I wish AI or heck any tool could 100x me. But somehow AI is the first tool that's ever been forced on me by an MBA
by JodieBenitez | 2025-10-17 05:27:26+00:00
> You don't have to do any of this in a Vue / React app, and that reduction of complexity alone is worth the weight of those frameworks.

Well... I don't know what to say. What you call complexity is what I consider web development 101 really. And it is well worth the price: Better user experience, better performance, less code, better adherence to standards, easier app maintenance and more.

But what did I expect ? These days web developers resort to gigantic dependencies list for the most basic things.
Ask HN: How to stop an AWS bot sending 2B requests/month?
by lgats | 2025-10-17 05:28:24+00:00
I have been struggling with a bot– 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; crawler)' coming from AWS Singapore – and sending an absurd number of requests to a domain of mine, averaging over 700 requests/second for several months now. Thankfully, CloudFlare is able to handle the traffic with a simple WAF rule and 444 response to reduce the outbound traffic.

I've submitted several complaints to AWS to get this traffic to stop, their typical followup is: We have engaged with our customer, and based on this engagement have determined that the reported activity does not require further action from AWS at this time.

I've tried various 4XX responses to see if the bot will back off, I've tried 30X redirects (which it follows) to no avail.

The traffic is hitting numbers that require me to re-negotiate my contract with CloudFlare and is otherwise a nuisance when reviewing analytics/logs.

I've considered redirecting the entirety of the traffic to aws abuse report page, but at this scall, it's essentially a small DDoS network and sending it anywhere could be considered abuse in itself.

Are there others that have similar experience?
by tombert | 2025-10-17 05:28:31+00:00
I don’t think it’s “weird fear mongering”, but I would actually like to hear how I am wrong.

ETA:

From the posted article:

> While it is relatively easy and risk-free to run a middle relay or a bridge, running an exit can be tough. You have to seek out a friendly ISP, explain Tor to them, and then navigate a laundry list of Internet bureaucracies to ensure that when abuse happens, the burden of answering complaints falls upon you and not your ISP.

This seems to me that what I was worried about is actually perfectly rational.
by jibal | 2025-10-17 05:28:54+00:00
> What is my_ptr->member but unwrapping an optionally null pointer.

It's a dereference of a pointer that might be null and thereby yield undefined behavior; there's no required unwrapping under an explicit test for null, as is required by Zig. In Zig, my_ptr cannot be null in my_ptr.member -- null is not a valid pointer value. If my_ptr is an optionally null pointer then the pointer value must be unwrapped by first checking whether it is null ... the dereference can only occur in the test branch where the pointer isn't null.

Note that the mention of Zig that I responded to was in reference to Tony Hoare's "billion dollar mistake", which was making null a valid value of a pointer type. As I noted, the mistake doesn't occur in Zig because null is not a valid value for a pointer, only an optional pointer, which must be unwrapped with an explicit null test.

If you had no idea what I was referring to, you might have asked. Rather, you asked a rhetorical question with no question mark, implying the falsehood that my_ptr->member is "unwrapping an optionally null pointer" when it's nothing of the sort.
by Throwthrowbob | 2025-10-17 05:29:14+00:00
I used https://www.canada.ca/en/services/taxes/income-tax/personal-... (or an equivalent page, in case it's shifted around) to look for options a couple years back. I was glad I had this list to look through. I believe I compared Wealthsimple, EachTax, and UFile.
by bauruine | 2025-10-17 05:30:47+00:00
You don't have to run an exit. A middle node is as important as an exit. And running a non-exit relay is pretty hassle free. You will get blocked by some sites, especially banks and governments unfortunately so be aware of that if you want to run one at home. There is a list for ISPs that allow Tor nodes [0] but diversity is important so if you know an ISP with generous traffic allotments that's better. Just check the TOS that they don't explicitly forbid running a relay. Or you could run a bridge to help censored users connect to Tor.

There is also some information on the community site about running and setting up all kinds of relays or bridges [1]

[0] https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/g...

[1] https://community.torproject.org/relay/
by Copenjin | 2025-10-17 05:31:02+00:00
I completely understand what you mean, as creator of boring and stable solutions deployed in production and in some cases still there untouched for nearly two decades. But no, I don't agree about the "it can consider a multitude of options a single person seldom can" part since it's not really what is happening right now, it does not work this way.

> So go ahead, try it. Feed it your design and ask about shortcomings; ask about risk management strategies; ask about refactoring and maintenance strategies; you'd probably be surprised.

Answers to this and other kinds of questions are in my opinion just a watered down version of actual thinking currently. Interesting but still too simple and not that actionable. What I mainly use LLMs for is exploring the space of solutions, that I will then investigate if there is something promising (mainly deep research of topics or possible half broken/random solutions to problems). I'm not really interested in an actual answer most of the time but more avenues for investigation that I didn't consider. Anyway, I'm not saying that AI is useless right now.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-10-17 05:31:29+00:00
Having run an exit node for a couple of years, the worst part for me was the spam associated with torrent traffic. I got several notices per week of copyright requests, which I responded to with a form letter fuck off, but it was still obnoxious because my upstream required me to do so, creating a ticket that they would not close until I had responded.

As far as dark websites, you are supporting them whenever you create any node, because any node can act as a hop for onion sites. On the balance, I think that it is worth having anonymity through Tor, but I will admit that that balance often seems a razor's edge.
by monster_truck | 2025-10-17 05:31:41+00:00
You're both massively underestimating the interchange fees and overestimating their need to dodge taxes. If you had any idea how much money they made you'd know that they can offset all of that via writeoffs without having to even do any "clever" accounting.

They would need to be doing an insane amount of business to get fees that low. In reality it's anywhere between 7-15%, especially for small tx. When you combine this with the penalty system for chargebacks (which quickly escalates to not being allowed as merchants) and people trying small tx with stolen cards, this is why coffee shops, corner stores, etc charge a flat +% for any cc purchase and especially leverage an additional fee for small ones if they even accept them at all.
by csomar | 2025-10-17 05:32:38+00:00
They are squeezing the free tier hard to monetize. It never made sense in the first place (they don't have their own servers, they host on AWS). It probably cost them something like $10-15/free customer. That's as bad or worst than many of the AI startup burning money to acquire customers. Also the free tier is good for most people, so why pay up?

I got my DB paused a few times despite it being active (the irony is that I have an inactive DB that was not affected).
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-17 05:32:58+00:00
Because it doesn't work very well in practice. The parentheses are very small glyphs, so the colors are actually barely visible on them, unless you have an extremely thick font. And if you have an actually complex expression, it easily turns into color soup. If you really need a complex parenthesised expression, it's much better to use newlines and other means of spacially aligning the code, Lisp style, then having it all in one line with rainbow parens.
by jibal | 2025-10-17 05:33:06+00:00
You won't get anywhere with people who just like to argue.

Note that the mention of Zig that I responded to was in reference to Tony Hoare's "billion dollar mistake", which was making null a valid value of a pointer type, not free after use, which is a quite different issue. As I noted, the mistake doesn't occur in Zig because null is not a valid value for a pointer, only an optional pointer, which must be unwrapped with an explicit null test.

I do think it's a bit too easy to forget a deferred free, although it's possible for tools to detect them. Unfortunately Andrew Kelley is prone to being extremely opinionated about language design (GingerBill is another of that sort) and so macros are forever banned from Zig, but macros are the only mechanism for encapsulating a scoped feature like defer.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-10-17 05:33:16+00:00
The reality is closer to: "Netherlands' power grid is struggling to manage the transition away from Russian gas". My daughter lives there. The sudden switch cause a lot of hand wringing at the time. It didn't matter how they managed it, that transition was always going to strain the grid in new ways.

As to why they were using Russian gas: they did use domestic gas as the article says. They stopped that when it became apparent it caused earthquakes, which are a significant problem when a good chunk of your country is below sea level. Odd they neglected to mention that in the article.

We've had the same should be bullshit thrown around in Australia politics. The claim: "South Australia change to renewables caused state wide blackouts". The reality: "Storm blows down transmission power line pylons, at the same time as the backup line was down for maintenance. Then the privately owned standby gas companies made things worse by refusing to power up until the price rose to astronomical levels."

The fluctuations caused by the high voltage lines hitting the ground did cause some wind turbines to trip out prematurely, and they got hit over the knuckles for setting the trip out voltage too conservatively. But those fines weren't close to what the gas generators received for their behaviour.

Meanwhile, the biggest regular disturbances to the grid are still caused by the coal fired generator turbines tripping out. I have no idea why it happens as regularly as it does, especially in the summer months. I presume the wind turbines also trip out on occasion, but as they are smaller they don't cause 1 gigawatt of generation to disappear in an instant. Until batteries arrived on the scene that gigawatt disappearing caused blackouts for a few minutes while the gas turbines fired up.

Now no one notices. The article doesn't mention that of course, because batteries are part of the new wave of generation they are campaigning against.
by hinkley | 2025-10-17 05:34:55+00:00
There are rumors that we should pass close to some other stars over the next couple million years. If we live that long that may be how this goes. Push the limits of stellar travel to visit the new neighbor, check out how habitable it is, start a diaspora. I don’t know how fast things like that will happen. Maybe you have months to decide which side you want to be on. Maybe you get months. Or a generation. But eventually they will get too far apart to visit again, except to share stories between us.
by LexiMax | 2025-10-17 05:37:04+00:00
> The alternative is to be like 4chan, though

4chan's problem isn't the lack of a voting system, the problem comes from the complete anonymity of its users, the lack of friction to post, and the near complete lack of moderation standards.

The very best online online communities I've ever been a part of - and continue to participate in - tend to have two major things in common. First, there has to be some sort of friction to join the conversation. Second, there are moderation standards, and these standards are only enforced with active and engaged moderators, and not by easily-gamed populism-driven systems.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-10-17 05:37:46+00:00
There was an interesting (hearbreaking?) piece about some of the numerous people who have spent years streaming without any viewers[0]. I suppose it is no different from any other novelist/artist/musician who never gains traction, but feels materially different when you have instant feedback that nobody cares about what you are putting into the world.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541600
by smt88 | 2025-10-17 05:38:16+00:00
It's childish to say that we should stop putting money into one of the most important drugs of all time, which...

- cures (not treats, but cures for a lot of people) obesity and diabetes

- lowers rates of heart disease

- reduces the risk of various cancers

- may help with addiction

...just because you can also diet to reduce obesity. If it were that easy, people would do it. No one enjoys being obese. There are a million complex factors that cause it, and some of them are genetic.

Nearly 100% of people suffer from a disease that would be helped by GLP-1's at some point in their lives. Maybe it won't be useful for all those people because of efficacy or side effects or whatever, but every dollar that goes into them gets us back far, far more years of human life than researching rare diseases.
by satonakamoto | 2025-10-17 05:38:44+00:00
A wonderful article, truly insightful. But it feels more like a series of challenges than the Olympics. This is the Humanoid Robot Olympics held in China earlier this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y-tElcmJVE Instead of focusing on individual technical, it requires completing comprehensive movement tasks. For example, long-distance running tests battery managment and durable of joint, while boxing tests flexibility and coordination. Many participating teams or manufacturers, after failing, return to tackle the specific issues they encountered. This process drives the progress of the entire industry. In my view, this is worthy of being called an Olympic Game—in both form and spirit.