MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-24 11:18:14+00:00
This summer, we had a white-faced hornet nest, in a bush, a few feet from our front door, so it had to go.

Normally, hornets are great. They are nowhere near as aggressive as yellowjackets (unless you mess with the nest), and they eat yellowjackets, so you either have hornets or yellowjackets, but not both (but they also eat bees, so people who want to encourage pollinators, need to discourage them).

But that low on the ground, and that close to the house, they had to go.

I have heard too many horror stories about botched hornet removal, so I called in a pro. I have a friend in the business, so I got a break (but that was $150).

It was interesting, watching him do it. Took about 15 minutes. He had a special suit. It looked flimsy, but they couldn’t get through.
by sneak | 2025-10-24 11:18:32+00:00
Because we in the global west generally have the right to photograph anything we can see in public, save for pathological places like Germany or France. You don’t own your image. If you go into public and I take a photograph of you, I hold the copyright on that image, not you. You don’t have any say in what I do with my (legally obtained) image taken in public, nor should you.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-24 11:20:42+00:00
In light of this game of cat and mouse, the age of direct satellite-to-handset telecommunications is a harbinger of a more disquieting capability: dirtboxes in orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirtbox_(cell_phone)

> A dirtbox (or DRT box) is a cell site simulator, a phone device mimicking a cell phone tower, that creates a signal strong enough to cause nearby dormant mobile phones to switch to it.
by bborud | 2025-10-24 11:21:02+00:00
I wasn't trying to make a "ship has sailed"-argument, but rather the argument that going after photography is odd given how little we care about surveillance and data collection that is far more invasive, complete and dangerous. If this were an optimization problem (optimizing for privacy and reducing criminal behavior), going after people who take pictures in public wouldn't even be on the radar. It isn't even a rounding error.

Sure, I understand that most people are barely aware of the insane amounts of data various data brokers aggregate, curate and sell of ordinary people's highly sensitive data. But most of us are. Or should be. And many of us are also part of the problem.

I do think this should be addressed. Especially since it is hard to address and it is not going to get any easier. In a well functioning legal system, every single one of the large data brokers that trade in sensitive personal information should be in existential peril. And people associated with them should be at very real risk of ending up in prison.

It seems ... peculiar to argue about taking away rights that private citizens have had for more than a century and at the same time not do anything about, for instance, private parties raiding sensitive government data and essentially nobody caring or showing any willingness to do anything about it.

You are right in that we do have a "the ship has sailed" attitude. But rather than focus on fixing what is most important we'd rather risk infringing on the rights of private citizens further because that is "being seen as doing something".

(I'm not accusing you of thinking this -- I am just finishing that line of reasoning to show what absurd conclusions this might lead us to)
by perbu | 2025-10-24 11:21:23+00:00
We need to support over 10M files in each folder. JSON wouldn't fare well as the lack of indices makes random access problematic. Composing a JSON file with many objects is, at least with the current JSON implementation, not feasible.

CDB is only a transport medium. The data originates in PostgreSQL and upon request, stored in CDB and transferred. Writing/freezing to CDB is faster than encoding JSON.

CDB also makes it possible to access it directly, with ranged HTTP requests. It isn't something I've implemented, but having the option to do so is nice.
by blooalien | 2025-10-24 11:21:55+00:00
> It's fucked, and its going to be a long time to fix it, if possible.

There's no fixing this. We've allowed the most psychotic lunatics on planet Earth control over the most absolutely insane weapons of mass destruction and all the armies and police, and those people have already decided amongst themselves that their little game of "he who dies with the most money wins" is far more important than all the life on Earth.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-24 11:23:32+00:00
Yeah, after a lot of thinking and visualization and brain-storming, a lot of which was the sort of formless void of the wordless prayers of St. John of the Cross and what I would reach for in Buddhist meditation (but never managed to hold on to for long if I even reached it --- given that I was regularly hit with a bamboo can before being told to go sweep up in the bookbinding shop, probably not....) I've managed to make a bit of progress on a project to the point of an actual concept realized in 3D in my head --- the problem has been that getting from mental image to 3D model to files which will can actually be cut on a CNC has been nightmarish --- the 3D CAM tools which I can afford either won't use the tooling which I wish to use in the way I need to use it, or one which did converted a 1" x 1" x 2" test section into a ~140MB file after churning for ~18 minutes (I'll need for this to exist in multiples and to be as much as 48 inches long).

Since then, I've been working on a personal project to cut this, but I've been running into issues with the complexity of CSG objects.... tried using linear/rotate_extrude but they rotate the 2D tool representation as if it were being used w/ a 5-axis CNC, but most people (incl. me) use a 3-axis....
Show HN: I created a light logic game in the style of the 90s
by DenisDolya | 2025-10-24 11:24:36+00:00
I made a terminal game called Digital Virus. It's a logic puzzle where you predict how a 4-digit code mutates after each wrong guess. Starts simple but gets tricky with combo rules at higher levels.

Wrote it in C to feel like those old 90s games. No graphics, just numbers and logic. Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/Digital-Virus

Curious what you think - especially if you remember when games came on floppies!
by blub | 2025-10-24 11:25:22+00:00
Actually, your assumptions that human drivers cannot be improved are wrong. Modern cars have a lot of safety features to help avoid accidents:

* lane keeping with optional steering

* pedestrian and obstacle detection at the front

* pedestrian and obstacle detection when reversing with automatic braking

* assisted driving with lane keeping and full stop / driving on in case of traffic jam

Waymos are just fancy taxis. And taxis haven’t replaced all human drivers or solved traffic accidents.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-24 11:25:42+00:00
People prefer products without ads at all. Ads are noise. People's brains literally learn how to filter them out via banner blindness.

People always comment that the internet is "so much nicer" after I install uBlock Origin on their browsers. It's just better, they can't explain why. They don't need to. I know why.

The fact is nobody wants this crap. Ads are nothing but noise in our signal. They're spam. They're content we did not ask for, forced upon us without consent. They do not improve the "experience", at best its impact is minimized.
by immibis | 2025-10-24 11:26:28+00:00
The UK could give Apple a choice: Either pay a fine exceeding the GDP of Finland, or stop being a monopoly, or every Apple senior executive will have an arrest warrant and the products will be seized on import.

To achieve the thing you wanted, word the law vaguely and have a judge interpret it. You know, the same way the law is applied to poors like you and me. Nobody gets off a murder by saying "Your Honour, when I stabbed that man to death, technically I didn't meet the criteria in point 3 subsection 12 and therefore I am innocent." Why should corporations get that privilege? (I note they may be found innocent of murder but guilty of something like manslaughter - which is fine! Different degrees of violation of the law can result in greater or lesser sentences. Proportionality is a good thing. Apple should only have to pay half the fine if the judge estimates they've done half what they should)
by PrairieFire | 2025-10-24 11:26:34+00:00
A lack of effective resiliency and redundancy at all of the major US airlines makes air travel feel like a bit of a coin toss in terms of whether you can expect to get where you need to go on any given day. In the past 3 years each of the big 5 have had multiple full ground stops due to multi-hour/multi-day system failures. They get heavy coverage during and in the immediate wake but consumers and the market tend to forget relatively quickly. As such there just isn't enough consumer or regulatory pressure on these airlines to invest the actual resources required to build more effective fault tolerance into their operations. I'm afraid this is just going to be part of life in US air travel for the foreseeable future.

A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period:

Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse July 2024 Delta 5 day outage August 2025 United weight and balance outage June 2025 American outage October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
by helsinkiandrew | 2025-10-24 11:26:54+00:00
> For milk chocolate to be classified as such, UK regulations say it should be made up of about 20% cocoa solids

20% is a very low bar. Even in the 70s Penguin bars where being marketed as full of "chocolate flavour":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI0Fa66h6Qo
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-10-24 11:27:39+00:00
They attacked Finland for the same reason the British invaded Iceland: they knew it would not be able to remain neutral, and they wanted to ensure that the Germans could not use it. The Germans were invading neutral states left and right, and the Soviets were not about to let a country whose border was just a few kilometers from Leningrad fall under Nazi control.

Just like the Western Allies, the Soviets were acting in reaction to the insanely aggressive moves that Germany was taking. They viewed it as a life-or-death issue. Germany, the strongest state in Europe, had conducted a massive military buildup and was bent on conquering the continent.
by adrian_b | 2025-10-24 11:27:55+00:00
Yes, indeed it was expected to reply with ICMP errors when receiving packets to unused ports and the necessity of firewalls was not predicted, because the "barbarians" were not using the Internet yet.

Nowadays the well configured servers send ICMP errors only for the traceroute port range and the badly configured servers, which are more common, do not send any ICMP errors for unused ports.
by Nursie | 2025-10-24 11:27:59+00:00
> In which situation does the end user not pay for everything?

In situations where the company needs to continue to compete, and factoring fines into prices would push it out of competitiveness, so it needs to find other ways to offset the fine.

Apple's unlikely to be in this situation, and probably has massive buckets of cash just sitting around in various offshore places anyway. I doubt a couple of billion are much danger.

> apparently people are fine with apple’s practices

I'm happy my mum has a phone that can only install apps and stuff that are sanctioned by apple.

She's not savvy enough to know differently, she doesn't really do apps, and frankly her best defence against any sort of tech-based scammers is likely to be "Oh, well, I wouldn't know how to do that", but otherwise extra-strong rails are a really useful thing.

Monopolies are bad but the current ecosystem is so good, and for me other app stores aren't that interesting. And for some less savvy users they would be an outright threat.
by cb321 | 2025-10-24 11:28:06+00:00
I used to do this, but unary kind of sucks after 3; So maybe others might like this better before their fingers get trained:

..() { # Usage: .. [N=1] -> cd up N levels local d="" i for ((i = 0; i < ${1:-"1"}; i++)) d="$d/.." # Build up a string & do 1 cd to preserve dirstack [[ -z $d ]] || cd ./$d }

Of course, what I actually have been doing since the early 90s is realize that a single "." with no-args is normally illegal and people "cd" soooo much more often than sourcing script definitions. So, I hijack that to save one "." in the first 3 cases and then take a number for the general case.

# dash allows non-AlphaNumeric alias but not function names; POSIX is silent. cd1 () { if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then cd ..; else command . "$@"; fi; } # nice "cd .." alias .=cd1 cdu() { # Usage: cdu [N=2] -> cd up N levels local i=0 d="" # "." already does 1 level while [ $i -lt ${1:-"2"} ]; do d=$d/..; i=$((i+1)); done [ -z "$d" ] || cd ./$d; } alias ..=cdu alias ...='cd ../../..' # so, "."=1up, ".."=2up, "..."=3up, ".. N"=Nup

and as per the comment this even works in lowly dash, but needs a slight workaround. bash can just do a .() and ..() shell function as with the zsh.
Ask HN: Should I cater to performance benchmark request for a large customer?
by kinj28 | 2025-10-24 11:28:11+00:00
Context: My service is a low code platform for building internal apps. (think retool alternative). One of the core component is integrations to connect to various data sources (say PostGRES, REST, etc)

I understand the ask is a fair ask. But the only challenge is there is no other player in our market which has published this and it looks like a futile thing to invest time and energy. Nor we think it will help a customer as there is no other reference data point for them. At best they can compare this performance to say a KONG or mulesoft which have published reports.
by comrade1234 | 2025-10-24 11:28:20+00:00
I was at my cabin in the fall - it was after Covid and the first time I was there in a couple of years. I got a nice fire going in the fireplace and maybe thirty minutes later I saw a wasp flying very poorly and slowly around the living room. Then a few more and a few more. I figure they must have built a nest in the attic during Covid, and were in hibernation for the winter but the warmth woke them up.

So that night and the next few I had a roaring fire and let it get cold during the day. I really didn't want to go into the attic to investigate. Eventually there were no more wasps. Problem solved!
by saubeidl | 2025-10-24 11:28:44+00:00
Do you know why Cuba went to the Soviet Union and asked for nukes? Because they needed deterrence after a failed US invasion attempt. Initially, Castro tried to be a good neighbor and even went on a US tour [0].

It was through American arrogance and aggressive attitudes that relations soured to the point where the Cubans thought they needed a deterrent.

It seems you guys still haven't learned your lesson.

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/this-day-in-politics-...
by ralusek | 2025-10-24 11:28:46+00:00
And it’ll be so good and cheap that you’ll figure “hell, I could sell our excess compute resources for a fraction of AWS.” And then I’ll buy them, you’ll be the new cloud. And then more people will, and eventually this server infrastructure business will dwarf your actual business. And then some person in 10 years will complain about your IOPS pricing, and start their own server room.
by pas | 2025-10-24 11:29:30+00:00
... well, it makes sense to be able to do a "join" with the `users` and `documents` collections, use the full expressive range of an aggregation pipeline (and it's easy to add additional indices to MongoDB collections, and have transactions, and even add replication - not easy with a generic filesystem)

put all kinds of versioned metadata on docs without coming up with strange encodings, and even though POSIX (and NodeJS) offers a lot of FS related features it probably makes sense to keep things reeeeally simple

and it's easy to hack on this even on Windows
by goobatrooba | 2025-10-24 11:30:05+00:00
Maps and routing errors would likely lead to masses of deaths, an entire motorway population rather than individuals not paying attention..

Like the various "unfinished/broken bridge" deaths that have happened with Google maps involved (not saying to blame.. but certainly not innocent either) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66873982 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o
by stared | 2025-10-24 11:30:30+00:00
This is a general phenomenon across the Western world.

There are a few Poland-specific twists:

- Poland’s economic progress has been staggering. It also means many challenges have shifted from those of a poorer country to those of a (kind of) rich one - see e.g. https://www.theglobalist.com/poland-economy-development-gdp-...

- There’s a long-standing stereotype of the Polish mother - self-sacrificing and overbearing. Many women (understandably) don’t want to perpetuate that model.

- Poland has one of the harshest anti-abortion laws in Europe. Many women fear that if they had health issues, some more conservative doctors or hospitals might risk women’s lives to "save" the pregnancy - even when it’s likely to end in stillbirth. See https://www.epfweb.org/node/857

- In Poland, affordable apartments are small. Typical rentals are around 40–50 m^2. Apartments of ~100 m^2 (within reach for many couples in Western Europe) are largely out of reach in Poland. https://www.espon.eu/sites/default/files/2024-06/affordable_...
by kakacik | 2025-10-24 11:30:34+00:00
I agree we should go after companies clearly engaging in profit-above-all, making societies and future generations worse from the start. Make them hurt, make them bleed bad, take tens % of their global revenue (not profit, thats easy to game).

But - parents are responsible too, more than anybody else. Gaming is generally bad for kids, physically and mentally. Come on, everybody who cares knows that for past 2 decades. Screens generally fuck up kids properly, the younger and more interactive the worse the result. Kids need tons of physical fun and tons of continuous social interaction in larger groups, doesnt matter what some echo chambers claim, 'digital skills' are not something your kid can anyhow miss on.

Its supremely easier to fuck off kids, leave me alone, my adult life is oh so hard already, here play some more, give me some break. Adults being glued to phones hard themselves. Results are what they are. Its called universally bad parenting, by psychologists and various experts for a reason. No sympathies for parents there, but I feel sorry for all those kids whose potential is squished into various anxieties and abysmal social behavior.

Talking all this and much more as parent of 2 small ones, luckily for them environment we are in is firmly agreeing with all above.
by topaz0 | 2025-10-24 11:30:45+00:00
Yes, this is absolutely part of it, and I think an underappreciated harm of LLMs is the homogeneity. Even to the extent that their writing style is adequate, it is homogeneous in a way that quickly becomes grating when you encounter LLM-generated text several times a day. That said, I think it's fair to judge LLM writing style not to be adequate for most purposes, partly because a decent human writer does a better job of consciously keeping their prose interesting by varying their wording and so forth.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-24 11:31:07+00:00
I run two OSes. So two variants.

Some are desktops, some laptops, some servers. Different packages installed, different hardware. Three more variants.

Yes, I do have a script to set up my environment, but it already has a lot of conditional behavior to handle these five total variants. And I don't want to have to re-test the scripts and re-sync often.
by Findecanor | 2025-10-24 11:31:30+00:00
I don't think short videos are bad, per se. I am bugged mostly by the vertical format and the annoying player interface that loops and switches to other videos.

For some time, I have been using a TamperMonkey script that at least redirects to the regular video player: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...
by close04 | 2025-10-24 11:31:33+00:00
> It literally remains stable for less time. Nine months instead of 5+ years, up to 12 if you pay them.

Isn't "stability" in this context a direct reference to feature set which stays stable? When a version is designated stable it stays stable. You're talking about support which can be longer or shorter regardless of feature set.

When they stop adding features, it's stable. Every old xx.04 and xx.10 version of Ubuntu is stable even today, no more features getting added to 12.10. When they stop offering support, it's unsupported. 14.04 LTS became unsupported last year but not less stable.

These are orthogonal. You can offer long term support for any possible feature combination (if you have the resources), and you can be stable with no support. In reality it's easier to freeze a feature set and support that snapshot for a long time then chase a moving target.
by LtdJorge | 2025-10-24 11:32:24+00:00
For people that don’t know, regular wasps always leave in the face of danger to the nest. If you have the typical small nest, the easiest thing you can do is hit it fast with a broom or similar. They will all disappear in seconds.

I’ve seen my dad do it a lot of times with his bare hands, never got stung. But if you pass by the nest enough times, you’ll be.

Another good solution is fire. A blow torch with a wide flame, burns their wings (if it doesn’t outright kill them) and also their nest, which is more or less made of paper.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-24 11:32:32+00:00
As we pointed out, PV is still trouncing nuclear in China. So if the difference is smaller there, it's still in favor of solar.

Storage is another matter here, but even there costs for batteries have simply collapsed. Understand that massive storage is needed even in a nuclear-powered economy. If all the 283 million cars and trucks in the US were replaced with 70 kWh BEVs, the storage would be enough to power the US grid (at its current average consumption) for 40 hours. That's a lot of batteries. So the demand is there to continue to drive them down their experience curves. In China, they're already around $50/kWh for installed grid storage systems (not just cell price).

The final storage problem, the only reed that nuclear can be clinging to at this point, is long term/seasonal storage. That's needed either to smooth wind variability (~ week scale) or to move solar from summer to winter (~6 months). There are at least two different ways this could be solved: hydrogen and heat. As mentioned elsewhere in these threads, the latter is very promising, with capex as little as $1/kWh of storage capacity and a RTE of about 40%. Should that work out anywhere close to that nuclear would be in a hopeless position anywhere in the world, even at very high latitudes.