MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ux266478 | 2025-10-07 16:54:49+00:00
> If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.

The problem is that while this is true, in practice it's more like the mandate of heaven than laissez-faire economics. When political power structures are involved, and thus the status quo itself is reliant on the omnipresence of certain economic forces, there can never be a drawdown under normal market forces. There is an intentional, exerted force which unbalances the equation in favor of the monoliths. "Enough of a problem" ends up becoming violent social upheaval. In effect, you advocate for normalizing the driver to aim our societal bus off the cliff because "somebody hasn't grabbed the steering wheel yet, so it's clearly an acceptable course." Discounting the fact that the co-driver is pointing a machine gun at the back of the bus.

Adam Smith would be absolutely apalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
by throw0101a | 2025-10-07 16:54:55+00:00
> Cash in the bank so you can buy equities at the bottom.

Cash is a good way to lose money through opportunity cost:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

If you're worried about risk and being able to sleep at night, you can dial back from 100% equities (S&P 500, Russell 3000), and do some bonds. Vanguard (e.g.) has funds that are fixed 80/20, 60/40:

* https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...

This way you don't have to go through the effort of rebalancing yourself.
by randallsquared | 2025-10-07 16:54:57+00:00
The US GDP in 2024 was 30+ trillion. A single trillion in gold (8133t) is not an astronomical amount of gold, even though it's more than any other owner. In fact, all the gold ever mined is only ~220000 tonnes, so US GDP is higher than all the gold above ground at $4000/oz troy.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-07 16:54:57+00:00
I have done a good amount of integration work with cloudflare in zero trust military environments, I used Cloudflare tunnels to do edge integration in a seamless way for services, if you need more flexibility (zero trust clients and integrations) Warp is the way to go.

The pattern I like is to shard customer data in D1+R2 based on a customer specific DO, and have that front your core services via tunnels, then have a shared state database fronted by hypertunnel. I like KEDA scaling of modular monoliths with Cloudflare containers as a burst fallback if SLAs are in danger of going red, it gives you resilience and scalability without boxing you into cloud specifics, and if you're going to be married to one cloud provider it should be Cloudflare, if they go down it's gonna be an internet wide thing.
by tavavex | 2025-10-07 16:55:06+00:00
It's crazy how quickly most of this ramped up. Not that Microsoft hasn't been trying to push abusive but money-making "requirements" down users' throats for decades, but there have always been paths around them for people in the know. Now, they've changed course and are trying to clamp down hard on every little thing that's like this, make their software watertight. It would almost seem desperate if one didn't see how dominant of a position they're in.

I'm tired of micromanaging all this, it's getting way too cumbersome even for someone who's grown up with Windows. I've stopped applying all feature updates to my Windows install because I know their current goal is to make your life worse (and more profitable) every single time. Once that install becomes too outdated, I'll move to Linux full-time - I've enjoyed it as a dual-boot experience, but games are still holding me back. Having to constantly tinker with my Linux install was another thing, but at this point Microsoft is making their software so annoying to use that it will soon outpace all the Linux hitches I've had.
Show HN: Rethinking audit trails in Django (structured and database-free)
by shree256 | 2025-10-07 16:55:11+00:00
We were using django-easy-audit to track CRUD and API events in Django. The problem: every action meant an extra database write, which slowed transactions, increased infra costs, and left us with audit tables that weren’t great for analytics.

I built django-activity-audit (PyPI) to fix this: - Extends Django’s logging system with custom AUDIT and API levels. - Captures CRUD + API request/response events as structured JSON logs. - Vector tails the logs and ships them into ClickHouse. - Grafana makes them queryable and visual.

This removes the extra DB writes, gives structured data ready for analysis, and keeps costs down.

Curious — how are others handling audit logging in Django (or other frameworks)? Do you log it, write it to a DB, or something else entirely?
by jjk166 | 2025-10-07 16:55:13+00:00
The injection mold machine is typically less expensive than the tool you put in the machine. The largest one I have is a $150k (new) machine, it runs a $200k mold which makes 2 million parts per year for a $14 million per year production line. This isn't the sort of thing you buy for the home shop, but as far as business capex goes it's nothing. If you buy used you can get a decent machine for $20k, assuming what you're making isn't stupidly large (bigger parts need bigger molds which need bigger presses). There's some labor to do mold maintenance, but for the most part these things run themselves. As long as you can sell what you're making, they're about as close as you can get to a money printer.
by HanClinto | 2025-10-07 16:55:20+00:00
> Sorry to be snarky, but to me Starlink is something rich people in rural England have

Yeah, so our perspectives may differ a bit. My personal focus has primarily been with Africa, where Starlink is truly transformative. Demand for Starlink may be underwhelming in developed countries (such as your "rural England" example), while in underdeveloped countries, the demand regularly outstrips the supply [0]. I love that it's affordable enough for my African colleagues to use. In the last couple of weeks, I've had more than one full-motion screen-sharing video call to northern Nigeria (I.E., not the capital city) to do collaborative engineering. Even just a handful of years ago, this would not have been possible before Starlink was available.

I'm not casting any shade on malaria eradication -- that is awesome as well. I can love both things, but the subject here is Starlink, and I want to underscore how truly impressive and effective Starlink has been for advancing infrastructure in a quantum leap.

Improving African infrastructure has been an extremely difficult problem for a very long time (for a quagmire of reasons -- regulatory, power, cost, distribution, etc etc etc). I think most people in the developed world simply don't understand how challenging it is to live day-to-day without solid and reliable infrastructure, or how effective Starlink has been in improving that. Very few other projects have been THIS successful at THIS scale. I think more people should be aware of the good that it does.

It has been a disruptive technology in so many of the best ways.

* [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408457
by mholt | 2025-10-07 16:55:28+00:00
Probably not hard. Timelinize's data sources have a standard API with just 2 methods [0], so it should be fairly trivial to implement depend on how accessible Immich is.

To clarify, you don't grant access to Google Photos, you just do the Takeout from https://takeout.google.com to download your data first.

[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/timelinize/timelinize@v0.0.23/...
by jjj123 | 2025-10-07 16:55:48+00:00
> and those slowest students don't want to learn

This is not a fair assumption and is what leads to kids in remedial classes not getting a decent education.

Kids can be genuinely disruptive or not care, or they can care but struggle with the material, those are orthogonal traits.

I don’t disagree that the lesson goes at the pace of the slowest students, but those slow students deserve a disruption-free classroom too, even if it moves slower than the advanced class.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-07 16:56:05+00:00
> “As much as Flock tries to be good stewards of the powerful tech we sell, this shows it really is up to users to serve their communities in good faith. Selling to law-enforcement is tricky because we assume they will use our tech to do good and then just have to hope we're right.”

> The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.

In other words, why bother with safeguards when they'll just lie to us anyways?
by donnaoana | 2025-10-07 16:56:15+00:00
I am curious, how would you use AI then, if not to make one more productive? The text is not AI generated, I came up with the questions, moderated the discussion, wrote a draft that the speakers red, added comments and the AI polished it, the AI was a custom GPT that I trained on my previous text from that substack. I am curious what would you have done differently or if you would refuse to use AI at all? I wrote the article, so I am genuinly curious. I didn't know someone posted on Hacker News, I knew people like to be negative here because there is no accountablity, I want to learn from all this hate. I am personally happy with the outcome, I gover over 30 notes from people who are building that this was useful to them, and the speakers were happy. So I am curious what could have I done differently from your perspective or what should be my learning from all these people who take time from their day to hate on this piece of writing instead of deciding not to read and moving on.
by nuancedev | 2025-10-07 16:56:24+00:00
Finished testing gpt 5 pro, the difference in quality to any other SOTA is minimal, yet the time to respond and cost are sky high.

I'm still waiting for a generational leap that would freaking change the field. After testing 121 AI models I can tell most give the same boring responses to a certain degree:

- All models do the pelican SVG challenge with the exact same POV - All models give "5 unique jokes" that are extremely similar - Models from different providers give similar responses to creative open-ended questions
by lbrito | 2025-10-07 16:56:30+00:00
>give me the exact original file of ml_ltv_training.py i passed you in the first message

I don't get this kind of thinking. Granted I'm not a specialist in ML. Is the temperature always 0 or something for these code-focused LLMs? How are people so sure the AI didn't flip a single 0 to 1 in the diff?

Even more so when applied to other more critical industries, like medicine. I talked to someone who developed an AI-powered patient report summary or something like that. How can the doctor trust that AI didn't alter or make something up? Even a tiny, single digit mistake can be quite literally fatal.
by herf | 2025-10-07 16:56:52+00:00
Here's my situation:

1. My Microsoft account is still @msn.com, which I don't trust in any way to be secure, since it's not an email account I ever use

2. I have lots of Samba and other shares that know my local login

3. If my router goes down, I'm probably going to log into this machine to fix it, and it won't be connected to the internet

So of course I used one of the local account tricks when I installed Windows 11, and I hope they don't break it. Apple's solution of letting you have BOTH a local login and an iCloud account is much better.
by jochalek | 2025-10-07 16:57:06+00:00
Very cool to see a serious local first effort. Looking back at how far local models have come I definitely believe their usefulness combined with RAG or in domain specific contexts is soon to be (or already is) on par with general purpose gpt5-like massive parameter cloud models. The ability to generate quality responses without having to relinquish private data to the cloud used to be a pipedream. It's exciting to see a team dedicated to making this a reality.
by bookofjoe | 2025-10-07 16:57:41+00:00
>Quantum efficiency of photosynthetic energy conversion [1977]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC431568/

>Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems [2007]

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05678

>Explaining the Efficiency of Photosynthesis: Quantum Uncertainty or Classical Vibrations? [2022]

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c00538

>Reassessing the role and lifetime of Qx in the energy transfer dynamics of chlorophyll a [2025]

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/sc/d4sc0...

>Full microscopic simulations uncover persistent quantum effects in primary photosynthesis [2025]

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady6751
by kanwisher | 2025-10-07 16:57:50+00:00
Here in Bangkok literally every gold shop is out of physical gold. I went and bought 80% of one shop that had some, and the rest got bought immediately by other customers. If there is sell pressure you would see Thai people line up at gold shops and dump their gold. It's one of the main investment instruments here and I don't hear of any wide spread selling.

I think whats happening is china is buying up all the physical supply in the global markets.
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-07 16:58:20+00:00
This was very much my experience going through an acquisition like that. I was working at a company that served big customers. We bought a smaller company, with one of the goals being to expand to serving smaller customers.

What actually happened was that our management very quickly started telling the people who came along with the acquisition that they were doing everything wrong. The salespeople were selling wrong, the marketing people were marketing wrong, the customer support people were supporting customers wrong. Everything that the company we acquired did differently was seen as a problem.

Within about a year, anyone they hadn't pressured to adopt our practices had left and been replaced with a transplant from the Mothership. Another year later, the customers we picked up in the acquisition were rapidly leaving for other vendors. They simply couldn't work with us in a way that worked for their business anymore. Last I heard, pretty much the only remaining vestiges of the company we acquired were trademarks, and we were back to only having very large customers.
by thyristan | 2025-10-07 16:58:30+00:00
You may want some redundancy because needing both tapes increases the risk to your backup. You could just backup more often. You could use 4 locations, so you have redundand keystreams and redundant backup streams. But in general, storing the key stream follows the same necessities as storing the backup or some traditional encryption keys for a backup. But in general, your backup already is a redundancy, and you will usually do multiple backups in time intervals, so it really isn't that bad.

Btw, you really really need a fresh keystream for each and every backup. You will have as many keystream tapes as you have backup tapes. Re-using the OTP keystream enables a lot of attacks on OTP, e.g. by a simple chosen plaintext an attacker can get the keystream from the backup stream and then decrypt other backup streams with it. XORing similar backup streams also gives the attacker an idea which bits might have changed.

And there is a difference to storing things unencrypted in two locations: If an attacker, like some evil maid, steals a tape in one location, you just immediately destroy its corresponding tape in the other location. That way, the stolen tape will forever be useless to the attacker. Only an attacker that can steal a pair of corresponding tapes in both locations before the theft is noticed could get at the plaintext.
by gruez | 2025-10-07 16:58:45+00:00
>Meanwhile Alex Jones receives a $1.5B judgement (against ~$10 mil in assets)

You answered your own question. $10M doesn't buy a lot of lawyering. $11B Does. Moreover Alex Jones was dumb and did his misdeeds in a way that makes it a slam dunk to sue him in court. The linked article above mentions why suing the Sacklers is much tougher:

>How are you going to get the Sacklers to give up all their money? You could sue them, sure, of course. The entity that is most obvious liable for the opioid crisis is Purdue, the company, which is very bankrupt, but you can probably find some causes of action to sue the Sacklers. For one thing, some Sacklers were executives or board members of Purdue, so you could sue them personally for their own actions running Purdue. (But not all of them were.) For another thing, there are arguments under the bankruptcy code that they should not have been able to extract $11 billion from the company while it was facing all this opioid liability, that the dividends they got were “fraudulent transfers” and can be clawed back by the company.

>There are problems with all of this. There are a lot of Sacklers. They can hire good lawyers. Some of them live abroad. Much of their money is in trusts that a US court might not be able to get access to. If you sued all of them, it would be expensive and time-consuming and you might not get much money. You might! And you might at least make life very unpleasant for them, which has its own virtues.

Finally, the supreme court votes show how divided the justices were. Contrary to the popular expectation that Republicans are pro-business, they were actually the ones voting against the settlement. The justices voting against the settlement were Trump, HW Bush, W Bush, Trump, and Biden appointees; justices voting for the settlement were Trump, W Bush, Obama, and Obama appointees.
by coredog64 | 2025-10-07 16:58:50+00:00
Wife's cousin is a GM mechanic, and similar to this, he explained how they game recalls/TSBs. When you have a recall/TSB, it's the same process where the manufacturer comes up with the amount that the dealer is paid to resolve. However, if the mechanics individually don't submit common problems, then it doesn't rise to the level of a recall/TSB and the dealership can bill T&M.

The specific example was a leak that was the shorting out of electric window motors due to rainwater leaking through the window. It was better for him to fix it by cutting up a plastic container and attaching it over the motor & getting hourly for it than it was for GM to tell the dealership "Here's the part, you get $8 to install it when the customer is subject to the TSB"
by BoredPositron | 2025-10-07 16:59:04+00:00
Woah...that brings back some memories. In a whole different timeline 22 years ago I was printing them for literal months. We did all European versions and it was 8 weeks of nothing but IKEA catalogs. They were highly optimized so for a language change we only had to switch the black cylinders. The whole IT was bonkers for the time we used SGI workstations for pre press and had like 100 bonded dial up connections for the mass of data. The pages came as TIF files and a catalogue was around 300GB. We were a rotogravure shop and did around 13m/s of 3-4 meters paper in width and around 4-5 kilometers in length. I think a whole run was 50 metric tons of paper. Good times but incredibly boring if the machine was dialed in.
by jofer | 2025-10-07 16:59:36+00:00
Flock really does have a huge amount of potential for abuse. It's a fair point that private companies (e.g. Google, etc) have way more surveillance on us than the government does, but the US and local governments having this level of surveillance should also worry folks. There's massive potential for abuse. And frankly, I don't trust most local police departments to not have someone that would use this to stalk their ex or use it in other abusive ways. I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance (i.e. marketing) more than I trust the government's legitimate need to monitor in some cases to track crimes. Things get scary quick when mass surveillance is combined with (often selective) prosecution.
by ls612 | 2025-10-07 16:59:44+00:00
I had this happen in both of the past two machines I have built but both were installing windows 10 so I was ultimately able to just finish offline and then grab the drivers on a usb stick to get the internet up and running. The Intel NICs are notorious for not working without the intel drivers.

I still think Rufus is perfectly sufficient for avoiding these issues and/or using autounattend. Ultimately you just need to get past first install and nothing else will be an issue using a local account on Windows 11.
by cobbaut | 2025-10-07 16:59:54+00:00
> When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.

I think Windows 98 was the last user-focused Windows. At least then all the useful settings were a single right-click away, and it just worked without invading your privacy.

(WinME never worked and WinXP was the first in a long series of shareholder-focused Windows.)
by nekusar | 2025-10-07 17:00:16+00:00
Arduino lost the narrative when official Arduino boards were $35, and a clone was $5, if that.

Arduino Megas? $110 official, $12 on Ali. Extra $10 gets you a RAMPS 1.4 board for full 3d printer platform. Yeah, a whoile Marlin-capable 3d printer board for $20. Id argue that THIS is what caused the 3d printer boom.

Arduino nano? Officially? Who knows. I bought them in bulk $1.40 and were pin compatible, and breadboardable.

And this was all true back in 2012 and up. Even their "Motor Shield" official driver was a pile of crap. Used an LM298 iirc. I would just go buy an a4988 stepper driver for a whole $.99 and run steppers.

They made the ecosystem, but they haven't properly stewarded or oversaw it. And now that Qualcomm is now owner, eh, fuck it. Stick with clones or ESP. (And for those who've had the displeasure of dealing with Qualcomm, yeah, just dont.)
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-10-07 17:00:37+00:00
> 1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement,

> 2) so the stock market has to go up

This is why I've come to despise 401k's replacing old-school pensions. Yes, pensions had their problems but with 401k's workers must fleece themselves to have any sort of retirement opportunity.

Want a shot at retirement? Now we all have to run ourselves into the ground to make number go up. It's insane.
by floundy | 2025-10-07 17:00:49+00:00
I wanted to try this for just two weeks — my Pixel phone's battery swelled up, and the new iPhone wasn't coming out for a couple of weeks; I told my wife I'd be fine without a phone and she quickly vetoed it.

I did my usual investigation of flip phones and dumb phones; couldn't find one that ran Android or basic apps like Spotify and podcasts that I use every day *and* worked on major US cell carriers. There's some cool E-Ink phones out of China, but AFAIK they don't have full compatibility on US cell networks.

I ended up with an iPhone and I just dumb it down. Black background, installed only like a dozen apps, removed a bunch of the preinstalled ones, aggressively culled notifications.

Actually I've been thinking of removing the web browser from my iPhone. Your post inspired me to do it. Settings --> Screen Time --> Content & Privacy --> Allowed Apps, disable Safari. Let's see how I manage!
by creshal | 2025-10-07 17:00:56+00:00
VS Code has enough momentum by now that Microsoft couldn't kill it even if it wanted to. And a lot of the arduino-side work would involve creating/tweaking LSPs to their ideosyncrasies and making IDE-agnostic compilers... all of which is IDE agnostic and makes Arduino more useful to all users.

And, worst case, they could take it all to IntelliJ or other IDE vendors and quickly spin out an Arduino-branded IDE that isn't raw sewage.