MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bko | 2025-10-13 00:33:07+00:00
I built a free calculator for iOS because I found the free calculators (for iPad) were super spammy and ugly. There was (and still is?) literally video ads that play between calculations. And since Apple didn't (doesn't?) offer a calculator app that came bundled with iPad, it was a huge market.

But I was naive and thought I could just create an obviously superior app and it would find some users. Why hadn't anyone thought of this before? But the app market is so saturated and poorly managed that there's practically no chance you can find users. Or at least I didn't care enough because.. you know.. its a free app. How much can I invest to get you to have a decent experience.

And the other point which was really the death blow to my app, is the ridiculous $100+ a year fee to app store to even host a free app. So after a few years and very few users, I decided to kill it.

1. The search sucks and prioritizes "popular" spammy apps.
by kwar13 | 2025-10-13 00:33:51+00:00
You don't think WhatsApp for some reason stopping to work and airlines losing their default way to issue tickets is a national security issue? How about health care appointments with national ID and address on them being sent as PDFs and stored on Meta's servers? All of those are massive national security issues for me. It can grind the country to a halt for days on end.

There's a reason South Korea has laws requiring all data on its citizens and geography to be stored in Korea. Even Google Maps doesn't quite work in Korea.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-13 00:35:03+00:00
Mostly because WireGuard (intentionally) didn't bother with obfuscation https://www.wireguard.com/known-limitations/

> WireGuard does not focus on obfuscation. Obfuscation, rather, should happen at a layer above WireGuard, with WireGuard focused on providing solid crypto with a simple implementation. It is quite possible to plug in various forms of obfuscation, however.

This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562302 goes into a practical example of QUIC being that "layer above WireGuard" which gets plugged in. Once you have that, one may naturally wonder "why not also have an alternative tunnelling protocol with <the additional things built into QUIC originally listed> without the need to also layer Wireguard under it?".

Many design decisions are in direct opposition to Wireguard's design. E.g. Wireguard (intentionally) has no AES and no user selectable ciphers (both intentionally), QUIC does. Wireguard has no obfuscation built in, QUIC does (+ the happy fact when you obfuscate traffic by using it then it looks like standard web traffic). Wireguard doesn't support custom authentication schemes, QUIC does. Both are a reasonable tunneling protocol design, just with different goals.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-10-13 00:35:03+00:00
Agreed. I think most people would agree the outcome here is profoundly unjust: this woman had her house destroyed with no compensation, and as a result police have no incentive to not go ballistic when a more constrained approach would suffice.

People can only be fucked over so much before they start to consider that the whole system is corrupt, including the courts. The only reason this hasn't been decided the other way is that it affects relatively few individuals, so it's not a rallying cry for most people.
by mordymoop | 2025-10-13 00:35:07+00:00
Perhaps surprisingly considering the current stratospheric prices of GPUs, the performance-per-dollar of compute is still rising faster than exponentially. In a handful years it will be cheap to train something as powerful as the models that cost millions to train today. Algorithmic efficiencies also stack up an make it cheaper to build and serve older models even on the same hardware.

It’s underappreciated that we would already be in a pretty absurdly wild tech trajectory just due to compute hyperabundance even without AI.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-13 00:35:28+00:00
They're not so hostile to Linux anymore because their business no longer depends do much on selling OSes but services.

However they still want you to use windows because it makes it easier to sell their services. Windows has become a marketing vehicle which is why it now demands we create a Microsoft account and constantly pushes things like OneDrive as the article alludes to.

I don't think they were ever any more benign. It was always a pretty hardcore business. First software then services (and now they're hell-bent on becoming the biggest AI player, not very successfully so because they're really only a reseller of watered-down OpenAI services)
by nathan_compton | 2025-10-13 00:36:09+00:00
It is pretty simple - if the rewards are great enough and the objective difficult enough, at some point it becomes more efficient to kneecap your competitors rather than to try to outrun them.

I genuinely thing science would be better served if scientist got paid modest salaries to pursue their own research interests and all results became public domain. So many Universities now fancy themselves startup factories, and startups are great for some things, no doubt, but I don't think pure research is always served by this strategy.
by Harlekuin | 2025-10-13 00:36:19+00:00
AutoDocument: https://github.com/TomMalkin/AutoDocument

Imagine your basic Excel spreadsheet -> generating document files, but add:

- Other sources like SQL queries

- User form (e.g. "Generate documents for Client Category [?]")

- Chaining sources in order like SQL queries with parameters based on the user form

- Split at multiple points (5 records in a csv, 4 records in a sql result = 20 generated documents)

- Full Jinja2 templating with field substitution but also if/for blocks that works nicely with .docx files

- PDF output

- output file names using the same templating: "/BusinessDrive/{{ client_id }}/Invoice - {{ invoice_id}}.pdf"

All saved in reproducible workflows (for example if you need to process a .csv file you receive each morning)
by culi | 2025-10-13 00:36:46+00:00
Wow it's incredible how much almost every single post of his is downloaded to oblivion. Never seen a community so united against an individual.

I do actually believe distinguishing the historical Chinese practice of Zen from its western incarnation is a valuable contribution but also see how unnecessarily instigative his comments can be. Perhaps in a different world where his contributions were more validated he could've learned to frame things in a more generative way
by giardini | 2025-10-13 00:36:55+00:00
Heck, you can get a 50-foot extension cord for $60!

Battery-powered hand tools are heavier, clumsier, generally of lower quality, less power and are less long-lived than AC-powered tools.

To be honest, there's a little Amish in me: I have hand-powered tools as backup for all my AC tools.
by versteegen | 2025-10-13 00:37:30+00:00
Yes, and the ECA project includes an emacs package; I've been using it recently.

I've been diving in to the ECA protocol a bit to debug some emacs issues, and from glancing at the ACP (Agent Client Protocol) documentation, it seems that the ECA and ACP protocols are incredibly similar, and both very well documented. An accident of reinvention.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-10-13 00:37:37+00:00
This other case, referenced in the same article, is even more deranged. For police to feel justified by such absurdly small reasons to mount a full blown militarized assault that they're entitled to offer no compensation for, corrupts every part of the decision-making systems above and below them. It's blatantly disturbed and sick. https://reason.com/2025/10/10/this-indiana-city-doesnt-have-...
by layer8 | 2025-10-13 00:37:57+00:00
> While half of the language design of C is questionable and outright dangerous, making its functions locale-sensitive by all popular OSes was an avoidable mistake.

It wasn’t a mistake for local software that is supposed to automatically use the user’s locale. It’s what made a lot of local software usefully locale-sensitive without the developer having to put much effort into it, or even necessarily be aware of it. It’s the reason why setting the LC_* environment variables on Linux has any effect on most software.

The age of server software, and software talking to other systems, is what made that default less convenient.
by kg | 2025-10-13 00:38:18+00:00
> The financial distress the company now finds itself in can be traced back to early August, when it was seeking to raise another $6 billion in loans. Through that process, investors started to raise questions about the numbers being presented.

> In early September it was reported that Apollo Global Management had amassed a short position against the debt of First Brands Group, meaning that it stood to profit if the auto parts maker failed to continue paying its debt.

> The news caused a rush for the exit and the value of its debt started collapsing, before a bankruptcy process was initiated to bring some order to what appeared to have become the equivalent of a bank run. First Brands said that its Chapter 11 cases pertain solely to US operations and it expects its global operations to continue uninterrupted.

Makes me think of the subprime mortgage crisis. Everyone seemed to agree that it was fine to issue loans to an auto parts company so it accumulated multiple billions USD worth of loans before anyone finally noticed that it might not be able to repay the money it was borrowing.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-13 00:38:36+00:00
> Should service providers be forced (e.g. by regulation) to support consumer hardware stacks they prefer not to?

Yes.

Well, sort of. They don't actually have to do anything. Nobody wants to force them to work for us, that's slavery.

Just don't get in our way when we start writing and using our own software. That's the "support" we want. Just stay out of our way. Leave us alone, without actively discriminating against us for it.
by jcranmer | 2025-10-13 00:39:50+00:00
This is going in fits and starts, but I'm working on a Win16 decompiler. The problems with existing decompiler tools for 16-bit code are a) support the NE file format is far less widespread; b) 16-bit code means geating to deal with segment registers, which are largely unmodelled for most binary tools; and c) turns out that you also have to get really good at recognizing "this is a 32-bit value being accessed entirely in 16-bit word chunks," which tends to be under-supported for most optimization toolchains.
by wilkystyle | 2025-10-13 00:40:20+00:00
Yes! I was very happy to see this. It's simplified my configuration a little bit, but there are still some niceties I would consider as necessary in order to be productive, so I am using Mason, mason-lspconfig (automatically configure and use any lsp servers installed by mason), and Blink for fast and ergonomic autocomplete popup.

IMO Neovim OOB experience isn't quite as nice as what Eglot and completion-preview-mode do for the Emacs OOB experience, but I love that every time I check back in on the latest state of either editor, they are sensibly adding really solid functionality to the core that continuously reduces my reliance on third-party plug-ins!
by ggm | 2025-10-13 00:40:28+00:00
It could take up to 5 years to come into full effect, from my skim of the article. So, as revolutions in housing go, this is slow-burn.

Needed, won't fix housing next month or even next year.

Sometimes I wonder if a state went out and bought the input supply stocks (wood, particleboard, roofing materials) and sold them below cost at the longer base-line price, but exclusively to builders constructing homes, if they could prevent a grey market re-sale to the less housing oriented market. The problem with trying to drag supply prices back down is making secondary markets between your rate, and the market rate.

I am not believing there is an actual shortage worldwide of either construction grade lumber, or other inputs: Its shipping related, its logjams backing up because .. well .. the wheels fell off at the start of 2020 and we haven't got momentum back up.

Oh right. Ships. So maybe the state has to buy ships.. which demands steel.. which is hard to get right now...
by faangguyindia | 2025-10-13 00:40:38+00:00
I’m currently working on a set of fitness tools and guides aimed at helping people navigate common fitness challenges.

Fitness Tools https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/

Fitness Guides https://aretecodex.pages.dev/

A lot of people often ask questions like: - How do I lose body fat and build muscle? - How can I track progress over time? - How much exercise do I actually need? - What should my calorie and macro targets be?

One of the most frequently asked questions in fitness forums is about cutting, bulking, or recomposition. This tool helps you navigate those decisions: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/bulk-cut-recomposition-we...

We’ve also got a Meal Planner that generates meal ideas based on your calorie intake and macro split: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/meal-plan-planner

Additionally, I created a TDEE Calculator designed specifically to prevent overshooting TDEE in overweight individuals: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/tdee-calculator

For a deeper dive into the concept of TDEE overshoot in overweight individuals, check out this detailed post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFitnessIndia/comments/1mdppx5/in...
by gyomu | 2025-10-13 00:40:41+00:00
For anyone curious, the competition rules are here:

https://www.birdpoty.com/rules

"With the exception of HDR, stitched panoramas, focus stacking, and in-camera multiple exposures, composited images or AI-generated images are not permitted in any category. Sky swapping or removal of objects through cloning, for example, is not permitted."
by spartanatreyu | 2025-10-13 00:41:12+00:00
An approach that has been taken for hardware in space is to have 3 identical systems running at the same time.

Execution continues while all systems are in agreement.

If a cosmic ray causes a bit-flip in one of the systems, the system not in agreement with the other two takes on the state of the other two and continues.

If there is no agreement between all 3 systems, or the execution ends up in an invalid state, all systems restart.
by pbronez | 2025-10-13 00:44:55+00:00
I think this concept has legs to be much bigger than just foods. There are lots of influencer types who focus on testing.

For example, there are two individuals who own the same $100k machine for testing the performance of loudspeakers.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php

https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/

Both of them do measurements and YouTube videos. Neither one has a particularly good index of their completed reviews, let alone tools to compare the data.

I wish I could subscribe to support a domain like “loud speaker spin tests” and then have my donation paid out to these reviewers based on them publishing new high quality reviews with good data that is published to a common store.
by wilkystyle | 2025-10-13 00:45:10+00:00
> I also switched from lsp-mode to eglot and it's better. Less fragile.

I agree with this, and it's a big reason why I made the switch myself. I also find myself favoring lightweight (and especially builtin) capabilities, because really large, comprehensive plug-ins tend to have their own paradigms or ways of doing things that break from the super well-designed Emacs system of everything just working together magically.
by hkpack | 2025-10-13 00:45:15+00:00
> I used all three every day for years.

Yeah, would not recommend. From my experience tweaking three OSes to be similar enough to be able to form muscle memory for efficient use is not trivial.

Unless you spend 99% of time in terminal, then it can be done, but in that case OS doesn’t matter. That is what I personally ended up doing.
by moron4hire | 2025-10-13 00:45:17+00:00
Back in 2014, I stumbled on the original source code for the first version of Oregon Trail, which was written in a suspect of BASIC for a timeshare system used by the public schools in Minnesota (probably not the version you're thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(1971_video_g...).

I was really into VR at the time and had been working on live-programmable VR environments, primarily through a text editor component that could render to a 3D object texture. As a demo of the component, I wrote a good-enough BASIC interpreter to ruin the Oregon Trail code.

Writing the interpreter was actually a lot of fun and not that hard, considering I already had a lot of code for processing code syntax for the syntax highlighting feature of the code editor.

Sadly, Web standards have changed a bit too much, I couldn't get traction on my project after Mozilla's AFrame released, so now it's some broken code sitting in a GitHub repo somewhere.
by thekid314 | 2025-10-13 00:45:35+00:00
Thanks for posting this, really interesting!

I've been building a wordpress plugin that converts JPEG to AVIF on the local server (since everyone wants to sell a service to convert in the cloud).

As a photographer who wants high quality photos on their portfolio website I love how AVIF respects color more the webp.

https://github.com/ddegner/avif-local-support
by kg | 2025-10-13 00:45:55+00:00
> Moreover, type systems can track that a list was previously sorted and maintained it's sorted status making the assumption reasonable to state.

This is true, but if you care about correct execution, you would need to re-verify that the list is sorted - bitflips in your DRAM or a buggy piece of code trampling random memory could have de-sorted the list. Then your formally verified application misbehaves even though nothing is wrong with it.

It's also possible to end up with a "sorted" list that isn't actually sorted if your comparison function is buggy, though hopefully you formally verified the comparison function and it's correct.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-13 00:46:00+00:00
Hackers will be fine. If anything, this kind of measure-countermeasure foolishness from corporations gives them a really meaty problem to dig into.

It's just very unclear that the force of law is the right tool for the job to address that problem.

(Also, people on Hacker News can care about a lot of things simultaneously. One of them can be that adding the government's cudgel to the problem may very well make it worse; do we really want the government having to well-define things like "protocol" and "communication" to craft that law?)
by liu3hao | 2025-10-13 00:47:06+00:00
Hi HN, I am working on Circuitscript, a language based on python to describe electronic schematics: https://circuitscript.net/. A basic IDE (called the Bench) to try Circuitscript is available online: https://bench.circuitscript.net/

Since the last month, I have created a complete schematic with Circuitscript, exported the netlist to pcbnew and designed the PCB. The boards have been produced and currently waiting for them to be delivered to verify that it works. Quite excited since this will be the first design ever produced with Circuitscript as the schematic capture tool!

The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.

The main language goals are to be easy to write and reason, generated graphical schematics should be displayed according to how the designer wishes so (because this is also part of the design process) and to encourage code reuse.

Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially from electronics designers/hobbyists. Thanks!
by zanecodes | 2025-10-13 00:47:52+00:00
You can directly pass JSON to Terraform by putting it in a `.tfvars.json` file [1], as far as I can tell this has been supported since v0.5.0 which released in May 2015.

Terraform doesn't have a built-in deep merge function, but it will merge `.tfvars.json` files in the order given on the CLI, if you specify multiple `-var-file` arguments. For what it's worth, as of Terraform 1.8, you can also use functions from third-party providers like isometry/deepmerge [2] to perform a deep merge.

[1] https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/parameter... [2] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/isometry/deepmerge/l...
by kbos87 | 2025-10-13 00:49:07+00:00
Of course, everyone comes from their own particular point of view and/or bias.

I'm a host. The POV I see this from is that of someone who pays close attention to the market and the changing perception of short term rentals. I've read far enough beyond the headlines to know that these accusations are very often not what they seem, and that this narrative is being blown way out of proportion considering how infrequently it actually happens.

The POV a sub-segment of NYT readers see this from is one of being righteous about short-term rentals (in theory at least.)

The POV of writers and editors at NYT is to respond to their readers' preferences.
by nuc1e0n | 2025-10-13 00:49:11+00:00
Centuries ago, the building materials for castles was taken by the locals and reused to build their houses with. Those data centres have a lot of sheet metal in them. Air conditioning units as well. The upgraded power networks around those data centres will alter where people live too. Oh and there's a lot of electric motors with copper wire in all the fans and hard drives those computers have.
by Polizeiposaune | 2025-10-13 00:50:15+00:00
The website of the Arkansas Secretary of State says "Arkansaw" and includes this gem:

"During the early days of statehood, Arkansas’ two U.S. Senators were divided on the spelling and pronunciation. One was always introduced as the senator from “ARkanSAW” and the other as the senator from “Ar-KANSAS”. "

https://www.sos.arkansas.gov/education/arkansas-history/how-...
by fghorow | 2025-10-13 00:50:45+00:00
This Jupyter (CRDT-based) extension appears to solve the BIGGEST HEADACHE I personally have with Jupyter(lab). Jupyter notebooks allow me to hack code/parameters too fluently, and I can't recover earlier positions in code/parameter space that produced interesting results.

Jupytext and git goes some way towards fixing that, but I don't save to git after every cut/paste of a parameter. This extension is effortless.

As a bonus, the extension appears to allow SubEthaEdit/GoogleDocs style collaboration too. (I haven't personally used that yet.)

Check it out.
by toasterlovin | 2025-10-13 00:50:58+00:00
Reading the details in another article, it seems like this was just old fashioned fraud. They used the same collateral for multiple loans and they were hiding other debt from lenders. Any loan agreement they signed would have required an affirmation that they weren’t doing either of those. They probably also went to some lengths to hide what they were doing, since payments to lenders would show up on bank statements, which underwriters certainly would have looked at.
by ml- | 2025-10-13 00:51:42+00:00
Still working on cataloging a curated list of craft beer venues across the world at https://wheretodrink.beer Unsure what the plan is going forward with it, apart from adding more venues and more countries. As long as it's fun for me I'll just keep adding things.

Just added health inspection data from countries that have that in open datasets (UK and Denmark). If anyone know of others I'd be appreciative of hints.

Thinking of focusing on another idea for the rest of the year, have a rough idea for a map based ui to structure history by geofences or lat / lng points for small local museums