MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-11-19 14:26:06+00:00
> “I have the high ground” ... was a legitimate force multiplier.

There are a huge number of places in Europe where the town has grown around the Old Castle, and the Old Castle has been a fortification of some sort since a very long time ago (often pre-Roman), and it's on a hill near a bend on a river - high ground, defensible and also transport links.

Everywhere from Edinburgh to Kraków.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-11-19 14:26:52+00:00
I had a very similar experience that gave me permission to pursue hobby-level writing. I read a very long series of books (Defiance of the Fall) that starts with frankly terrible writing (sorry Jeff if you somehow read this) but also contained some genuinely good concepts.

Not only is this a pretty successful series but it’s 16 books long! The writing gets progressively better and the strong concepts (heavily borrowed or otherwise) carry it through. The latest books are not legendary or anything like that but I really do enjoy them and the writing no longer gets in the way of that.

This sort of progression is way more inspirational to me than reading Hemingway’s best or listening to a Ted Talk. It’s objective clear evidence that you can just start writing, even releasing the weak stuff, and both succeed and improve simultaneously.
by trklausss | 2025-11-19 14:27:08+00:00
It is the HashiCorp fiasco all over again. HashiCorp thinks third-party is profiting from Terraform, they relicense, Terraform gets forked into OpenTofu.

Here, Rebble says Core is profiting from their work (hey, look at your licenses). It would be a direct violation of their ToS though, since there is this clause:

> 4. Services Usage Limits > > You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, access to the Service, or Content accessed through use of the Service, without Rebble’s express written permission.

So I don't know what to think honestly, I don't see any bad actors here...
by isodev | 2025-11-19 14:27:35+00:00
But is HN the only forum for tech discussions available to you?

The whole point is that both phone platforms are required to participate in modern life. Imagine if your water or electricity company decides not to supply your house. There is a reason such fundamental services are made into universal rights and do not follow the usual competition rules.

Apple/Google can’t be both the store, the device and the OS.
by teeray | 2025-11-19 14:27:46+00:00
I wonder what the author’s development process for all this is like. It’s fascinating seeing the end result, and I certainly learned a ton. However, I’d love to see some of the trial and error process. My own process is starting from a configuration.nix on a node and iterate with `nixos-rebuild switch`, but it still feels like there’s better methodologies out there.
by bdangubic | 2025-11-19 14:28:02+00:00
This is an easy way out... if you want to have a honest discussion you should read and address the opposing views. you are trying to oversimplify things like "states are nullifying federal laws" etc... you need to dig deeper that to see WHY that is - you think some State folk woke up one morning and went "shit, why don't we see which Federal Laws that are on the books we want to break today?" or you think perhaps there are other reason why we have sanctuary cities, what prompted that to begin with...? if you think someone just woke up and said "hell, why don't we just make this up for the heck of it...?" then maybe but none of this is all that simple...
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 14:28:05+00:00
They don’t. The movements pushing these ideas are against the idea of aptitude testing. Many of them are even against the idea of having advanced classes for those who are ahead.

It’s not a niche ideology, sadly. It’s going mainstream. A core part of Zohran Mamdani’s platform was his goal to phase out gifted education programs, for example.
by grogers | 2025-11-19 14:28:16+00:00
Of course it depends on the situation. But I don't see how you could think that in this case, crashing is better than stale config.

Crashing on a config update is usually only done if it could cause data corruption if the configs aren't in sync. That's obviously not the case here since the updates (although distributed in real time) are not coupled between hosts. Such systems usually are replicated state machines where config is totally ordered relative to other commands. Example: database schema and write operations (even here the way many databases are operated they don't strongly couple the two).
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-19 14:29:09+00:00
Why does this always get asserted? It's trivial to do (reserve the cost when you allocate a resource [0]), and takes 2 minutes of thinking about the problem to see an answer if you're actually trying to find one instead of trying to find why you can't.

Data transfer can be pulled into the same model by having an alternate internet gateway model where you pay for some amount of unmetered bandwidth instead of per byte transfer, as other providers already do.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45880863
by trekz | 2025-11-19 14:29:09+00:00
Sorry but this is a pointless survey. Not sure how one could determine whether RSS is alive when it already is.

The other problem is that the responses will be skewed depending on where you choose to advertise this survey and who's more passionate about taking it. Posting it here would likely trigger responses from those more inclined to say "rss is not dead", since that's what the overwhelming sentiment is here.

I can only conclude that you likely already know the survey is pointless, but it's being used to advertise for your RSS reader (you plug that in on multiple places on the site). You'd probably be better off just advertising your RSS reader instead.
by elric | 2025-11-19 14:29:09+00:00
Much like the current cookie banner shitshow, a "centrally configured" setting which "websites must respect" will accomplish nothing. There is no consent, informed or otherwise. Advertisers and their ilk are still hoovering up all the data they can, with or without cookies or consent.

Locking up a few people who don't respect their users' privacy would be a much more effective way of achieving actual results. AFAIK no big adtech or data brokers have been punished in any way.
by ysy63874 | 2025-11-19 14:29:28+00:00
Hi everyone, Over the past year I’ve been slowly putting together a personal learning repo while studying modern C++ full-time. It’s finally in a shareable state, so I thought I’d post it here in case it helps anyone else on the same journey. It currently has: A structured learning roadmap Detailed beginner-friendly tutorials Essential development tools & setup guides Curated collection of high-quality resources (books, videos, websites) High-frequency interview questions with detailed explanations Quick note: The main README and all in-depth explanations are in Chinese (since that’s my native language and I can articulate concepts more clearly). I’ve added a separate English README with an overview and table of contents, so non-Chinese speakers can navigate easily. All code and tools are of course language-independent :) I’m still very much a learner myself – there are definitely mistakes and gaps. If you have time for a quick look and could share what’s wrong, unclear, or what should be added/removed, I’d really appreciate it. No pressure at all, but if you find it useful someday, a star would mean the world and motivate me to keep it updated. Thank you!
by Thorrez | 2025-11-19 14:29:38+00:00
I still don't think it's a wealth tax. I guess you could say deflation is less good for the wealthy than inflation, but it still doesn't result in the wealthy losing anything, so I wouldn't call it a tax.

If the deflation rate is lower than typical stock market returns, the wealthy would keep their money in stocks, and their wealth would increase faster than a wageearner's wage. If the deflation rate is equal to or higher than typical stock market returns, the wealthy would keep their money in cash, and their wealth would increase at the exact same rate as a wageearners' wage.

The big downside of deflation is it discourages spending and investing. In "The Miracle of Worgl" it sounds like it solved their problem by encouraging spending and investing. If spending and investing is discouraged, the economy grinds to a halt, and unemployment rises. Instead of using some money to create a new business and hire people (aka investing in a new business), people are encouraged to just hold the money in the bank. That's why unemployment rises.
by AlgebraFox | 2025-11-19 14:30:20+00:00
While censorship is one thing, they forgot another overlooked ability of these app stores: pushing unwanted apps/services to our personal devices without our knowledge.The fact that the majority of people don’t care about this censorship and backdoors makes me think we don’t really appreciate the concept of freedom, and maybe we are okay with being slaves—at least until we cannot take it anymore. Maybe that’s why history repeats itself every few decades to remind us about these values.
by sershe | 2025-11-19 14:30:43+00:00
"in reality welfare state with its massive redistribution and limits on concentration of power that won"

The welfare state increased 3x since post war time so that one is plain wrong. It was not clear if the 2nd part was "its" or separate . What is the metric for concentration of /power/? Rather than wealth. If anything the recent developments are the result of more direct democracy. Candidates like trump would have never been allowed by concentrated media and party machines mid century
Show HN: Gram Functions – Serverless platform for turning code into LLM tools
by disintegrator | 2025-11-19 14:31:08+00:00
Hi HN, Georges from the Gram team here. We're really excited to share a major update to Gram, our platform for curating tools for agents, in the form of Gram Functions. Gram initially started out by letting users upload OpenAPI documents and turning them into tools that can be curated into small MCP servers that power your agentic use cases.

We've known for quite some time that many existing REST APIs are simply not suitable as LLM tools and we wanted to solve this problem by letting users simply write code and we would take care of deploying that code for them and hosting MCP servers. We call this Gram Functions and you can get started with it today by running `pnpm create @gram-ai/function` (or `bun create ...`, `npm create ...`).

Under the hood, when you send us code, we provision fly.io machines that run this code behind a Go server listening for tool calls. Once you've deployed, you'll be able to use the Gram dashboard to create a number of MCP servers that have tools generated from this code and any OpenAPI documents you may want to upload. The key thing is you create small MCP servers for your different agents by cherry picking from these sources. This approach to curation helps manage context bloat that massive MCP servers tend to introduce.

Hope you give it a try! The team will be around to respond to questions and feedback.

PS: If you'd like to poke at some code, Gram's code is up here: https://github.com/speakeasy-api/gram
by rayiner | 2025-11-19 14:31:26+00:00
What’s there to reconcile? My view of what’s good for America doesn’t need to validate my cultural identity or serve my personal interests. My dad left Bangladesh even though we were rich back home because he didn’t want to raise his kids in the culture. So nobody is hurting my feelings by saying that we should resist importing that culture into the U.S.

And to be clear, I don't view myself as an exception! My mom never really assimilated--culturally, she's a Bangladeshi elite--and children mostly receive their culture from their mother.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-11-19 14:31:32+00:00
>> Is your argument that West Virginia is "disorderly" or "culturally inferior" because of immigrants? Which groups, and from when?

> Appalachia was settled by people from a culturally distinct region of northern Britain: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/four-folkways. Hundreds of years later, this group remains culturally and sociologically distinct from other British Americans.

Albion’s Seed is not a reliable narrative as it concerns the region: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40933452 (1992)

In particular, “Borderers” are a myth Fischer concocted out of whole cloth by selectively ignoring inconvenient bits of his primary sources.

The weird second life it got from the glowing Slate Star Codex review is yet another instance of Rationalists wrongly assuming competence outside their domain of expertise.

Your naive adoption and regurgitation of American biases against Appalachians does not endear you to me, either.
by NickC25 | 2025-11-19 14:31:48+00:00
I'm not even left or right but just pointing out that MAGA, who worships hypermasculinity and claims to be the party of God, seems to rile some folks up who can't come to terms with reality.

They make a demigod out of a fat lifelong Democrat in makeup who wrote in a book that if he ever ran for office he'd run as a Republican because they lack independent thought and effectively fall in line. They literally worshipped and prayed to a golden statue of him, which makes the whole story about the golden calf somewhat ironic.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-11-19 14:31:52+00:00
I agree, though the industry does this all the time by hiring someone with a degree vs someone who built key infrastructure and has no degree, solely because they have a degree. Remember, the creator of brew couldn't get past a Google interview because they asked him to hand craft some algorithm, I probably would have not done well with those either. Does that make him or me worse developers? Doubtful. Does it mean Google missed out on hiring someone who loves his craft? Yes.
by sumtechguy | 2025-11-19 14:32:04+00:00
pretty sure scummvm pulled in one of the ultima remake projects. Think it was exult but I could be wrong.

Do you need to play the prev ones? hmm I would say if you play 6 and 7 together you should be ok. You could get away with them standalone probably. I would not play the expansion packs of 7 without playing the base first though. the extra 6 ones you could play standalone. But you would probably want to play savage empire before martian dreams.

Out of those my personal fav was savage empire for some reason. A remix from origin using the ultima 6 engine.
by mojoe | 2025-11-19 14:32:05+00:00
Happy to talk about it, the TL;DR is that this is a hobby where I as the editor don't expect to make back the money I spent creating the book, but the authors get paid a fixed amount up-front. Here's a more detailed answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154#45879003

The only addendum to that answer is that after being featured on HN last week I'm now over halfway toward break-even.
by arcfour | 2025-11-19 14:32:10+00:00
I have a problem. I know, I'll post a dismissive, overly reductive platitude and farm points on HN.

Perl 5 is a great language far ahead of it's time, it's extremely functional, and it still underpins many large and important systems to this day. No, it's not perfect, but it's the first time programming where I ever felt like I was having fun writing the code as opposed to achieving a means to an end.

I admittedly have no experience with Perl 7 and didn't like Raku. Sometimes worse is better.
by piltdownman | 2025-11-19 14:32:18+00:00
// Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job

If we completely ignore the commonplace role of the maid, nanny or domestic helper — women in 1965 spent the same amount of time on child care and only about 10 more hours on housework a week than women in 2011. According to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’” From 1870 through the mid-1900s, that percentage only increased.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/decline...

//much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot

The CPI accounts for these as 'hedonic quality adjustment'.

It's always convenient to benchmark this against 1970s onwards as it was the first year that data on race and ethnicity was included in the income statistics. However 1970 is also a recession year which bottomed out the market and eventually led to an oil crisis for most of the decade.

Adjust for inflation to 2023 and its inarguable.

New house: $23,450 -> $174,468 Average Income: $9,400 -> $69,936 New car: $3,450 -> $25,668 Minimum Wage: $2.10 -> $15.62
by Xelbair | 2025-11-19 14:32:22+00:00
Moderation is okay when it properly adjusts signal-to-noise ratio of discussion.

Censorship is about suppressing opinions which fall out of Overton's window, which is not okay, as all it does is to enforce status quo.

There was a good blogpost by Ex-reddit engineers about it where the idea was to treat it as signal which you cannot understand, and your core purpose as moderation(from automated PoV) is to adjust the signal to noise ratio without being able to comprehend/read the underlying data.

A bit hypocritical of them, looking at how reddit's moderation works.

Frankly i'm also against private censorship in case of social media - as it is basically outsourced government censorship.
by mimsee | 2025-11-19 14:32:34+00:00
IMO there isn't a cookie nightmare but rather a tracking nightmare. I'm not fully up-to-date on if there is a separate EU directive on cookies on the internet specifically, but the GDPR is the _General_ Data Protection Regulation. Meaning that if I go and collect your info on pen and paper, I must then ask your permission on how I process and share that data, especially if sharing that data is not necessary to complete the main transaction but is somehow done auxiliary to the main purpose. (e.g. I buy a pillow online, my info is used to target ads for me.)

GDPR itself doesn't require consent for functional cookies. For example, Apple.com does not have a cookie consent box _at all_.

On tracking specifically, I feel there are at least two levels. One that happens in-browser by third party companies. These are your classic advertisements. The other is more first-party backend-heavy. These would be your local grocery store using your purchase history linked to your membership card and using that data to create analytics and targeted ads etc.

So creating a browser setting would likely not toggle all tracking away, just the ones that are "annoying" while browsing.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-19 14:32:54+00:00
> I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?"

Something I've noticed is that a lot of conspiracy theory is "exactly wrong": people will identify something which does have a real true problem to it, usually to do with elite unaccountability or widespread public lying, and then - without evidence, or using one extremely flimsy link - attach it to someone who least represents that problem. Thereby effectively covering up for all the other crimes.
by backpackviolet | 2025-11-19 14:33:01+00:00
I think it's inversely correlated with power, influence and reach. HN and Reddit don't have guns, can't throw you in prison, and there are lots of social medias to choose from, so a fair bit of censorship can be tolerated. Apple can't deport you, but you also don't have a lot of other choices, very low tolerance for censorship. The Government can really ruin your life if you get on the wrong side and your options for changing it or escaping it are pretty limited, we should demand the highest levels of transparency. Sure, some secrecy around military and intelligence for a little while, but we should eventually know what they decided and why.
by troupo | 2025-11-19 14:33:15+00:00
"Europe's cookie nightmare" has nothing to do with Europe and everything to do with companies assuming that they have god-given right to all your data in perpetuity.

Things like "precise location information stored for 12 years": https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541

Europe literally said: we're not going to force specific tech decisions on you. All we ask is to let people opt-in if they want to be tracked. What we got is "we care about your privacy, we're sending all your data to 15000 partners" from the industry.

To people crying "but this should've been mandated as a browser setting": Which world's largest advertising company has dominating browser marketshare and subsumes all web standards committees? What exactly prevented that company to come up with a browser setting that isn't "we sell your data by default and use dark patterns to trick you to agree" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923?

Our industry is shit, and we blame governments for regulations that ... assume that industries shouldn't be shit. There's literally no need for EU to regulate browser settings. And yet here we are.
by nis0s | 2025-11-19 14:33:22+00:00
It exists. Let me explain.

The only reason Cursor is a company is because it serves as a nice mechanism of wealth transference from VCs to people they like. That’s not a bad thing by itself, but better judgement is to fund ideas by people you like who can make something more than an IDE plug-in competition.

But this company is really just adult daycare for people who went to elite schools, a training ground till they’re ready to expand to real job or problems. These resources are better spent on ideas, people, or places that would bring greater returns on investment.

Their elite school relationships aren’t the problem, the problem is that if someone from a lesser background pitched the same thing, they wouldn’t get funding. This is why things are shit, because people get mesmerized by someone’s school relationships, but they’re not paying attention to what the person or people are actually doing.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-11-19 14:33:32+00:00
I think I agree, at least until it's clear how exactly this should be implemented.

Fingerprints can be shared with third parties without cookies, and while I know that the so-called "cookie law" is not really just about cookies, this is where the deception begins.

For some reason, I think it's easier to force websites to list everyone they share data with, than to force them to comply with an invisible preference that says "don't share data".

It even sounds as if this could be a trojan horse to dismantle parts of the GDPR altogether (see the DNT references in this thread...), and I happen to think that by and large, GDPR is good.
by ajross | 2025-11-19 14:33:52+00:00
I did! Here's the quote:

> But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.

So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault.

Again, is the subject complicated? Sure. But education policy doesn't produce effects like this. It never has, probably never will, and the article even doesn't claim it does.

You know what does produce effects like this? Keeping 13-year-olds out of class for two years.

I mean, come on. I repeat: write it down, in 4 years we'll all be reading about the miracle of American education policy. And that will be wrong too.