MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mesrik | 2025-11-10 14:11:38+00:00
That is true, sw licenses were a major nuisance. As they usually are. Not just where to get one, but in time, to keep track of those and secure so that proof of purchase was not lost before deployment and include final delivery. HP product codes and major version change product renaming plague were not exactly my favourite part of work!

Many HP-UX boxen (servers) came with default (interactive) multiuser OS licenses. Product differentiation which HP sales loved had license castrated workstations, which came only two user license.

First time I had no clue about this and were wondering why some odd network management software I was installing a server did not restart properly and was causing head scratching. Then I found that logs stated our license was not valid though it had been confirmed valid in other test install.

A HP support guy I knew and saw later told that I had probably to install optional two-user package and then the software will start. Oh, great that it was. But what the heck that two-user license only prevented only two serial line users simultaneously and only systems console was serial that time and everyone else logged in via network. To be sure I made PM check if we still were within license because of that. He told me later yep, no problem there. Just get it done and we're ready deploy it to site.
by styanax | 2025-11-10 14:11:43+00:00
I'm sure geo has something to do with it - my connections generally terminate in Austin, TX but it varies around Central US. I have T-Mobile Home Internet and our IPs show up to remotes under the same general ASNs as the traditional mobile network (big huge CGNAT, my IP can change 5 times a day or whatnot and it doesn't reflect where I actually am located).

Edit: in case useful to someone reading, right now I have an IP assigned out of this block:

NetRange: 172.32.0.0 - 172.63.255.255 CIDR: 172.32.0.0/11 NetName: TMO9 NetHandle: NET-172-32-0-0-1

Edit edit: in the network record is a link to the self-reported geo data, I missed that.

Comment: Geofeed https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmobile/tmus-geofeed/main/tmus-geo-ip.txt
by Fileformat | 2025-11-10 14:12:27+00:00
Because we want RSS to be friendly to new users. If you display a RSS feed as a wall of XML text, no new user will understand. If you just make it so clicking a RSS link brings up a blurb about RSS is & links on how to use, they might understand.

And we have done it for other formats: PDF is now quite well supported in browsers without plugins/etc.
by arghwhat | 2025-11-10 14:12:34+00:00
They are trying to improve service by avoiding noise. Something few realize is that all wireless technologies are, in effect, time-share: Every device on the channel, router/tower included, take turn to talk while everyone else shuts up and listens.

If other types of devices also use your channel, you'll have to shut up and wait for airtime even longer. Having WiFi and cellular co-exist mean that they are both fighting eachother over airtime, and both spending a lot of time silent.

It's preferable to avoid channel overlap when the services need to co-exist.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-10 14:12:38+00:00
The "hate" is the same as the backlash to Huawei, which is the suspicion that there's Chinese government-accessible backdoors that can cripple infrastructure.

However, as far as I'm aware none of that has been found yet. And since multiple countries have state-level and state-funded hackers / IT security experts who have the time, budget, and capability to completely dismantle and disassemble these devices (plus enthousiastic hobbyists), you'd think they would have found concrete evidence already. If there was any.

I have faith in "our" capacity to uncover backdoors.
by surajrmal | 2025-11-10 14:13:04+00:00
You still need to maintain that sandbox. Ultimately no one wants to spend energy maintaining software that isn't used very heavily. That's why feature depreciation happens. If someone cares enough, they should step in an offer to take over long term maintenance and fix the problems. Ideally a group of people, and perhaps more ideally, a group with some financial backing (eg a company), otherwise it may be difficult to actually trust that they will live up to the commitment.

Even projects like Linux deprecate old underused features all the time. At least the Internet has real metrics about API usage which allows for making informed decisions. Folks describing how they are part of that small fraction of users doesn't really change the data. What's also interesting is that a very similar group of people seem to lament about how it's impossible to write a new browser these days because there are too many features to support.
by fainpul | 2025-11-10 14:13:27+00:00
Having a group of people come together and agree on some structure (i.e. governance) doesn't take anybody's freedom away. But such a group could hopefully achieve more than all the "lone wolves" or small teams on their own.

I think the big difficulty is that every person has their own taste and preferences when it comes to the desktop UI/UX and doesn't want to contribute to something that is somewhat different from that. It's easier for a company / organization which can hire people. The payment makes up for any small misalignment of ideas.

But the article also talks about compatible interfaces, so all those fragmented projects could be used together in a meaningful way.
by paweladamczuk | 2025-11-10 14:14:06+00:00
Beets with this flag works relatively well for me when wrapped in a shell script, but I have spent a lot of effort trying to make it actually non-interactive.

I'm still not totally sure I got all the certainty thresholds right, I still sometimes get unexpected behavior when using Beets this way, so I agree that the non-interactive experience is lacking.
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-10 14:14:09+00:00
The Premier is the largest soccer league by revenue. England also spends the most on players. So yes, soccer is 'our' game currently.

And the sun still doesn't set on our Commonwealth.

Also, Great Britain is an island, not England.

We can't win in the UK: if we cheer on our achievements and be positive, we're accused of being stuck in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy. If we get depressed about our economy, we're told we're not being positive enough and are 'talking down' the UK.
by ielts_pal | 2025-11-10 14:14:25+00:00
I built an AI-powered voice agent to help people prepare for the IELTS english exam -- specifically the speaking portion.

https://ieltspal.ai

- Realistic exam conversations with natural follow-ups and questions to challenge your viewpoint

- Get scored on all 4 criteria (fluency, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation)

- Instant feedback on where to improve

- Free credits to start

There are many existing resources to help prepare for the IELTS exam, however the options are very limited when it comes to practicing the speaking portion.
by shagie | 2025-11-10 14:14:29+00:00
It does float, though not necessarily at the top of the water column. It's also larger and thus a bit more difficult to get mixed into the sand. It is still a problem.

1997 Lego spill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Lego_spill

The Cornish beaches where Lego keeps washing up - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198

After 25 Years at Sea, Shipwrecked Lego Pieces Are Still Washing Ashore on Beaches in England - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/whimsical-legos-ar...
by basscomm | 2025-11-10 14:14:38+00:00
> Google doesn't hate XSLT, it is simply no one wants to maintain libxslt and it is full of security issues. Given how rarely it is used, it is just not worth the time + money. If the author wants to raise money to pay a developer willing to maintain libxslt, Google might revise the decision.

Counterpoint: google hates XML and XSLT. I've been working on a hobby site using XML and XSLT for the last five years. Google refused to crawl and index anything on it. I have a working sitemap, a permissive robots.txt, a googlebot html file proving that I'm the owner of the site, and I've jumped through every hoop I can find, and they still refused to crawl or index anything except a snippet of the main index.xml page and they won't crawl any links on that.

I switched everything over to a static site generator a few weeks ago, and Google immediately crawled the whole thing and started showing snippets of the entire site in less than a day.

My guess is that their usage stats are skewed because they've designed their entire search apparatus to ignore it.
by tonyvince7 | 2025-11-10 14:14:43+00:00
The ship was the pride of the American side Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most With a crew and good captain well seasoned Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms When they left fully loaded for Cleveland And later that night when the ship's bell rang Could it be the north wind they'd been feeling?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound And a wave broke over the railing And every man knew, as the captain did too 'Twas the witch of November come stealing The dawn came late, and the breakfast had to wait When the gales of November came slashin' When afternoon came, it was freezin' rain In the face of a hurricane west wind

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin' "Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya" At seven p.m., a main hatchway caved in, he said "Fellas, it's been good to know ya" The captain wired in he had water comin' in And the good ship and crew was in peril And later that night when his lights went outta sight Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

-- Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-11-10 14:15:00+00:00
I think I have read something like that similar as well.

Freebsd seems like an amazing project too.

I am always confused tho by what is the actual difference b/w freebsd,netbsd,openbsd as I feel like freebsd is taking a lot of positive ideas from both netbsd and openbsd or independently building them.

I might want to play with freebsd one day but I feel like it might have limited software or I might need to compile a lot of things as compared to archlinux or even debian etc.
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-10 14:15:50+00:00
It's perfectly reasonable (and much more maintainable and powerful) to use client side JavaScript on a static site to transform Atom or RSS into HTML.

If your argument is that you don't want to use JavaScript because it's Turing complete and insecure and riddled with bugs and security holes, then why the fuck are you using XSLT?
by ferguess_k | 2025-11-10 14:16:52+00:00
MSFT lays the burden of QC to its users. This is intended and they mean the end product to be shitty at the beginning and gradually improve every sprint/release. That's the world now.

I started to notice this when I tried out Power BI back in 2018. Back then the software is barely useable by developers. The code editor is barebone and overall the software is bloat and slow. But it has improved a lot since then. We can definitely argue that at least some of the nitty gritties should be fixed even before the earlier releases, but I guess the culture is already "Move fast, get back when you fall" -- after all it is the users who fall anyway.

I wonder how old timers such as Raymond Chen or David Cutler view this phenomenon. David Cutler is said to be very stringent on the quality of the kernel at least.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-11-10 14:17:04+00:00
I wanted to build flatpaks cli applications and I still don't understand how to build a flatpak cli in the first place and I have asked in some communities and they mention things like vim being in flatpak but I more so need a definitive guide on how to publish a cli application to flatpak

A lot of focus in flatpak sadly gets focused on guis and not clis

Like how much efforts would it take to convert a golang static binary/project cli to flatpak?
by zerkten | 2025-11-10 14:17:05+00:00
The sites sometimes want to provide some special formatting on top of the RSS without modifying it. For example, you might point people to available RSS readers which may not be installed or provide other directions to end users. RSS feeds are used in places other than reading apps. I've seen people suggest that this transformation could be done server-side, but that would modify the RSS feed which needs to be consumed.
by researcher-one | 2025-11-10 14:17:26+00:00
Another interesting myth is that Hedy Lamarr was a competent mathematician. I would like to see any evidence supporting this. She quit school at age 16 (IIRC). Perhaps this is another instance where people who have no knowledge of mathematics perpetrate an urban legend, in the same way that people who have no knowledge of invention or communication engineering perpetrate the myth that the world is in Hedy's debt because "she invented FHSS."
by m_rpn | 2025-11-10 14:17:41+00:00
The Brits don't produce anything anymore except money laundering in the City of London (where i work btw) and some cattle, so you should expect that kind of biased narrative from them. We in Italy are among the best and most profitable in the high-tech mechanical manufacturing industry, but we also have the worst paid engineers and technicians of the western world. The Italian Miracle.
by assemblyman | 2025-11-10 14:17:49+00:00
I think a lot of this depends on where you started. I don't disagree that the details of the methods don't apply especially to technology stocks. On the other hand, one learns a principled way of looking at companies. It's easy, if one hasn't paid attention to anything in the financial world, to think of stocks as abstract numbers that "will go up" or "go down" or "has good prospects because everyone is talking about it". Any of these books are a good antidote to that because they teach a framework to reason about companies.

I also do find it strange that this idea gets so much push back. For people who don't want to think about investing, just put your savings in index funds (and/or cash equivalents depending on your plans). For people who are curious about these aspects, read some of the books and invest with small amounts and learn. Maybe you won't consistently beat SP500 and maybe you will. After all, it's not like all active investors shut their hedge funds down and started investing in SP500. The usual argument is that the funds have much more resources but it's actually easier to invest with smaller amounts than millions or billions of dollars.
by nis0s | 2025-11-10 14:17:50+00:00
Okay, then please read someone who writes gooder than I do:

On child prostitution in Germany—https://www.dw.com/en/germany-police-raise-alarm-over-spike-...

On sex trafficking in Germany—https://www.dw.com/en/germany-mulls-ban-on-buying-sex-to-fig...

Further on sex trafficking—https://mission-freedom.de/en/forced-prostitution/facts-and-...

On increase in STDs— >…significantly more STI diagnoses

https://di.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article/224168/Men-who...

On issues with the recent report on PPA—https://catwinternational.org/2025/08/catws-statement-on-the...

Why do you think they’re trying to do the Nordic model now? Hint: it’s not because legalizing sex work proved to be a great solution for their society.

Interesting to note, Germany ranks lower than the US on the happiness index.
by cassepipe | 2025-11-10 14:18:22+00:00
It seems like it's a conservative fantasy that all public money is being wasted but until I see detailed information on where and why (Chesterton's fence style) it is being wasted, I can't take them seriously

It seems like people are vastly overestimating the amount of money being wasted. If it was that easy, it would have probably been done. In serious circles (outside overt MAGA propaganda ecosystem) I believe DOGE is considered quite a failure.

I'd be much more sympathetic to a tax system reform as it seems that in democracies, there is a vast amount of tax "gerrymandering" in order to favor your voter base... but of course no politician wants to remove that option
by CameronBanga | 2025-11-10 14:18:34+00:00
Been working on a native iOS client for Bluesky. Liquid glass design, and trying to make it feel much more native than the standard client.

Been posting some screenshots to my feed, if you want to see what it currently looks like: https://bsky.app/profile/cameronbanga.com

Have about 100 spots left on my current TestFlight if anyone is interested: https://testflight.apple.com/join/RRvk14ks
by hhameed | 2025-11-10 14:18:38+00:00
Thanks hoisbypetard, I took a look at that platform, I found at least a few key differences, though there are probably more. 1. First of all, we have more features. One of the notable ones is the support for tools. You can see from the dashboard that we support a variety of tools. There are more (eg, users can organize their chat sessions into nested folder structures, etc.) 2. We have more handy features, for example, say you want to highlight or annotate a response. 3. Our prices by the way is way less than what they are offering.
Show HN: Beitha – Supercharge the Browser
by anwarlaksir | 2025-11-10 14:18:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Anwar, I previously built Cubent (now acquired from a private buyer), a developer tool extension for vscode.

And now, I created Beitha, a lightweight agent that runs directly inside Chrome (or any Chromium browser) and lets you control the web with natural language, no new browser, no setup. I wanted to go beyond “AI chat” and build something that actually acts: opening tabs, filling forms, editing text, clicking buttons, or extracting data, all through one interface.

Beitha doesn’t replace Chrome it augments it. Think of it as a layer that makes your browser do the boring stuff for you.
by zerkten | 2025-11-10 14:19:03+00:00
Did a JS polyfill ever go anywhere? There is a comment on https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/zIg2K... which suggests that it might be possible, but a lot has changed. I suspect any effort died with continued availability after the first attempt to kill XSLT.
by toomanyrichies | 2025-11-10 14:19:40+00:00
I'm building CommitKit, a tool that turns your git history into résumé bullet points and STAR-based talking points for interviews.

After being downsized twice in two years from senior engineering roles, I realized how painful it is to reconstruct what you actually accomplished at a job once you’ve lost access to your repos.

Each time, I had to dig through memory and scraps of old PRs to remember what I’d built. The first time, I lost GitHub access immediately after the layoff notice. This time, at least we got 90 days of paid transition work. But even with just 5 months in the role, I’d already made hundreds of commits. For engineers who’ve been around for years, that’s an impossible amount of history to summarize manually.

So I’m building CommitKit, a command-line tool that scans your repo for your commits, groups them by feature or theme using embeddings, and generates professional CV bullet points or behavioral interview summaries. It runs locally using Ollama, so your commit messages and diffs never leave your machine. The goal is to help people quickly turn real engineering work into clear narratives of impact, especially when time or access is limited.

It’s still early: the clustering isn’t grouping commits quite as I’d hoped, possibly due to sparse commit messages or embedding quirks. But it’s been a great learning project: my first CLI tool, my first deployment on Render, and my first serious use of Ollama for local LLM inference.
by whism | 2025-11-10 14:19:59+00:00
My guess is that this change has its roots in the move from physical media delivery of software to internet delivery.

My instinct is that there is some general principle that relates “friction” and “quality”, although I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to describe it.

I.e. where there is a barrier to entry, quality of results tends to improve.

I also see this in ease of publishing to social media, bias of “old music is better” (time has sorted wheat from chaff) and so on.

Perhaps there’s a well known description of this phenomenon somewhere already…
by crazygringo | 2025-11-10 14:20:01+00:00
An RSS feed is not a document meant for viewing. It's not like PDF or HTML or a video.

It's a format intended for be consumed like an API call. It's like JSON. The link is something you import into an aggregator.

RSS feeds shouldn't even be displayed as XML at all. They should just be download links that open in an aggregator application. The same way .torrent files are imported into a torrenting client, not viewed.
by sigwinch | 2025-11-10 14:20:18+00:00
I think it’s unbiased to say that Jan 6 was about Trump more than any other person. No matter how you pore over his speech, he’s purposefully unclear about what “we” means and how the “fight” should start. No one analyzed the speech in realtime for its most-influential lines and this edit reflects what the rioters heard and felt.
by crote | 2025-11-10 14:20:32+00:00
You've got to take into account that those bandwidth figures exist on paper only - nobody is getting 5Gbps out of their wifi.

In practice it is all about degraded performance. If you're sitting in another room than the AP, close to your neighbour, do you want to be left with 50Mbps remaining out of the original 5000Mbps, or 2Mbps remaining out of the original 200Mpbs?
by ramses0 | 2025-11-10 14:20:54+00:00
I've heard rumors/suggestions that you shouldn't worry too much about things until you have a clear revenue or expense plan that reaches the IRS minimums: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/check-if-you-need-to-file-a-...

ie: if you're making $100/mo (talk to your tax advisor), but if you're clearly making $3k+/mo then you should have a plan to incorporate, file taxes, etc. (and should also be talking to your tax advisor).

It helps to cool my jets when my brain gets into "unicorn mode" ... do I have 30 people RIGHT NOW who will pay me $100/mo? Am I supporting 3 customers who are each paying me $1000/mo? Are 300 people beating down my door to pay me $10/mo?

...probably not... and if they were? Then you've got the beginnings of a company and should start with the paperwork!
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-10 14:21:09+00:00
Back in my day our batteries came in a bunch of standard sizes and you could just pop them in and out of a compartiment in your electronic devices. There were collection points at any grocery store, there was even a points scheme so you could get a video game from handing in used batteries [0]. Or you could get rechargeable ones.

I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek, this still exists but I don't understand why they don't make lithium batteries in AA / AAA size or whatever for things like vapes. Battery collection, replacement and recycling is / was a solved problem.

[0] https://archive.org/details/BATTERYCHECK
by seethishat | 2025-11-10 14:21:13+00:00
This all started, in earnest, with Response Policy Zones being added to BIND. RPZ allow DNS resolvers to lie to clients by returning (nxdomain or redirects to other domains) and the client does not know it is being lied to.

https://www.isc.org/docs/BIND_RPZ.pdf

At first, RPZ was used to block known malicious domains (drive by malware downloads, etc.). Then, the security weenies started using RPZ to block other things like TikTok (for administrative/legal reasons). That's when the DNS became a big lie.

I guess some day, one political party will use it to block the websites of other political parties, etc. That's stupid to say (I know) but that seems to be the slippery slope we are sliding down.
by devsda | 2025-11-10 14:21:22+00:00
I never understood the concept of newspapers endorsing a candidate.

Don't newspapers have to at-least pretend to be neutral in a democracy i.e. on the side of people. Is there some dynamic here due to America being effectively a two party democracy that I'm missing.

I feel like endorsing one candidate over the other is a public declaration/acknowledgement that their future reporting on failures of their endorsed candidate will be soft and reporting on the other party will be aggressive.

Someone who regularly follows news on both sides may be able to tell whether this has been true so far or not.