MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mlok | 2025-11-23 18:57:12+00:00
Ok you don't like dark mode.

I love dark mode, and I don't like light mode. Everything is dark mode on my machines, day and night.

I find it stupid to have so much light beamed into my face, and I prefer to only light up the useful signal. The letters and numbers, and graphs. The 99% of background is of no interest and as such it doesn't need to send light to my face.
by fn-mote | 2025-11-23 18:57:28+00:00
In this case, the suggestion of banning advertising is drawing downvotes from me because I see it as politically unrealistic.

At least in my state, there isn’t even a ban on advertising online gambling!! It is quite a stretch to think we could move from there to banning any kind of advertising.

It has nothing to do with the fact that a bunch of HN readers make money from ads. I don’t.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-11-23 18:57:39+00:00
> Bonus point: I don’t have to do the whole “men are like this and women are like that” dance that many people in my social circle explicitly seem to do. Because my dance is “she is like me and I am like her”.

That does sound appealing when put like that.

My experience has been with the counterbalancing kind of relationships I mentioned (maybe I subconsciously seek them out that way), with about 50% overlap in personality or interests and 50% divergence. And many of the memories I cherish from them have been from them introducing me to new little worlds, social environments, and experiences that I wouldn't have sought out or even given a thought to, on my own.

But there were also times when I wished we were more similar, when some experiences (that I was excited about) would have been great to share, and were diminished or even skipped out on because they weren't as into it. So seeking out more overlap seems at least worth trying out.

Thank you for giving a thoughtful and well-considered reply, by the way.
by Tooster | 2025-11-23 18:58:08+00:00
I was sure it must have been invented already! I've been trying to look for this idea without knowing it's called "spectral rendering", looking for "absorptive rendering" or similar instead, which led me to dead ends. The technique is very interesting and I would love to see it together with semi-transparent materials — I have been suspecting for some time that a method like that could allow cheap OIT out of the box?
by cubefox | 2025-11-23 18:58:37+00:00
Apparently (from a layman's perspective) the difference between conventional RGB ray tracing and spectral ray tracing is this:

RGB assumes all light sources consist of three RGB lights, where the brightness of red, green, and blue varies. E.g. a yellow light would always be a red and a green light.

In contrast, spectral rendering allows light sources with arbitrary spectra. A pure yellow light (~580 nm) is different from a red+green light.

The physical difference is this: If you shine, for example, a pure yellow light on a scene, everything looks yellow, just more or less dark. But if you shine a red+green (impure yellow) light on a scene, green objects will be green and red objects will be red. Not everything will appear as a shade of yellow. Conventional RGB rendering can only model the latter case.

This means some light sources, like high-pressure sodium lamps, cannot be accurately rendered with RGB rendering: red and green surfaces would look too bright.

(Also note that the linked post has also a part 1 and 3, accessible via "next/previous post" at the bottom.)
Show HN: I just fixed .env once and for all – better-env
by harish3304 | 2025-11-23 18:59:03+00:00
.env files have always felt archaic, insecure, clunky and honestly just not fun to work with. I see my friends (and myself) accidentally committing them all the time. Managing secrets across projects becomes a mess of copy-pasting keys into scattered env files with no real way to sync anything.

So I built better-env: a secure, developer-friendly alternative to .env.

Store your secrets once in a global encrypted store, and load them per-project at runtime.

I’d love feedback on whether this feels useful beyond solo devs, and what you’d want for teams or CI setups.

Fully open source: https://github.com/HarishChandran3304/better-env
by anaisbetts | 2025-11-23 18:59:04+00:00
Same tbh. macOS is my last resort, I find so much of it incredibly frustrating, from the literal constant permission nannying, the unrepentant "We broke your shit, deal with it" that comes with many many updates, the horrendous UI of Tahoe, it's the worst. Apple might have great (though boring) laptop hardware, but jeez louise does macOS ruin the whole thing.
by shmeeed | 2025-11-23 18:59:23+00:00
This, so much! It's outright disgusting. I have no idea why we tolerate this as a society. I fear it is because this diagnosis isn't widely known, it's happening on the fringes.

Everybody, including journalists and tech people, is moving about their own algorithmic bubble nearly all the time. They just can't imagine how bad the situation has become out there. We're turning a blind eye to the very thing that is destroying our societies.
by imiric | 2025-11-23 18:59:50+00:00
I repeat:

> Whatever issues Signal Foundation has had, they certainly pale in comparison to Meta's.

At this point I would trust a vibe-coded messenger app over anything produced by Meta. Security and privacy are completely opposed to Meta's business model and track record, regardless of how WhatsApp was once designed, and especially regardless of what their PR army claims. The idea that the same couldn't hypothetically happen to Signal is pure fantasy that's not worth entertaining in this discussion.
by ericmcer | 2025-11-23 19:00:01+00:00
You can extrapolate this on to anyones life, not just someone with such a huge and dramatic secret they were hiding for the stability of their family life.

If your parents get old/sick or you have kids or a bad relationship or you get stuck in a job or any other myriad life events occur, the weight of your own days can suddenly drain so much time and energy that years fly by. Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
by potsandpans | 2025-11-23 19:00:17+00:00
> What is the issue is the hostile and inflammatory style of commenting towards other community members and HN as a whole.

Please.

> having established a history of participating on HN with this persona of being a brave combatant for, I don't know, some worldview or philosophy that you seem to be fighting for;

What? Just because I have a different worldview than you, doesn't mean I am fighting for or am a brave combatant of anything. But it's extremely telling that you think that, and revealing about your own views. And furthermore troubling that you are a moderator here.

Maybe you should read up on the clustering phenomena wiki and understand your own personal biases a little more.
by pickledonions49 | 2025-11-23 19:01:41+00:00
Nothing is ever going to be completely equal in society. Innovation is driven by labor being capital (thus profit), or by influence (state backed stuff loses money in exchange for influence). I have a right to make money with resources at my disposal. Taxes are exchanged for the privileges of citizenship, and hopefully, someday, the ability to not get screwed by insurance.

Correct me if I am wrong, I am open to ideas. My knowledge of economics is all from social studies class, my brother almost dying because insurance at first denied to pay for his surgery, and making money from yard work and fixing electronics because I am not old enough to get a legit job. I have never paid taxes, but I somewhat understand disdain towards taxation in an age where the cost of living is as high as it is relative to the amount of money one is capable of making.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-23 19:01:49+00:00
MAGA was introduced by Trump and is a symbol of Trump. I didn’t argue that they shouldn’t ban “Hope” even though Hope was also something that wasn’t political before Obama. It was clearly partisan for Obama.

MAGA is not speaking to “American greatness”. It’s whining that America isn’t great any more because of among others gays and skinny jeans wearing west coast elite - ie making it great “again”

The idea of America not already being “great” was something that no Democrat could have said. We have been drinking the Kool Aid of American exceptionalism for a century.

If you listen to almost anyone in the MAGA camp, it meant “those evil minorities like the secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia law and those Hatians eating pets took over America and now it’s a crime ridden country infested by immigrants”
by nothrabannosir | 2025-11-23 19:01:53+00:00
Disagree with this just because it makes everything else easier. The more you stick to common key bindings, the more intuitive various packages will be. Eg navigating lines vs blocks in a magit diff block is C-n and N respectively. Copying a full hash is M-w. All these bindings are intuitive “overlays” on conventional bindings.

Emacs shines when packages combine to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Changing basic key bindings is the quickest way to vitiate that symbiosis.

Unfortunately.

And while they may be old school, traditional, and orthodox, they are by no means idiosyncratic. They’re widely supported: readline , bash, everywhere on macos, even modern browsers. Eg you can actually paste in bash: try killing something with C-w or C-k, and paste it back using C-y. Or transpose arguments using C-M-t. Navigate suggestions in Firefox using C-n and C-p. Bash even supports undo using C-/.

All to say: learning emacs movement keys pays off.
by oktoberpaard | 2025-11-23 19:02:13+00:00
What you are taking about is also called HDR, but has nothing to do with what the other person is talking about. The other person is talking about the still image equivalent of HDR video formats. When displayed on an HDR capable monitor, it will map the brightest parts of the image to the extended headroom of the monitor instead of tone mapping it to be displayed on a standard SDR monitor. So to be even more clear: it defines brightness levels beyond what is normally 100%.
by credit_guy | 2025-11-23 19:02:52+00:00
> It probably won't cost too much time to catch up

That's a risky bet. It is more likely that the user interface of AI will evolve. Some things will stick, some will not. Three years from now, many things that are clunky now will be replaced by more intuitive things. But some things that already work now will still be in place. People who have been heavy users of AI between now and then will definitely have a leg start on those who will just start then.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-11-23 19:03:05+00:00
As someone who in fact _doesn't_ have a strong suit for art (and is a programmer) - I don't feel this is an unfair statement. It says "programmers are known" which is not an absolute statement but more of a vibe - and it's a vibe I would definitely say is true on average.

Does that discount your personal experience as an artist? Of course not! That would just be reading into the phrasing way too much.
by packetslave | 2025-11-23 19:03:07+00:00
I have a bit of a different take on browser fingerprinting: I don't want to uniquely identify you as a person so I can serve you ads, or whatever. I want to identify your traffic when you're scraping my content from 2,000 different IP's and 1,000 different user accounts, I can block you or rate limit you without hurting anyone else.

Given the scale of scrapers these days (AI companies with VC money have no problem spinning up thousands of VMs running Chrome), fingerprinting at the browser level is the only realistic option.

(obligatory: my personal opinion, not necessarily my employer's)
by rapnie | 2025-11-23 19:03:19+00:00
Yes, there's also the "Eskimo kiss" in Inuit culture. Rubbing noses together, as a climate adjusted habit. From Wikipedia:

> Rather, it is a non-erotic but intimate greeting used by people who, when they meet outside, often have little except their nose and eyes exposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_kiss
by port11 | 2025-11-23 19:03:55+00:00
Well… I had friends working in research or drafting advice that ends up in the hands of policy-makers. And while these people are motivated and want to do their job well, I disagree that they're providing the best advice.

Politicians don't need to know the details but should know understand the wider, larger brushstrokes of the painting. That would be worlds easier if tech people listened to Bruce Schneier and started getting into policy.

Someone who's had a career in tech can probably tell good from bad advice when it comes to the best interests of the public in mind. And perhaps they'd be less corruptible by the best interests of the wealthy.
by ang_cire | 2025-11-23 19:03:58+00:00
> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.

I think given that the writer, who lived in the same culture with the same dangers and expectations, decided to accept the risks by coming out, I don't think it's vanity. They did what their father was too afraid to do.

It is absolutely bitterness, but I don't think you're in any position to judge the appropriate level of bitterness for a child to have towards their deadbeat parent.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-11-23 19:04:08+00:00
Can't you do that with a normal ID card?

Digital ID makes it easier for governments to mandat "real name" polcies when registering online (reddit, HN, etc.), because you already have a digital ID, and if you want to make a reddit account, you'll have to link it with your real name, and this was hard until now.
by DetroitThrow | 2025-11-23 19:04:10+00:00
>Response times matching OpenAI’s API latency patterns (150–400ms for most queries)

This also matches the latency of a large number of DB queries and non-OpenAI LLM inference requests.

>Token usage patterns identical to GPT-4’s pricing tiers

What? Yes this totally smells real.

He also mentions backoff patterns, which I'm not sure how he'd disambiguate extremely standard backoff in a normal API.

Given the ridiculousness of these claims, I believe there's a reason he didn't include the fingerprinting methodology in this article.
by t_mahmood | 2025-11-23 19:05:03+00:00
I can assure you, It's not about organization, not for me at least.

I just can't stand too many windows open in a single workspace, I get anxious, and close window, and then I close an important window and get lost.

With workspace, I don't have to close any window, go to another workspace, and keep working. If I remember something, on some other window/app, I can just move it to the current workspace.

So, now come to the point with too many window, traversing them become a huge pain. So, for that, I use `rofi` with window list option, so, I can just fuzzy search and jump to any window.

Switching by search is absolutely must if you are working in workspace and have too many windows.

I try to keep my projects in separate workspaces, and terminals related to the project in secondary monitors, and IDE on the primary, that's all organization I have
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-23 19:05:38+00:00
Not a ton of info on it, but ran into this graphics of a galaxy, all rendered with some form of spectral rendering. Thought it was super cool. https://bsky.app/profile/altunenes.bsky.social/post/3m5z6vr2...

Distantly reminds me the decades I spent with galaxy as my xscreensaver. https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/xscreensaver-data/galaxy....
Show HN: AwardLocker – Real-time award flight search
by __cxa_throw | 2025-11-23 19:05:38+00:00
AwardLocker searches award availability across multiple airlines in real time. Results stream in as they're found, so you see options immediately.

Backstory: I've been working on this in my spare time. I enjoy award travel searches, and I wanted to contribute something useful to the space. Existing tools often have suboptimal search experiences—poor date selection, slow results, and limited flexibility, and SLOW SLOW SLOW websites. Airline website are slow, and my credit card strategy allows to transfer to multiple airlines.

I built this to parallelize searches across all airlines and show results as they arrive.

What's different: Instead of waiting for all results, flights appear as they're found. You can search multiple airlines at once, use multi-city codes (EUR, TYO, NYC, USA, etc.), and compare economy, premium, business, and first across programs in one place. I wanted something similar to google search, without all the riff raff of other point search tools. Simple start + end date, and location.

Current coverage: Alaska, American, Virgin Atlantic. Others are in progress. Try it: https://awardlocker.com — no signup required for the free tier (14-day search window). Pro ($7.49/month) adds 18-month searches and 31-day date blocks. Use code HN20 for 20% off Pro subscriptions :^)

Explicitly looking for feedback on: - UX - What features people want next - What airlines people want to support the most - Any other features to improve the search?

If anyone prefers feedback via email: tsb[at]awardlocker.com

There are some known issues im buttoning up: - Bypassing bot detection on airlines isn't bullet proof, sometimes requests will fail.
by adrianmonk | 2025-11-23 19:05:55+00:00
After you click the "SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT" button (on the page you linked), you then see a message that says, "Comments are due 12/02/2025 at 11:59 pm EST."

I think a better UI design would be to show that info before you press the button, but my main point is that they are apparently still accepting comments.
by flag_fagger | 2025-11-23 19:06:04+00:00
Cigarette makers were a dying cry of the old aristocracy. Silicon Valley is the rallying cry of the new aristocracy.

While I don’t quite believe they’ll achieve their Feudal dreams in the near-medium future. I do expect the US to transition to a much more explicitly an oligarchic republic as a large, with the pretense of “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is largely pushed to the side.

Only solution seems to be to drop out of society to whatever degree possible.
by diogenescynic | 2025-11-23 19:06:19+00:00
No, I have no burden of proof because I'm not writing a scholastic paper and I made my argument using critical thinking that you can easily infer if you just think about it.

People aren't wearing masks anymore, do you see a dramatic increase in COVID deaths? Then your point is self-evidently wrong--no further analysis needed.

You're conflating so many different things. Surgery with an open wound is not the same as spreading COVID which was never even proven to be spread airborne. You're either intellectually dishonest or naive. Either way this is pointless. You clearly just like being told what to think. I get it, there's safety in feeling like if you just follow the rules you'll be safe. You can follow the school into the net, because freedom is not what you actually want.

They just wanted to sell you masks. Don't you get it? It's just about the money.
by mindcrash | 2025-11-23 19:06:35+00:00
If you have compiled a pretty fat kernel with all useful, non-exotic, modules built in you will never have to recompile the kernel (unless a new release drops) when switching out hardware. You (most likely) only need the firmware, which apparently is quite a hassle in Debian based environments.

For NixOS and Gentoo, for example, all the firmware you will probably ever need is included in one big package: linux-firmware. Install that, and you are pretty much done and ready to use almost everything connected on your computer without any problems.

Almost, because there's one big exception: Nvidia video cards. Which will need their own proprietary drivers to run properly. AMD works out of the box...
by pygy_ | 2025-11-23 19:07:39+00:00
This is TFUS [1] with a novel target.

It looks like independent hackers with a strong technical background and little regard for decorum.

Their methodology seems reasonable, and their results are plausible.

I’m reserved about the final part of the post where they moot about applications, but the core result seems solid. They elicited osmosphenes like one can elicit phosphènes by targeting the visual cortex.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_focused_ultrasoun...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-23 19:08:15+00:00
> Better do the math, which means 15 years to reach where macOS is nowadays

macOS nowadays is closing in on 20%. And you can only buy macOS on premium-priced hardware and by now Linux supports more games than it does. The thing holding either of them back has always been third party software compatibility, which as the web has eroded native apps has been less of a problem, which is why both macOS and Linux have been growing at the expense of Windows.

And these things have tipping points. Can your company ignore Linux when it has 0.5% market share? Sure. Can you ignore it when it has 5% market share? There is a less of a case for that, so more things support it, which allows it to get even more market share, which causes even more things to support it. It's non-linear. The market share of macOS would already be significantly higher than it is if a new Mac laptop didn't start at a thousand bucks and charge $200 extra to add 8GB of RAM. Linux isn't going to have that problem.

Now, is it going to jump from 5% to 50% in three days? Of course not. But it's probably going to be more tomorrow than it was yesterday for the foreseeable future.

> we need to face the reality without Windows, Valve would not have a business.

Valve makes money from selling games and Steam. If Linux had 70% desktop market share and Windows had 5%, what would change about how they make money?
Scraping via Googlebot – How is it possible?
by devx_ | 2025-11-23 19:08:27+00:00
Hi,

I run a website that recently experienced unusually high traffic from what appeared to be legitimate Googlebot. After investigating the access patterns, I was able to identify the source through some creative analysis.

Background

Someone has been scraping my website extensively using what appears to be authentic Googlebot. I traced the activity back to the person responsible, and they revealed they're using a commercial API service that can trigger real Googlebot crawls on-demand.

Technical Details

I tested the service myself to verify their claims, and confirmed it does indeed dispatch legitimate Googlebot to any URL within 1–2 seconds.

Verified Googlebot IPs (via reverse DNS):

- 66.249.76.65 → crawl-66-249-76-65.googlebot.com

- 192.178.4.87 → crawl-192-178-4-87.googlebot.com

- 2001:4860:4801:002d::0006 → crawl-2001-4860-4801-002d...googlebot.com

- Additional IPs from 34.96.x.x range → googleusercontent.com

Request Headers:

- User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/117.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

- From: googlebot(at)googlebot.com

- Referer: https://www.google.com/

What Makes This Unusual:

- The service returns scraped HTML within 1–2 seconds

- It works for completely fresh URLs that have never been crawled

- All reverse DNS lookups confirm legitimate Google infrastructure

- The requests are triggered on-demand via API call

Verification Offer

I'm happy to validate these claims by having the service trigger a crawl to a unique test URL, so you can verify in your internal logs that it's genuinely Googlebot being dispatched.

Any insights into how this is technically possible?

Thanks!