MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ProgrammerByDay | 2025-11-23 10:50:26+00:00
I wanted a lightweight way to know which users were drifting away before they hit ‘cancel,’ so I built LowChurn.

Just drop in a JS snippet and connect Stripe (with read-only api key) — the AI correlates usage patterns with payment behavior and tells you which users are at risk, and why.

It’s been surprisingly accurate, so shipping it publicly now.

Let me know if you like to try it. (private Beta is free)
by sturza | 2025-11-23 10:50:39+00:00
The critique of metadata being hard is fair, the claim that sealed sender is “totally useless” is not. It’s a small, incremental hardening step in a very messy design space, not a magic invisibility cloak, and judging it as the latter sets the bar unrealistically high for anything that still wants to be a drop-in WhatsApp replacement.
by HelloUsername | 2025-11-23 10:50:39+00:00
I thought you can register Signal with a virtual number, then in settings simply hide the phone number, and create new chats with your username?

Also, what about Briar/Berty as alternative?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.briarproje...

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1535500412
by n8cpdx | 2025-11-23 10:52:17+00:00
I’m wondering if HDR means something different to me, because I see HDR images all the time. I can share HDR images via phones (this seems to be the default behavior on iPhone/Mac messages), I can see HDR PNG stills on the web (https://github.com/swankjesse/hdr-emojis), I can see wide gamut P3 images on the web as well (https://webkit.org/blog-files/color-gamut/).

What am I missing?
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-23 10:52:53+00:00
Those two weeks probably would've been two days had the main developer been able to reboot and test the device directly.

Outsourcing this work to outside developers on the regular probably would make the media claim something like "Lenovo is too lazy to pay their people to make their speakers work so they make strangers on the internet do it instead" which isn't half false.

It'd probably be better and cheaper if they'd just hire someone to make their speakers work on Linux.
by ad_hockey | 2025-11-23 10:53:17+00:00
> The most common refrain is that popstars often write their music. This is misleading: they write the lyrics, suggest a general vibe, and some rough melodies or chords. And even this is a stretch many times. They are not composing or producing the music in any larger sense, and this is the pivotal part of actually making music.

To be fair, if they write the lyrics, define the vibe/feel of the song, and compose the melody and chord progression, then that does sound like the vast majority of the song. What's left - I guess some additional instrumentation, the percussion, production? To me it does sound fair to credit the popstar with having composed the music in this case.
by physicsguy | 2025-11-23 10:54:32+00:00
I don’t know that that is fair.

A number of years ago I worked on a POWER9 GPU cluster. This was quite painful - Python had started moving to use wheels and so most projects had started to build these automatically in CI pipelines but pretty much none of these even supported ARM let alone POWER9 architecture. So you were on your own for pretty much anything that wasn’t Numpy. The reason for this of course is just that there was little demand and as a result even fewer people willing to support it.
by codedokode | 2025-11-23 10:55:07+00:00
You can change the header, but browser developers are not that dumb and they added properties like "navigator.platform" which do not change and immediately give you away. Consider also writing a browser extension to patch these properties. Also, I think that DRM module (widewine), that is bundled with browsers, also can report the actual software version. Sadly it is undocumented so I don't know what information it can provide, but I notice warnings from Firefox about attempts to use DRM on various sites like Yandex Market.
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-23 10:55:48+00:00
> If I saw that in a PR I would push very hard to reject; something like that is a maintenance burden that probably isn’t worth the cost

As someone who came from a CS background, this kind of attitude is deeply mysterious. That seems like a type expression I'd expect a CS undergrad to be able to write - certainly if an SDE with 1-2 years experience was confused by it, I'd be advocating against their further promotion.
by xandrius | 2025-11-23 10:56:37+00:00
Other than being defined as "sexy" this article doesn't add much more than what one would have learnt at school in Italy.

There are so many aspects which are more recently brought him about his campaign (i.e. Making deals with local lords in the south, which allowed today's mafia families to de facto remain in power).

So, if you think this article was interesting, do go dig a bit deeper as it's rather shallow.
by bjoli | 2025-11-23 10:56:52+00:00
I always thought sealed sender was something they implemented for their own sake. The less metadata they can see is better. As a user that means you have to trust them in what they say regarding the data they keep anyway.

Regarding sealed sender I don't think they ever fixed the statistical method of identifying sealed senders described in the "improving sealed sender" paper from 2019 (?), meaning it is pretty useless anyway if signal decided they wanted to identify senders.
by ivape | 2025-11-23 10:57:23+00:00
There’s objective facts about the two combatants. One weighs more and hits harder. The bigger one argues that a fight is a fight, and should be allowed to use their full fury.

In full anarchy, the bigger person is rational. Regardless, the bigger person seeks to make some semblance of a case of why their perspective is not immoral, and they mostly can’t. It’s not both rational and moral (as much as they want delude themselves out of moral accountability), it is simply just rational which means one actor is truly psychopathic.
by jwr | 2025-11-23 10:57:40+00:00
Signal is in an impossible position. On one hand, it needs to appeal to the crowds currently using WhatsApp and happily syncing their entire contact list to Facebook/Meta, so that they can be profiled and a social graph can be built. That crowd needs it to be super simple and "just work". If it doesn't do that, people will criticize it for being difficult to use.

On the other hand, it needs to provide ultimate security, even though there is always a compromise between security and convenience. If it doesn't, geeks will criticize it for not being secure enough.
by kakwa_ | 2025-11-23 10:57:57+00:00
Sometimes, I'm wondering if Mozilla did not get too much money.

With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.

Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.

Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.

But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-23 10:58:13+00:00
Baseload power plants are already dead in many grids. Or forced to become peakers.

Flexible dispatchable power plants are having a field day though.

> Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter

Source please. All these ”unimaginable amounts of storage” calculations are usually based on not over producing on a yearly basis.

We also should not let perfect stand in the way of good enough.
by _0x04 | 2025-11-23 10:58:30+00:00
> writing code in a self-documenting manner eliminates the need for comments. This is just incorrect.

why do you think it is always incorrect? in my opinion "good comments" about design decisions, hidden assumptions the code is relying on, etc. should be included in documentation or surrounding .md files, but not in code sources. Sentences made of english words and sentences made of instructions for computer/interpreter are completely different constructions which imply separate language processing in programmer's brain. it is like mixing up english and french in a single book page -- one french sentence per 30 english is tolerable, while 30 french sentences mixed up with 30 english ones become much less informative than if they were seprarated into different pages.
by mettamage | 2025-11-23 10:58:41+00:00
Well yea sure. But also look at death though. What does any uncomfortable thing mean in the face of death?

Not much. And this is coming from someone who hasn’t voluntarily faced death or consciously experienced the threat of it.

I respect both views. I guess it takes some Janusian thinking skills [1], for me at least, but both perspectives are worth it.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creative-exploration...
by motbus3 | 2025-11-23 10:58:52+00:00
Visiting a store does not give it the right for someone to stalk you. I don't see any reasons why (apart from the obvious $) this sort of business is not considered illegal. It wouldn't solve all the problems but would drastically reduce the incentives.

I know one particular online car store that shares user data with insurance companies and they use that in their models to compute a "willingness" to pay more for insurance as well as of establishing the user profile. Let's say you look a sports car but you end up buying a family van, they charge you more for that.

The very interesting part is that they create a "customer profile score" they is just a number and sell that number to other companies. So, by pipping your habits they aggregate data and technically do not violate some local laws.8
by oulipo2 | 2025-11-23 10:59:13+00:00
I'm not sure I get why we need something specific like MCP-UI? why wouldn't "just another tool" do exactly the same?

Eg you present a "display-graph-chart" tool as a MCP tool, and the agent calls it, it doesn't need to adhere to any protocol except the basic existing MCP protocol, and the UI that's used to interact with the agent would know the best presentation (show it as an embedded HTML graph if in a web ui, show it as a ascii chart if in a terminal, etc)?

Is the idea just to standardize the "output format" of the tool so that any agent UI could display stuff in the same way? so that one tool could work with any agent display?
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-11-23 11:00:04+00:00
I’ve known many pop stars (have worked in the pro audio industry for decades) and one thing that is common among them is that they are very interesting people. Very rarely interested - mostly involved in being interesting.

I think there has to be a balance, personally. If you spend your life trying to be as interesting as possible, it gets very spiritually depleting. If you do take an honest interest in others, though, the pop-star factor gets multiplied.

So many times I’ve seen fans congregate around a star, struck as they were, to be regaled with that stars new interesting thing, or entertaining acts. Sure, they walk away with the experience. But, whenever the pop star turns it around and takes more of an interest in the other person - wow! The fan factor multiplies significantly. (Incidentally, this works not just for pop stars but also anyone at all, actually.)

That said, I don’t think being a pop star is a particularly healthy activity. The exhaustion levels once the green room door is closed are pretty obvious, and the means of healing from weeks, or months and months of continuous, daily, “being interesting” takes a huge toll.

The pop stars I’ve known, intimately, who have a strong family that just treat them like regular people, are usually the healthiest. The few stars I consider friends, as in we could call each other just to hang out and chat now and then, are really the ones who find this balance early in their life.

I also have a somewhat famous actress in my family, and she is an extremely tiring person to be around, even though she has millions of adoring fans, because there is a continual vibe of being as interesting as possible, no matter the circumstances, and this is exhausting for those of us who live with her on a regular basis. Inter-family gossip always takes note of her attention levels.
by codedokode | 2025-11-23 11:00:11+00:00
You can determine user's language from IP address location. Of course, there are users with VPNs, but they probably are used to seeing foreign content. For example, Youtube shows me advertisement in a language I don't understand despite my language header saying I only understand "en-US" and "en" languages. So this header is unnecessary, even Youtube ignores it.

Also, when using VPN, Google typically uses a language based on IP address, not my language header. I assume the header is only useful for fingerprinting today.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-23 11:00:12+00:00
Communication conventions aren't "just" a preference in the sense that they actually lower the friction inherent in any communication. It may be pretty hard to understand other people even if you use the same conventions to write down your thoughts. It becomes harder when the conventions aren't kept: the extra processing necessary has non-zero cost.

Imagine Debian maintainers releasing a slightly incompatible TLS library because of their preferences.
by actimefy | 2025-11-23 11:00:42+00:00
Actimefy helps users track computer usage automatically—logging applications, windows, and websites minute-by-minute—so you can uncover where your focus goes and improve productivity. It features rich visual reports (daily, weekly, monthly), customizable dashboards, and in-depth analytics for spotting trends and bottlenecks. All data is stored locally to protect your privacy. Great for freelancers, professionals, or anyone wanting deeper insight into their digital habits.
by macguillicuddy | 2025-11-23 11:01:09+00:00
Yes that's true, but there's effort to consider on both sides of design decisions like those TypeScript has made. Much of the compile time behaviour comes from the decision for TypeScript to be incremental on top of JavaScript. That allows you to start getting the benefit of TS without the effort of having to rewrite your entire codebase, for example. Having used TS for many years now I feel that the balance it strikes is incredibly productive. Maybe for other folks/projects the tradeoff is different - but for me I would hate going back to plain JS, and there's no alternative available with such tight integration with the rest of the web ecosystem.
by throwaway7356 | 2025-11-23 11:01:31+00:00
> I'm sure there are a number of bearded dudes who would commit themselves to keeping an old distro alive, just for the sake of not having to deal with systemd for example.

I don't think so: there are Debian forks that aspire to fight against the horrors of GNOME, systemd, Wayland and Rust, but they don't attract people to work on them.
by pas | 2025-11-23 11:01:43+00:00
Arguably having a ton of hard to write, hard to maintain docs is waaay worse than Markdown that gets attention in PRs (MRs).

Especially that the things in the article seem irrelevant compared to actually adding and handling non-text content IMHO. (Mermaid diagrams for example.)

Sure a validator would be nice, but that's why a simple preview is available in most collaboration platforms.
by Shugyousha | 2025-11-23 11:02:04+00:00
I agree! Science is about experiments to verify hypotheses. Design of Experiments seems like a fundamental part of that. That's also why the quote below made me laugh.

> What if you don’t care about efficiency or causality?

"Yeah, what about if you don't care about money/time and are happy with finding a correlation only?!!?"
by kotaKat | 2025-11-23 11:02:21+00:00
Likely documentation-related.

As a US citizen I "just" needed to present my birth certificate and Social Security card to the DMV along with my "normal" license, and a print-out of a paystub from my employer online (that they didn't even look at).

Of course, the second factor is "going to the DMV", which depending on area can either be an all-day hellscape, or if you're rural, five minutes in and out.
by sandblast | 2025-11-23 11:02:44+00:00
I don't know what you're mentioning, but let's not forget that whatever view he might have, it changes nothing in the technology he creates. It's open source, it's auditable, and the code does not have worldviews of its own.

Your comment promotes cancel-culture, and as filthy as it is in general, it's even more so in the technology world. Don't do it. Please.
by everdrive | 2025-11-23 11:03:04+00:00
Then let's get rid of the business internet. Every single thing I dislike about the internet is from the business internet: tracking, cookies, fingerprinting, SPAs, excessive javascript, optimizing for engagement, data brokers, I could go on.

"But won't you miss XYZ?" Nope, don't care, want it gone. If you can't be bothered to go to the store and get it then it probably didn't matter very much.
by jabl | 2025-11-23 11:03:49+00:00
> The only way to make a cheap synthetic fuel is from a nuclear reactor that produces heat in the 900C range (could be 700C or 1100C, but near there). You can't do that with solid fuel reactors, you need a liquid fueled reactor for that

Some of the highest temperature reactor concepts use solid fuel (see e.g. various VHTR gen4 concepts).

As an aside, some nuclear proponents claiming synthetic fuel production as some unique selling point of advanced nuclear sounds more like wishful thinking combined with admitting being unable to produce electricity at competitive price. With the 'electrotech revolution', most things will switch to being powered by electricity, leaving a relatively modest market for synthetic fuels (long range aviation and shipping, mainly, and some chemicals production), assuming regulation prevents usage of fossil fuels.

> And you need Thorium for a liquid fueled reactor.

No, why would you? You can use U235 in a non-breeding thermal reactor (Terrestrial being an example design), or you can run the U-Pu breeding cycle in a liquid fueled fast reactor (such designs use chloride salts as the fuel carrier rather than FLiBe).

> That's why this design is so popular.

So popular that despite being invented in the 1960'ies, it hasn't yet progressed beyond the prototype stage?
by eph0x | 2025-11-23 11:03:51+00:00
Hey there, firstly, let me just say I respect the passion you seem to have, as well as what is clearly an engineering mindset, you saw a problem so you fired up your code editor and started working on a way to solve it.

On to the project though... I was a developer for a long time, before moving into DevOps/SRE which I've now been doing for even longer so I'm quite aware of the value there is in being able to aggregate data from each part of your system to generate insights and as a way to simplify debugging issues. Over the years though there have been many projects that have tried to provide this, with many differing strategies for their implementation. One of the most popular methods was implementing the ELK stack:

ElasticSearch - Provides the data store for the logs from across the system, along with fulltext searching to query that data

Logstash - Runs alongside each part of your system, ingesting the logs, annotating them if needed, and then pushing them to the ElasticSearch datastore

Kibana - Provides a way to search, sort, and display the data from the store.

More recently, within kubernetes you're more likely to see a setup of Prometheus and grafana.

Then you have tools like sentry, which focuses on centralising any error messages from across your system but then also enriches that data by storing context about the environment the error occurred in, such as the stack trace, the version of the code, the version of the dependencies, etc.

Then there are tools less aimed at developers. If you're an organisation that has an obscene amount of money to splunk up the wall, then you're gonna go with... splunk :P

What I'm trying to get at is, to give your product the best chance of being adopted by users, think about what you're offering that either other tools just don't offer, or that you're able to offer in a better, or more simple, way. This really doens't mean trying to implement some of the features of these over systems, but set yourself apart from them by tailoring your offering to a specific use case, or by making it much more simple to setup and maintain. A good example of this is Dozzle, it doesn't have all the features of these other systems, but still, when I'm developing microservices on my homelab setup it's still one of the first services I set up, and this is because when it comes to installing/configuring it, I only have to type 1 command into my terminal and less than 30 seconds later I have a service that pulls all the logs from every container that gets run on that system and a simple web app to display and filter all this data.

Anyway, this has become a much longer post than I had ever intended it to be. If you ever want someone to bounce ideas off of, or if you're up for showing off your toy and giving me a demo of your MVP, you can find my details at https://devopsbrett.github.io/
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-23 11:04:01+00:00
Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany should stop their renewable buildout and keep their current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new built nuclear power to ”save the day”?

That literally makes no sense at all.

Looking at wholesale prices all of continental Europe is quite similar.

Some countries, like Germany, taxes electricity a lot to promote efficiency.

Not sure what alternative you suggest?

The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. So that’s not an option either.

Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program. The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
by dbspin | 2025-11-23 11:04:19+00:00
While this is a fascinating perspective, I find this analysis of the source of hate online to be under-examined and self serving.

Sure, any public figure will be the target of hatred, negative projection, ridicule. And doubtless that's doubly true for female celebrities. But much of this is driven by envy - envy fuelled by the gilded age level of inequality we're currently experiencing. By the performative nature of conspicuous consumption by pop stars. By their ubiquity and elevation to celestial rather than mere celebrity status.

There's another factor she fails to recognise. Charlie XCX's music is woeful. 'Pop' in the sense of ephemeral, unoriginal, commercial, rather than merely popular. That, combined with her pretension to art makes her vast wealth and celebrity irksome in a way that the success of more original, avant garde or obviously 'artistic' musicians from David Bowie to Imogen Heap is not.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-23 11:04:30+00:00
Idea: Let the entertainment industry blow through as much carbon as they want in creating content. BUT - require that their audiences be butt-in-chair-on-the-ground immobile while consuming that content, with no carbon footprint beyond breathing, electricity for the TV and lights, HVAC, and maybe a fizzy drink.

Considering audience sizes compared to production crews, and all the far more carbon-intensive things those immobilized audiences could be doing instead - that deal sounds like a huge net win to me.