MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thot_experiment | 2025-11-14 18:59:17+00:00
I've been using XMonad since 2012, not really for any reason other than someone at HMC told me to and I just stuck with it ever since. Sometimes I wonder if there's a reason to try something else, but I already know all the keybinds and it just does everything I want.

My absolute favorite feature (i'm sure this is present elsewhere too) is the idea that I have my stuff laid out on virtual screens and I can just assign a virtual screen to a physical screen super trivially without ever moving my hands off the keyboard. It's such a wonderful workflow.

Tiling WMs are one of those power user things where once you get used to it the other way just seem so obviously bad. VIM and Blender are similar, unfamiliar annoying interface if you're used to the normie way of doing things, but once you understand the patterns and the way you can compose them it becomes so much more expressive.
by everforward | 2025-11-14 18:59:50+00:00
> Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other?

That's not really true if you care about reliability. You need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes (via DNS or a load balancer or etc).

You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to make that work, and it's way more complicated than chucking CloudFlare in front of static assets.

I would be with you if this was something complicated to cache where you're server-side templating responses and can't just globally cache things, but for static HTML/CSS/JS/images it's basically 0 configuration.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-11-14 18:59:57+00:00
"AI" is the only term that makes sense for end users because "AI" is the only term that is universally understood. Hackernews types tend to overlook the layman.

And I hope no one gets started about how "AI" is an inaccurate term because it's not. That's exactly what we are doing: simulating intelligence. "ML" is closer to describing the implementation, and, honestly, what difference does it make for most people using it.

It is appropriate to discuss these things at a very high level in most contexts.
by otrack | 2025-11-14 19:00:21+00:00
Thank you, dgacmu! We are currently working on a TLA+ specification with master's students, and we plan to verify it with TLC and Apalache. I discovered that Iulian's TLA+ specification was missing a ballot variable [1] by injecting a trace, because exhaustive exploration was not tractable. Therefore, state-space explosion is likely to become a problem (systems of interest contain 7–9 processes with non‑transitive conflicts). In that case, intermediate abstractions will be necessary, which may naturally lead us to theorem proving.

Once the specification is ready, I'll post about it here. :)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10917
by ericmcer | 2025-11-14 19:00:43+00:00
We are just in a weird transitory period right now so it is all shitty implementations replacing what we are used to.

I am semi-confident that LLM backed interfaces will be the future of many UIs though. When it works it just is a way better UX. A smart chat instead of a <form> or crawling through pages of search results is just nicer.

It is bridging the gap between the hard data computers use and the generalized way humans communicate.
by randallsquared | 2025-11-14 19:01:35+00:00
> Many immigrants [...] were actually rather wealthy and education in relation to where they came from.

But they're not wealthy here, and they can't buy the cost of living in NYC or LA with that level of wealth.

With the education point, you're gesturing at something like the real reasons they often outperform very poor Americans (if we compare only equivalent capacity for the sake of argument), I believe: habit, work ethic, drive, belief in improvement. Dom's article about what "poor" looks like makes sense from the inside, but after making it out one looks back and sees all the opportunities everyone around them had to get out of poverty, and it looks a little different, then. Not everyone has all the same opportunities, but a key driver is being open to those that appear, and conducting your life such that they are more likely.

The despair of believing they can't get out of the rut they're in is one of the causes of not getting out of the rut they are in. It's not that the despair isn't real, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (and this is true even if they win the lottery, looking at outcomes there).
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-11-14 19:01:51+00:00
“And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run.”

I’ve always thought about nature didn’t evolve to use electricity as its primary means of energy. Instead it uses chemistry. It’s quite curious, really.

Like a tiny insect is chemistry powered. It doesn’t need to recharge batteries, it needs to eat and breathe oxygen.

What if our computers started to use biology and chemistry as their primary energy source?

Or will it be the case that in the end using electricity as the primary energy source is more efficient for “human brain scale computation”, it’s just that nature didn’t evolve that way…
by voxleone | 2025-11-14 19:02:09+00:00
My personal analogy, useful in my early days: Translating is like finding a vector in another space that points in the same direction or carries a similar magnitude of meaning.

In other words:

The source sentence is a vector in “language A space.”

The target sentence is a vector in “language B space.”

A good translation finds a vector that has the same direction (same meaning, intent, tone) even though it lies in a different coordinate system (the new language).
by periodjet | 2025-11-14 19:02:11+00:00
The point of disagreement here seems to be about poverty itself. The author (and many in these comments) seem aghast at the very idea of poverty: how can this state be allowed to exist?!

The truth is that humanity’s default state is one of “poverty”. It should evoke no surprise or confusion whatsoever, and yet it does.

Poverty is an entirely valid and normal state for a person to be in. There isn’t a vast shadowy conspiracy trying to keep you down; you’re just at the default state of humanity.

Humans improving their situation, now THAT is surprising and interesting, and it’s the thing we should be focusing our curiosity on. If you’re poor, emulate those who aren’t. Maybe they’re onto something.

The alternative is to blame the vast shadowy conspiracy, “capitalism”, etc, and remain poor. That’s an entirely valid mode of being. Nobody owes you anything.
Show HN: Unified Payment Sandbox – A UAT Env for Stripe/Razorpay Integrations
by g-sudarshan | 2025-11-14 19:02:40+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm exploring an idea for a developer-focused SaaS: A unified UAT environment for payment gateways — essentially a sandbox simulator that lets developers integrate payments without creating multiple sandbox accounts or dealing with inconsistent/mock behaviors across gateways.

The Problem

If you’ve ever integrated payments, you know:

Stripe has excellent test tooling

Razorpay is decent

Paytm/PayU/etc vary a lot

Many banks don’t have predictable UAT behavior

Webhooks arrive differently, some delayed, some flaky

Testing disputes/refunds/settlements is nearly impossible

For dev teams building complex flows, they end up writing internal mocks, maintaining them, and still missing edge cases.

The Idea (SaaS)

A unified Payment Sandbox Simulator that:

Mock APIs for multiple gateways

Stripe

Razorpay

Paytm

PayU

Cashfree

Worldline

Visa/Mastercard tokenization mock

UPI PSP simulators

Simulate real-world scenarios

Captures

Refunds

Partial refunds

Chargebacks

Disputes

Settlement delays

Failed payouts

KYC verification

Randomized webhook delays/skips

Network downtime simulation

3-D Secure / OTP mock pages

UPI timeouts / pending states

Hosted dashboards

View mock transactions

Trigger lifecycle events (manually or timed)

Trigger webhooks again

Create custom gateway profiles

Define “rules” to simulate: failure %, latency, webhook disorder, retries

For engineering teams

Private UAT environment in one URL

No more creating 10 sandbox accounts

CI-friendly “headless payment” flows

Add Mock PG in local → swap to real PG in staging

Automatic contract testing

Pricing thought

Free Tier → 100 test transactions/mo $29/mo → small teams $99/mo → startups $499/mo → enterprise / white-label

Ask to HN

Would you use this? What’s missing? Would payments teams trust a 3rd-party simulator? Which gateways or scenarios matter most?

Happy to answer questions
by moralestapia | 2025-11-14 19:02:41+00:00
Credit where credit is due.

I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing.

Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN.

xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
by naikrovek | 2025-11-14 19:03:13+00:00
Well, hopefully, future XBoxes are fixed-spec PCs which run Steam AND some xbox frontend, and can switch between them as the user wishes.

There's no reason anymore for the xbox to be a different platform or hardware than PCs. An Xbox that is just a PC with fixed specs (or varying specs with some way to measure what spec you're compliant with) and which can use the Xbox store is probably all that people really want anyway.
by pembrook | 2025-11-14 19:03:13+00:00
As of 2024 it was actually 50% last I saw.

This trend is increasing across the whole continent and it's extremely bleak. The only growth sector in all of Europe is government spending. Aging populations mean social outlays are increasing every year, while the private sector is being actively looted by governments, stifled, and chased away so the economy isn't growing enough to fund the increasing social welfare demands.

Somehow my child understands that money must be earned before it can be taken away and redistributed, but the adults with PhDs can't figure this one out.

It's a death spiral of deficits, political instability, and more stupid policy like increasing taxes in countries that already have the highest taxes in the world.

Luckily Norway has oil wealth so they could probably afford to completely kill their private sector and chase away all private capital. It will just deepen their status as a petro-state. Becoming white Saudi Arabia is a bizarre goal for socialist politicians who also claim to be "moral" and care about "the environment." But as the saying goes, the children of wealth tend to make dumb decisions.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-14 19:03:19+00:00
> We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat.

If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture so we’d be saving very little on water consumption if we cut out all animal products [2]. Our water consumption would even get a lot worse because we’d have to replace that protein with tons of irrigated farmland and we’d lose the productivity of essentially all the pastureland that is too marginal to grow anything on (50% of US farmland, 66% globally).

Animal husbandry has been such a successful strategy on a planetary scale because it’s an efficient use of marginal resources no matter how wealthy or industrialized you are. Replacing all those calories with plants that people want to actually eat is going to take more resources, not less, especially when you’re talking about turning pastureland into productive agricultural land.

[1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

[2] a lot of feed is also distiller’s grains used for ethanol first before feeding them to animals, so we’d wouldn’t even cut out most of that
by ceejayoz | 2025-11-14 19:03:31+00:00
Sweden is also a bit of an exception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

> A 2011 study by Trabandt and Uhlig published in the Journal of Monetary Economics estimated a 70% revenue maximizing rate, and estimated that the US and most European economies were on the left of the Laffer curve (in other words, that raising taxes would raise further revenue). A 2005 study concluded that with the exception of Sweden, no major OECD country could increase revenue by reducing the marginal tax rate.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-14 19:03:40+00:00
The important thing is the likelihood of mistakes getting past the compiler. According to Google's numbers the likelihood for memory safety reduces by several orders of magnitude, and the likelihood for other kinds of mistakes reduces by a factor of ~4 (depending on how you interpret their numbers).

Just saying "but you can still make mistakes" is dumb and irrelevant and it's kind of disappointing that it's such a commonly bandied non-argument that Google still had to address it in this post.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-14 19:03:41+00:00
Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre.

Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure.

There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
by Brendinooo | 2025-11-14 19:03:45+00:00
I dunno. People put too much stock in Max Weber, who cherry-picked his evidence: he literally used Benjamin Franklin, a deist who'd abandoned Christian doctrine, as his model "Protestant." He created a compelling just-so story that is now picked up by people who never check the actual sources.

I mean, here are actual Calvin quotes:

> Nothing is more dangerous, than to be blinded by prosperity.

> Men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success.

> A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner—but as righteous.

> Hence the Prophet reminds us, that though God would bountifully feed his Church, supply his people with food, and testify by external tokens his paternal love, and though also he would pour out his Spirit, (a token far more remarkable,) yet the faithful would continue to be distressed with many troubles; for God designs not to deal too delicately with his Church on earth; but when he gives tokens of his kindness he at the same time mingles some exercises for patience, lest the faithful should become self-indulgent or sleep on earthly blessings, but that they may ever seek higher things."

Anyways, it's probably good to let Actual Calvinists weigh on the matter:

https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-real-protestant-eth...

If you want to argue that this work ethic is a real phenomenon...sure. But I think you have to start with recognizing that the supposed exemplar was a person who generally unmoored from orthodox Protestantism, so "Protestant work ethic" is really a misnomer.
by chasd00 | 2025-11-14 19:04:55+00:00
to be fair, Worldcom ended in an accounting scandal. I had a friend who worked at UUNET and would sneak me into the megahub in Richardson TX at night to download movies and other large, for the time, files (first time i ever saw an OC148 in real life). UUNET was bought by Worldcom and then after the implosion my friend showed me these gigantic cube farms in the office that were completely empty of people. It was very weird.
by ben_w | 2025-11-14 19:04:59+00:00
That depends how sentient a chicken is: their brains are of similar complexity to the larger of these models, counting params as synapses.

Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat, because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans would give up meat.
by brudgers | 2025-11-14 19:04:59+00:00
The kind of homeowner who pays a reasonable rate to get their AC repaired during a Houston heatwave.

The first AC guy at my last house and us had kids in the same third grade classroom. Later when his business changed to commercial work, Charlie put us on to a semi-retired AC guy who kept us running for several years until we moved.

By the way, Charlie was recommended by our neighbor two doors down when we moved in.
by jmadeano | 2025-11-14 19:05:28+00:00
While building this, we've had to do a lot of debugging. You think "Hey, this is a pretty simple request, why did it fail?" Then you actually dig into the archive that is 98 files of HTML, JS, and CSS, inlined and minified with obscure variable names and no comments. Thankfully many sites do still have relatively stable selectors + aria labels, but I am honestly amazed everyday at how well some of this stuff manages to works.

And that isn't even to mention all the guardrails the sites put in place today: content security policies, untrusted html, dynamic refreshing, etc.
by soulofmischief | 2025-11-14 19:05:57+00:00
That doesn't mean anything, because they're not necessarily educated on the topic, and yet are making decisions that affect everyone.

When it's so cheap to enact mass propaganda, selective omission and manufactured intent, it becomes impossible to just say, "well, the people want it." Their decision making process is compromised by the same people pushing these policies through.

Democracy is indeed broken, and we have to take that seriously if we're going to fix it.
by godelski | 2025-11-14 19:06:11+00:00
Are you sure this isn't perception bias?

Mozilla does good thing: doesn't make news and everyone carries on as doing good things is expected and "normal"

Mozilla does bad thing: people get upset and this drives more attention and discussion.

We live in a world of social media where it's absolutely obvious what drives "engagement". Why would this be any different here? I mean we even see the inverse side where Google is expected to be evil so it's just stats quo. People then complain about how helpless they are to fight off these monopolies and yet are looking for excuses to not do something as simple as changing a browser. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not. The perfect browser does not exist. But browsers are pretty feature rich and fairly on parity these days. But let's not pretend that these complaints are more driven by our want to complain or our need to justify our current choice than it is about the actual impact of these things. I mean here we are talking about an optional feature and we're pigeonholing it into the optional AI quick tab while ignoring other useful things like translation. And let's not pretend like that quick tab is a crazy thing. We're on Hacker News and we all are quite aware at how often people are using LLMs. You think suddenly in this thread everyone is anti-LLM? Or maybe it's perception bias. I for one quite like the quick tab because I can just press <C-x> to open up Claude instead of pinning a tab or navigating to their site. I don't use it to read my websites and it doesn't have to. Everything here is 100% optional.
by ta12653421 | 2025-11-14 19:06:12+00:00
Well, as European, i have to clearly state - unfortunately - this is only because of what happened in the 20th century: WWII. This "event" changed somehow the psychology, not allowing the EU to "stand up straight with our shoulders back".

Unfortunately. With around 500m customers, we could be powerful. But we arent: Stumbling upon our own feeds.
by jquery | 2025-11-14 19:06:13+00:00
No, just no. I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree in the strongest terms that copying China is the way forward. Closed, centralized models can scale quickly, as China did, but open models generate more frontier innovation and resilience. Iirc, nearly half of our unicorns have immigrant founders.

Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.
by tptacek | 2025-11-14 19:06:29+00:00
This is what I mean when I suggest people who use PGP are LARPing. It's perfectly reasonable to prefer decentralized systems to centralized ones or to think that it's critically important to the future of the Internet that we pursue decentralization. But cryptosystems need to function when lives are on the line; the preference of an system with inferior, flawed cryptography, in pursuit of a philosophical goal about Internet governance, betrays the fact that the security you're after is only a secondary goal.

You see all sorts of different variants of this argument. People cling to PGP because they believe SMTP email needs a future. What does that have to do with protecting the life of a user? Nothing. People cling to PGP because of concerns about open source. Same issue. Not wanting to run things on their phone. Same issue.
by theramm | 2025-11-14 19:06:46+00:00
Author here. Some context: this Epstein Files tool is part of a larger transparency research project.

Also live: The Capture Cascade Timeline - 1,945+ documented events of kleptocratic capture from 1971-2025. https://www.capturecascade.org/ Working on: Offshore Leaks MCP server for network analysis (coming soon). All open-source, all reproducible.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-14 19:06:49+00:00
> What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read?

In some cases I do find that useful, but more generally I find that having a quick chat about a document after reading it is a good way to interrogate my own understanding of the document.

I agree that it's probably not for everybody. But I do think that by putting tools like this out there, Firefox users may find unanticipated uses for it, which in turn may inform more thoughtfully implemented futures in the future. You've got to walk before you can run.
by 98codes | 2025-11-14 19:06:51+00:00
I first started hearing about it 20 years ago, and was able to confirm it for myself earlier this year. In order to truly de-stress, to let go, you need 3 weeks away. Doesn't have to be a 3 week vacation, just 3 weeks of not thinking about work.

If you can do it, I highly recommend it if for no other reason to clearly see just how much stress your work is adding to your life, even if everything seems "fine".

I say that fully acknowledging that very, very few people will get that opportunity, "unlimited" PTO or otherwise.