MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-24 06:59:15+00:00
> If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too.

Most of the cost of collecting fares is actually the money. You need machines that can process currency, which are expensive and often requires network infrastructure and middlemen and contractors, and then they have to be secured against theft or card skimming etc., and you need customer service and billing and tech support when the machines break and all the rest of it.

If all you want is to track usage you can just put a simple pedestrian counter at the door and you're not actually disrupting anything if it's offline for a week because you're just looking for statistical sampling anyway.

> There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.

Ambiguous "social engineering benefits" are the sort of thing that implies it is lobbying, because there is no good way to prove or disprove it but it gives someone something to claim is their reason when the real ones are less sympathetic, i.e. they're trying to get the collections contract (or have read a study funded by someone who does) or they just don't like spending money on transit but know that won't be a convincing argument to someone who does.
by mavamaarten | 2025-11-24 07:01:23+00:00
I'm not going to share my employer, but this is exactly how we operate. Bugs first, they show up on the Jira board at the top of the list. If managers would abuse that (they don't), we'd just convert them to stories, lol.

I do agree that it's rare, this is my first workplace where they actually work like that.
by deanCommie | 2025-11-24 07:01:47+00:00
I think there's an even simpler point that people who make fun of athletes for blowing their paychecks instead of saving them miss:

* These are elite athletes at the top of their pyramid, which means they have an absolutely bonikers elite competitive drive that got them where they had so far.

They were probably the best player on every team they've been since kindergarten. They've made it to the top of the pyramid and most want to keep going. Championships, all-stars, MVPs, all of these are things they are USED to getting at every level so far, and they want to keep going.

So when they sign there $X00,000 rookie deal they're not thinking "OK how do i save the most of this for my retirement", they're thinking "how do i get $Y,000,000 deal next? And the $WZ,000,000 deal after that?" And of course then I'll be set for life, and it will be easy to save and retire cuz i'll be rich.

This is just human nature.
by gritten | 2025-11-24 07:01:52+00:00
No it doesn't. Voluntarily choosing to marry someone, choosing to deceive them in such a cruel and selfish way, choosing to betray a solemn vow is not being "placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation". It is deliberate, conscious, malicious action over many years upon an innocent victim. The circumstances are entirely of his own creation. He is 100% culpable.
by yanhangyhy | 2025-11-24 07:02:02+00:00
I think you’ve nailed it perfectly. China definitely has its imperialist side, but the way it operates is completely different from the US style. I often feel China’s foreign policy is kinda “dumb” in execution, but that’s just our national character at work. Take Myanmar as an example: if we were the US, it would be simple – send in troops, install a pro-China regime, done. But we’re not America, and we can’t do that without the entire Western media tearing us apart. So China’s approach is: “You guys fight it out yourselves, whoever wins, I’ll do business with them. Just don’t touch the projects and interests I already have.” This naturally makes ordinary people in those countries dislike China – they genuinely believe China is the root cause of many of their problems, and they think importing Western systems will let them solve everything and stand on their own. In reality, that probably won’t happen most of the time. But there’s no helping it; I don’t know what a “better” Chinese foreign policy would even look like. All I can say is China has been really lucky – thank Trump, thank Sanae Takaichi – they’ve helped us way more than people realize.
by lambdafu | 2025-11-24 07:02:12+00:00
I have the Widex SmartRIC 220, and would buy them again. They are comfortable, have musical audio quality (Widex works with musicians), very low latency (reducing comb filter effect), and in general look and feel very professional.

As for technology, they use bluetooth low energy to connect to the smart phone, which works really well, with the caveat that the range is quite low and if it is in the pocket and you are moving around, media sound will often disrupt or desync intermittently. On the plus side, they last well over a day even with media use (WIdex says they last 37 hours without bluetooth use and that checks out). The case provides charge for about a week, and has wireless and usb-c charging.

They are quite pricey, but there are several options (110, 220, 330, 440), and the 220 were more than enough for me. The app has several modes, including directional focus mode, and you can define your own. I sometimes use a different mode for listening to concert music, that disables most filters such as volume protection.

I am wearing them for 9 months now, and there was no situation (concerts, traveling, work, sports, etc) were they gave me any issues whatsoever.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-24 07:02:38+00:00
Actually, the 140k Tor exit nodes, VPNs, and compromised proxy servers have been indexed.

It takes 24 minutes to compile these firewall rules, but the black-list along with tripwires have proven effective at banning game cheats. Example, dropping connections from TX with a hop-count and latency significantly different from their peers.

Preemptively banning all bad-reputation cloud IP ranges except whitelisted hosts has zero impact on clients. =3
by eru | 2025-11-24 07:03:05+00:00
> 1hr of work is >us$5k!

Not all GDP is created by work. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPSGA156NRUG to learn that our labour share of GDP is roughly 50%.

And, of course, the average hides a lot of information about the distribution.

Though even given all the caveats, your numbers still seem wrong to me. 90kUSD / 200 / 8 ~ 57 USD, not 5kUSD.
by xwolfi | 2025-11-24 07:03:26+00:00
How did they invest in that infrastructure ? The LGFVs they used for that are so large the only way to pay for their loans is to throw in new LGFVs.

If there's a place where the music will stop really suddenly and really hard, it's in China, where all this infrastructure to build cheap glasses will completely crumble under the cost of its own financing. They're not increasing margins, so they're not gonna match their bond yields...
by heddycrow | 2025-11-24 07:03:38+00:00
This is a very thoughtful response; thank you.

I'm not arguing that pro-regulation is a bad stance just noting that my image of youth is wounded by thinking that the new youth are hands down in favor of it in general.

This is a silly and sad sentiment. Part of me just wants to think that some among us are crazy or naive enough to tend towards resistance. I don't blame anyone for not being so.
by defrost | 2025-11-24 07:04:20+00:00
Lies work in the sense that they can persuade large groups of people to take courses of action based on their beleif in those lies.

They are used by bad actors to, say, win elections and then destroy systemic safeguards and monitoring mechanisms that work to spotlight bad actions and limit damage.

There are also lies, such as a common belief in Wagyl, that draw people to together and act in unison as a community to help the less fortunate, preserve the environment and common resources, and other things not generally perceived as destructive.
by teiferer | 2025-11-24 07:04:21+00:00
> In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open? It's that a business with only physical presence in one country selling a service that is only accessible physically inside the country.... doesn't.... have any need for selling compressed air to someone who isn't like 15 minutes away from one of their gas stations?

But that person might be physically further away at the time they want to order something or gather information etc. Maybe they are on holidays in Spain and want to access their account to pay a bill. Maybe they are in Mexico on a work trip and want to help their aunt back home to use some service for which they need to log in from abroad.

The other day I helped a neighbor (over here in Europe) prepare for a trip to Canada where he wanted to make adjustments to a car sharing account. The website always timed out. It was geofenced. I helped him set up a VPN. That illustrated how locked in this all has become, geofencing without thinking twice.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-24 07:05:08+00:00
The majority of the people of Taiwan are ethnically Chinese, but this is a relatively recent status. Taiwan is not an ancient part of China.

Taiwan has become ethnically Chinese in 2 stages, first an immigration from the neighboring Chinese province that is a few centuries old, then the invasion of the island by Kuomintang at the end of WWII, which took the political power from the native Chinese.

So Taiwan has become a Chinese-populated territory only during the last few centuries, and the desire to unite it with mainland China is not something that can reassure China's neighbors that this is where its desire of expansion will stop.
by hapless | 2025-11-24 07:05:15+00:00
fads come and go but idiocy is forever

this guy didn't write a blog post, he wrote the preface material for a training module to be sold to the least-competent HR execs he can find

it is generally a bad sign when you set out to taxonomize all possible productive behaviors. in this case, possibly a worse sign is that this guy has two "clusters" making up eight "foundational skills." for perspective, when Immanuel Kant set out to taxonomize all possible human experiences, he came back with four "clusters" of four "skills"

apparently engineering management encompasses the same complexity as half of all possible human experiences, from tabula rasa. good to know, i guess

(perhaps obviously, i did not read the essay any further than the introduction of "eight foundational skills" in "two clusters." at that point clearly I am being sold nonsense, and I feel free to stop reading and just poke fun at the author instead.)
by eucyclos | 2025-11-24 07:05:27+00:00
I think by including those, the author is saying that we tend to think that what is best for us (this tool is great/awful for my work) is also best for everyone else. It might also be a case of 'I understand this tool better/worse than others so if it's adopted I'll become more/less important' but that's a little more of a conscious thought process than what I think the article is pointing towards.

I also think the whole thing is written in a deliberately accusatory tone to provoke discussion among the target audience - rather than say that 'the ego wants to be at the center' the author could just as well have said 'our model of what other people know skews to be too similar to what we ourselves know'.
by shallowsax | 2025-11-24 07:06:02+00:00
Yep, it's 100% common knowledge. I distinctly remember my teacher making a point to explain why Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Jieshi were both valid transliterations in my 10th grade world history class.

No one in America with a high school education believes that Taiwan is an unrelated country that China randomly decided to pick on after throwing a dart at a map. Chinese history from antiquity to modern European/Japanese colonialism and war crimes to the unresolved civil war and KMT's retreat from the mainland are standard course material; the history and politics around reunification aren't some big mystery.

Don't get me wrong. The history is interesting, but from an American perspective interesting history doesn't translate into justification for violent incursion on an established nation's sovereignty. We largely don't even support our own past unprovoked invasions, much less invasions by rivals against stable and prosperous liberal democracies that we have long-standing friendly relationships with. The American lesson from our history isn't "we screwed up in Iraq and Vietnam, so other countries should get a pass to behave similarly"; it's "let's work to prevent such tragedies from repeating".
by daimajia | 2025-11-24 07:07:40+00:00
Hi HN!

I built a free printable coloring pages website for kids, powered by AI generation.

The Fun Part: Almost all the code was generated by Windsurf with Claude Sonnet 4.5. This was an interesting experiment - I never thought I could actually pull this off. It's fascinating to see what's possible with AI-assisted development today.

Background: As a parent, I noticed my kids love coloring, but most online resources are either low quality or require paid subscriptions. So I built this using AI to provide high-quality coloring pages for free to all parents.

Core Features: - AI-generated high-quality line art (powered by Google Gemini) - 50+ themed categories (animals, holidays, nature, etc.) - Age-appropriate content (3-12 years) with difficulty levels - One-click PDF download, print-ready - Multi-language support (English, Chinese, etc.) - User favorites and browsing history

Tech Stack: - Next.js 16 + React 19 - Drizzle ORM + PostgreSQL - MeiliSearch for search - Cloudflare R2 for image storage - Google Gemini AI for content and category generation - Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui

Interesting Challenges: 1. AI category consistency - Built a "memory system" to make AI reuse existing categories instead of creating duplicates 2. Image optimization - Using Next.js Image optimization with preloading strategy, LCP < 1.5s 3. SEO - Implemented structured data and multilingual sitemaps, now indexed 500+ pages on Google

Future Plans: - Custom AI generation from user prompts (text-to-coloring-page) - Image upload to generate coloring pages (image-to-coloring-page) - User upload and sharing features

Feel free to try it out and share your feedback! I'd especially love to hear suggestions on technical implementation and product direction.

The source code is not open-sourced yet, but happy to discuss technical details.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-24 07:08:06+00:00
This discussion is assuming that the outage is entirely out of your control because the underlying datacenter you relied on went down.

Outages because of bad code do happen and the criticism is fully on the company. They can be mitigated by better testing and quick rollbacks, which is good. But outages at the datacenter level - nothing you can do about that. You just wait until the datacenter is fixed.

This discussion started because companies are actually fine with this state of affairs. They are risking major outages but so are all their competitors so it’s fine actually. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze to them, unless an external entity like the banking regulator makes them care.
by parineum | 2025-11-24 07:09:18+00:00
> This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them.

This nightmare scenario involves selling the rights to your character to a company that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors.

I'm certain I never would have heard of Roger rabbit had it not been sold.
by zorked | 2025-11-24 07:10:42+00:00
You are arguing for rigor, not for its didactics. Those are different.

> had you, you would have instantly known how to do numerical differentiation and understand the limits, pitfalls, and other subjects like FEM

No, you wouldn't. You would also learn things out of order. You would be exposed to things without understanding why you are learning them. People who argue this usually learn things the intuitive way (whether from rigorous material or not - what goes on in their mind isn't rigorous), and then they go back and reassess the rigor in the light of that. Then they pretend that they learned from the rigorous exposition. No, they didn't.

It is totally fine to iterate. Learn non-rigorously. Go back to it and iterate on rigor later. As it becomes necessary, and if it ever becomes necessary for your field.

> Unless you're Ramanujan, every mathematician has spent hours banging their head against a literal or metaphorical wall

Particularly if you are learning from "rigorous" material. But then you go watch some YouTube videos to make up for the absence of didactics in your textbook.

I mean, why don't we just throw Bourbaki books at freshmen and let them sort it out without classes? They are maximally rigorous, therefore maximally great to learn from, right?
by inkyoto | 2025-11-24 07:10:56+00:00
> Take Myanmar as an example: even if China occupied it […]

Historically, however, the record is rather unflattering for China in its engagements with Myanmar (formerly Burma) – China has waged four wars[0] with Myanmar and suffered a defeat to Myanmar in each instance.

[0] Or one war with four invasions – depending on the point of view.
by vasco | 2025-11-24 07:11:23+00:00
I'll die on the hill that centralization is more efficient than decentralization and that rare outages of hugely centralized systems that are otherwise highly reliable are much better than full decentralization with much worse reliability.

In other words, when AWS or Cloudflare go down it's catastrophic in the sense that everyone sees the issues at the same time, but smaller providers usually have much more ongoing issues, that just happen to be "chronic" vs "acute" pains.
Syd – An offline-first, AI-augmented workstation for blue teams
by paul2495 | 2025-11-24 07:11:38+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Paul. I’m building Syd, an offline-first forensic workstation that orchestrates tools like YARA and Nmap through a GUI, using a local LLM to analyze the results without leaking data. It runs completely offline on localhost—no data is ever sent to the cloud, making it safe for sensitive investigations.

Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dQV3JbLrRE.

I built this because while tools like YARA are powerful, managing rule sets and decoding hex strings is slow. AI is great at explaining malware signatures, but I couldn't use ChatGPT for my work because pasting potential malware or sensitive logs into a web form is a massive security risk. I needed the intelligence of an LLM but with the privacy of an air-gapped machine.

Under the hood, it’s built on Python 3. I use subprocess to manage the heavy lifting of the scanning engines so the UI (built with CustomTkinter) doesn't freeze. The "secret sauce" isn't the AI itself, but the parser I wrote that converts the unstructured text output from YARA into a structured JSON format that the local LLM can actually understand and reason about.

I’ve been using it to triage files for my own learning. In one case, Syd flagged a file matching a "SilentBanker" rule and the AI pointed out specific API calls for keylogging, saving me about 20 minutes of manual hex-editing. In the demo video linked, you can see this workflow: scanning a directory, hitting on a custom YARA rule, and having the local AI immediately analyze the strings.

Through this process, I learned that "AI wrappers" are easy, but AI orchestration is hard—getting the tools to output clean data for the LLM is the real challenge. I'd love to hear if there are other static analysis tools (like PEStudio or Capa) you consider essential for a workstation like this, or how you currently handle the privacy risk of using AI for log analysis.
by teiferer | 2025-11-24 07:11:44+00:00
There is a crucial step between having an opinion and voting. It's conversations within society. That's what makes democracy and facilitates change. If you only take your opiniom, isolated from everybody else, and vote from that, there isn't much democracy going on and your chance for change is slim. It's when there is broad conversations happening when movements have an impact.

And that step is here on HN. That's why it's very relevant to observe that that HN crowd is increasingly happy to support a non-free internet. Be it walled gardens, geofencing, etc.
by rzerowan | 2025-11-24 07:12:03+00:00
So were going backwards to a world where there are basically 5 computers running everything and everyone is basically accessing the world through a dumb terminal.Even though the digital slab in our pockets has more compute than a roomful of the early gen devices. Hopefully critical infrashifts back to managed metal or private clouds - dont see it though with the last decades of cloud evangalism to move all legacy systems to the cloud doesnt look like reversing anytime soon.
by macleginn | 2025-11-24 07:12:35+00:00
> But historically, China has never been good at ruling non-Han peoples.

"Good" is not a very objective term, but China does have 55 official minorities, coming from a long period of imperial expansion, so arguably it can be done.

> The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.”

Firstly, this is a troubling statement, again given that China has 55 official minorities, who are evidently failures of assimilation more than anything.

Secondly, there are other ways of imperial sovereignty: Vietnam was a Chinese dominion for a longest time, and Korea was effectively ruled from China as well.

In other words, China has a long and not very remote history of territorial expansion and old-school dependent-state imperialism. The fact that the Han have a very strong cultural identity and do not find it easy to coexist with other peoples doesn't help either: just look at the history of the relations between Britain and Ireland.
by Aeglaecia | 2025-11-24 07:13:35+00:00
personally it has become clear that discussion involving good vs bad is inherently relative to personal frames of reference. in this logic , usage of 'should' degenerates an argument to a personal judgement.

a more professional and unbiased statement would be 'it seems to me that using tool X would mitigate problem Y in our pipeline, because of Z.' this amended statement maximises objectivity compared to the original.

but nobody is gonna spend their whole life delivering extended objective justifications when 'we should start using this tool' suffices for the most part. so i too don't see the value of questioning such benign conversational aspects.