MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bobdvb | 2025-11-13 14:01:48+00:00
There are lots of platforms where people pay for their distribution, but they're not as successful.

The main problem is that smaller creators couldn't afford the true cost of hosting and indexing to the level that YT provides.

As someone who's spent many years building streaming platforms, the lack of understanding of the economics and this kind of massive over simplification is really sad.

There's no conspiracy with YT, they've built a 'wonder of the world' which has a very low barrier to entry and which has paid out billions to creators.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-13 14:03:30+00:00
> Meaning, allowing linux you'd probably be flooded with cheaters if you already get them on windows.

There's an easy way to not get cheaters, or at least to slow down their impact: stop making your games "free to play". When cheaters have to buy 60€ games everytime they get b&, eventually they'll run out of money.
Show HN: Link Snapper – Copy URLs as plain text for unclickable sharing
by wahvinci | 2025-11-13 14:04:39+00:00
Sometimes I want to mention a website (like on X/Twitter) without making it clickable, so I’d type “example. com” with a space. Doing that every time got tedious, so I built Link Snapper — a free Chrome extension that lets you copy any website’s URL as plain text.

You can customize how it copies links — include or remove https, copy only the domain, or grab the full path. When you paste it anywhere, it stays exactly how you want it — clickable or not.

It’s simple, privacy-friendly, and works in one click.

Curious what you think or how you’d use it in your workflow.
by another_twist | 2025-11-13 14:05:27+00:00
I dont understand some of the cynicism in this thread. This is a bold move and I support. It is impossible to not have incidents like this and until theres a proper post mortem we wont really know how much of it can be attributed to carelessness. They could have just kept is hush hush but I appreciate that they came forward with it and also donated money to academia. The research will be open and everybody benefits.
by wtcactus | 2025-11-13 14:05:39+00:00
I hear these stories about UK private rail system being terrible for more than a decade now. But, truth is, I go there frequently and the times I had to use it it was quite fine. Lots of trains and they arrived on time (and they were fairly clean).

It was much, much better - by any account of imagination - than the public railway we have here in Portugal. And I’m guessing they cost the taxpayers a lot less too (but that part I didn’t check).
by neilsimp1 | 2025-11-13 14:06:11+00:00
This might be a less popular opinion on a site like HN, but I'm of the opinion that CEO's don't do a whole lot.

Maybe at small startups they are more involved, but the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do.

While I also think ChatGPT is over-hyped and largeley incorrect in what it says, I would answer your question with a "yes". ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing/delivering speeches at MS Build or whatever.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-11-13 14:06:24+00:00
Windows Explorer still respects the color-scheme preference but the problem is the way it does it.

When you as a dev use a Windows provided control (be it a button, a toolbar, a context menu, etc.) the system grabs the theme information from something called uxtheme. This is how it worked in Windows XP and why you had like 3 different themes you could pick from and switch between at any time, and most apps would respect the selection.

But dark mode doesn't work like that, there's no uxtheme for dark mode. Windows Explorer is given special treatment by Windows with undocumented APIs. Other apps are not so lucky. If they want dark mode, they need to effectively draw the whole UI themselves. Even apps like Notepad++ have to do that these days.
by quit32 | 2025-11-13 14:06:42+00:00
Places that support Apple's digital ID / Wallet state ID do so by utilizing a an identity reader that the user taps their phone against after selecting which info they want to convey. It is not meant for the owner to physically show the phone to the requesting party.

I'm sure this will happen in some cases especially in the interim where digital ID is technically not accepted but the person doesn't have their physical ID. An example would be a traffic stop in a state that currently supports digital state ID since usually the digital ID is basically only supported at TSA currently. But the cop looking at your phone doesn't add any more authenticity vs you just verbalizing the info and them writing it down which is what they usually do if someone has a photo of their missing ID.

Also, Apple cleverly designed it so if phone is in locked state and you activate wallet and select ID, the biometric scan it does doesn't unlock the entire phone and trying to get into the rest of phone requires another biometric scan or phone password.

From the article "Users do not need to unlock, show, or hand over their device to present their ID."
by saberience | 2025-11-13 14:06:53+00:00
Another person wrote a good response to this but yeah, I would say, as someone that has worked in fintech, you will almost always have some integrations with systems which require Microsoft word format, as well as obviously PDFs, CSVs, etc.

Every country you operate in has different rules and regulations and you have to integrate with many third party systems as well as governmental entities etc, and sometimes you have to do really really technically backwards things.

Some integrations I remember were stuff like cron jobs sending CSV files via FTP which were automatically picked up.
by txrx0000 | 2025-11-13 14:07:20+00:00
Demographers were kinda right, it's just that we've had new socioeconomic problems [0][1] post-pill, and we're really starting to feel the effects since around 2008. Post-pill fertility rates in Europe and NA had been slowly rising before that. I think we're likely to fix at least one of these problems in the coming decades. Or rather, we have to because we'd be royally screwed otherwise. And in the event we fail, most democratic societies would turn authoritarian, in which case they'd be able to implement population engineering measures like banning birth control.

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725009

Due note, I'm citing these sources because they show the problem, not because their conclusions are sound.
by pmontra | 2025-11-13 14:07:27+00:00
> Models should run in ephemeral containers where data is only processed in RAM

Maybe, but letting aside that they are two different kind of products, how can you trust them to really do so? And in any way, in the case of ChatGPT where should I store my client side private key, as I use those bots only in my web browser? Maybe in my password manager and I copy paste it every time I start a new conversation.

My take is that if they went this way we would not be talking about them now, we would be talking about one of their competitors that didn't put hurdles between their product and their customers.

In other words, survivor bias.
by turnsout | 2025-11-13 14:07:28+00:00
It's great that this type family has such good Asian language support, but I wish the Roman design was more adventurous. In 5 years, these lookalike geometric sans will all feel so incredibly dated. It already looks like it could go on a Material Design mockup from 2015.

If you're going to pay a foundry to create a custom face, why wouldn't you make it distinctive enough to feel "yours?" It's like having one of the world's top architects make a near-exact copy of a suburban tract home.
by jchw | 2025-11-13 14:07:32+00:00
> The term is commonly used to mislead people into believing that a certain piece of software is not a compiler, so that knowledge about compilers does not apply to it.

Why would people use a word that has the word "compiler" in it to try to trick people into thinking something is not a compiler? I'm filing this into "issues not caused by the thing that is being complained about".
by ApolloFortyNine | 2025-11-13 14:07:32+00:00
Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1]

And they actually continue to expand their service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
by joshuaissac | 2025-11-13 14:08:51+00:00
It's hard to measure this.

British Telecom lost its monopoly around the same time it was privatised. Is today's (very competitive) telecommunications market more a result of privatisation or of the loss of BT's monopoly?

Another way to look at it would be, are BT's customers better off now, than when it was a government company?
by fulafel | 2025-11-13 14:08:56+00:00
Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex".

If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit.

This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-13 14:09:37+00:00
> Radios are ubiquitous in modern technology, and getting a deeper understanding of how they work can have surprising career benefits too!

Indeed.

The problem with many modern ham radios of any sufficiently complex feature set - especially when it comes to cheap hackable radios or digital radios - is that a lot of the functionality is hidden away in blackbox ASIC hardware blocks that have no public datasheets (e.g. BK4819 powering Quansheng's radios, Si4732, or for anything DMR, the AMBE-2020 vocoder).

It's truly a miracle what the hacker community has gotten out particularly out of the Quansheng chipset.
by DivingForGold | 2025-11-13 14:09:43+00:00
"We saw this problem repeatedly in user feedback: “The mower works fine until a wire gets nicked — then I have to dig up half my lawn to find the break.”

Actually, this is not true. There are inexpensive devices on the market that allow one to trace out the wire path and locate the break in a few minutes, I used to own an expensive one.

Search for "Irrigation Wire Tracer" on Amazon for examples.
by InTheArena | 2025-11-13 14:09:46+00:00
Depends, do you travel through any of the airports in Europe, use many of the train services in Europe, get power from spain, portugal or (non-nuclear) France? Fly on a Airbus, or a Boeing with RR engines?

There are legit reasons to be skeptical of privatization, but yes. It works well when it works.

Dogmatic responses (free market == everything, only government and unions can provide service) are not helpful.
by philjw | 2025-11-13 14:09:51+00:00
Just set-up a linux machine with Pidgin Messenger and XMPP last week like in the old days.

It used to bundle MSN, ICQ, IRC and everything in one messenger - super resource efficient.

Unfortulately I cannot reach many contacts that way these days but it showed me how inefficient applications became by using more abstraction layers.

Same on my Mac - it uses almost 16GB of RAM in idle mode with some Tabs, VSCode and Figma open - How did we get here?

edit: Just saw another comment mentioning there is a WhatsApp plugin for Pidgin. Awesome!
by rpdillon | 2025-11-13 14:10:00+00:00
It's really interesting living through this revolution because it's pretty obvious to me that the outcome here needs to be that training is fair use, pirating materials you train on is not going to end up being okay, and the user of the AI tool will be responsible for whether or not the resulting work is infringing. AI tools that are predominantly designed for infringing use cases will of course be ruled against.

I feel like this is all so blindingly obvious and yet I feel like it's going to take us decades to get there. I guess the wheels of justice turn slowly.
by plomme | 2025-11-13 14:10:07+00:00
A good and thought provoking read. This is obviously navel-gazing, but looking at this from an individual or family perspective, I'm wondering about how you could prosper in a depopulating, aging, and warming world.

Traditional investments like real estate and property may not be solid bets if there are suddenly a lot of it to go around due to there being less of us around. Then again, city growth seems stable.

Another point is what happens to stock markets when there are less consumers and producers. Stagnating GDP and indices do not make attractive investments. Where do I invest my hard earned cash then? Private elderly care, drug companies, robotics companies?

We should probably look to the countries mentioned in the article, like South Korea or Japan for answers. But I'm not sure I'm able to pick out winning strategies looking at those, or even be sure they would work where I'm based.

I'm curious what your thoughts are - how do you invest and prepare for the next fifty years?

I realize this is a selfish comment to make, but shoring up oneself is at least actionable for us as individuals, in addition to trying to make the world a better place for everyone else.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-13 14:10:10+00:00
This. Some ways back I actually purchased bluray recording device only to learn that its firmware is deliberately crippled to accommodate someone's business model. There are people who do the unsung hero work, but those types of skills are not exactly common and a business asshole is a dime a dozen any century you want to pick.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-13 14:10:24+00:00
Just because I used italics to emphasize something one time doesn’t mean you get to talk to me like that. I am not a child and you’re being unnecessarily patronizing.

I let it slide in the previous comment and gave you the benefit of the doubt despite what I saw but this comment clearly illustrates how disrespectful you’re being.

Have a good rest of your day man
by spacebanana7 | 2025-11-13 14:10:28+00:00
In the UK the airline and telecom privatisations were largely successful (BA, Rolls Royce, BT, etc). BP did okay too.

For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.

MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making Chinese state owned enterprise (SAIC). Still makes popular, cheap and not very reliable cars though.
by 4ggr0 | 2025-11-13 14:11:12+00:00
> because there wasn't enough money in it

i wonder what the world or progress in general would look like if profit-incentives didn't matter (as much as they do), and instead just "would this take us forwards as societies?"

or in a different way, what are we missing out on just because some people think stuff has to be profitable in order to be "good".
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-13 14:11:30+00:00
Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me is seeing a company as big as Valve try making some hardware (steam machine, controllers, the weird steam box streaming thing), watch them fail spectacularly, and then listen to feedback while they bravely work on a new conception of the hardware.

Valve heard everyone hating on the og controller and seem to have fixed it. Same for the steam machine. I'm less certain about the headset, but if anyone has the hutzpah to make VR happen, my money is on Valve.

Valve added a second joystick to the controller. That's utter insanity in today's market. The expected play is to find a way to force consumers to buy the single stick, and a subscription, somehow. Or gaslight everyone into thinking single stick is somehow better, actually.

It's just crazy to me to see a big company acting with rationality, sense, and forethought
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-13 14:11:32+00:00
This is only possible due to how the console space has changed over the last 10 years. The killer app for console over PC used to be simplicity - you pop in the disc/cartridge and you just go. This is rarely true anymore. Even Switch 2 games often require waiting to download a bunch of stuff before you can play. Meanwhile the PC experience has generally gotten simpler and most games "just work", in part thanks to Steam itself.
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-13 14:12:06+00:00
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by laziness.

Personally, I MIT/BSD my stuff because, well... it means I don't have to think about it ever again. If I do GPL, I have to make sure that I'm following the rules set out in that license and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same.

And that's, like, work, man, especially if you don't have a foundation and legal eagles on your side to double-check that everything's kosher.

Linux is an exception, not a rule, in how GPL is usually handled in FLOSS projects.
by repied | 2025-11-13 14:12:10+00:00
A client-side web app to help scuba divers set up their dive computer.

Scuba divers use computers to tell them when to make stops during ascent to prevent decompression illness. Many recent computers implement Bühlmann's decompression algorithm with "Gradient Factors".

Gradient Factors are 2 free parameters that control the "safety" margin of the dive. It's not obvious what values to choose, especially for novice divers.

My app explains what they are and shows their impact on the computed dive plan.

https://repied.github.io/paliers/
by mapontosevenths | 2025-11-13 14:12:38+00:00
Just to double check that it was fixed, I asked ChatGPT what was on the front page of the New York times today and I get a summary with paraphrased titles. It doesn't reproduce anything exactly (not even the headlines).

Interestingly, the summary is made by taking screenshots of a (probably illegal) PDF it found someplace on the internet. It then cites that sketchy PDF as the source rather than linking back to the original NY Times articles.

If I were the NYT I would still be plenty pissed off.

ChatGPT's reference: https://d2dr22b2lm4tvw.cloudfront.net/ny_nyt/2025-11-13/fron... via https://frontpages.freedomforum.org/
by kibwen | 2025-11-13 14:12:47+00:00
> overly-long

Worth noting that one of the focuses of the past decade-ish of development has been to make the game significantly shorter. D has lost 7 floors, Lair and Vaults lost 3, Elf, Orc, and Crypt lost 2, the S branches and Slime lost 1, and the first 6 levels of every hell branch have become much smaller. As a result the density of powerful monsters has increased and popcorn has been dramatically reduced compared to earlier versions.
by this_user | 2025-11-13 14:13:13+00:00
> In most cases

Therein lies the problem. When dealing with the law, you don't want to be relatively sure that you won't go to prison or won't get sued for $1M, you want to be completely sure.

Something like the GPL is complex and non-standard as far as its interactions with the legal system go, because it is essentially a sort of hack of copyright law. If it goes before a court, you have no idea what might potentially happen. So rather than deal with that kind of complexity and uncertainty, you'd use something under MIT or Apache License that is just much better understood.
by edent | 2025-11-13 14:13:25+00:00
It depends on what you count as a success.

The privatisation of BT meant that there was no specific monopoly on ISPs during the Internet boom. While the privatised BT had a monopoly on the wires - customers could choose from hundreds of different dial-up and, later, ADSL ISPs.

Similarly, the privatisation of the mobile phone networks means that the UK had some of the cheapest airtime contracts in the EU. Yes, there are still gaps in network coverage, but there were at the peak 5 different MNOs for customers to choose from each competing and driving down prices / increasing coverage.

Energy has been mixed. Companies like Octopus have provided things like real-time electricity APIs. I can't imagine an organisation like British Gas launching something like that. Similarly, if your power supplier has crap customer service, you can move. And people do! In that sense, it has been a success.

Pickfords was also privatised. People forget that house-moving companies were nationalised during WW2. The liberalisation of that market has been a success.

You can argue about things like Rolls Royce, BP, British Airways etc. But I don't think they offset the utter failures of privatising water, trains, etc.
by elwafa | 2025-11-13 14:13:48+00:00
I'm working on Volt-Test, a performance testing engine I started building after repeatedly debugging concurrency and race-condition issues in Laravel/PHP applications.

The idea is to bring something like k6 to the PHP ecosystem:

A Go-based load-testing engine

A PHP SDK that lets developers write performance tests inside PHPUnit

Assertions for latency, error rates, and business logic

Can spin up local servers and run in CI/CD

Working on distributed mode to scale tests across multiple nodes

Currently building the cloud version so teams can run large tests without managing infrastructure

For Laravel developers, I also released a package that integrates Volt-Test directly into the framework:

https://github.com/volt-test/laravel-performance-testing

It supports automatic route discovery and makes it easy to write performance scenarios using familiar testing patterns.

Docs + examples: https://php.volt-test.com

If anyone here has experience building or running distributed load-testing systems, I’d appreciate any feedback or pointers.
by phobotics | 2025-11-13 14:14:02+00:00
I think a lot of people in the UK would agree with this. It's not perfect but the rail system on the whole is pretty great for getting around the country. There's some annoying things like having to go to a hub to go back the way you came sometimes. But without a sprawling expensive network that's somewhat unavoidable. And obviously some lines are worse than others re delays and cancellations.

Most complaints in the UK are about cost of tickets. They are very valid complaints imo, the cost of getting a train in this country can be absurd. There would be a really positive attitude towards train travel in the UK and our rail system if it wasn't trying to bankrupt you every time you use it.
by encoderer | 2025-11-13 14:14:27+00:00
I was floored when watching the recent documentary about the Grenfell fire that residents who called 911 were told to stay put and if they needed to evacuate a fireman will come.

These poor people, inside an inferno, losing their last chance to escape, because they listened to the official state policy. An animal knows to run from a burning barn but here we are, trained to ignore that instinct.
by bikeshaving | 2025-11-13 14:14:33+00:00
If you want adventurous fonts, try:

Open Dyslexic: https://opendyslexic.org Using this font will make you brain look at similarly shaped sans serifs in strange ways. You can configure Claude Web to use this font.

Atkinson Hyperlegible: https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/ Pushing aging eyes with smaller display fonts in the terminal. I found the Braille Institute’s Atkinson Hyperlegible to have very good readability in small sizes.
by saberience | 2025-11-13 14:14:42+00:00
Paying ransomware fines is never the smart move to do unless you happen to trust what cyber criminals tell you.

You send them the payment, they tell you they deleted the data, but they also sell the data to 10 other customers over the dark-web.

Why would you ever trust people who are inherently trustworthy and who are trying to screw you? While also encouraging further ransomware crimes in the future.