MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kalonb911 | 2025-11-13 23:01:35+00:00
Pranking friends can be a hilarious way to inject some lighthearted fun into your day, especially when the prank is clever rather than mean-spirited. One prank that often catches tech-savvy friends off guard involves exploiting the magnetic sensors found in some laptops. Many modern laptops have a small magnetic sensor near the lid that detects when it’s closed; when the sensor is triggered, the computer automatically goes to sleep or shuts down. By subtly placing a magnet near this sensor, you can make their computer behave mysteriously, seemingly turning off on its own. The confusion this causes can lead to plenty of laughter—as long as you reveal the prank quickly.

The key to pulling off this prank successfully is understanding your friend’s computer and where the magnetic sensor is located. Usually, the sensor is near the edge of the laptop lid, but its exact position can vary depending on the make and model. Using a small, safe magnet, you can hover it near the sensor while your friend is using the laptop. At first, the laptop may go to sleep unexpectedly, causing them to wonder if their device is malfunctioning. Their reactions—ranging from frustration to bewilderment—are the most entertaining part of the prank.

Timing is everything when executing this kind of prank. Ideally, you want your friend focused on something that requires attention, like writing an assignment or browsing the internet. The sudden shutdown or sleep mode will make them question if the computer is broken, and it can spark a funny investigation as they try to figure out what went wrong. The humor comes from the subtlety—nothing is damaged, but the effect is convincing enough to create a moment of harmless confusion.

It’s crucial to ensure this prank remains harmless and reversible. Never leave a magnet on the computer for an extended period, as strong magnets can interfere with certain hardware components like hard drives in older laptops. A light magnet used briefly near the sensor is enough to create the effect without risk. After a few moments of laughter and confusion, you should reveal the prank to avoid genuine frustration. The goal is to amuse, not annoy or damage.

Finally, pranks like this work best when shared stories can be laughed about later. Your friends will probably remember the “haunted” laptop incident for weeks, telling the story to others and maybe even plotting revenge in a similarly lighthearted manner. The charm of this prank lies in its simplicity and ingenuity: it doesn’t rely on complex software or messy tricks, just a small magnet and a bit of timing. In the end, harmless tech pranks like these strengthen friendships, as long as everyone walks away laughing.
by criemen | 2025-11-13 23:01:49+00:00
I don't know Rust, and I'm genuinely curious: How does it improve over that problem?

When you call a REST API (or SQL query for that matter), how does it ensure that the data coming back matches the types?

TS allows you to do parse the JSON, cast it into your target type, done (hiding correctness bugs, unless using runtime verification of the object shape, see sibling comment). Does Rust enforce this?
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-13 23:03:31+00:00
Is that a rhetorical question?

There's software that exists beyond the web and SaaS.

Windows is still used widely in all sorts of places you'd never expect to see it. POS systems, ATMs, industrial controllers, digital signage/interactive kiosks, SCADA is largely Windows still. You need software for all of that, and it ain't gonna be web apps.

Windows is also still widespread in finance. The backend systems may be Linux or custom FGPA hardware but the front end finance world is ran on Windows (and Excel on Windows). Plenty of trading software is Windows only.

Heck, MS SQL Server is still in the #2 or #3 spot for database marketshare behind Oracle. Granted, it can run on Linux now but I don't many who are yet.

None of it is "sexy" like HN startups and SaaS so it doesn't get the coverage or discussion, but Windows is everywhere and so are Windows developers. You could argue whether or not Windows is/was the right choice for a lot of those (it's probably not), but it's there nonetheless and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
by autoexec | 2025-11-13 23:04:16+00:00
> So many women are getting abused in dorms now and nobody can talk about it;

I don't believe that there's a widespread issue of people stopping other people from talking about people being abused. You're doing it right now and nobody stopped you. Other examples of it successfully happening abound.

> a friend of mine complained that a man was hanging out in the women's bathroom for hours on end on friday/saturday nights and the RA threatened to write her up.

This is not an example of somebody who was prevented from talking about being abused. I'm honestly not sure what to make of it. If the place had segregated bathrooms why were men in there at all? Literally anyone regularly hanging around in a shared bathroom for hours on end is a bit rude, but it's hard to understand why an RA would have threatened to write up your friend. Write her up for what exactly?

> Rape/abuse rates are around 300x higher (depending on the numbers you use) for trans/non-binary people than women yet nobody cares

Ignoring the fact that many trans/non-binary people are also women, I don't believe that nobody cares. Don't you? I also know that research is still being done on the subject. Schools can be weird though, so I'd be interested in examples of tenured professors who were fired for trying to research the subject if you have any.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-13 23:04:42+00:00
"The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd."

Perhaps you can read the history then.

"I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025."

I'm not sure that I missed anything. Perhaps I just disagree with the degree that things like interstate commerce and taxes have been contorted to be, to the degree that basic logic and reading skills have been abandoned to justify whatever those with power feel like. Just as you have opinions about what you see as problems with the Senate.
by Ninjak8051 | 2025-11-13 23:04:46+00:00
The techies are insolvent but not yet bankrupt. They have been running their business off accounts receivable (which rightfully belong to you) for months. There is no way to work things out, the money isn't there. You have been hosting their guests and you will get back pennies on the dollars you are owed, years later. Time to pull the plug.
by radiator | 2025-11-13 23:04:52+00:00
Is there not a legal way to fight this back? With this patent application, someone is trying to establish an advantage *against everyone else*. So legally, anyone might have self-interest to sue the applicant, if the application is fraudulent (because for example it is a stolen 200-year-old mathematical method). I mean, such patent applications should not be a freeroll, they should also entail some risk for the applicant.
by mandevil | 2025-11-13 23:05:00+00:00
My experience with LP is that they went way down in quality after Red Ventures (who own CNET, Bankrate.com etc.) bought them in 2020. I stopped trusting them completely after the CNET AI scandal- wikipedia no longer considers CNET to be a reliable source, and I'm not sure why I should trust LP either.

It turns out that living in a high trust environment is a lot better than living in a low trust environment, but if we're going to be living in a low trust environment, better to understand it than to pretend we can still act like it's still high trust.
by zbentley | 2025-11-13 23:05:18+00:00
> The only way I can see it being a lot of work is if your nodes are very small

Which is a totally valid use case for a huge-nodecount cluster! Geo distribution or similar use cases employ this pattern often.

> you're going to hold onto the partial heartbeat for like 2 seconds

And if a region goes down such that a large number of nodes are tarpit-heartbeating at the same time? Your cluster can fail to accept real traffic because it’s clogged with heartbeats.

Like sure, generally 2krps should be fine. But in clusters this large it is totally reasonable to tune heartbeat behavior. I’ve seen plenty of real distributed system failures along these same exact lines.
by josephg | 2025-11-13 23:05:33+00:00
Can you say more?

I’ve found it a joy to use compared to CMake and friends. How does it make it harder to consume something downstream? Seems easy enough to me - just share the source crate.

Are you trying to distribute pre compiled code or something like that? I can see how that would be harder - cargo doesn’t really support that use case.

How would you improve cargo?
by gruez | 2025-11-13 23:06:02+00:00
> Superior Court Judge Barbara Rouse entered a temporary restraining order, forbidding Estridge and his eight Joy of Movement corporations from selling any assets or real estate. On Thursday, Judge Elbert Tuttle also placed liens on real estate and bank accounts belonging to Estridge and his companies.

But your stuff in the gym's locker aren't the gym's "assets"? Same if you parked your car in some bankrupt hotel's parking lot. Just because it's on some bankrupt company's property, doesn't mean your car is up for grabs by creditors.

The only trouble is that the building probably does count as the gym's assets, so even though your stuff isn't technically frozen, you can't really go in to get your stuff. But if for whatever reason you could (eg. breaking in?), you'd be in the clear to grab your stuff.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-11-13 23:06:21+00:00
> Cargo is absolutely awful. It might be better than cmake, but it still the worst part about Rust. It’s completely opaque, and intermixes a huge pile of different functionality.

"Absolutely awful" strikes me as wild hyperbole -- you also meant it this way as well, right? What toolchains are not absolutely awful in your mind?

Cargo isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination -- there are a few common complaints that people have and a bunch of sharp edges (most of which have a github issue that has been open for years), but... "absolutely awful" has to be hyperbole.
by observationist | 2025-11-13 23:06:30+00:00
I agree. Bruhcula? Something like that. He's a vampire, but also models and does stunts for Baywatch - too much color and vitality. Joan of Arc is way more pale.

Maybe a little mode collapse away from pale ugliness, not quite getting to the hints of unnatural and corpse-like features of a vampire - interesting what the limitations are. You'd probably have to spend quite a lot of time zeroing in, but Google's image models are supposed to have allowed smooth traversal of those feature spaces generally.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-13 23:07:05+00:00
Kept secret by the government is very different from kept secret in a product anyone can buy and encrypt arbitrary messages with.

What are some message-sending cryptography products where people didn't know how the encryption worked for a long time?

> It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions.

Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.
by nradov | 2025-11-13 23:07:16+00:00
I don't know the details of this particular case but generally most guests who reserved their stay using a credit card wouldn't have actually paid anything yet. There is no insurance claim if they're not out any money. Most likely the appointed bankruptcy administrators will charge the evicted guests for the nights that they actually stayed in the hotels and cancel the rest of their reservations. The guests are legally obligated to pay for services already rendered, even if the customer service was terrible.
by tablets | 2025-11-13 23:07:18+00:00
In my experience it is also the other things in there which helps with the pain relief. Doctors in my country talk about the entourage effect and mixing strains as they reckon it's not just the THC which is helping.

I can imagine people in the future looking at us like idiots as they use cannabinoids in the same way we use paracetamol.

From personal experience suffering from chronic pain cannabis is absolutely transformative. The difference between a life spiralling to nothing just about surviving on opioids compared to effective pain relief from cannabis and being able to work and be productive again.

One of the tragedies of the 20th and hopefully not the 21st century. So many people in so much unnecessary pain.

Looking at history I could quite easily come to the conclusion... ...due to racism.
by andai | 2025-11-13 23:07:24+00:00
Also by the author: https://www.makingsoftware.com/

Recent discussions:

Making Software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43678144

How does a screen work? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44550572

What is a color space? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45013154
by vunderba | 2025-11-13 23:07:37+00:00
Good read minimaxir! From the article:

> Nano Banana supports a context window of 32,768 tokens: orders of magnitude above T5’s 512 tokens and CLIP’s 77 tokens.

In my pipeline for generating highly complicated images (particularly comics [1]), I take advantage of this by sticking a Mistral 7b LLM in-between that takes a given prompt as an input and creates 4 variations of it before sending them all out.

> Surprisingly, Nano Banana is terrible at style transfer even with prompt engineering shenanigans, which is not the case with any other modern image editing model.

This is true - though I find it works better by providing a minimum of two images. The first image is intended to be transformed, and the second image is used as "stylistic aesthetic reference". This doesn't always work since you're still bound by the original training data, but it is sometimes more effective than attempting to type out a long flavor text description of the style.

[1] - https://mordenstar.com/portfolio/zeno-paradox
by rogermeier | 2025-11-13 23:07:52+00:00
Wolfgang and me introduced the concept of the SPDX-License-Identifier, see https://spdx.dev/learn/handling-license-info/ also landed within the Kernel later, beside of many things we did for our stuff at Siemens, upstream first such as https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/board/siemens
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-11-13 23:08:13+00:00
Exactly. I've gotten much more interested by LLM now that i've accepted I can just look at the final result (code) without having to read any of the justification wall of text, which is generally convincing bullshit.

It's like working with a very cheap, extremely fast, dishonest and lazy employee. You can still get them to help you but you have to check them all the time.
by lrvick | 2025-11-13 23:08:51+00:00
In my experience building bug bounty programs for many high risk orgs, PGP reports are rare, as you indicate. Maybe a couple a year.

That does not make them any less critical or relied on. We always took them super seriously and read them offline because they were often highly sensitive real disclosures that merited being exposed only to a very small circle of people with security team decryption smartcards.

It is a safe assumption skiddies do not know how to use PGP so low skill reports with PGP almost never happened.

I would never run a bug bounty program without having an highly visible public key to encrypt highly sensitive reports to.
by aurumque | 2025-11-13 23:09:09+00:00
Having been affected by this personally, I don't think Marriott cares about their brand at this point as they have achieved relative monopoly status. There are plenty of other horrible things they've accomplished in the last few years besides this. It makes me want to watch out for CitizenM similarly, because it's increasingly unclear what Marriott's actual role in your stay even is anymore.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-13 23:09:11+00:00
> what was sold with a name of Starship included much more things than getting stage 2 into orbit

...what was it? Are you talking about HLS? Propellant transfer? (The latter is absolutely "getting its mass into orbit.")

Which of those has been either officially cancelled or had its delays materially impact the customer's timeline?
by tptacek | 2025-11-13 23:09:51+00:00
I will not, because I joined this subthread to make a specific point (that the other commenter was simply wrong that the archaisms in PGP/OpenPGP are a mere consequence of GnuPG and avoidable by avoiding GnuPG), and this whole subthread has been an exercise in avoiding that point and switching to other more tractable arguments. I'm sorry, but I'm not interested.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-13 23:09:51+00:00
There is this dumb belief stemming from lack of proper CS education that any code you write can just randomly have memory safety issues.

This is effectively true in C and C++ though. Show me a nontrivial project in either of those languages that has never had a memory safety issue and I'll show you a project that doesn't look at quality. Even SQlite doesn't meet this bar, despite incredibly skilled programmers and an obsessive commitment to quality.
by nxor | 2025-11-13 23:09:59+00:00
You say all that as if I have a positive opinion of my country.

I live here. I know the problems. I'm very critical of them. In fact, the things that get discussed here don't even make it to Europe.

I live in a very violent city. I am a minority. I see minority crime. I know people who have been shot.

My point is that you all see us as unreliable, but fail to talk about the way this applies to western Europe as well.

I didn't say I was an expert.

You judge the US based on politics? Ok, I judge Europe based on politics. Your media lies to you regularly about the US and if the US is so bad, why did Europe obsess over it for so long?
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-13 23:10:19+00:00
If you still do guidebooks, it’s baffling that you get the Lonely Planet. After all, already in the early millennium there were magazine investigative pieces and tell-all books by former LP writers that the publisher was not actually researching everything on the ground, but was just putting together things found on the internet or making stuff up. I see that there are accusations that recent guides rely on AI generation.

What got LP flack has now spread to other guidebook publishers with little furor. I looked at a Rough Guide recently that had all the tell-tale signs that the publisher no longer considers fact-checking and quality control necessary steps. I do like a good guidebook, but in English that means only Bradt these days for its combination of abundant historical context and local knowledge, since so many of its guides are written by people who have been resident in the country for many years and often have an areal-studies background.
Show HN: Prom.dev – Prompts that simulate Hacker News (and a tool to share them)
by hjack_ | 2025-11-13 23:10:21+00:00
We’re Heather and Matt, and we want to invite you to Prom. Prom is a simple place to share the prompts you’re proud of and discover ones other people actually use.

The idea came out of a lightweight internal library we hacked together for our team earlier this year. Before that, we had “good prompts” on Slack or Google Docs. We wanted a dedicated place for prompts, and somewhere people can post what’s working for them, compare approaches and models, and see what “good” looks like in the wild.

The tech is, well, nothing fancy, but intentionally lightweight. Flask backend, Bootstrap frontend. You can keep prompts private or make them public, and open them directly in Cursor with a deeplink if that’s your workflow.

Right now it’s early and pretty minimal. We’re thinking about adding things like version history, a prompt improver, and maybe an MCP server, but the part we care most about right now is the community. We think it would be cool to see people sharing weird experiments and genuinely useful prompts.

If you try it, we’d love to know what you think, what kind of prompts you might build, and hear what would make this a better place to post and browse prompts. Enjoy Prom!
by Retric | 2025-11-13 23:11:14+00:00
Patents go way back possibly as far as 500 BC, with other examples dating to 1331 etc, yet the introduction didn’t kick off any great wave of progress.

Instead a wide range of factors like better plants feeding both population growth and an ever larger percentage of society could do something other than grow food where the real root causes here. Devoting land and labor to cotton for example requires a surplus of food.
by joshuamorton | 2025-11-13 23:12:12+00:00
I will simply say that Google is one of the few places that, to a first approximation, has this. We have our (pretty good) suite of tests. We can run only affected tests. We can them with instrumentation (*SAN), we can run them under various memory and CPU limits, we can run them 1000 times in parallel to deflake.

Anyway Google has all of that, and yet still finds this improvement.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-11-13 23:12:28+00:00
This examples don't mean the dollars aren't fungible only that where they are stored can make them less accessible or subject to fees. Its like the difference between a gold nugget in your hand and one that's buried deep in the ground. The gold itself is inter-changeable, one nugget is worth the same as the other if side by side. Only one is in a more inaccessible location and you'd have to pay the cost of retrieving it. If you magically switched the two nuggets, the situation would be exactly the same from a value perspective.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-11-13 23:12:46+00:00
> Could we have made Rust in 1990?

No. Only massively oversimplifying, Rust could be described as a bunch of ideas pioneered among functional languages coming back to C++, the same way Java was a bunch of ideas from Lisp coming back to C. There is very little that's truly new in Rust, it's just mixing a bunch of features that were not often together before.

> The compiler is also relatively slow. Would Rust have been worth working with on 30+ year old hardware?

What makes Rust slow to compile is largely independent of what makes it unique. A lot of text has been written about this, but the again massively oversimplified version is that had the designers cared about compile times when the language was being designed and the compiler written, you could have something that's very similar to Rust but also very fast to compile.
by KraftyOne | 2025-11-13 23:12:55+00:00
Thanks for the great feedback! Yeah, for isolation we recommend each service have its own system database and communicate via clients (so service A starts a workflow in service B by creating a client and calling "client.enqueue").

How could we make this experience better while keeping DBOS a simple library? One improvement that comes to mind is to add an "application name" field to the workflows table so that multiple applications could share a system database. Then one application could directly enqueue a workflow to another application by specifying its name, and workflow observability tooling would work cross-application.
by echelon | 2025-11-13 23:13:30+00:00
Rust is the most defect-free language I have ever used.

I'd wager my production Rust code has 100x fewer errors than comparable Javascript, Python, or even Java code.

The way Result<T,E>, Option<T>, match, if let, `?`, and the rest of the error handling and type system operate, it's very difficult to write incorrect code.

The language's design objective was to make it hard to write bugs. I'd say it succeeded with flying colors.