MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sodafountan | 2025-12-28 04:17:17+00:00
I used to follow system wars. I used to love following which home console was performing the best and then hopping online and trolling the people who bought the console with the least support. I was a huge fan of the 360 when I was younger. It had a superior controller, awesome online play, and decent graphics. I was never a fan of Sony's consoles. I didn't like the controller layout, and the exclusives never appealed to me. I typically owned a Nintendo and a Microsoft console when I was a kid. I started with the N64, GameCube, 360, and I had an Xbox One.

I stopped following mainstream gaming not too long ago, to me, I just couldn't care less at this point. The Series X doesn't appeal to me at all as I've gotten older.

It would be interesting if Microsoft went the way of Sega and stopped producing home consoles. I still think they have the superior controller.
by encrypted_bird | 2025-12-28 04:18:27+00:00
Ah yes thr classic "the homeless are ruining my day!" argument.

The issue here isn't the homeless; it's that the infrastructure designed to help the homeless (shelters, reeducation programs, free home address programs, and so forth) are either nonexistent or underfunded.

Don't blame the homeless for the problems of your society; blame the problems of your society for the homeless.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-28 04:18:43+00:00
Wait. This doesn’t make sense to me. Statically typed programming languages cannot be deployed nor can they run with a type error that happens at runtime. Untyped languages CAN run and error out with a type error AT runtime. The inevitable consequence of that truth is this:

In the spectrum of runtime errors statically typed languages mathematically and logically HAVE less errors. That by itself is the definition of more reliable. This isn’t even a scientific thing related to falsifiability. This comes from pure mathematical logic. In science nothing can be proven, things can only be falsified. But in math and logic things can be proven and it is provable that static types are more reliable than untyped.

It is definitely not vibes and feels. Not all of banking uses statically typed languages but they are as a result living with a less reliable system then the alternative and that is a logical invariant.

There are many reasons why someone would choose untyped over typed but reliability is not a reason why they would do this unless they are ignorant.
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-28 04:18:50+00:00
Toll roads are corrosive to the American spirit. They are low-trust, f-u-i-got-mine, and they breed resentment both between economic classes and between people who follow the rules and people who don't care about them. They are the HOA of traffic management schemes.

Toll roads are the worst. The fact that there are increasing numbers of them is as much a bellwether of the death of the American experiment experiment as anything else.
by Avamander | 2025-12-28 04:18:50+00:00
Debian and most Debian derivatives have HTTP-only mirrors. Which I've found absolutely crazy for years. Though nobody seems to care. Maybe it'll change this time around.

Though this type of juggling knives is not unique to Linux. AMD and many other hardware vendors ship executables over unencrypted connections for Windows. All just hoping that not a single similar vulnerability or confusion can be found.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-28 04:19:02+00:00
I doubt the war was truly lost on that faithful day in 2013. It was still possible to save, and Phil Spencer even did a decent amount of work trying to reclaim the goodwill of people by pushing for things like backwards compatibility for previous gen Xboxes.

I think the larger problem is just that Xbox doesn't really know what itself is. Sony has the same problem to a lesser extent. None of the current gen consoles have any exclusives of note. Sony have a few, while Microsoft have basically none. That alone gives Sony a big advantage. Meanwhile, in the PS4 days, people would buy one just for Bloodborne, while in the 360 days, they'd buy one just for Halo. Now Halo is on PC, so no longer an exclusive, and while the same goes for Sony, they still retain a bit of a default console status, which helps draw in the couch console crown who aren't interested in the PC. If you want a traditional console experience, you buy a PS5, since there's no real reason to buy the Xbox even if you did care to compare them side by side.
by asmor | 2025-12-28 04:19:21+00:00
I don't get the hangup on having multiple accounts. The point of AP is that you can read any kind post, not create any kind of post.

There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-28 04:19:31+00:00
No, because reproducing the fundamental is the thing. Saying otherwise is kinda like me saying I'm gonna take a voice call, run it through a filter that generates a ton of distortion harmonics, then seperate out those distortion harmonics, and then call it a "tone" of your voice.

But also the original post was about a 7hz tone somehow resonating with a chicken's skull cavity, which if you know the basic wave equation relating wavelength with frequency is an absurdity. The waves involved are multiple orders of magnitude too big to couple to a volume that small. They'll just diffract around like nothing.
by rastrian | 2025-12-28 04:21:30+00:00
I think you’re both pointing at the same tradeoff: “untagged” unions feel lighter, but you often pay it back in ad-hoc narrowing (shape checks/heuristics) and ambiguity once variants overlap.

Tagged unions/ADTs make the discriminant explicit, which is exactly why they tend to be reliability-friendly: exhaustive matches + explicit constructors reduce “guessing” and refactor breakage.

That said, I agree the ergonomics matter, TS-style discriminated unions are basically “tagged” too once you add a kind field, for example.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-28 04:21:30+00:00
> It's in the interest of NASA (and the ESA) to hype the importance of the magnetosphere. After all, they are given money to investigate it

I don’t know that that is a good reason to cause you to you think they’re lying.

NASA also extensively investigates Earth's atmosphere.

They use missions like Aura, CALIPSO, and upcoming ones like AOS and INCUS to monitor ozone, clouds, aerosols, and storms, providing crucial data for forecasts and climate science.
by pests | 2025-12-28 04:22:22+00:00
I really hate UI button mismatch in steam. I grew up on PS controllers, I couldn't even tell you the xbox layout from memory. I was once forced to use a Switch controller (was traveling, forgot my main) while the in-screen UI was XBox. I had so much trouble at first, especially since the xbox and switch controllers share button names but even the "x" made me think of the playstation x. Just some musings.
by asmor | 2025-12-28 04:22:30+00:00
> When I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.

While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think you need to couple "offline interaction" with this criticism. As a neurodivergent person in more than one way I appreciate being able to interact with people that face similar challenges to me and understand me. The problem is that social media is increasingly designed to not facilitate that, but content distribution.
by tombert | 2025-12-28 04:22:38+00:00
I so want to like these vibe coding agents, and sometimes I do, but it really does kind of suck the joy out of things.

What I was hoping would be that I could effectively farm out work to my metaphorical AI intern while I get to focus on fun and/or interesting work. Sometimes that is what happens and it makes me very happy when it does. A lot of the time, however, it generates code that is wrong, or incomplete (while claiming it is complete), and so I end up having to babysit the code, either by further prompting or just editing the code.

And then it makes a lot of software engineering become "type prompt, sit and wait a minute, look at the code, repeat", which means I'm decidedly not focusing the fun part of the project and instead I'm just larping as a manager who backseat codes.

A friend of mine said that he likes to do this backwards: he writes a lot of the code himself and then he uses Claude Code to debug and automate writing tedious stuff like unit tests, and I think that might make it a little less mind numbing.

Also, very tangential, and maybe my prompting game isn't completely on point here, but Codex seems decidedly bad at concurrent code [1]. I was working on some lock-free data store stuff, and Codex really wanted to add a bunch of lock files that were wholly unnecessary. Oh, and it kept trying to add mutexes into Rust, no matter how many times I tell it I don't want locks and it should use one-shot channels instead. To be fair, when I went and fixed the functions myself in a few spots and then told it to use that as an example, it did get a little better.

[1] I think this particular case is because it's trained on example code from Github and most code involving concurrency uses locks (incorrectly or at least sub-optimally). I guess this particular problem may be more of the fault of American universities teaching concurrent programming incorrectly at the undergrad level.
by RijilV | 2025-12-28 04:22:40+00:00
I keep on pestering folks who work at Apple to add color filters to the per-app accessibility options, who knows maybe there's someone there who'll read this.

Since iOS of a couple of versions ago, you can trigger color filters on and off from shortcuts, and get a similar behaviour, but it isn't perfect and sometimes glitches. I do this so my photos app and a few others are in color, but the rest are in grey scale.
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-28 04:22:42+00:00
This misses the entire point of Stein as much as AI misses the point of Stein, reduces it to simple and literal style; it is good because I feel it is good. Stein and the minimalists she inspired (Hemingway, Bernhard, Brautigan, Beckett, etc) are all great examples of the failings of AI and most people when it comes to literature, they miss the subtext. Unlike AI, most people get the subtext even if they don't understand the subtext, which is the point of subtext, to effect instead of preach. Unless your interest in reading is to become a writer, you are not supposed to get subtext, you are just supposed to feel it, rely on that innate understanding which the majority of people are great at getting,

Edit: Stein is one of my favorites and The Making of Americans is the American Epic and THE Great American Novel.
by Spivak | 2025-12-28 04:22:43+00:00
Infra person here: you will need external monitoring at some point because checking that your site is up all over the world isn't something you want to do in house. Not because you couldn't but because their outages are likely to be uncorrelated with yours—AWS notwithstanding.

Anyway you'll have one of these things anyway and I haven't seen one yet that doesn't let you monitor your cert and send you expiration notices in advance.
by DetectDefect | 2025-12-28 04:23:00+00:00
> We built Iris after watching friends spend weeks doom-scrolling Craigslist, Zillow, Apartments.com and broker sites — only to miss good units or run into stale / scammy listings.

How does Iris help avoid stale/scammy listing, using AI or other means?

> Verified listings only from property managers, owners, and authorized agents

Who else besides these parties is listing properties for rent - and how do they contribute to the aforementioned category of listings?
by Qem | 2025-12-28 04:23:34+00:00
I think a more obvious candidate is self-selection. People with known mental issues that want a pet are wise to choose those that demand less maintenance. It's hard to go walk the dog while undergoing a mental breakdown. Cats, on the other hand, don't require people to walk them, and are mostly self-cleaning. They are a safer pick for people whose routines are subject to sporadic disruption.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-28 04:24:10+00:00
Because the cost is not an issue for higher income people. The poor either sacrifice something else to pay the toll, or they take a (likely longer, slower, or more congested) alternate route to avoid the tolls. This ends up costing them more time, which of course is a fixed quantity per day, so they again end up sacrificing. In a way it's regressive even if they avoid it.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-28 04:24:17+00:00
I questioned the same thing over a decade ago with my then-shiny Samsung Galaxy S5: At the lowest of its low-power battery-saving modes, it drained the color from the screen and made it greyscale.

Perhaps it can make sense for LCDs: After all, LCDs operate by blocking backlight.

Blocking less backlight (by area) by using greyscale might make sense: It seems obvious that a higher perceived brightness can be achieved for any given pixel if using greyscale instead of using colors, just because less of the backlight's area is occluded.

And then: Usability can be maintained while also reducing backlight intensity.

Reduced backlight intensity definitely does have a big effect on battery life.

So -- for LCDs -- it might make sense.

(But even if it makes sense for LCD, the S5 happened to use one OLED variation or another, not LCD. Perhaps there's a non-linear relationship between subpixel brightness and power consumption, and keeping 3 subpixels (RGB) barely-illuminated is more efficient than keeping 1 subpixel (G, say) more-illuminated is?

Or, what I determined to be most-likely at that time: Samsung was simply an uncoordinated wreck that was full of shit.)
by tra3 | 2025-12-28 04:24:21+00:00
Sorry to hear this happened to you. Everyone's piling on, like they've never made mistakes. With no "hard" limits, it's almost like google wants this to happen. Have you tried contacting your credit card company? They may be able to chargeback google. Maybe you can make a case about idle capacity?

I have enabled some google services to play with (maps, calendars), that required me to put my credit card down. I'm thinking I should get a prepaid credit card so if things get out of hand, they'll shut me down rather than keep charging me until my max credit limit.
by Uptrenda | 2025-12-28 04:28:08+00:00
I think I get more what they're going for now. A technical person can setup a server for themselves and setup services to work for multiple projects. But its complex to get everything right. Trying to reuse a server, setting up routing, domains, and so on can be tedious. I guess they abstract that problem. The wild card domains -> VM is a neat mapping. Then making it easy to use your resources and dispose of VMs.

I guess its an innovation at the resource management layer where you create / manage VMs. It's interesting they choose to give away individual plans. That's very generous. Though I'd feel bad using any of their resources.
Show HN: I analyzed 50 directories to see what makes money
by tejas3732 | 2025-12-28 04:29:29+00:00
Hi HN

Over the last few weeks, I analyzed 50+ real directories to understand what’s actually working in 2025.

Instead of opinions or hype, I focused on:

Real traffic data (SimilarWeb)

SEO & keyword shifts (Ahrefs / Semrush)

Public revenue signals

Category-level patterns (what’s growing vs saturated)

The goal was simple:
If someone were starting a directory today, where should they focus — and what should they avoid?

I turned these findings into a free Directory Trends Report 2025
by toast0 | 2025-12-28 04:29:42+00:00
It's hard to keep a phone's clock closely synchronized because they experience a lot of temperature swings, going between pockets and hands and open air and sometimes in direct sun, and the processor goes between idle and 100% as well.

Once you get to internationa phones, you'll have places where the phone does not include all timezones and specifically is missing the actual local timezone, so automatic sync is typically disabled so that the time can be set so that the displayed time matches local time... even if that means the system time is not correct.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-28 04:31:36+00:00
“The user can choose between starting their new policy on the first day of employment, the first day of the fiscal year, on a specific date, or some number of days after their prior policy expires. If they choose the first day of the fiscal year, the user must specify when their company’s fiscal year starts. If they choose a specific date they must choose a date that is after the first business day of the next month and no later than December 31st of the year that month belongs to. If the user specified some number of months after their current policy expired the user must provide a policy number and the number of days no less than 1 and no more than 365.”

Type validation can help with some of that but at some point it becomes way easier to just use imperative validation for something like this. It turns out that validating things that are easy is easy no matter what you do, and validating complex rules that were written by people who think imperatively is almost impossible to do declaratively in a maintainable way.
by troad | 2025-12-28 04:32:59+00:00
Plain HTML is very cozy to me - I came of age in that era. Marquee tags 4eva.

But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS. If you want, say, a model form that manages its children as well, you're basically going to end up with a 2003-era ASP-feeling application (as seen on your employer's current HR system), with way too many views and forms. Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.

I dislike modern JS to the extent that I opted for Phoenix LiveView, just so I could achieve interactivity without ever having to touch JS, but in truth it's not a comprehensive solution. Still had to write a web worker, a bridge to handle things like notifications, etc. Plus the future direction of Phoenix, all in on AI, is worrying.

Honestly, I should probably just swallow my disdain and learn to appreciate and use modern JS, as painful as that sounds. I want to write and release cool things, not get caught up in navel-gazing language wars.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-28 04:33:30+00:00
This is just simply not true, not if you compare apples to apples. Cars are the most dangerous form of transportation and nothing even comes close. You're 100x more likely to die in a car above the subway in NYC than on the subway. Thats not an exaggeration, that's the actual figure.

And then people invariably talk about theft or getting beat up, forgetting that most car accidents don't kill, they injure. And they're extremely expensive.

Cars might FEEL safer because you're in a little box away from everyone else. But it's the exact same everyone else. Still the same amount of crazies and sociopaths.

Except now, they're also in little steel boxes that weight 2,000 pounds going faster than any human was ever meant to go. And they're in full control.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-28 04:33:33+00:00
The AGG (“Anti-Grain Geometry”) library does something similar[1], from what I understand.

Also, I had (though never tested) the impression that in the Windows world ClearType uses 3x the horizontal resolution internally (I vaguely remember that being mentioned in the horror novel^W^W Raster Tragedy[2] somewhere?..). Given many font designers’ testing process for their hinting bytecode seems to be to run it through ClearType and check if it looks OK (not unlike firmware programmers...), we all, including Microsoft, are essentially stuck with that choice forever (or at least until people with painfully low-res displays become rare enough that the complaining about blurry text can be disregarded). So I’d expect 1/3 of a pixel to be the natural resolution for a glyph cache, not 1/4? Or have things changed in the transition from GDI to GDI+ to DirectWrite?

[1] https://agg.sourceforge.net/antigrain.com/research/font_rast...

[2] http://rastertragedy.com/
by foundart | 2025-12-28 04:33:50+00:00
The github repo link from the npm page doesn't work, so I guess the author had second thoughts.

I was just fighting ffmpeg earlier today, or rather Gemini and Claude were fighting it. Task: create a video that is a pan across a photo, followed by a scale/zoom.

Probably easy for some people, but I had no clue and the LLMs weren't doing that well either. Things took a turn for the better when I asked Gemini for an alternative tool.

The answer was Vapoursynth - https://www.vapoursynth.com/doc/introduction.html#introducti...

Again, the LLM did the work, but it was able to do so. Since Vapoursynth is driven by python scripts (though with the extension .vpy), it was easy for me to make adjustments.
by Avamander | 2025-12-28 04:35:15+00:00
> For most apps on non-mobile devices, there isn't filesystem isolation between apps.

If there isn't there should be. At least my Flatpaks are isolated from each other.

> Apple/Microsoft/Google all ship encrypted storage for secrets (Keychain, Credential Manager, etc), because restricting key material access within the OS has merit.

The Linux equivalents are suspicious and stuck in the past to say the least. Depending on them is extra tedious on top of the tediousness of any PGP keyrings, god forbid a combination of the two.

> Basically everything in PGP/GPG predates the existence of "corporate security circles".

Then we know where this stuff came from.
by baconner | 2025-12-28 04:35:28+00:00
NVIDIA makes money no matter if the model is open weights or not. I don't think open is a concern for them and they'd very much like to be servicing China and their batch of open models I think. what's concerning them more likely is

A. The inevitable breakdown of their massive head start with CUDA and data center hardware. A serious competitor at real scale.

B. Anything that'll cool off the massive data center buildouts that are fueling them.

Seems clear that locking up a major potential competitor especially the minds behind it solves for A. And their ongoing machinations with circular funding of companies funding data centers is all about B - keeping the momentum before it fizzles.
by rastrian | 2025-12-28 04:36:32+00:00
I get why it reads like FP evangelism, but I don’t think it’s “ignoring decades of prior art.” I’m not claiming these ideas are exclusive to FP. I’m claiming FP ecosystems systematized a bundle of practices (ADT/state machines, exhaustiveness, immutability, explicit effects) that consistently reduce a specific failure mode: invalid state transitions and refactor breakage.

Rust is actually aligned with the point: it delivers major reliability wins via making invalid states harder to represent (enums, ownership/borrowing, pattern matching). That’s not “FP-first,” but it’s very compatible with functional style and the same invariants story.

If the TS example came off as “types instead of validation,” that’s on me to phrase better, the point wasn’t “types eliminate validation,” it’s “types make the shape explicit so validation becomes harder to forget and easier to review.”
by safety1st | 2025-12-28 04:36:33+00:00
I tried everything under the sun including the grayscale trick, and at the end of the day there were three things that worked. Putting the phone on silent, putting it out of sight, and simply turning it off.

This resulted in 5 hours of phone time per day declining to 1 (it's my companion at the gym plus during most meals and that's OK).

Everyone's approach is going to be a little different depending on the rhythm of their life. For me the phone usually stays turned off for most of the morning now. It's in a drawer for most of the afternoon/evening. If I'm out and about it's in my pocket or bag on silent. It briefly gets unmuted at times when I'm expecting a delivery, appointment etc. and that's about it. The bar is high because the peace of mind is too great to lose.