MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by edoceo | 2025-12-08 00:52:04+00:00
PE does this wealth extraction trick which breeds the ill-will.

Eg: purchase a few mom&pop veterinarian business in some area. Squeeze the service rates, trim hours, reduce staff, add some debt. The PE investor gets cash out - the business is destroyed and the community loses a (critical? valuable?) service.

It's a common pattern. But not all PE is like this. Like "not all men" and "not all guns" - but enough that the pattern is easily associated - and disliked by many w/o the power to keep them out.
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2025-12-08 00:52:44+00:00
While Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons, it did not have the launch codes, infrastructure, technical knowledge, or the economy needed to convert them into an arsenal under their sovereign control. Moscow still “held the keys” for all of those warheads.

Given how insistent the international community was on making sure those nukes were disposed of, and how economically devastated post Soviet countries were, I don’t think Ukraine stood any chance of having a nuclear deterrent.
by beloch | 2025-12-08 00:52:50+00:00
There's nothing too unexpected in this post. Firefox + uBlock is pretty much standard now. It's been impossible to recommend Chrome ever since Google moved to manifest v3, which can only be described as deliberate anti-privacy enshittification. The recaptcha solver is starting to become niche, since cloudflare has really taken over (for better or worse).

I would add one more useful tool though: A user-agent switcher[1]. There are still some websites that insist you must use Chrome (or sometimes Edge). They will block you if you try to use them with Firefox, even though they work perfectly well and sometimes even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome. A user-agent switcher gives you the option to simply uninstall Chrome for good.

e.g. My ISP provides a website for streaming live TV (e.g. sports) that claims to be incompatible with Firefox, but actually runs better (i.e. fewer glitches) on it than it does on Chrome. However, it refuses to load on Firefox unless you use a user-agent switcher.

Why do people write websites that refuse to run based on user-agent checks? By all means, warn users that you couldn't be arsed to test things on more than one browser, but why go that extra mile to brick your site when other browsers probably support it quite well?

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...
by josh_p | 2025-12-08 00:53:51+00:00
When I worked grocery retail when I was a teen 20ish years ago, any time a customer disputed the price of something during checkout, we’d have someone check the shelf and find the display tag. If the price was lower as the customer suggested, we’d always give them the item at the price listed on the display tag. An employee usually just missed that tag during price change day.

It’s so foreign to me that any retail place would defer to “the computer” if display price and database price were out of sync.

Even young-me understood the idea of “oh yeah, our bad, have it at the lower price” and the potential for legal action if we did otherwise.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-12-08 00:53:53+00:00
With hardware there are only so many sanely quantifiable ways someone might use, abuse, or hack up your product. And you don’t have to care about some or all of them. Someone might desolder an Apple silicon chip successfully and do something neat with it, but they’re unlikely to use it to power an MRI machine.

But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers.

At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)
by ineedasername | 2025-12-08 00:54:30+00:00
Do you have a source for that being the key difference? Where did you learn your words, I don’t see the names of your teachers cited here. The English language has existed a while, why aren’t you giving a citation every time you use a word that already exists in a lexicon somewhere? We have a name for people who don’t coin their own words for everything and rip off the words that other painstakingly evolved over a millennia of history. Find your own graphemes.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-08 00:54:34+00:00
I do, to an extent, agree. But I also think it's impolite to have relationships where "we're going to talk about what I want to talk about, but when we go to talk about what you want to talk about I'm just going to pick up my laptop and ignore you or tell you I don't want to".

You could argue, in your description, the same about RMS - he might feel entitled to someone's time to talk about free software.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-08 00:54:42+00:00
Some people say it's trickery, but when I apply the razor I find pricing errors more likely to be the result of stupidity than of malice.

Having worked in retail myself, I understand that some days there just isn't time to get it all done. A debt of unfinished tasks can accumulate. It happens. Sometimes old prices get left up. (I think the stupidity is on the part of management more than it is the employees, but it's still more stupid than it is malicious.)

---

Dollar General got into the thick of it with the Ohio Attorney General a couple of years ago[1] over this issue: The prices on the shelf didn't always match the prices at the register. Stores were closed[2] while they updated their price tags to match reality.

And as part of the settlement with the Ohio AG: Nowadays, when I go into a Dollar General and Red Baron pizzas are on the shelf for $5 and they ring up at $7.65, they're required to honor the posted price of $5 when I bring this up to them.

(That last bit really should be enshrined in law instead of the footnotes of a legal settlement with a single entity, but alas: It just isn't that way in Ohio.)

[1]: https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Media/Newsletters/Consum...

[2]: https://www.supermarketnews.com/foodservice-retail/ohio-ag-d...
Show HN: I replaced my premium workout app with vibecode
by maddmann | 2025-12-08 00:55:14+00:00
I was going through my app subscriptions and realized I was paying $15 for a pretty good workout app, which seemed a bit high to me.

As a software engineer who is also well versed in claude code, I realized that I could likely vibecode a very similar app, or even build something more to my liking. I challenged my self to build something roughly equivalent this afternoon.

Workflow was: start with a detailed spec from Claude code describing many of the features common in workout apps. Then paste this into lovable to have it build out the initial mvp.

Once that was built, I used claude code extensively to modify the app until it was usable, including adding an import from the costly premium app.

While there are bugs, I think I might use this app. And it is insane that we are in a place where I can build this on my phone during an afternoon. In a few years, the economics of apps is going to be different, at least for folks willing to work a little bit.

In theory this project will save me over $190 a year.
by chongli | 2025-12-08 00:55:25+00:00
Lots of businesses have big positive externalities [1]. They provide more benefit to their communities than they take in for themselves. Unfortunately, these sorts of businesses are easy pickings for PE.

Artists are a classic example. They generate huge positive externalities for a community while reaping almost none of the benefits for themselves. Artists get severely exploited by the economy for this!

To counteract this problem we need other ways of addressing the positive externalities. In the case of artists, this usually comes in the form of public (and private) patronage and endowments for the arts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Positive
by panny | 2025-12-08 00:56:11+00:00
Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They're cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren't stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased.

Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don't feel like they are paid enough to be vigilant or maybe they're too overworked to keep up. Whatever the case, you just learn to keep an eye on the checkout, or alternately ask for a price check on it before the cashier starts ringing merch. The second approach is more polite and the cashiers appreciate that.

The same thing commonly happens at the grocery store, and other stores I shop at too. It's not unique to Family Dollar or Dollar General. But I will note, at the Family Dollar, the cashiers will often say "This is on sale now, but it's not posted yet. That whole shelf is discount." And they will give me a better price than what I was expecting to pay. They have to manually adjust the price to give that discount to me a lot of times. Grocery cashiers just scan as quickly as they can and don't check.

So while all the yuppies who never step into dollar stores are acting hyperoffended about this story, I think the story is unfairly targeting the dollar stores. Apparently saving money gives some people here the "ick" but the employees there are only human. A lot of times, lower paid humans. Cut 'em some slack.
by hunterpayne | 2025-12-08 00:56:16+00:00
Not types, type-safety. Things like covariant and contravariant type declarations, implicit types (variables looked up by type instead of by label), and other things that you need to make a type safe system/service/application. The problem is that that feature of a language is massively oversold. Its nice but to pretend it prevents bugs or is even a great design goal is questionable and not backed up by research (as they claim).
by Bender | 2025-12-08 00:56:48+00:00
Setting up nginx is more than my parents could handle though.

The idea in this case would be that case is you are hosting the files and setting up nginx. They could send files back if your web server has an upload interface or they could send files back using SFTP to a chroot sftp-only account. Set up a profile in WinSCP for them. Make a few screen-shots in case they forget. It can be made one-click to connect and one click to sync files.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-08 00:57:01+00:00
I am not an attorney, but given that Dollar General and Family Dollar are highly likely to serve a much larger percentage of SNAP-eligible customers, isn't there a far more serious FEDERAL crime being perpetrated here of retailer abuse and fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamp fraud? That is, if the SNAP customers have no other means of purchasing food (living in a food desert), and the retailer is intentionally charging more for food items, isn't the retailer committing fraud against the US government? Federal criminal prosecution of SNAP violations could result in fines up to $250,00 and imprisonment up to 20 years. More significant consequences than otherwise being reported here.
by MrJohz | 2025-12-08 00:58:15+00:00
I think that statement is also a great concise explanation for why literate programming doesn't really work in practice.

For something as complex as the Linux kernel, there is no single document that is going to explain the entire system to anyone who reads it. For a start, different people need different levels of explanation. Someone fresh out of a JavaScript bootcamp is going to need a very different guide to Linux than someone who's spent years working on the Windows kernel and just needs to know what's different and what's the same. Moreover, the further a person is from understanding how the Linux kernel works, the more iterative the explanation will need to be: first setting up the broad concepts, then explaining these concepts in more detail, then clarifying these details with more precise examples, and so on. If these layers of explanations are bound to code, then the person who needs less of an explanation will end up skipping parts of the codebase (assuming they let themselves be guided by the literate documentation). If the explanation is not bound to the code, then that's not really literate programming, it's just documentation.

The other issue is that even two different people with similar levels of skill will often want things explained in different ways. Partly, that's going to be things like the analogies they're used to, and partly that's going to be a question of what they need from the explanation. A document "The Linux Kernel for the Data Scientist" will probably look very different from "The Linux Kernel for the Systems Engineer", and both will be different again to "The Linux Kernel for Project Managers". A huge part of technical writing is understanding precisely who your audience is, and in literate programming, your audience kind of becomes "everyone", which is too large an audience. The advantage of separating code and documentation is that you can write your code for a much more restricted set of readers, but provide a bunch of different additional guides that are each aimed more precisely at a target audience.

I think literate programming can work for programs that are primarily intended as tools for teaching (because then the whole application is designed to be read by a specific target audience, and can be written from that perspective), but for general-purpose applications, particularly more complex ones like the Linux kernel, are better served by separating out the different documentation concerns.
by erelong | 2025-12-08 00:58:22+00:00
I think the top comment is getting at some issues, that this substack post seems to have a neoliberal (?) focus on material prosperity, but I'd try to frame the discussion maybe in a way to try to make it more obvious and then ask some questions about things.

Assume you are the richest person in the world.

What if you had to live in solitary confinement? (So, you wealth doesn't give you good relationships)

What if you were chronically sick? (Your wealth does not give you health)

What if you were not able to spend your money freely due to living under a dictator? (Your wealth does not give you freedom)

You could probably continue this thought experiment and maybe zero in on some specific problems.

What if you could be the wealthiest person but you literally had to work every waking hour? So, having wealth (in this thought experiment example) does not buy you free time.

What if you had access to being able to buy some of the best stuff but it costs more than it did for generations, forcing you to work more for "better" but more costly items? So having more money yourself doesn't say anything about how the market is developing around you.

Naturally, a counter-argument to some of the above is that money may allow you to buy things to solve some of these problems, but it doesn't always work out that way.

(I liked the article mostly in that it felt like it was expressing an obvious idea, that America has more "success" and thus "should" be happier but the author acknowledges there is some legitimate unhappiness that exist, and then it was kind of like a brainteaser to think about if people are rationally or irrationally unhappy in the USA)
by conradev | 2025-12-08 00:58:28+00:00
I have found Nix and NixOS to be able to absorb any amount of complexity I throw at it with grace.

If a Docker image truly is the best way to use a bit of functionality (like Home Assistant), then I will just configure NixOS to run it in podman as a systemd service with host networking.

I have not come across something that I could not package. The trick is that Nix composes functionality in a way that Dockerfiles or docker-compose configs cannot, because it's one language, one system, one abstraction.
by californical | 2025-12-08 00:58:51+00:00
The amount of livestock that we actually would need in that case is probably around 5% of what we actually have (in the US). So it’s still valid if half of all people became vegetarian, and the remaining amount cut their meat consumption to “special occasions only”.

Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.
by uplifter | 2025-12-08 00:59:14+00:00
To me such an interpretation suggests there are likely to be papers that were not so easy to spot, perhaps because the AI accidentally happened upon more plausible nonsense and then generated fully non-sense data, which was believable but still (at a reduced level of criticality) nonsense data, to bolster said non-sense theory at a level that is less easy to catch.

This isn't comforting at all.
by davnicwil | 2025-12-08 00:59:25+00:00
I think there's a fundamental psychological reason for this - people want to feel like some ritual has been performed that makes at least some level of superficial sense, after which they don't have to worry.

You see this in all the obvious examples of physical security.

In the case of software it's the installation that's the ritual I guess. Complete trust must be conferred in the software itself by definition, so people just feel better knowing for near certain that the software installed is indeed 'the software itself'.
by latexr | 2025-12-08 00:59:44+00:00
The point is precisely that there are plenty of stories, there’s no need to single out any of them. Look for his treatment of women or while being a house guest. Heck, you can even read about disappointing (if minor) interactions in this very submission. I won’t link to them specifically because I remember more than one woman mentioning how they were harassed by Stallman fans after telling their stories. I have no desire to contribute further to that, I’m sure you’re capable of coming up with the searches yourself, it’s not remotely hard.
by itchingsphynx | 2025-12-08 01:00:32+00:00
Yes, seems to be partly regulation and enforcement partly cultural in a voluntary code of conduct that tends towards benefit to the consumer. For example,

[All the major grocery retailers] are signatories to the voluntary code of practice for computerised checkout systems in supermarkets. Generally, this means that if an item is scanned at the checkout at a higher price than it says on the shelf or as advertised, a customer is entitled to receive the first item free and all multiples of the same item at the lower price.

https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advic...

This practice not just matches price (dang, you caught us out this time), but incentivises minimising errors (oops, our bad, have it for free).
by bpt3 | 2025-12-08 01:01:38+00:00
Okay, a scenario where you're building a hobby project alone and you don't care if or when it gets finished would be one where estimates aren't needed.

There is no scenario where it's appropriate or necessary when developing software professionally or even as a side project where others are expecting you to complete work at some point.

One of the many misconceptions in the original comment in this thread is that "worthwhile software is usually novel", which is not the case without a very specific and novel definition of worthwhile that I don't believe was intended.
by antonvs | 2025-12-08 01:02:19+00:00
You’d have to explain why you believe that. Just because someone in poverty can afford to purchase items in the store, doesn’t mean it’s good value, i.e. it’s not necessarily providing relief from poverty. In fact, it’s the opposite. See e.g. “How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices”:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
by uplifter | 2025-12-08 01:03:49+00:00
> She argued for thinking of this moment as a wildfire rather than a bubble. The metaphor landed immediately. Wildfires don’t just destroy; they’re essential to ecosystem health.

This is some of the most nihilistic thinking I've read linked from this site. Also it lacks the nuance that when brush is left to accumulate over due years of forest mismanagement, the resulting wild-fires are much worse and unnecessarily destructive in ways that are hardly describable as "ecosystem health."
by alephnerd | 2025-12-08 01:03:53+00:00
The issue was there was no robust quantitative research done before OLPC was created.

The programs I gave as examples above all had previously been tested in control groups via RCT before they were rolled out en masse. On top of that, these initiatives were done in coordination with local stakeholders.

This is why JPAL@MIT [0] (Banerjee, Duflo) and REAP@Stanford [1] (Liu, Wang, Rozelle) have had significant success in helping raise HDIs in the states in India and China respectively that they worked with.

On top of that, OLPC (and similar initiatives) took a significant amount of oxygen from the philanthropy ecosystem, with programs and initiatives that had a better strike rate being looked over simply because "it's Negreponte". Even Negreponte's MIT Media Lab largely failed from an outcomes perspective, and was buoyed becuase of donor relations.

[0] - https://www.povertyactionlab.org/

[1] - https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/reap
by jefftk | 2025-12-08 01:04:10+00:00
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50.

This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign.

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...