MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nataliste | 2025-12-14 10:34:08+00:00
>It works like this: after loading the clothes, detergent and water, and letting it sit for 10-15 minutes, users can close the lid and turn the handle for two minutes, repeating this twice more after ten minutes of letting the clothes sit in between spins. And voila — the machine can then be drained using the tap at the front.

I lived off-grid and did all of our laundry, a family of four (including a baby in cloth diapers), by hand, even in the winter (below -20F).

You know what works as well? A wash tub and a stick. Or a bucket and plunger. Or a posser if you're really fancy. I used a 30 gallon garbage can and a hand-carved posser. In mild or hot climates you can just stomp on it.

Same principle: Draw water, add cleanser, agitate for a couple of minutes, let it soak, return at some time in the future, agitate again. Remove laundry and let drip dry while you draw fresh water (mangles and spinners speed this up and are more effective, but not necessary). Squeeze wet laundry at lowest point where water has gathered. Repeat entire process with clean water, then lay it out in the sun prioritizing any sides with stains.

The secret sauce of clean laundry isn't how you agitate the laundry. It's just time and chemistry.

Water access, cleansing agents, and patience are fundamentally more important than providing "revolutionary" contraptions. It's the same difference between teaching people about no-knead bread and giving them hand-cranked stand-mixers. One solves the need for intensive manual labor and the other doesn't, but introduces a new point of failure.

And even importing enzyme-containing detergent is unnecessary. Plant ash (a source of alkali) and aged urine (a source of ammonia) are all you need to create what's known as bucking lye which cleans just as effectively and uses byproducts that they themselves produce by default. Residual stains are removed via UV from sun drying.

There's absolutely no need to complicate this.
by iamflimflam1 | 2025-12-14 10:34:55+00:00
CrowdSupply is great - I ran a successful project through them. And I would definitely recommend anyone doing some hardware taking a look.

There are a couple of things to be aware of - everything is shipped to the US and then distributed from there (using Mouser US).

From the project point of view this means, depending on where things are manufactured) tariffs can come into play. The terms of shipping to mouser are delivery duty paid - so it’s the shipper who pays.

For backers it does mean people outside of US can pay quite high shipping costs.

The other thing from a project point of view is that mouser is a distributor. They want a reasonable (around 40%) margin on the things they ship.

With CrowdSupply there are two sets of orders:

Orders placed during the campaign - the project gets the full money (minus fees etc…)

Orders placed after the campaign and any additional bulk orders - the project gets the wholesale price.

I wrote a fairly detailed write up of it here: https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro
by youhatetheleft | 2025-12-14 10:35:30+00:00
Reading a pulp novel as opposed to watching 10 second video clips is in no way comparable. I went to good schools but I hope most public schools still have libraries and if they don’t where I live the library is extremely cheap for young children. Also TikTok and YouTube aren’t free FFS, they’re commodifying your data anyways I don’t have children but if I did and I wanted them to read and the place where I live isn’t giving them an environment to do that I would try to create one myself (easier said than done I know) but kids can have book clubs just like adults do I would often hang out and talk to other kids about the books we both enjoyed reading.
by ragequittah | 2025-12-14 10:35:57+00:00
The research on video games indicates that it tends to enhance certain skills like spatial awareness and reflex time. They're also pretty decent social / competitive outlets.

The research on social media indicates that it lowers attention span and increases anxiety, depression, and anger. And my personal opinion is it's the reason we're seeing crazy things that I can't fathom happening without it like the measles resurgence.

Neither should be used for 5 hours a day but the consequences don't seem comparable to me. The only place they do align is you should probably be exercising more instead.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-14 10:37:06+00:00
> He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.

I only dislike these people if they blog about it. None of them are nearly as insightful as they think they are, and most of them aren’t self-aware enough to realize that this whole shtick hasn’t been “cool” since 2010.

> mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.

This disparaging attitude towards tourists is in vogue among Europeans right now; there’s a group of anarchists in Barcelona that have spent the last year or two scrawling: “TOURISTS GO HOME, REFUGEES WELCOME” on the sides of buildings.

The theory goes that tourists are a net negative to cities because they cause neighborhoods to gentrify and displace those who intend to actually live within the city. The money coming in is a negative because it causes the city to deploy resources intended to cater to tourists, the tourists fundamentally change the character of the neighborhood by their very presence (the cannibalism you are alluding to), the tourists are rude, the tourists look funny, etc.

Disdain for tourists is just a socially-acceptable way for progressives to practice the xenophobia that is now in vogue among reactionaries. They can’t blame all of their problems on foreigners writ large like the reactionaries do, so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-14 10:37:11+00:00
The timings given in the datasheet of 286 are very optimistic and they can almost never be encountered in a real program.

They assume that instructions have been fetched concurrently without ever causing a stall and that memory accesses are implemented with 0 wait states.

In reality, instruction fetching was frequently a bottleneck and implementing a memory with 0 wait states for 80286 was much more difficult than for MC68000 or MC68010.

With the available DRAM, normally both 80286 and 80386 would have needed a cache memory. Later, after the launch of 80386DX, cache memories became common on 386DX MBs, but I have not seen any 80286 motherboard with cache memory.

They might have existed at an earlier time when 286 was the highest end, but by the time of the coexistence with 386 the 286 became the cheap option, so its motherboards never had cache memory, thus the memory accesses always had wait states, increasing the probability of instruction fetch bottlenecks and resulting in significantly more clock cycles per instruction than in the datasheet.
by gadders | 2025-12-14 10:38:00+00:00
Not as meaningful as some of these but one that stuck with me.

I had a door to door selling summer job in America at 21 after leaving university (I'm a brit) .

The job was primarily on the Eastern Shore in Delaware. Everywhere I went a kept hearing about the famous crabs they cook. One chap whose door I knocked on asked if I'd had any yet. I told him I hadn't.

He sat me down there and then with his whole family to eat some at a meal with them.

I wish I could find them again and thank them properly.
by andriesm | 2025-12-14 10:38:59+00:00
The real question is whether genetics is a substantial or a negligible influence on intelligence (or proxy measures like IQ).

If genetics is less than 5 percent I would consider that something worth ignoring.

If it is 10 percent it is substantial enough to make a difference at the extremes.

If it is 20 percent that is real serious business.

Anything higher means we should really sit up and take notice of this fact.
by ben_w | 2025-12-14 10:39:42+00:00
IMO, depends where you are in the world.

I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.

If I was in the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around. Initially I also had Japan and Taiwan in that comparison, but thinking a bit harder, there's also a risk that Trump is isolationist, that means the risk from each is more like a multiplier than a simple comparison.
by landryraccoon | 2025-12-14 10:40:35+00:00
It depends on the county of course, but in my experience service workers at many “touristy” countries seem to benefit directly from tourism.

For example, some of the workers at resorts in Thailand went to college and studied Tourism, a major I didn’t even know existed, and their wages come directly from the tourist industry.

What countries in particular are you thinking of where the locals are very unhappy to see more tourists? I’ve heard Japan might be in that category, and the United States certainly feels that way, but did you experience this yourself?
by fjfaase | 2025-12-14 10:41:02+00:00
It is fairly new, but very relevant for daily life, like many others are not. Thousands of people have tried to write smart algorithms to solve NP problems and many have thought they found an algorithm in P only to be disproven later.

Whether the Riemann hypotesis is true or not, is not going to have any practical effect, accept for a small group of mathematisians who are working on it. Most people do not know what a Field medal is nor care about it.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-14 10:42:26+00:00
Any assumption made in order to ship a product on time will eventually be found to have been incorrect and will cause 10x the cost that it would have taken to properly design the thing in the first place. The problem is that if you do that proper design you never survive to the stage where have that problem.

I think the solution to that is to continuously refactor, and to spell out very clearly what your assumptions are when you are writing the code (which is an excellent use for comments).
by adrian_b | 2025-12-14 10:45:13+00:00
What you say about memory indirect addressing is true only about MC68020 (1984) and later CPUs.

MC68000 and MC68010 had essentially the same addressing modes with 80286, i.e. indexed addressing with up to 3 components (base register + index register + displacement).

The difference is that the addressing modes of MC68000 could be used in a very regular way. All 8 address registers were equivalent, all 8 data registers were equivalent.

In order to reduce the opcode size, 80286 and 8086 permitted only certain combinations of registers in the addressing modes and they did not allow auto-increment and auto-decrement modes, except in special instructions with dedicated registers (PUSH, POP, MOVS, CMPS, STOS, LODS), resulting in an instruction set where no 2 registers are alike and increasing the cognitive burden of the programmer.

80386 not only added extra addressing modes taken from DEC VAX (i.e. scaled indexed addressing) but it made the addressing modes much more regular than those of 8086/80286, even if it has preserved the restriction of auto-incremented auto-decremented modes to a small set of special instructions.
by decimalenough | 2025-12-14 10:47:05+00:00
Your snark is misplaced to such an extent that I suspect you have not actually read his books. Bourdain is genuinely obsessed with food, and when Kitchen Confidential entirely unexpectedly became a megahit and shot him from borderline poverty to wealth and fame, he was genuinely delighted to be able to (I quote) "travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want." His admiration for (most) other cultures is genuine and many of his favorite destinations are also places that can hardly be called economically disadvantaged (Singapore, Japan, France, etc).

> popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans

So would it be preferable if they stayed at home, didn't share any of their wealth with less developed countries, and marinated in completely ignorant bliss of the world outside the USA instead?
by userbinator | 2025-12-14 10:47:21+00:00
This somewhat reminds me of the old MakeProcInstance mechanism in Win16, which was quickly rendered obsolete by someone who made an important realisation: https://www.geary.com/fixds.html

Another seemingly underutilised feature closely related to {Get,Set}WindowLong is cbClsExtra/cbWndExtra which lets you allocate additional data associated with a window, and store whatever you want there. The indices to the GWL/SWL function are quite revealing of how this mechanism works:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-14 10:47:27+00:00
Yeah for many years the railway would let a lot of things slide even though they've had the legal right to prosecute.

Many people find out the hard way just how many legal powers the railway has (they have even more they could enforce, such as dropping litter, or playing music, or being inebriated - criminal offencs with no excuse)

The social contract of buying a ticket and behaving in return for good customer service has broken down, it's gone. It's really the entire of the UK at this point.
by watt | 2025-12-14 10:49:06+00:00
I do see how it does, in a way. That something the designer thought is "invalid state" turns out a valid and possible state in real world. In terms or UI/UX, it's the uncomfortable long pause before something happens and screen renders (lack of feedback, feeling that system hangs). Or, content flicker when window is resized or dragged. Just because somebody thought "oh, this clearly is invalid state and can be ignored".

The real world and user experience requirements have a way of intruding on these underspecified models of how the world "should" be.
by ben_w | 2025-12-14 10:49:25+00:00
Brazil?

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth...

Output in 2024 was 20 tons.

The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons.

I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.
by seszett | 2025-12-14 10:49:56+00:00
This is about ping though, so presumably ICMP packets. There is no content to cache as the request is sent with random data that must be sent back in the reply.

It is very unlikely that VPN providers use convoluted caching systems just to make their ping replies appear to come from a different region than the one they claim to be in. It would be much more likely for them to add a little latency to their responses to make them more plausible, instead.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-14 10:53:28+00:00
> The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority

The people ultimately in control of this policy are usually elected officials, so I’d (idealistically) say they have at least some incentive to make decisions that the general public wants.

Economic benefits by themselves are just one metric by which we can evaluate desirability, but do you have any reason to suggest that existing policy towards tourism is contrary to the prevailing opinion among those who interact with tourists on a daily basis?
by noufalibrahim | 2025-12-14 10:54:19+00:00
I think you've nailed it and it's kind of depressing in a way since there were a lot of things kids were part of just a few decades ago. The local football group, the bunch that gathered together to watch a TV show at one guys house that would air at 7:30 pm on a weekend, the circle of cousins kids would hang out with during a stretch of holidays, the circle of people who they'd meet regularly during a congregational prayers, etc. etc.

These things are as missing as they're necessary in kids' lives and (non-mainstream?) music gives people some semblance of community that has a stabilizing effect.

The Discord "communities" don't have the same effect unless the group actually meets in person regularly.
by torginus | 2025-12-14 10:56:04+00:00
Sorry to intrude on the discussion, but I have a hard time grasping how to produce the behavior mentioned by quotemstr. From what I understand the following program would do it:

int arr1[] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}; int arr2[] = {10, 20, 30, 40, 50}; int *p1 = &arr1[1]; int *p2 = &arr2[2]; int *p = choose_between(p1,p2); //then sometime later, a function gets passed p // and this snippet runs if (p == p2) { //p gets torn by another thread return p; // this allows an illegal index/pointer combo, possibly returning p1[1] }

Is this program demonstrating the issue? Does this execute under Fil-C's rules without a memory fault? If not, could you provide some pseudocode that causes the described behavior?
by codeflo | 2025-12-14 10:56:34+00:00
Once you notice the pattern, you see it everywhere:

> Stability isn’t declared; it emerges from the sum of small, consistent forces.

> These aren’t academic exercises — they’re physics that prevent the impossible.

> You don’t defend against the impossible. You design a world where the impossible has no syntax.

> They don’t restrain motion; they guide it.

I don't just ignore this article. I flag it.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-12-14 10:58:54+00:00
I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for sure because I can see it's style rubbing off.

Someone linked this article you wrote from 7 years ago.

https://www.sanity.io/blog/getting-started-with-sanity-as-a-...

It's well written and obviously human made. Curious what you think as to the differences.
by keiferski | 2025-12-14 10:59:12+00:00
It’s not that surprising that many successful people seem to be strong fans of heritability, or more broadly, of the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value. To do otherwise requires living one’s life in cognitive dissonance; how could they be worthy of such riches while others struggle to just pay the bills? Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame.

Ironically IQ is also popular amongst people in a very different situation, that is, people that aren’t actually successful “in the real world” but score highly on aptitude tests. Their high scores serve as an identity pedestal to look down upon others and set themselves apart from the masses. This seems to be the primary demographic of IQ-requirement organizations.

Now of course there are scientific studies on this topic, but let’s not pretend like this is a cultural meme because writers like Cremieux are just tirelessly searching for the truth, no matter what ideological consequences that may have. They quite obviously have a viewpoint first and then work backwards from there to justify it.

As a meta comment: the whole obsession with IQ as a kind of unchanging permanent quality seems very much out of tune with how biological systems actually work, and is kind of a remnant of a Platonic worldview. That is, it’s not dynamic/process/system oriented in the way that nature actually works, but instead is in search of eternal qualities á la Plato.
Show HN: LudvigEditor – A lightweight Python alternative to Electron editors
by ludvig2457 | 2025-12-14 10:59:20+00:00
Show HN: LudvigEditor – A lightweight Python alternative to Electron editors

A code editor built on Python 3.14 + PyQt6 + QtWebEngine. It uses Monaco Editor (the same engine as VS Code) without Electron.

Key features: built-in Git GUI, extension system (Python/JS), integrated terminal, support for 20+ languages.

Technical Focus: Seeking feedback on integrating PyQt6 with QtWebEngine for creating native desktop applications with web components. Licensed under GPLv3.

Code: https://github.com/Ludvig2457Ultra/LudvigEditor
by glimshe | 2025-12-14 11:00:05+00:00
MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies on other people being available and generally leverages the usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.

LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce interesting events as I explore the world.

If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it could give me interesting life stories to listen without any action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is in the envelope?
by ludvig2457 | 2025-12-14 11:00:58+00:00
Author here. This project started as an experiment to see if we could build a fully-featured desktop code editor using Python and PyQt6 while avoiding Electron.

The most challenging and interesting part has been creating a robust bridge between the Python backend and the Monaco Editor (JavaScript) running inside QtWebEngine. I'm particularly interested in discussing the architecture choices, performance considerations, and any pitfalls others have encountered with similar native/webview hybrid approaches.

The code is GPLv3, and there are several "good first issue" tasks marked for anyone who wants to dive in.
by Const-me | 2025-12-14 11:01:08+00:00
> I'm genuinely surprised Microsoft's attitude towards "wndprocs don't have a context pointer"

They designed windows classes to be reusable, and assumed many developers going to reuse windows classes across windows.

Consider the following use case. Programmer creates a window class for a custom control, registers the class. Designs a dialog template with multiple of these custom controls in a single dialog. Then creates the dialog by calling DialogBoxW or similar.

These custom controls are created automatically multiple at once, hard to provide context pointers for each control.
Show HN: Sub-agents for Cursor via MCP (isolated context, no worktrees)
by shinpr | 2025-12-14 11:01:14+00:00
https://github.com/shinpr/sub-agents-mcp

Brings Claude Code's sub-agent pattern to Cursor (and other MCP-compatible tools): define task-specific "specialists" in Markdown, each running in its own isolated context window and returning a concise result to the main agent — without spawning git worktrees.
by konfekt | 2025-12-14 11:01:29+00:00
They may have rendered absurd to not have TLS, but they also rendered certification absurd, in the sense that all you get is little more than encryption: if you care about identity, then the free Let's Encrypt certificate coupled to a domain owner's email address gives you little guarantee. Compare this to the extended validation certificates with personally certified credentials and browsers attesting these by, say, a green address bar (instead of today's flat padlock), that a bank customer expects before entering their login data.

Setting up an encrypted web-domain with continual Let's Encrypt certificate renewal has become tedious cargo-culting around the relicts of the idea of a certificate that establishes trust by identity verification.

The collapse of identity-based certification is not Let’s Encrypt’s fault. People naturally choose the easiest option, and Let’s Encrypt supplied it.

Entrusting a handful of commercial certificate authorities with global identity is dubious on first principles anyway, but at least they tried; yet, for all its flaws, that centralized system has proven more practical than the idealistic, decentralized "web of trust".