MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjc50 | 2025-12-21 22:09:16+00:00
Patrick very carefully declined to give examples of such legitimate yet debanked businesses. Presumably because they're all grey market stuff that sets off a whole other "wait, is that legal?" conversation.

I have never seen a legitimate business asking for payment in gift cards. I've encountered the traditional tradesmen offering discounts for cash, though.

Edit: I think he may actually be talking about businesses accepting payments in their own gift cards, which is so obvious that it's easy to forget. It's not a scam when Apple ask you to pay in Apple gift cards. It's just the only non scam such case.
by georgemcbay | 2025-12-21 22:11:03+00:00
Entirely anecdotal, perhaps useless information (and off-topic for anyone who doesn't current consume caffeine) but I've never had an easier time losing weight than I have since I entirely quit using caffeine after decades of normal usage.

After eliminating caffeine its like a switch entirely flipped in my brain turning off all the usual cravings I'd have for carbs/sugars/etc.

The quitting caffeine part was pretty horrible though. Not just because of the headaches (which weren't actually super bad for me) but I went through a couple of weeks of what I assume was for-reals depression/anhedonia as my brain figured out how to operate with non-blocked adenosine suddenly suppressing my dopamine levels.
by linguae | 2025-12-21 22:11:08+00:00
I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators. I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.

On the Windows side, things started going downhill starting with the Windows XP era, and on the Mac the annoyances began sometime in the mid-2010s.

It seems Microsoft, Apple, and other companies realized that they’re leaving money on the table by not exploiting their platforms. Thus, they’re no longer selling simple tools, but rather they are selling us services.

Yes, there are good Linux distributions that don’t annoy me, and the BSDs never nag me, but the problem with switching to these platforms is that I still need Microsoft Office and other proprietary software tools that are not available outside “Big Tech.” There are other matters that make switching away from Windows and macOS challenging, such as hardware support and laptop battery life.
Processing Fees and Settlement Delays Solution
by dixonlin | 2025-12-21 22:12:04+00:00
Hi,

I’m working on a payments product for international businesses that primarily sell to US customers. I’m trying to understand if processing fees and settlement delays are painful enough to warrant a new solution, or if this is just a cost of business that people have accepted. Would love 10–15 minutes with anyone running a subscription business who’s dealt with cross-border payments (Stripe, Paddle, PayPal, etc.). DMs open, or feel free to comment!
by bawolff | 2025-12-21 22:12:21+00:00
I always find this argument a little silly.

Like if you were building one of the first normal computers, how big numbers you can multiply would be a terrible benchmark since once you have figured out how to multiply small numbers its fairly trivial to multiply big numbers. The challenge is making the computer multiply numbers at all.

This isn't a perfect metaphor as scaling is harder in a quantum setting, but we are mostly at the stage where we are trying to get the things to work at all. Once we reach the stage where we can factor small numbers reliably, the amount of time to go from smaller numbers to bigger numbers will be probably be relatively short.
by ashdksnndck | 2025-12-21 22:12:25+00:00
One time I got a car detailed, and when I was paying at the end, I noticed that the employee was writing out a receipt and marking that I had paid with a gift card. I don’t remember if I was paying with cash or a credit card, but either way I figure some sort of tax evasion and/or money laundering scheme was happening.
Show HN: A faster way to generate consistent UI avatars without full 3D workflow
by xtrivity | 2025-12-21 22:13:17+00:00
Hi HN — I’ve been running into the same issue across multiple product teams: designs often need characters or avatars, but maintaining a full 3D pipeline (or large illustration systems) is heavy relative to the actual UI needs.

Static illustration packs are fast but inflexible. Fully custom 3D workflows are powerful but slow, with a lot of permutations to manage.

I built a small tool to explore a middle ground: generating consistent, production-ready avatars from parameters rather than handcrafting or fully modeling each one. The goal was speed, consistency, and easy integration into design and code workflows — not replacing 3D artists or bespoke art direction.

It’s early, but it’s been useful for: • product mockups • onboarding flows • empty states • internal tools

Would appreciate feedback from people who’ve dealt with similar tradeoffs: • does this approach make sense? • where does it fall down? • are there workflows you’ve found that work better?

Happy to answer questions about how it’s built or how it fits into existing pipelines.
by ecshafer | 2025-12-21 22:13:40+00:00
Wouldn't the comparison be more like the 1920s for computing. We had useful working computers in the 1940s working on real problems doing what was not possible before hand. By the 1950s we had computers doing Nuclear bomb simulations and the 1960s we had computers in banks doing accounting and inventory. So we had computers by then, not in homes, but we had them. In the 1920s we had mechanical calculators and theories on computation emerging but not a general purpose computer. Until we have a quantum computer doing work at least at the level of a digital computer I can't really believe it being the 1960s.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-12-21 22:14:24+00:00
> I think there’s a mix of revisionist history blended with PR claims going on in this thread.

I can only speak for myself. I worked for a company that is somewhere in the observability space (Sentry) and Charity was a person I looked up to my entire time working on Sentry. Both for how she ran the company, for the design they picked and for the approaches they took. There might be others that have worked on wide events (afterall, Honeycomb is famously inspired by Facebook's scuba), she is for sure the voice that made it popular.
by omoikane | 2025-12-21 22:14:29+00:00
I see that this coincides with Ruby 3.4.8 release[1]. I wonder we will get another Ruby release on 2025-12-25, since Ruby has made a Christmas day release for 13 consecutive years[2].

[1] https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/12/17/ruby-3-4-8-rele...

[2] https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/releases/
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-21 22:14:51+00:00
Say they used AI to write it, it came out bad, and they published it anyway. They had the opportunity to "make it better" before publishing, but didn't. The only conclusion for this is, they just aren't good at writing. So whether AI is used or not, it'll suck either way. So there's no need to complain about the AI.

It's like complaining that somebody typed a crappy letter rather than hand-wrote it. Either way the letter's gonna suck, so why complain that it was typed?
by echelon | 2025-12-21 22:15:06+00:00
Nice! I see you're one of (if not the primary) contributor!

Do you see this as a prototype language, or as something that might evolve into something production grade? What space do you see it fitting into, if so?

You've been such a huge presence in the Rust space. What lessons do you think Rue will take, and where will it depart?

I see compile times as a feature - that's certainly nice to see.
by bunnybomb2 | 2025-12-21 22:15:46+00:00
I kind of both agree and disagree with this point.

Ive gotten into 3+ new engineering projects all because of AI. My entire life I only dreamed of the inventions I didnt have technical knowledge or time to complete. I would have never been able to do that 3-4 years ago.

I need an AI to dumb it down for me. It makes intimidating learning curves, do-able. Call me stupid, or smart, it doesnt really matter.

AI is not a substitute for books.. but it is a clear gift for humanity. Especially the lazy humans (Me.)
by nine_k | 2025-12-21 22:15:50+00:00
Ad-blocking and reader mode is "adding its own spin" (or rather removing that of the original).

The problem is not that a browser should not act intelligently on behalf of the user. The problem is that what is usually called "AI" is known to sometimes act erratically and invasively, and also consume a lot of (local) resources. That is, the "AI" is not trustworthy enough. And the key feature of Firefox for much of its audience is that it's more trustworthy than the browser named after a particular shiny transition metal.
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-12-21 22:15:55+00:00
>And how would he do that exactly to whatever ungodly standards you are setting for the man?

By providing a result in a way that will be superior to the current status quo. Maybe there will be results, but right now there are none.

I have no idea why you are so invested. I don't care about the man's personality or whatever qualities he has. I look at what he does, and so far, he spent 10 years making a game that you yourself admit won't be even that good.

Of course, you could say that changing the course of the industry not possible in one man's lifetime, so you'll need to gather round more people to get the action going, but this tone actually prevents you from starting a Jai revolution.
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-21 22:16:43+00:00
I don't disagree with most of what you said. But a tyranny of the majority is still better than a tyranny of the minority.

And yeah, pretty clearly the alleged checks and balances we have weren't the right ones. The problem is that the system we have set up enshrines the difficulty of changing those checks and balances as one of its primary features. That's why I think we're not going to get anywhere by trying to chip away at the edges of our problem within the existing constitutional framework.
by rockenman1234 | 2025-12-21 22:17:00+00:00
Thank you! I agree - it’s an honor to host RMS for a talk! We will be posting video recordings of the event online afterward, so please keep an eye out if you’re interested in hearing what he has to say in 2025.

> It is an honor and achievement of a society that Richard Stallman may speak and say what he chooses to say, in 2025.

Georgia Tech, as a public institution, takes the First Amendment very seriously (see: https://provost.gatech.edu/academic-freedom-and-freedom-expr...). Our student organization has worked hard with the College of Computing and other members of the administration to ensure that all of RMS's requests have been met.
by dheera | 2025-12-21 22:17:13+00:00
> you'll never have kids

Which is also OK. It's financially smart to realize you don't have the resources and not have kids.

If {some subset of the government, rich people, people who control the economy} want more people to have kids, which is something I keep hearing from that class of people: They need to collectively figure out how to put more money into the pockets of people. Higher salaries, drastic tax cuts, cheaper housing, more people will be financially ready and more kids will happen as a result. Also, work hours need to be standardized at 4 hours/day per person OR costs of living need to be designed that 1 parental income is enough.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-21 22:17:44+00:00
What kills me is there seems to be no option for accounting that is acceptable to CPAs besides being held captive paying whatever QuickBooks cloud demands. It's not like dual entry accounting has changed much in 500 years. There are bank integrations and service contracts (notably Apple Card wasn't willing to pay licensing fees for the quickbooks file format, so you simply couldn't syncronize your accounts with your spending, instead falling back to manual import), but they would not make investors happy by merely offering bank connection services

(God forbid banks be required by law to offer a web connector that allows you to request your own data. A workaround I've tried is to have my bank send me an email alert on every transaction over a penny, so at least I have a record, but never got around to setting up an auto import from my inbox)
by Cadwhisker | 2025-12-21 22:18:06+00:00
LMStudio? No, it's the easiest way to run am LLM locally that I've seen to the point where I've stopped looking at other alternatives.

It's cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux), detects the most appropriate GPU in your system and tells you whether the model you want to download will run within it's RAM footprint.

It lets you set up a local server that you can access through API calls as if you were remotely connected to an online service.
by jfengel | 2025-12-21 22:18:50+00:00
As an American, I am surrounded by people who are so convinced that their country is awful that they want to basically abolish vast swathes of the government. Their elected representatives say extremely negative things about my beliefs, literally every single day, including veiled and not-so-veiled threats.

The world may be physically comfortable but I do not feel safe. And that's because they do not feel safe from me. I don't want to sound defeatist but there is no objective way to describe it without sounding cynical.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-21 22:19:04+00:00
> Apple can push whatever. So can Red Hat or Ubuntu or Gentoo

In the case of Ubuntu and Debian, and to a lesser extent RedHat, I trust the developers not to do that because they have a history of not "just pushing whatever".

Also in many cases I actually know these developers, and I can go round and ask them / remonstrate with them / put a brick through their window / other response if required about it.
by defrost | 2025-12-21 22:19:07+00:00
Good work, thanks for this.

It would be useful to be able to get an URL for each scrapped book so that users could link to, say, the entry for A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics.

The TeXbook by Donald Knuth has been mapped to A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics by N.P. Bali from this source comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399031#45400264
by throwaway613745 | 2025-12-21 22:20:28+00:00
> what would previously have been a manga

Completely out of touch to downplay the entire manga industry as "skill issue".

Akira Toriyama totally created Dragonball as a manga because he was just wasn't good enough to make an animated movie!

Berserk is a book because Kentaro Miura just had skill issue!

Only imagine if Tolkien wanted to create the Lord of the Rings if he had AI!

As if a medium only artistic merit because sufficiently advanced technology just didn't exist yet. groooaaaaan
by suprjami | 2025-12-21 22:20:31+00:00
If you want to do it cheap, get a desktop motherboard with two PCIe slots and two GPUs.

Cheap tier is dual 3060 12G. Runs 24B Q6 and 32B Q4 at 16 tok/sec. The limitation is VRAM for large context. 1000 lines of code is ~20k tokens. 32k tokens is is ~10G VRAM.

Expensive tier is dual 3090 or 4090 or 5090. You'd be able to run 32B Q8 with large context, or a 70B Q6.

For software, llama.cpp and llama-swap. GGUF models from HuggingFace. It just works.

If you need more than that, you're into enterprise hardware with 4+ PCIe slots which costs as much as a car and the power consumption of a small country. You're better to just pay for Claude Code.
by fuzztester | 2025-12-21 22:21:55+00:00
"Be careful" ...

Thanks, but no thanks, for unasked-for advice. It's a tendency a lot of people have. They need to get a life. See what I did there?

"It's crucial to note".

Hee hee. On the same lines as the above one. Crucial for who? Rosicrucians, maybe?

"Hacker News commenters will totally trash you" ...

You mean you give a flying fuck about their opinion?

I would feel sorry for you, except for the fact that I don't feel (the need to feel) sorry for anyone.

Get a life, other than as an unpaid advisor, that is.
by vunderba | 2025-12-21 22:22:09+00:00
FWIW, Ollama already does most of this:

- Cross-platform

- Sets up a local API server

The tradeoff is a somewhat higher learning curve, since you need to manually browse the model library and choose the model/quantization that best fit your workflow and hardware. OTOH, it's also open-source unlike LMStudio which is proprietary.
by delusional | 2025-12-21 22:22:47+00:00
Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer.

I don't think I have an ideological limit. I'm pro weighing alternatives, and seeing what happens. If law enforcement misuses the tools they are given, we should take them away again, but we shouldn't be afraid to give them tools out of fear of how they might misuse them.

I think my limits are around proper governance. Stuff like requiring a warrant are hard limits for me. Things like sealed paper trail, that are too easily kept away from the public, are red flags. So long as you have good ways for the public to be informed that the law isn't working, or being misused, I don't have many hard limits, I don't think democracy really allows for hard limits.

At the very broad level. I believe that Big Tech (Meta, Google, etc.) are already surveilling you. I believe that government should have at least as much ability to surveil you as companies. If you are willing to hand over that data to a company, you should be willing to hand it over to your government (specifically YOUR government, not the one the company is based in).
by rockenman1234 | 2025-12-21 22:22:48+00:00
Dr. Stallman has received 15 honorary doctorates (see: https://www.stallman.org/articles/dr-stallman.html). After a certain point, the consistency of such recognition speaks for itself. TBH after like 5 I would start seeing the point of calling myself 'doctor'. Georgia Tech also awards honorary doctorates through the statewide university system, and as such, there is no institutional policy dictating how individuals are to address one another.

I appreciate the concern and agree that RMS has been extraordinarily influential in the field of computing. We will be posting videos of the event afterward, so if you’re interested in hearing what he has to say in 2025, please keep an eye out!
by SkyeCA | 2025-12-21 22:22:59+00:00
> Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia

I know I'm burnt out (increasingly severe burnout at that) and I ask myself that question daily. The truth is there is no point and I can't motivate myself anymore. I don't see any solution to the problem and I expect I will lose my job sooner or later at which point I'm not sure what I'll do.

I've largely come to the conclusion that what I need to be mentally healthy and what society needs from me are fundamentally incompatible things.
by the_af | 2025-12-21 22:24:06+00:00
I agree many Trump supporters will be able to spin -- even if just to themselves -- any damning news no matter what (especially in this age of easily spoofed photos and videos) but still, puzzlingly enough, his voting fanbase actually made the Epstein files a thing, so much that he publicly lashed against them when they wouldn't let go. It was the one crack in his armor, the only (mild) falling out with them he's ever had. Do you remember this?

I think Trump made the Epstein conspiracy such a thing, it's now hard to disentangle from the minds of his MAGA supporters. All it takes is for some of his political rivals (from within the party) to fan the flames.

I'm not sure about what Trump actually did, and we have no solid proof. I can only guess, judging from how the man behaves, and his general attitudes toward lying and women.
by juancn | 2025-12-21 22:24:22+00:00
Logging is one tool of many, you need logs, metrics and distributed tracing at the very least for any significant piece of modern infra.

If you really want to get serious, you also want some kind of continuous profiling (like pyroscope) or at the very least some periodic thread dump collector (for serious degradation diagnostics once every couple of minutes is enough).

But logging is still a great tool.
by com2kid | 2025-12-21 22:24:46+00:00
I joined a compiler team out of college because it seemed like fun and I'd never worked on compilers before.

I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.

I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.

Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
by gregsadetsky | 2025-12-21 22:24:47+00:00
correct! it's a sqlite database which ends up being automatically gzip'd by the github cdn aka fastly - this ends up being ~4mb over the wire

obviously this solution doesn't scale (versus something like https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs ) but sometimes it's fun to "just" send the sqlite database to the frontend and be done :-)
by retrac | 2025-12-21 22:25:03+00:00
We do have a fair amount of gun homicide here in Canada; well above the average in many European countries and about 1/3rd the rate in the United States. But historically this was mostly crimes of passion, and organized crime. Someone would get real angry and kill their lover or business partner, or it would arise out of a dispute over criminal property. We've had spree killings, too.

What happened in Toronto with the death of that boy from a stray bullet in his mother's arms in his own home, is rather novel to Canadians. And I'm not sure what the ultimate effect will be. I'm not sure that gun control can get much more stricter domestically; while most people can buy a handgun in practice, they are heavily regulated such that lawfully licensed ones are only very rarely used in crimes.

The handguns used to murder almost all come from over the border. The way this intersects with the border and US foreign and trade policy re: Canada is hard to avoid. Free exchange with the USA increasingly is seen as a vulnerability.
by beasthacker | 2025-12-21 22:25:04+00:00
I buy the productivity argument, but I’m not convinced “30 minutes reading/tweaking agent output” is equivalent for learning to building it yourself.

If your goal is the feature, then yes: letting the agent do the heavy lifting and reviewing the diff afterward is a huge win.

But if your goal is understanding / skill-building, the hard part usually isn’t seeing a working solution. It’s doing the messy work of (a) making design choices, (b) getting stuck, (c) debugging, and (d) forming the mental model that lets you reproduce it later. Reviewing a correct implementation can create a feeling of “I get it,” but that feeling often doesn’t survive a blank file.

I’ve noticed this in my own hobby coding: LLMs are great for familiarity and unblocking progress, but the learning “sticks” much more when I’ve had to struggle through the failure modes myself. I’m watching the same dynamic play out with my son using ChatGPT to study for physics/calculus . . . it feels deep for him in the moment with the LLM, but exam-style transfer exposes the gaps.