MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by promiseuzoechi | 2025-12-14 18:14:31+00:00
Early-stage startup life often means doing everything at once—coding, customer support, fundraising, ops. I’ve found that sheer motivation isn’t the problem; constant context switching and browser distractions are.

I started experimenting with stricter focus systems, including a lightweight browser setup that blocks distracting sites, uses Pomodoro-style focus sessions, basic task tracking, and a simple focus dashboard (I’ve been using Ashdeck for this). What surprised me was how much easier deep work became once distractions were removed by default.

Curious what’s actually worked for others here:

Tools vs routines?

Time blocking vs Pomodoro?

Discipline alone, or systems that enforce focus?

Would love to hear what’s genuinely helped you stay focused while building.
by collingreen | 2025-12-14 18:14:34+00:00
I've been shocked when talking to younger people who have -never used a computer that wasn't their phone-. People genuinely interested in cs degrees that needed to be taught how to use the computer first. These are not "dumb" or "unwilling" folks they just have grown up in a way I don't recognize and didn't expect. I assume it's the equivalent of how I've gone to a library to do research at most a half dozen times in my life despite doing lots and lots of reading, learning, and writing - my world just does not look like "do that at the library" anymore even though probably folks just 10 years older were almost exclusively there.

I think you're painting with too broad of a brush if your goal is an accurate model of the world here.
by niceguy1827 | 2025-12-14 18:15:30+00:00
Yes, it's basically a large Kindle.

For reading and work, I actually prefer this experience. The contrast for text is way better and more crisp than regular LED/LCD/OLED displays, unless you turn the regular display's brightness way up, until which point my eyes hurt from all that light emitted. This was my primary reason for buying such a display -- I love my Kindle and want to use it more, but I couldn't.

Now for entertainment you are obviously limited. For informational Youtube videos you could be getting by alright -- you don't really need to see colors for those. Games is tricky since you could only do non-demanding ones. Shopping gets tricky since you can't see colors. Sometimes I find myself hopping on my iPhone to check before placing orders.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-14 18:15:33+00:00
Well, that's certainly not the case. Each satellite transmits a low-precision almanac to the receiver that helps it lock onto the others, as well as a higher-resolution ephemeris that provides the necessary pseudorange accuracy for that particular SV.

But it's true that neither of those factors accounts for miles of error. That has to come down to either poor sky coverage/signal strength, poor software, or (more likely) both.
by af78 | 2025-12-14 18:15:52+00:00
Taxation is only part of the picture. Quoting from https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/13/uncle-sucker/:

In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech...

Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-14 18:15:57+00:00
I think the ideal solution is forcing companies to offer privacy focused ad-free options as a subscription, with a cost calculated from the average revenue per fully tracked/ad-riddled user, maybe plus some small premium.

Of course, this would likely receive a lot of blow-back in the form of "Looks like now you have to be rich to not get your life sold to third parties" and "Google used to be equal for all and now they are just going to prey on the most vulnerable in society"

The only way to win in this situation is for people to understand that things cost money. They probably cost more than you expect, and you probably will want your ads and tracking back once you see the true cost. After all, at the end of the day, the downside to these decades of tracking to most people has been "Damn, how does google know I buy Tide detergent!".
by throwaway12345t | 2025-12-14 18:16:28+00:00
It’s been a week, two? The value of the post likely is greater than the value of the migration at this point.

The real test in any system is scaling usage across many different use cases and users.

But you did your job, it’s driving clicks and views, pushing the narrative that you don’t need x vertical, you just need cursor.

What software do you think shouldn’t be rebuilt and replaced with cursor?

Because if it’s all cursor, at some point you have eaten all your customers.
by lfittl | 2025-12-14 18:16:34+00:00
Regarding pgstattuple specifically: If this was a 24/7/365 service and you would be concerned by the I/O impact of loading the full table or index at any time, you could run this on a replica too. For tables there is pgstattuple_approx which is much better at managing its impact, but there is no equivalent for indexes today.

The REINDEX CONCURRENTLY mentioned in OP could also be run at other times of the day - the main issue is again I/O impact (with potentially some locking concerns at the very end of the reindex concurrently to swap out the index).

There are no magic solutions here - other databases have to deal with the same practical limitations, though Postgres sometimes is a bit slow to adopt operational best practices in core (e.g. the mentioned pg_squeeze from OP may finally get an in-core "REPACK CONCURRENTLY" equivalent in Postgres 19, but its been a long time to get there)
by swores | 2025-12-14 18:17:13+00:00
Agree with you over OP - as well as Qwen there's others like Mistral, Meta's Llama, and from China there's the likes of Baidu ERNIE, ByteDance Doubao, and Zhipu GLM. Probably others too.

Even if all of these were considered worse than the "only 5" on OP's list (which I don't believe to be the case), the scene is still far too young and volatile to look at a ranking at any one point in time and say that if X is better than Y today then it definitely will be in 3 months time, yet alone in a year or two.
by ctoth | 2025-12-14 18:19:08+00:00
Congratulations, I guess? I can't read your content. But ... The machines can't either, so ... great job!

Although... Hmm! I just pasted it into Claude and got:

When text content gets scraped from the web, and used for ever-increasing training data to improve. Copyright laws get broken, content gets addressively scraped, and even though you might have deleted your original work, it might must show up because it got cached or archived at some point. Now, if you subscribe to the idea that your content shouldn't be used for training, you don't have much say. I wondered how I personally would mitigate this on a technical level. et tu, caesar? In my linear algebra class we discussed the caesar cipher[1] as a simple encryption algorithm: Every character gets shifted by n characters. If you know (or guess) the shift, you can figure out the original text. Brute force or character heuristics break this easily. But we can apply this substitution more generally to a font! A font contains a cmap (character map), which maps codepoints and glyphs. A codepoint defines the character, or complex symbol, and the glyph represents the visual shape. We scramble the font's codepoint-glyph-mapping, and adjust the text with the inverse of the scramble, so it stays intact for our readers. It displays correctly, but the inspected (or scraped) HTML stays scrambled. Theoretically, you could apply a different scramble to each request. This works as long as scrapers don't use OCR for handling edge cases like this, but I don't think it would be feasible. I also tested if ChatGPT could decode a ciphertext if I'd tell it that a substitution cipher was used, and after some back and forth, it gave me the result: "One day Alice went down a rabbit hole,

How accurate is this?

Did you seriously just make things worse for screen reader users and not even ... verify ... it worked to make things worse for AI?
by buran77 | 2025-12-14 18:19:14+00:00
The law defines what companies can or cannot do around privacy. So Meta can't go around telling users to pay to get the privacy the law affords them anyway or conversely, if users don't pay they don't get the privacy.

The root of the issue is probably the "freely given consent" that the law defines. If Meta charges users unless they consent to something, then the consent isn't freely given.
by worik | 2025-12-14 18:19:26+00:00
I hate this.

Good people in the UK spending their time dreaming up solutions to "problems" far away

The people who live "far away" have agency and can solve their own problems, if given the chance.

Westerners do not know better, are not better, and generally should mind their own business. It would be much be much better to work on local problems in their own societies
by bigyabai | 2025-12-14 18:19:33+00:00
Refuses is not the right word, there is no way to audit Apple's refusal or hold them accountable here.

US Senator Ron Wyden whistleblew how iOS Push Notifications are collected by US intelligence, which is concerning when you consider how much iMessage relies on it:

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/imessage_push_notificatio...
by kurthr | 2025-12-14 18:20:09+00:00
The biggest problem with calculators (rather than slide rules), was that because calculations with big numbers (large mantissa) were so easy, people got used to doing them that way without consideration.

Using a slide rule meant inherently knowing order-of-magnitude, rounding, and precision. Once calculators make it easy they enable both new kinds of solutions and new kinds of errors (that you have to separately teach to avoid).

At the same time, I basically agree. Humans are very bad calculators and we've needed tools (abacus) for millennia.
by Bootvis | 2025-12-14 18:20:27+00:00
Maybe, but buffer overflows would occur written in assembler written by experts as well. C is a fine portable assembler (could probably be better with the knowledge we have now) but programming is hard. My point: you can roughly expect an expert C programmer to produce as many bugs per unit of functionality as an expert assembly programmer.

I believe it to be likely that the C programmer would even writes the code faster and better because of the useful abstractions. An LLM will certainly write the code faster but it will contain more bugs (IME).
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-12-14 18:20:39+00:00
They did not lie, you are reading things into the text that are not there.

Firstly "Consensus that humans started making fire 50k years ago" is very different from "Until now, the oldest confirmed evidence ... about 50,000 years ago.". All archaeology has to contend with the reality that we have evidence of a very small fraction of the things that happened in the past, and archaeology focusing on the paleolithic doubly so. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Secondly, use of fire (which is what is needed for the scenes you quoted) and the ability to start a fire are two entirely different technologies that might be separated by a vast gulf of time. We have clear and accepted evidence of use of fire from ~1 million years ago, and fragmentary, contested evidence a million years before that. Prior to this find, we didn't have any evidence of people deliberately starting fires more than 50k years ago. These claims are not in conflict! It is entirely possible that people were maintaining fires they caught out of wildfires, for substantially longer period of time than has elapsed since we learned to start fires. Or alternatively maybe there was a method of starting fires that left no durable evidence.

This is still an amazing find! But it changes a lot less about what we know about or past than a careless read of it might suggest. It certainly does not hint that human evolution was slower than we thought.
by blargwill | 2025-12-14 18:21:42+00:00
Woah! The world really works in mysterious ways. I've found myself thinking in this space a lot recently. I've been working on a pager that takes the notifications from my phone and relays only the ones I want to see. I use LTE-M/NB-IOT to get connectivity anywhere and the device works and I'm looking to find a way to get a pcd/case made..

Landing page (doesn't link to anything): https://fob.launchbowl.com/

A little word dump of thoughts at the start of the journey: https://launchbowl.com/e_ink_pager

Your project seems really cool and allows you to bring your own hardware. Out of curiosity, have you blocked all notifications on your phone? Would this be run on your computer? Would you ever move in the direction of a physical device?
by coryrc | 2025-12-14 18:22:11+00:00
Dude already found the perfect thing, but wanted an excuse to play with random metallic driers and resins instead. Fine, but don't pretend it was necessary.

But it’s really hard to mix properly and apply on small wooden objects like spoons and cups. I almost always use too much accelerator,

Just use a precision scale. Pharmacists give me side-eye when I mention cutting my medicine. No, I do small-scale epoxy mixing!
by ben_w | 2025-12-14 18:22:22+00:00
> in a cost effective manner

Facebook is currently showing me these ads:

Lady's earrings (see my name), Pixel 10 (I'm theoretically an iPhone developer), cat food (I don't own any pet let alone a cat), special offers from a supermarket I would have been shopping at anyway even if they had not told me about the offers, a sponsored government message because apparently the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit don't have a better method of contacting German residents than by buying ads from a US social network (I have previously seen such from the British government telling me that some breed of dog was now banned even though I don't own a dog and also live in Germany)…

… but none of that's what's importantly wrong.

Cost effective? It's an auction, each ad in isolation may be fair (but there's reason even then to be suspicious), but in aggregate the ad sector is an all-pay auction.

There's a massive over-supply of solutions because all the startups chase the same ideas at about the same times, and the only one of them to get big is the one that pays enough to the gatekeepers of eyeballs to win the all-pay auction bidding for mindshare.

If everyone stopped advertising, the knowledge of solutions would still diffuse, the winner would be so by word of mouth. The difference is that the 1200 "trusted partners" on all the GDPR popups wouldn't collect rent on advising people on the best strategy for selling their user's privacy and battery life and mobile data allowance for money that those users never get to see, and the people buying those eyeballs wouldn't be wasting their VC runway making something other than the product.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-14 18:22:26+00:00
Yes because in 2020 when middle of the road Biden barely eked out a win against Trump, I’m sure Bernie would have won.

Bernie’s ideas were way too left field for me and I consider myself to be a bleeding heart capitalist pig - ie let companies make money, tax them and use the money to provide a safety net. Also take away the idea of your insurance being tied to your employment
Show HN: A small web app to see who's still working during workshops
by czvziwzx | 2025-12-14 18:22:54+00:00
When running hands-on sessions or workshops, it’s often hard to tell who has finished and who’s still working, or who needs help.

I built a small web app to make this visible in real time.

It’s designed to be simple and used only during the session.
by griffzhowl | 2025-12-14 18:23:19+00:00
For more in-depth physics, combining mathematical detail with excellent visualizations, the best channels I've found are

Richard Behiel, Physics Explained, Dr Jorge Diaz

For mathematics, I really appreciate the simpl but effective format of Richard Borcherds (Fields medalist)

https://www.youtube.com/@richarde.borcherds7998
by tonyhart7 | 2025-12-14 18:23:38+00:00
I don't like this argument since this is can be applied to everything and You expect people to roll out their own service for everything since everything is a product in some form or another

its okay to depends on some product because they are just good, for example people free to use Office alternative which is free btw but people literally dont choose that because MS Office is just better

all of this deep talk discussion is irrelevant since User want an working product that they expect them to

its just that
by rtp4me | 2025-12-14 18:23:42+00:00
I have a different point of view. Claude code is extremely good at creating and maintaining solid, everyday code including Ansible playbooks (used in production), creating custom dev/ops scripts for managing servers (again, used in production), creating Grafana dashboards (again, production), comparing database performance between nodes, etc. Just because a person did not hand-write this code does not make it any less production ready. In fact, Claude reviewed our current Ansible code base and already highlighted a few errors (the files written by hand). Plus, we get the benefit of having Claude write and execute test plans for each version we create. Well worth the $100/mo we pay.

And to your note that real production code is not necessarily a high bar, what is "real production code"? Does it need to be 10,000 lines of complex C/rust code spread across a vast directory structure that requires human-level thinking to be production ready? What about smaller code bases that do one thing really well?

Honestly, I think many coders here on HN dismiss the smaller, more focused projects when in reality they are equally important as the large, "real" production projects. Are these considered non-production because the code was not written by hand?
by the_af | 2025-12-14 18:23:44+00:00
This is not true.

There are plenty of people horrified with both Israel and Hamas, and that while sympathizing with the plight of the Palestinians, think Hamas is hurting their chances of a peaceful solution.

Many people think Israel's right-wing and Hamas need each other, a kind of symbiosis. (Netanyahu certainly needs Hamas to exist).

Of course, the Israeli right wing wants to paint any opposition as pro Hamas anti semites. It's a time tested tactic.
by lumirth | 2025-12-14 18:24:07+00:00
That’s the correct text of the article, as far as I can tell. Though not the entirety of it. The author goes on to say that ChatGPT wasn’t able to parse out the underlying text.

Part of the reason it might be useful is not because “no AI can ever read it” (because I’m sure a pentesting-focused Claude Code could get past almost any similar obfuscation), but rather that the completely automated and dumb scrapers stealing your content for the training of the AI models can’t read it. For many systems, that’s more than enough.

That said, I recently completely tore apart my website and rebuilt it from the ground up because I wasn’t happy with how inaccessible it was. For many like me, sacrificing accessibility is not just a bad look, but plainly unacceptable.
by imiric | 2025-12-14 18:24:08+00:00
> Dosage matters. Lots of folks take psilocybin and lsd on a daily basis.

Microdosing is not the same as recreational usage. Not many people take LSD or psilocybin recreationally that often. Cannabis recreational usage is much more common, with far lower health risks.

> Also the weed we smoke today is absolutely nothing like historical cannabis.

It's much stronger, but I wouldn't say it's "absolutely nothing" like historical cannabis. The way we consume it (concentrates, edibles, etc.) also makes it much more potent. But even that pales in comparison with the effects of moderate doses of psychedelics, which can have lasting psychological effects.

So, sure, dosage matters, but these substances have fundamentally different psychoactive effects.
by ttscoff | 2025-12-14 18:24:21+00:00
Yeah, that's how I felt about CommonMark, too (but I've come around). The thing I'm shooting for is not a new standard, it's a tool that implements all of the existing "standards." I'm not creating new syntax or enforcing new rules, just making a tool that means you don't have to think about which processor you're using and what extensions you might be giving up by choosing one over another.
by MK2k | 2025-12-14 18:24:32+00:00
Vibe coded CRMs do exist. They are not open to the public though, as they are just used by the company that built them tailored to their needs is all.

Same with more complex systems: entire shop systems with payment integration, ERP and all – heavily supported by LLM code tools with a 3-10x productivity boost, just done by the CTO and no additional developers needed. They exist, the shop greets it’s customers and all you see is Vue and Tailwind as the tech stack where Shopify could’ve been. It’s now completely owned by the company selling things (they just don't sell the software).
by anonym29 | 2025-12-14 18:24:39+00:00
On what planet is Zionism loosely defined? Go ask young people - Zionism is support for the existence of an Israeli state.

Outside of Jewish and Zionist Christian circles (which make up a tiny minority), virtually everyone under 30 can be lumped into the "not a fan of Israel" camp. The only question is a matter of degree.

A third of them think Israel was too heavy-handed in the response to 10/7.

Another third are cheering for 10/7 and chanting "from the river to the sea".

The final third are quiet about it in person, but behind pseudonyms online, are denying the holocaust while simultaneously asserting that jewish people deserved it.

Seriously, go talk to people under 30.

Jewish people are in for a very rude awakening as the loudest non-Jewish defenders of Israel and of Zionism, the boomers, die out.

This is absolutely not an endorsement of antisemitism, or of violence or threats of violence being directed at anyone, which is always wrong, but if I were Jewish and living in the US or western Europe, I'd already have started making plans to flee/escape. Just because what is happening is morally wrong doesn't mean it isn't happening.
by hnlmorg | 2025-12-14 18:24:42+00:00
I think the OP is aware of that and I agree with them that it’s bad practice despite how common it is.

For example with AWS, you can use the AWS CLI to sign you in and that goes through the HTTPS auth flow to provide you with temporary access keys. Which means:

1. You don’t have any access keys in plain text

2. Even if your env vars are also stolen, those AWS keys expire within a few hours anyway.

If the cloud service you’re using doesn’t support OIDC or any other ephemeral access keys, then you should store them encrypted. There’s numerous ways you can do this, from password managers to just using PGP/GPG directly. Just make sure you aren’t pasting them into your shell otherwise you’ll then have those keys in plain text in your .history file.

I will agree that It does take effort to get your cloud credentials set up in a convenient way (easy to access, but without those access keys in plain text). But if you’re doing cloud stuff professionally, like the devs in the article, then you really should learn how to use these tools.