MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dirkc | 2025-12-15 21:09:38+00:00
That approach might be at odds with the market, but I don't think it's at odds with learning. I strongly dislike duolingo - it's gamification kept me pre-occupied for a while without noticing that I wasn't making any progress learning the language. When I figured that out, I felt cheated by the app!

A long time ago I used a beta app that was being built by a high school teacher that I really enjoyed. It basically had a bunch on YouTube videos with a few different type of exercises. Unfortunately I had a busy schedule and couldn't keep up and I don't think the app was successful.

My day job is development in the education space. If you care about building a learning app, read up on learning theory / pedagogy. A concept I really like wrt language learning is "comprehensible input". Other things to consider with languages is that hearing native speakers is extremely important.

ps. wrt to gamification - I wish that people took the parts of games that I do like when they gamify an experience - open worlds, exploration, story telling, low stakes, save points, fun!
by anvandare | 2025-12-15 21:09:39+00:00
I think we are well past the point where belief in a rules-based world order turns from optimism to delusion. Entrench yourself behind entire libraries of law books if you wish, it only makes for spectacular kindling.

To paraphrase Thucydides: the nuclear capable countries do what they want, and the non-nuclear countries suffer what they must.
by transpute | 2025-12-15 21:10:02+00:00
Conformant: Incompatibilities with strict shopify/liquid are bugs to be fixed. Flexible: Liquid embraces variants for different domains and we want to follow in that spirit. Performant: Do the best we can within what is conformant.

This has potential to replace Github Pages ruby-based Jekyll+Liquid, which is unusably slow on iOS without JIT.

Compiled cobalt with liquid-rust on iSH is fast enough for static blog publishing and browser-based offline site preview on iOS/iPadOS, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220227
by tstrimple | 2025-12-15 21:10:24+00:00
Apple TV 4k has an idle power draw of 0.49W and a 4k streaming power draw of 2.31W. That mini desktop will likely run at around 20W idle and approaches 30W under relatively light load and up to 60W on high loads. Plus keyboard and mouse are generally terrible couch devices. I've already got a NAS and plenty of devices I can stream from. The Apple TV is an almost perfect small and efficient device to stream to.
by ancillary | 2025-12-15 21:10:30+00:00
I think the claimed issue is that these people do receive income from those assets indirectly. My understanding is that if your assets are worth much more than the amount you're borrowing then a bank is happy to keep giving you loans, which you use like income, that incur compound interest until you die, your estate must settle up the loans, and the estate gets to pay capital gains against the basis when you died, not the basis when the shares were first created and worth $1 each.
by ozim | 2025-12-15 21:10:37+00:00
I will say you are right.

But ;)

At the same time Universities worth their salt also get students that are most likely going to be more self staring. Likely good professors will fail students that need more hand holding because it will be waste of their time.

So there is no magic trick to scale up. Besides getting more people to understand school/university is not going to do hand holding. You will get tools to learn how to learn and curated resources all the other things depend on you.
by ChaitanyaPatel | 2025-12-15 21:10:48+00:00
For MATLAB, there exist many high quality free and/r open source toolboxes from community and academia.

Also there are high quality free and/or open source alternatives.

GNU Octave https://octave.org and Octave online https://octave-online.net/

Freemat https://freemat.sourceforge.net/ (sadly no ongoing development)

Scilab https://www.scilab.org/ and Scilab online https://cloud.scilab.in/
by nitwit005 | 2025-12-15 21:10:52+00:00
You can use something like Salesforce as an app platform if you want. It lets you create "Custom Objects", which are basically tables, write queries, and so on.

It's just that the hassle of dealing with that platform tends to be similar to the hassle of setting up an app yourself, and now you're paying a per-user license cost.
by nxobject | 2025-12-15 21:10:58+00:00
You're right – close-minded is immediately blacklisting. Thoughtful is:

"What did you do at $PLACE_CURRENT_ADMIN_LIKES, and what, in retrospect, did it actually accomplish that made people and society freer, more empowered, and their lives richer?"

At which point you can say "I made an interface to let anyone with access scrape ALPRs around the nation, and I genuinely didn't think about what people would do with it", and then that speaks for itself.
by drnick1 | 2025-12-15 21:11:07+00:00
The choice is not to buy those devices if it comes to that.

Car manufacturers also do similar things (onboard 4G/5G modem), and one solution (other than driving an old car) is to disconnect the cellular modem. Of course the issue is that few people know there is one in their cars in the first place, so they are unknowingly snooped on.
by tylertreat | 2025-12-15 21:11:13+00:00
https://mealsyoulove.com

Basically personalized meal planning and grocery integration. Since the Show HN I posted a couple months back I've been incorporating user feedback to add things like meal prepping, better ingredient reuse across meals, and cooking style preferences.

One of the biggest points of feedback has been adding more grocery stores but I'm really limited by who has APIs to actually integrate with, which is basically just Kroger and Instacart. Walmart has an API but ignored my API access request. Would love to hear if anyone has ideas on how to approach this.
by SatvikBeri | 2025-12-15 21:11:15+00:00
> Python is sometimes slower (hot loops), but for that you have Numba

This is a huge understatement. At the hedge fund I work at, I learned Julia by porting a heavily optimized Python pipeline. Hundreds of hours had gone into the Python version – it was essentially entirely glue code over C.

In about two weeks of learning Julia, I ported the pipeline and got it 14x faster. This was worth multiple senior FTE salaries. With the same amount of effort, my coworkers – who are much better engineers than I am – had not managed to get any significant part of the pipeline onto Numba.

> And if something is truly performance critical, it should be written or rewritten in C++ anyway.

Part of our interview process is a take-home where we ask candidates to build the fastest version of a pipeline they possibly can. People usually use C++ or Julia. All of the fastest answers are in Julia.
by wjgilmore | 2025-12-15 21:11:26+00:00
https://securitybot.dev/

SecurityBot.dev is an all-in-one uptime, performance, security, and SEO monitoring tool. I launched it a few months ago and have been iterating on it ever since. Later this week SecurityBot.dev will log its 1 millionth uptime check which is pretty cool to see.

It includes the usual uptime monitoring service that you see everywhere else, but also features such as a PageSpeed Insights monitor (https://securitybot.dev/pagespeed-insights) and a broken link checker (https://securitybot.dev/broken-link-checker). I continue adding new monitor types as I personally need them (and also based on use feedback).
by nlitened | 2025-12-15 21:11:33+00:00
I think the major problem with your described system is how you quantify wealth. For example, you start a startup, get almost no salary, but you raise a 20M investment on 100M valuation — with your proposed method of calculation, the government already wants you to pay tax on your shares of a 100M enterprise, whereas you may not see a dollar of profit for another 10—20 years (or ever, if the startup fails). It's very difficult to quantify wealth, especially taking into account that a lot of it is risk-bound and long-term.

One interesting aspect of trying to quantify wealth and tax based on that — is that it gives enormous advantage to bearers of wealth that is difficult to quantify. For example, political followers is wealth that you can't tax, but one can turn into profit very easily and in many sneaky ways. Also power in general (power to collect taxes, power to control law enforcement and army, or people with guns in general) is wealth that isn't quantifiable in monetary amounts. So in this system powerful people will be much more powerful because they will start accumulating all other forms of wealth, and very difficult to restrict — why would they use their power to restrict themselves? They would use their power to remove any restrictions at the highest priority.

So instead of the current system (people willing to invent new things and work overtime for years to bring value to millions of people for a chance of outsized returns — and sometimes earning them) you get a system where political class seizes all power, removes all checks and balances, redistributes wealth production to themselves, and unleashes violence to rule forever. It has been tried many times.

> Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to severe penalties

This only works in capitalistic open societies where wealth doesn't concentrate with government employees.

> The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small

Not all businesses can be small. How can a small business construct an airplane? Organize a nation-wide or international postal delivery service? Build millions of cars with spare parts available for decades? Make food, clothing, and shelter for millions? These things require economies of scale to be affordable. And yes, government-managed big businesses have also been tried, they tend to be very unproductive, and produce expensive and low-quality items (with tendencies to significantly decline over years).
by tialaramex | 2025-12-15 21:11:41+00:00
> the bug does not need to be inside in unsafe block

The argument is that while you wouldn't in fact fix the bug by modifying the unsafe code block, the unsafe code block was wrong until you fixed the other code.

For example imagine if a hypothetical typo existed inside RawVec (the implementation details of Vec) causing the growable array to initially believe it has 1 element inside it, not 0 even though no space has been allocated and nothing was stored. That's safe code, and of course the correct fix would be to change it from 1 to 0, easy. But this broken type is arguably broken because the unsafe code would deference a pointer that isn't valid, trying to reach that non-existent value. It would be insane, perhaps even impossible, to modify that code to somehow handle the "We wrote 1 instead of 0" mistake, when you could instead fix the bug - but that is where the theoretical fault lies.
by 0x3f | 2025-12-15 21:12:15+00:00
I'm no fan of Vercel, but it's kind of the symptom of a wider pattern, right? I see crazy architecture astronaut setups in so many places. It's true non-technical stakeholders can cause problems but I often see it pushed from inside the tech org too. I'm thinking it's some combination of resume-driven development, misunderstanding of 'scalability'/when it's needed, and intra-org working-together problems where it's easier to just make a new service and assert your dominion over it.
by voidnap | 2025-12-15 21:12:27+00:00
I've heard the term used for servers before but not version control repositories. I just don't understand what it would mean for a git repo to be a cattle vs a pet. Like what is an example of a cattle repo vs a pet repo. The metaphore just sounds like gibberish to me idk.

Unless all it means is that that you can have more than a few like the other commenter said but I didn't think that was what the metaphore meant with respect to servers so again I have no idea lol
by jamesrr39 | 2025-12-15 21:12:39+00:00
Ironically we bought a Roborock (Chinese brand with close links to Xiaomi) and didn't connect it to the internet (checked this would work before we bought it).

If you don't want the scheduling and other app features, and are happy switching it on when you need it, it works fine.

Motivation for an offline one was more than just cameras, also that it wouldn't be bricked by an update one day, but still...
by agentifysh | 2025-12-15 21:12:52+00:00
we have so many failure-as-a-feature ops these days im surprised we aren't discussing it more. something that consistently happens with enough frequency without any repercussions ultimately just becomes a feature of its own.

we consistently have data breaches in institutions we trust is converging to a point where its literally just a data harvesting ops and everybody stops caring. They won't even bother to join class action lawsuits anymore because the rewards enrich the lawyers while everybody gets their twenty bucks in the mail after providing more personal data to the law firm its like a loophole.

we now have legalized insider trading in the form of "prediction markets", legalized money laundering and pump and dump through crypto, all of these always lead to failures for the participant disguised as wins.
by mr_00ff00 | 2025-12-15 21:12:52+00:00
Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing.

I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point.

When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally.

Any other way of writing feels like you are trying to be fancy just for the sake of seeming smart.
by saltcured | 2025-12-15 21:12:58+00:00
I think it's becoming reasonable to think consumer storage could be a limited number of soldered NVMe and NVMe-over-M.2 slots, complemented by contemporary USB for more expansion. That USB expansion might be some kind of JBOD chassis, whether that is a pile of SATA or additional M.2 drives.

The main problem is having proper translation of device management features, e.g. SMART diagnostics or similar getting back to the host. But from a performance perspective, it seems reasonable to switch to USB once you are multiplexing drives over the same, limited IO channels from the CPU to expand capacity rather than bandwidth.

Once you get out of this smallest consumer expansion scenario, I think NAS takes over as the most sensible architecture for small office/home office settings.

Other SAN variants really only make sense in datacenter architectures where you are trying to optimize for very well-defined server/storage traffic patterns.

Is there any drawback to going towards USB for multiplexed storage inside a desktop PC or NAS chassis too? It feels like the days of RAID cards are over, given the desire for host-managed, software-defined storage abstractions.

Does SAS still have some benefit here?
by pbalau | 2025-12-15 21:13:22+00:00
I think this is missing the main problem with security on a Linux Desktop, the user. All an attacker has to do is to convince the user to run InstallSteamWithAllGamesUnlockedForFree.sh You know, the AnnaKurnikovaSexTape.exe of the windows world.

This is an education problem and no amount of tech is going to fix it.

Even if dbus didn't have this problem, this is my hardware, I'll do what I want! That's the whole point of Linux.
by araes | 2025-12-15 21:13:33+00:00
Had to read the wikipedia article on Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) to figure out what it was supposed to mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system

They compare it to timeshare systems, which seems horribly out of date (although apparently that's still kind of what occurs anyways on CPUs). What's the part that's "Real Time" relative to anything else people do with Cortex processors? The preemptive part? Not trying to be critical, just not getting the real time part. Does it not share CPU resources among tasks? Get a fixed core per task or something? Minimal interrupts and minimal thread switching?
by pedrozieg | 2025-12-15 21:13:35+00:00
I’m not worried about “can I, personally, keep this thing running?” so much as “what is the long-term story for the kind of person who buys a turnkey appliance”.

Yes, Umbrel OS is on GitHub and you can already run it on generic NUCs / Pi etc. That’s great. But the value prop of the hardware is the whole bundle: curated apps, painless updates, maybe remote access, maybe backups. If Umbrel-the-company pivots or withers, the repo still being there under a non-commercial license doesn’t guarantee ongoing maintenance, an app store, or support. And the NC clause is exactly what makes it hard for someone else to step in and sell a fully supported forked “Umbrel but maintained” box to non-technical users. So for people like you and me, sure, we can just install it elsewhere; for the target audience of an expensive plug-and-play box, the long-term social contract is still the fragile part.
by lysace | 2025-12-15 21:13:40+00:00
Agreed. We need a second source, preferably located in the EU. They could share operational code/protocols/etc. I.e. during peace time they could collaborate.

The EU started building the Galileo GNSS ("GPS") in 2008 as a backup in case the US turned hostile. And now look where we are in 2025 with the US president openly talking about taking Greenland. Wise move. It seemed like a gigantic waste back then. It was really, really expensive.

Then lots of European countries ordered F35s from Lockheed Martin. What an own goal. This includes Denmark/Greenland.

But i digress...
by hntway2594 | 2025-12-15 21:13:50+00:00
Funnily enough I had recently been thinking something like this would be a good idea. Like if the govt. created a department with the soul goal of developing open tech for the public good. I guess you could say they kind of already do this with research grants but something with more clear focus could be a good thing.

It's too bad this was created by an absolute dumpster fire admin that will 100% use this for malicious ends.
by ghusto | 2025-12-15 21:14:04+00:00
> In fact, if you do not need a shared secrets service, and your applications are containerized... why do you need a secrets IPC at all? Just let each program store its secrets in some of its supposedly private storage...

If I store my secrets in KWallet, which purports to _storage for secrets_, I absolutely do not expect every application on the desktop to have access to those secrets, whether I want to share them or not.

I can't believe you're suggesting this is sanely defensible.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-15 21:14:27+00:00
This is the most hilarious ineffectual and defeatist copium I've read all month. Billionaires don't pay taxes. Getting there would first require billionaires paying their fair share of taxes, which is never going to happen in an extremely corrupt political environment. If the billionaires benefitting from the incessant destruction of workers' income equality were held to account, UBI would be a thing but that's not going to happen either with things the way they are at present. It's unsustainable and must change soon before extreme communist agitation comes to offer "salvation" to systematic mistreatment that won't benefit anyone.
by Arathorn | 2025-12-15 21:14:51+00:00
There's some really interesting stuff we've been looking into on the Matrix side to solve this - e.g. https://github.com/asonnino/arke aka https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1218 or https://martin.kleppmann.com/2024/07/05/pudding-user-discove....

Meanwhile, Matrix for now does support hashed contact lookup, although few clients implement it given the privacy considerations at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/identity-service-api/#secur...
by mands | 2025-12-15 21:14:57+00:00
We've just moved to GraphQL after using REST and bog-standard RPC, and it's been a breath of fresh air. I was considering building my own HTTP RPC system, similar to json-rpc or open-rpc, but I would have ended up with a poorly-specified GraphQL clone.

I think GraphQL's biggest issue is a naming and positioning problem. I, along with colleagues, thought for a long time that it was tied to graphs, DB query languages, and heavy backend implementations.

It's actually a typed RPC system designed for Client UIs, including SPAs and mobile. We're using it with a monolith in a code-first manner, where the schema and client code are auto-generated from backend types.

I think the project could benefit from a `graphql-lite` / `graphql-full` split, where `-lite` includes a well-documented, leaner core featureset (RPC, simple resolvers), and full mode includes federation.
by foxyv | 2025-12-15 21:15:05+00:00
My elementary school bully killed himself with shrapnel from blowing up a GI Joe. I felt really guilty about it because I kept wishing he would just disappear and then bam, he was gone. Reading Ender's Game gave me way too much sympathy for Ender.

Adult cruelty towards children seems to be a thread running through my life.
by ottah | 2025-12-15 21:15:59+00:00
I'm kind of had enough of unnecessary policy ratcheting, it's a problem in a every industry where a solution is not possible or practical; so the knob that can be tweaked is always turned. Same issue with corporate compliance, I'm still rotating password, with 2fa, sometimes three or four factors for an environment, and no one can really justify it, except the fear that not doing more will create liability.
by jjtheblunt | 2025-12-15 21:16:10+00:00
i am glad you responded, because i just went looking anew and could not find it being debunked...and don't remember what i had seen last time around.

evidently not debunked, as i just (first time in months) went re-reading CDC etc...but the punchlines i remembered from months ago include the only reservoir being cats, who clear the infections themselves, and healthy immune system humans generally have no symptoms.

"Cats can only release the infectious oocytes for between one and three weeks after they become infected, after which they can no longer spread the parasites."

what's interesting, and to your point, is the lack of insight as to why some people have side effects like bipolar and schizophrenia.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-15 21:16:12+00:00
Funnily enough, my work macOS keychain maimed itself in such a way that I need to recreate it every time I install an OS update. Every time I recreate it, the OS spends a few minutes in a state where every application that needs access to the secrets store requests access through the keychain's password. Incredibly secure!

Turns out, that's every application, every few minutes, many of them multiple times. Applications like having access to things like refresh tokens so they can download your email, or discover passwords for offering autofill for a website.

I'd welcome many improvements to the Linux status quo, but applications not needing to ask before accessing the bus is the only reason it's usable in the first place.
by Arainach | 2025-12-15 21:16:36+00:00
>That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down

This is nonsense. Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system. Oil barrel prices were far from the only thing controlled by the standard oil monopoly.
by nallana | 2025-12-15 21:16:37+00:00
>> The engine is closed source. You cannot see how fft or ode45 are implemented under the hood. For high-stakes engineering, not being able to audit your tools is a risk. This is just a lie. Open matlab and you can inspect all the implementation details behind ode45. It is not a black box.

How do I see the .c files / trace how `ode45` will execute on my machine? Can I see the JIT's source code?

--

Entitled to your view, but clearly difference of opinion here. From perspective of open / closed source -- maybe for you it qualifies as open source, but I can't follow the logic chain, so to me MATLAB is not open source.