MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by n1b0m | 2025-12-15 18:48:00+00:00
Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by:

Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years).

Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually.

Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometimes be used as a deduction.
by umanwizard | 2025-12-15 18:48:00+00:00
The State of Israel controls certain territory which it administers democratically. It controls other territory in which only people of a particular ethnic/cultural group are citizens and everyone else is stateless and governed by military law. Conveniently, the latter territory is considered “not part of Israel” despite having been fully controlled by the state for many decades.

So, is Israel a democracy? I guess that depends on your definition of “democracy”, and also your definition of “Israel”.
by int_19h | 2025-12-15 18:48:09+00:00
Investment is not how you "create wealth". An actual worker somewhere performing their job is what creates wealth. Yet when that worker is paid for the wealth actually produce, we tax that heavily. So if you want to encourage productivity, regular income ought to be taxed higher than passive investment.

The argument for low capital tax is that if it's high, the people with the capital - who, crucially, need someone else to use it to make money from it - will just hoard it. For one thing, the obvious glaring issue with it is that however high the capital gains tax is, so long as the owner of capital in question still gets to pocket some of the wealth produced using it, they still have an incentive to continue - something is better than nothing. The actual, real world threat is that some other jurisdiction sets the tax rate lower than you will, and capital will then move there. But this same threat applies to many other taxes, capital gains aren't special in that regard.
by seneca | 2025-12-15 18:48:15+00:00
> Except in technology where the gains come from my personal investment in skills.

Not really. That's essentially a weaver learning to use the new automated weaving machine. That is what you do to remain qualified for the job. Now, if you were a framework or key system creator, building the underlying platforms that get adopted throughout the industry, I would agree. But just learning to use the tooling the the industry creates isn't that different, other than the rate of change you have to keep up with.
by scottlamb | 2025-12-15 18:48:29+00:00
> Certainly <umm> a book I wrote about the state of computing in the early 2010s--largely derived from things I had written over a few prior years--was hopelessly out of date within just a few years.

I could see it being obsolete quickly to the extent that when someone was trying to learn devops and saw a book on the (virtual) shelf that didn't cover containers next to one that did, they'd pick the latter every time. You probably saw this in your sales tanking. But I'm not sure many of the words you actually did write became wrong or unimportant either. That's what I mean by additive. And in the context of a CS program, even if their students were trying out these algorithms with ridiculously out-of-date, turn-of-the-century tools like CVS, they'd still have something that works, as opposed to fumbling because they have no concept of how to manage their computing environment.
by latexr | 2025-12-15 18:48:35+00:00
Open the App Store on a iPhone. Of the four tabs, two are game-centric (“Games” and “Arcade”). Another (“Today”) has been consistently using more than half of its features for games.

In their most recent operating systems, they have released a separate app specifically for games (look at that domain, even).

https://games.apple.com

They created the Game Porting Toolkit.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

When they discontinue Rosetta next year, they’ll continue limited support specifically for old games.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

Plus, whenever they announce new chips they feature games and gaming personalities in the keynote.

Those are clear signs they are interested in gaming happening on their platforms. Whether they’re succeeding at it is another story.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-15 18:49:05+00:00
> when the Western media is no better than them

better is a continuum across many dimensions. Therefore when you say "no better than" you're saying "worse than".

I'm not saying Western media is good, but it's really hard to argue that it's worse than the Chinese media, given the headline story above and our freedom to discuss it here and elsewhere.

Both can be bad, but one is more bad than the other.
by lcnielsen | 2025-12-15 18:49:12+00:00
I'm not going to say Slurm is great (its API:s are awfully inconsistent and there's a lot of code churn between versions leading to subtle behaviour changes in prod), but it's an invaluable and reliable tool. As someone who manages Slurm clusters in academic HPC as a major part of my job, I'm not at all happy to see this and quite worried that the development and maintenance of Slurm will be broken by the inevitable market volatility.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-15 18:49:13+00:00
I don't think the timestamped UUIDs are "carrying data", it is just a heuristic to improve lookup performance. If the timestamp is wrong, it will just run as slow as the non-timestamped UUID.

If you take the gender example, for 99% of people, it is male/female and it won't change, and you can use that for load balancing. But if later, you found out that the gender is not the one you expect for that bucket, no big deal, it will cause a branch misprediction, but instead of happening 50% of the times when you use a random value, it will only happen 1% of the times, significant speedup with no loss in functionality.
by 9dev | 2025-12-15 18:49:22+00:00
It doesn't matter much how exactly those costs are passed on; someone has to eventually pay for them. That includes the energy itself, which doesn't come for free, but also the bill for environmental damage and resource exhaustion that we will have to pay at some point. You can argue that that'll be the case only in the far future, but then you're just externalising the cost—again—to future generations. It's all moot: Someone will pay for it eventually.
by jlawson | 2025-12-15 18:49:30+00:00
> If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.

It would certainly impact their willingness to do the company-building that creates all those innovations and jobs.

With such a rule, Tesla wouldn't exist, no electric cars, no SpaceX, no cheap advanced launch tech; basically most of the modern world would be choked in the crib by taking away the incentive to build it.
by sqreept | 2025-12-15 18:49:33+00:00
This CSI plugin is fully vibe coded by Claude Sonnet 4.5 & Haiku 4.5 and tested on a real cluster in a loop by claude-code.

My only contribution was to uphold standards as this is one big thing where LLMs struggle probably because there's so few examples out there.

Hope it helps you!
by tptacek | 2025-12-15 18:49:35+00:00
Even in my local community, which is likely among the 10 most progressive in the country (we're either the first or second most progressive in Chicagoland, itself one of the most reliably blue major metros in the country), support for Flock was pretty evenly divided.

I think it's good to engage this way, but I have a lot of thoughts on things to do that are more effective than giving public comment, and a caution that if you have strong opinions about ALPRs and you choose to pay attention to this issue you're going to be confronted with a lot of opinions that may surprise/discomfit you.
by Jeremy1026 | 2025-12-15 18:49:41+00:00
Sending "Error Detected" has failed multiple times, including in a re-test now.

Tried changing to "Hey Jeremy1026: Error in payment processor at 3:42 PM", same status with no delivery to my phone number, ID: jz44a46jjpx7vjpzsa9c0soc.

I used to work with Twilio pretty heavily at a SaaS, I left as they started to crack down on SMS. One of my last projects was developing an in-app front-end to submit the regulatory paperwork to get higher delivery rates for SMS. I know it was a huge pain, sounds like it still is.
by maxglute | 2025-12-15 18:49:57+00:00
TBH after a while I optimized things around robovac, or tidiness levels. I have hardwood floors, woven carpets, just stuff where vacs pick thing sup very effectively.

I don't know if Chinese ones are any better in terms of performance, suction levels only matter when you're on carpet and then it heavily depends how worn out or well maintained your brush head is which is where cheap consumables start to matter. For me the easy surfaces get 80%+ clean, the harder surfaces get 50% but even with very highend vaccuums I can still scrapes tons of hair out with a fur brush. But part of it is also I have a ancient magic high performance furbrush (random plastic junk for 30 years ago) that somehow digs out more fur than any other brush.
by EGreg | 2025-12-15 18:49:58+00:00
I find it ironic that individual income tax is a thing in USA, but as soon as AI does the work, oh only the owner has to pay.

As a libertarian, I find the whole requirement for workers to secure an accountant and file individual income taxes under threat of retaliation silly. Individuals should be free to engage in activities like working for an employer, taking care of their kids or aging parents, or having sex, without paying tax to the government. Taxes should be levied on companies and robots, not humans doing everyday things.

The employer knows exactly how much they are paying each employee, and they already have accountants on staff. Why create "bullshit jobs" just for employees to file this same exact information again?

So yeah, we shouldn't wait for AI to replace workers, to abolish the individual income tax for individuals. It should have been done a long time ago. Employers can pay the tax (as they do with FICA). And in fact, we're going to have to have a tax regime that taxes robots, which would become the primary economic actors soon anyway. If corporations can have legal personhood, surely robots can too LMAO.
by bccdee | 2025-12-15 18:49:59+00:00
The value proposition of SaaS is ultimately just that it's not a hack.

Most SaaS products could be replaced by a form + spreadsheet + email workflow, and the reason they aren't is that people don't want to be dealing with a hacky solution. Devs can hack together a nice little webapp instead of a network of spreadsheets, but it's still a hack. Factoring in AI assistance, perhaps SaaS is now competing with "something I hacked together in a week" as opposed to "something I hacked together in a month," but it's a hack either way.

I am absolutely going to pay for analytics and dashboards, because I don't want the operational concerns of my Elasticsearch analytics cluster getting in the way of the alarm that goes off when my primary database catches fire. Ops visibility is too important to be a hack, regardless of how quickly I could implement that hack.
by __rej__ | 2025-12-15 18:50:18+00:00
It is a very good idea about SRAM! Around 16KB of SRAM can fit on the die (Wafer.Space provides 20 mm^2 area per chip) - that could be useful for both fixing old computers like ZX Spectrum and handy for turning Z80 into a tiny MCU.

However Flash/EEPROM is currently out of the question. I don't know of any open-source versions available. That would have been a very serious undertaking on it's own!
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-12-15 18:50:43+00:00
The issue isn't in the individual but at scale, what % of our population are we okay with separating with reality? What secondary effects of that inability to live in reality will show their heads? What will politics look like when everything can be made up and treated as equal to reality?

What will the mental health of society start to look like if every person who's on the edge has a computer to tell them they're totally correct and everyone else are haters?
by tialaramex | 2025-12-15 18:50:47+00:00
ISO/IEC 9899 is the name of the ISO document describing the C programming language. The current edition is, I think the 2023 document aka C23.

You can read a "draft" of that document here: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3220.pdf

[If you've ever been under the impression that "real" people use the actual ISO text, disabuse yourself of that notion, ISO takes ages to turn the same exact words into an official branded document, then charges $$$ for a PDF, ain't nobody got time or money for that]

I can't tell you what they intended by TC3. It might be a typo or it might be some way to refer to a specific draft or a section within that draft. I doubt this particular section changes frequently so I wouldn't worry about it.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-15 18:50:58+00:00
> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.

Cords suck. So I bought a cordless vacuum, and was able to vacuum more. But I also needed a mop because vacuums don't do well enough on my laminate, stuff still gets stuck on. So I bought a cordless mop, so I could map more. This worked great for awhile but...

But it turns out if I did my vacuuming and mopping every night, I could keep my floor in better condition. I don't have time for that, but a robot from Eufy does and doesn't cost much compared to how much I would benefit from it.

Luddism on HN is a bit weird, but I get it, some people don't see the point of automating these tasks because their lives aren't complicated enough yet (e.g. they don't have kids, or have lots of free time and energy to spend on house work).
by looperhacks | 2025-12-15 18:51:06+00:00
From the Wikipedia article:

> Finnix 0.01 was based on Red Hat Linux 6.0, and was created to help with administration and recovery of other Linux workstations around Finnie's office.[citation needed] The first public release of Finnix was 0.03, and was released in early 2000, based on an updated Red Hat Linux 6.1.

So it seems that it was based on Knoppix later
by notahacker | 2025-12-15 18:51:09+00:00
I think it's more accurate to say there weren't many expansionist tyrants whilst the US was looking interested in world policing. The Soviet Union had to be very careful about what they did in Europe despite having their own nuclear umbrella, Saddam could tyrant all he wanted until he annexed a neighbouring state the US felt vaguely positively disposed towards, and whilst you could fight petty border wars or maybe fund a coup against a neighbour somewhere less strategic you didn't have the option of doing what 1939 German and Japan and Russia did or even what 2020s Russia is trying to do and China is probably thinking of.
by tguvot | 2025-12-15 18:51:14+00:00
i bypassed this specific problem by getting dogs that don't shed (frankly, i shed more than both of them).

i contemplated getting spare dock for my roomba and modding it. but one thing I didn't figure out yet it's a how to close opening into central vacuum piping when it's not actively engaged. probably possible to do something with servos/etc, but it feels like too complicated/messy
Show HN: A lightweight SaaS to reduce early-stage app friction
by rubenhellman | 2025-12-15 18:51:23+00:00
I recently shipped a small SaaS I built in roughly 24 hours, mostly during school breaks. This is my first project that I have taken from idea to deployment, onboarding, and real users.

The product targets early-stage developers and focuses on reducing initial setup and preparation when building new apps. It abstracts away some of the repetitive early decisions and boilerplate that tend to slow down first-time builders, especially around project structure, configuration, and “what should exist on day one”.

I have a small number of active users, but churn is relatively high, which suggests either:

the problem is not painful enough

the abstraction leaks too early

the UX or onboarding fails to communicate value

or the tool solves a problem that disappears after the first session

I would really appreciate technical feedback on:

whether the abstraction layer makes sense

if the mental model aligns with how you bootstrap projects

where the product feels opinionated vs restrictive

what would make this something you would actually keep installed

Thanks for reading. Direct, critical feedback is very welcome.
by 0x457 | 2025-12-15 18:51:54+00:00
Because then you run into an issue when you 'n' changes. Plus, where are you increasing it on? This will require a single fault-tolerant ticker (some do that btw).

Once you encode shard number into ID, you got:

- instantly* know which shard to query

- each shard has its own ticker

* programatically, maybe visually as well depending on implementation

I had IDs that encode: entity type (IIRC 4 bit?), timestamp, shard, sequence per shard. We even had a admin page wher you can paste ID and it will decode it.

id % n is fine for cache because you can just throw whole thing away and repopulate or when 'n' never changes, but it usually does.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-15 18:51:57+00:00
I was taking a class on geoengineering and was partnered for a debate with a very justice-oriented student who had spent a lot of time in the Amazon rainforest learning about and who had brought me to a great lecture about the conservation of the rainforest so we'd done a lot of preparation together. I was playing a sort of Henry Petroski character who was a right-wing engineer who would get accused of wanting to build a Dyson sphere. [1]

The day before our debate he and his friends were at a karoke night and his friend tried to intervene when a stranger was bullying another stranger [2] in the sense that "you just don't do that". His friend got stabbed and my partner rode up to Syracuse in the ambulance with him to support him and couldn't come.

I wound up giving both sides of the presentation which fortunately was easy because I had his slides and we'd done enough prep. But yeah, this points out that intervening is a dangerous thing.

When I was in college we had a student, Chris Cater, who was waging a war against gays and had polarized the community around him and created a number of circles of support, for instance some people who were involved in violent attacks, the baptist student union who "loved the sinner but hate the sin", pot smokers who liked that he was criminally minded and was the best dealer because he'd take risks others wouldn't, etc. When he and a friend of mine came by the college radio station and were preparing to prick a can of shaving cream and throw it into a meeting of "gays and friends" I told my friend "Dom, that's dumb, that's really dumb." I didn't see it so much as "taking a stand" but just my spontaneous reaction.

It was the beginning of a whole lot of trouble because Cater and his gang would ambush me at my dorm (stopped the time I ducked into the dorm of the captain of the Rugby team) and when I was out walking. It put a lot of pressure on me because I wasn't really that gay positive at the time and was a stress on my relationships with Christian, pot-smoking, and other friends who found something positive in Cater's charsima and I felt even I was in one of his outermost circles of support and felt the accompanying moral injury because I just didn't want to be involved or seek connections with other victims.

I'm still angry at the school administration because they were slow to intervene and I blame them for the suicide of two students who I think wasn't so much motivated by the attacks but by the failure of institutions to respond -- they don't tell you your life is worthless, they show you.

So yeah, taking a stand can really turn your life upside down.

[1] I tend to become what a group is lacking. Put me in a left-wing group and I am the rightmost, put me in a right-wing group and I am the leftmost. Not so much like I'm a centrist but I think if a class in the Engineering school doesn't have a right-wing engineer in it or somebody like a character in a Heinlein novel something is wrong.

[2] ... I think a continuation of a wider conflict, possibly gang-related
by Ukv | 2025-12-15 18:51:58+00:00
Given the chain was:

> > Using a random UUID as primary key does not mean users have to memorize that UUID. [...]

> So what is such an identifier for? [...] Why bother with UUID at all then for internal identifiers?

The context, that you're questioning what they're useful for if not for use by the user, suggests that "internal" means the complement. That is, IDs used by your company and software, and maybe even API calls the website makes, but not anything the user has to know.

Otherwise, if "internal" was intended to mean something stricter (only used by a single non-distributed database, not accessed by any applications using the database, and never will be in the future), then my response is just that many IDs are neither internal in this sense nor intended to be memorized/saved by the user.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-15 18:52:20+00:00
Like the other poster said, this is a problem with default values not encoding the birthday into the personnummer.

I think it also is important to remember the purpose of specific numbers. For instance I would argue a PN without the birthday would be strictly worse. With the current system (I only know the Swedish one, but assume it's the same) I only have to remember a 4 digit (because the number is bdate + unique 4 digits). If we would instead use completely random numbers I would have to remember at least an 8 digit number (and likely to be future proof you'd want at least 9 digits). Sure that's fine for myself (although I suspect some people already struggle with it), but then I also have to remember the numbers for my 2 kids and my partner and things become quickly annoying. Especially, because one doesn't use the numbers often enough that it becomes easy, but still often enough that it becomes annoying to look up, especially when one doesn't always cary their phone with them.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-12-15 18:52:31+00:00
Major cities had more than one - the rest did not. The major cities had 2-3, so a duopoly. They all minted money for decades before the internet.

The local newspapers in question have terrible economics now because of the internet. The competition has come from the internet. Sinclair is dying, because they have bought a bunch of dying/dead assets. Tronc is the same. There was nothing to do here, the newspaper business as it worked previously is dead with a few exceptions.

The business is dead. The people involved aren't getting paid well, the owners are losing money, it's all bad when economics go bad.
by danaris | 2025-12-15 18:52:36+00:00
This kind of absolutist individualist argument just rings more and more hollow as we see the very real consequences of that philosophy for our society.

Who am I to say they're wrong? A human being, that's who. A human being who lives in a modern society that does not have to prioritize the whims of the wealthy few over the needs of the many. We can choose to set stringent requirements on people who have that much money, and therefore power, and that is not evil. Indeed, it is the furthest thing from it.