MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alwa | 2025-12-21 23:05:35+00:00
> This is exactly the behavior that “never happens from a legitimate business” except when it does by the tens of billions of dollars.

> As Bits about Money has frequently observed, people who write professionally about money—including professional advocates for financially vulnerable populations—often misunderstand alternative financial services, largely because those services are designed to serve a social class that professionals themselves do not belong to, rarely interact with directly, and do not habitually ask how they pay rent, utilities, or phone bills.

This resonated for me, and reminded me of the way I and my formally-banked and formally-employed colleagues sometimes struggle to wrap our minds around payday lending (sure looks like usury from the security and comfort of a formal banking relationship!), remittances, hawala, pawn shops, Cash App, gift card exchanges, video game economies… for all the normative thinking in the professional classes, people sure do develop a kaleidoscopic array of approaches to storing and transmitting value.

“Just sanction [whoever]” or “just debank [whoever]” sounds to certain circles like an appealing tool to have—the modern equivalent of exile—but I have to imagine it’s probably healthy that such a tactic is hard for a state actor to apply in a totally watertight kind of way.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-21 23:05:37+00:00
Vitamin D supplements are controversial on their own.

There is ample results on better health correlated with higher levels of Vitamin D, but the reverse is far more teneous: shoving in Vitamin D isn't guaranteed to be properly absorbed, and even when it is we don't see conparable results to people producing the Vitamin D themselves.

An example: https://academic.oup.com/jbmr/article/38/10/1391/7610360
by nostrebored | 2025-12-21 23:06:25+00:00
The reason it’s dead is these are completely irrelevant and you aren’t having a conversation, you’re taking a pulpit.

California does not dictate federal labor law and I’m sure that you already know that. Your arguments are bad and aggressive.

You’d have way more influence and agreement if you argued about immigration processes as a whole (“why are these people with jobs not given visas already?”) than these contrived obviously ridiculous and irrelevant excerpts.

You’re arguing with me like I won’t actually think about what you say, which is the “not the HN style” comment I gave you before. I will.
by hansvm | 2025-12-21 23:06:31+00:00
If that's an issue (visibility into middle layers) it just means your events aren't wide enough. There's no fundamental difference between log.error(data) and wide_event.attach(error, data), nor similar schemes using parameters rather that context/global-based state.

There are still use cases for one or the other strategy, but I'm not a fan of this explanation in either direction.
by ultrarunner | 2025-12-21 23:07:43+00:00
This is one of my biggest frustrations with aviation— the certification required to get this done is hugely onerous. The whole basis of certified aircraft is that they may not change, which makes improvements like airframe parachutes, auto land systems, and even terrain awareness, engine monitoring, etc. very costly to obtain. I think there is an argument to be made that there should be a pathway to airframe recertification to allow for innovation and improvement to take place in the aviation industry.

Instead, the FAA is probably going backwards on this issue and doubling down on the regulatory framework that gave us the MAX-8 situation while narrowing any avenue for smaller firms to innovate [0]

[0] https://avbrief.com/faa-wants-to-phase-out-ders
by marstall | 2025-12-21 23:07:57+00:00
they also offer a bunch of stuff like

- searchable website

- incredible well thought out postgres database that differentiates, for example, a recording from a release (and much, much more)

- ability to replicate changes to said database hourly to your own environment

- workable system for schema updates

- cover art archive

- refined interface for submitting/moderating listings

- etc.
by alwa | 2025-12-21 23:08:20+00:00
Cash requires in-person exchange. To use it electronically, you’d need to participate in the formal banking sector. Many people can’t or don’t.

Instead you can take your cash to any of a large number of retailers and acquire a card that sits outside the tight credit/debit-card regulations. That card, thanks to the wide reach of various multinational corporations, has broad (and cross-border) value and is suitable for electronic exchange. All that in exchange for a small(ish) tax (the price of the card plus whatever discount the recipient/exchange applies to its face value), and less recourse if you’re scammed or you screw up somehow.

Incidentally you might be interested in @patio’s description [0] of Japanese konbini (convenience store) payments. There, your remote payee gives you a transaction number. You take that number to your local convenience store and hand them the cash to complete the otherwise-electronic transaction.

[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payments-in-japan/#:~...
by EnPissant | 2025-12-21 23:08:30+00:00
I've never seen any significant difference in linear vs affine types.

To me it just seems like Rust has Linear types, and the compiler just inserts some code to destroy your values for you if you don't do it yourself.

I guess the only difference is that linear types can _force_ you to manually consume a value (not necessarily via drop)? Is that what you are going for?
by rendx | 2025-12-21 23:09:21+00:00
> "Gaslighting" would be suspect

Gaslighting would be simply incorrect, since gaslighting refers to an elaborate scheme of making somebody doubt their own perception/sanity. It a a severe form of abuse, requires an ongoing relationship with power dynamics (it cannot happen from a single instance of interaction), and typically results in long-term PTSD for the victim(s).

Agree on the capturing. Watering down terms is highly unfortunate for everyone.
by herdymerzbow | 2025-12-21 23:09:22+00:00
As much as I hope it to be mass exodus, and as someone who switched over to CachyOS as my main OS in Nov 2025, I'm not sure that 3% of the steam user base really qualifies as a 'mass' exodus.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Linux-gaming-growth-SteamOS-sh...

Going back to my Windows install every now and then to do things feels uncomfortable. Almost like I'm sullying myself! The extent of Microsoft's intrusiveness kind of makes it feel like entering a poorly maintained public space...at least compared to my linux install.

I'm not sure that the majority of people feel this way about Windows 11. They just put up with it in the same way as they do YouTube ads, web browsing without ublock origin, social media dark patterns etc. But certainly, never been a better time I think to move to linux for my kind of user, i.e. the only mildly technologically adept.
by gkoberger | 2025-12-21 23:10:05+00:00
This is cool, but it will almost definitely never end up in a park, outside of some promotional situations.

Disney's been doing awesome work with "Living Characters", like a Mickey that moves his mouth or a BB-8 that can roll around. But for various reasons, they never tend to make it into regular usage.

If you have a few hours over Christmas break and want to watch a 4 hour YouTube video (I promise if you're on HN on a Sunday, you'll be delighted by it), I highly highly recommend this video:

"Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise" by Defunctland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyIgV84fudM
by jspash | 2025-12-21 23:11:02+00:00
The domain and article just a long-form advert for the author's observability sass. Oddly it's free, but you have to sign up for Cloudlfare, where the author is currently employed.

It's seems they are playing the long-long game!

All snarkiness aside, I learned a few things from the article. And I might even sign up to the sass since I already have a CF account.
by wesammikhail | 2025-12-21 23:11:57+00:00
I used to do it like that and it worked really well but I changed the flow to where exceptions are actually part of the control flow of the app using PHP's set_exception_handler(), set_error_handler() and register_shutdown_function().

Example, lets say a user forgot to provide a password when authenticating, then I will throw a ClientSideException(400, "need password yada yada");

That exception will bubble up to the exception_handler that logs and outputs the proper message to the screen. Similarly if ANY exception is thrown, regardless of where it originated, the same will happen.

When you embrace exceptions as control flow rather than try to avoid them, suddenly everything gets 10x easier and I end up writing much less code overall.
by bsder | 2025-12-21 23:13:07+00:00
Bill Murray has the best take: "I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job."
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-21 23:13:44+00:00
Sure, but we're pretty far from Germany over here.

In the States (or at least, every US state that I'm familiar with -- each one is free to make their own traffic rules, similar to how each EU member state also has their own regulatory freedoms), a dark/disabled/non-working traffic light is to be treated as stop sign.

For all drivers, in all directions of travel: It functionally becomes a stop sign.

That doesn't mean that it is the best way, nor does it mean that it is the worst way. It simply is the way that it is.

How does "you can only piss with the cock you've got" translate to German slang?
Show HN: Solo Founder Toolkit Claude Code Plugin – Tools to Ship Faster
by ericvtheg | 2025-12-21 23:14:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this to lean into the Claude Code plugin ecosystem while solving my own solo founder problems. The mindset of a solo founder is different from a typical engineer, we need to ship fast, avoid over-engineering, and make decisions that drive impact. This toolkit includes an anti-patterns skill that catches common mistakes (like endlessly refactoring your code), a decision framework for scoring what to build next, a landing page reviewer, and a command that generates build-in-public tweets from your git commits. It's opinionated, open source, and built for founders who'd rather ship than deliberate.
by eek2121 | 2025-12-21 23:15:11+00:00
I would not have believed for a second if stores here in my location in the U.S. did not recently begin locking up gift cards in a cage. I thought the move was quite odd, until I remembered a story that I read (possibly here?) about specific types of imaging that could see the pin behind the scratch off part.

Originally I assumed it was due to customer education/fraud, however no additional signage is posted at the stores doing this. Second thought was people must think these cards are already activated, however there is tons of text stating these things are only activated at POS.

The retailers I mentioned are nationwide. However, they've only recently began to do this, and only in a few locations that I am aware of.
by solid_fuel | 2025-12-21 23:16:44+00:00
> As long as you're happy that if your property ever blocks the road, you will pay for the damage too.

Pretty sure that's always the expectation? It's typical to tow illegally parked cars, smash windows to run hoses through cars blocking hydrants, etc.

The only unusual thing here would be holding a corporation to account the way we hold individuals to account.
by rlue | 2025-12-21 23:17:43+00:00
I have also contemplated wearing a keyboard on my pants and using a pair of “XR glasses” (like those by X-Real or Viture) as a display.

I would absolutely never do this in a public place, much less a crowded one.

This guy’s figured it out though.

https://evantravers.com/articles/2023/04/06/magsafe-tenting-...
by thrance | 2025-12-21 23:17:58+00:00
Actually yes, how much numbers you can crunch per second and how big they are were among the first benchmarks for actual computers. Also, these prototypes were almost always immediately useful. (Think of the computer that cracked Enigma).

In comparison, there is no realistic path forward for scaling quantum computers. Anyone serious that is not trying to sell you QC will tell you that quantum systems become exponentially less stable the bigger they are and the longer they live. That is a fundamental physical truth. And since they're still struggling to do anything at all with a quantum computer, don't get your hopes up too much.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-21 23:18:24+00:00
I don’t think I’ve ever read an article where the reason I knew the author was completely wrong about all of their assumptions was that they admitted it themselves and left the bad assumptions in the article.

The above paragraph is meant to be a compliment.

But justifying it based on keeping his Mac for five years is crazy. At the rate things are moving, coding models are going to get so much better in a year, the gap is going to widen.

Also in the case of his father where he is working for a company that must use a self hosted model or any other company that needed it, would a $10K Mac Studio with 512GB RAM be worth it? What about two Mac Studios connected over Thunderbolt using the newly released support in macOS 26?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644
by vbard | 2025-12-21 23:19:13+00:00
In Men in Black II (2002), Will Smith learned that a miniature civilization existed in a locker. Later, Will Smith’s character learned that our civilization was in a locker of a larger civilization.

By thinking of memory usage, you’re restricting yourself to our perceived physical limits withine our perceived reality.

But, what if the things running the simulation did not have those limits? E.g. maybe data could be stored in an infinite number of multiverses outside of the infinite simulations being discussed. Any of the simulations could potentially simulate universes like ours while still allowing those simulations to contain others, to be contained by others, to have references to others, to have reflective references, etc. The makes anything and everything possible while not necessarily removing limits we have in our own simulation. It just depends on what’s running the simulation.
by pfdietz | 2025-12-21 23:19:34+00:00
A principle in engineering is that for any market niche, only a few, or even one, technology persists. The others are driven to extinction as they can't compete. It's the equivalent of ecology's "one niche, one species" principle.

There are far more technologies going for the hours scale storage market than will survive. Sure, explore them. But expect most to fail to compete.
by squigz | 2025-12-21 23:19:57+00:00
> Other data sources such as the MP3.com rescue barge, PureVolume archive, and Anna's Spotify archive lack the country-of-origin metadata, so are of less interest to me. It may be possible to use an LLM to guess the language of each track title, but someone else will have to do that.

I would guess that combining these sources, along with info from MusicBrainz, would help quite a bit? Still, I'm rather surprised Spotify doesn't provide more information about artists.
by andrei_says_ | 2025-12-21 23:20:09+00:00
Ruby is still a joy for me, too, and Rails continues to evolve while providing solid best practices as the default.

A side effect is an increased intolerance to agony, boilerplate verbosity, complexity. I look at the JavaScript world and shudder.

Also, Ruby being as expressive as it is, describing things to an LLM is not really a timesaver over writing the code myself.
by MBCook | 2025-12-21 23:20:10+00:00
Right. You know there are humans somewhere in the city who got confused or scared and mess up too. Maybe a young driver who is barely confident in the first place on a temporary permit, or just someone who doesn’t remember what you do and was already over-stressed.

Whatever, it happens.

This was a (totally unintentional) coordinated screw up causing problems all over as opposed to one small spot.

The scale makes all the difference.
by smurda | 2025-12-21 23:20:19+00:00
One theoretical use case is “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) attacks, or “Store Now, Decrypt Later” (SNDL). If an oppressive regime saves encrypted messages now, they can decrypt later when QCs can break RSA and ECC.

It's a good reason to implement post-quantum cryptography.

Wasn't sure if you meant crypto (btc) or cryptography :)
by 0xjerry | 2025-12-21 23:20:23+00:00
Used AI to document the code for readability (it's OSS). The iptables rules, Kyber integration, and SOCKS handling are the actual work. Find me an AI that can set up transparent proxying with netfilter that doesn't leak. Fixed the sloppy comments though, thanks. Fair point on the error handling. Many of those are in non-critical paths (flag parsing, optional config loading), but you're right that they should be handled properly.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-12-21 23:20:39+00:00
> This gives insight into possible changes, but the sample sizes were usually too small to draw conclusions from.

They buried the lede in the fifth paragraph.

> However, zinc in chickpeas would be expected to plummet by up to 37.5%, with a “significant” decrease in protein, zinc and iron in essential crops such as rice and wheat. The researchers warned of “devastating health consequences” including “hidden hunger, where people have sufficient food calorically but insufficient nutrients”.

Loss of nutrients is not new. Factor farming - with a focus on yield - has been removing nutrients from the soil and doing too little to replenish them. The article should mention this.

Should we he concerned? Maybe. But more bad “journalism” and associated hyperbole isn’t going to help.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-21 23:21:28+00:00
I use these same tripods with magsafe stickers (to be used next on my newer Glove80 with Pro Reds). It works well. I also use them atop somewhat taller mini tripods for other ergonomic situations, or with clamps attached to my chair. It's very quick to move the keyboard halves around and use during travel where desks will not be at ergonomic heights.
by Levitz | 2025-12-21 23:21:35+00:00
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...

Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.

I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
by lubujackson | 2025-12-21 23:22:09+00:00
The "coinciding problems" should be an assumption, not a edge case we reason away. Because black swan events are always going to have cascading issues - a big earthquake means lights out AND cell towers overloaded or out, not to mention debris in streets, etc.

What they need is a "shit is fucked fallback" that cedes control. Maybe there is a special bluetooth command any police or ambulance can send if nearby, like clear the intersection/road.

Or maybe the doors just unlock and any human can physically enter and drive the car up to X distance. To techies and lawyers it may sound impossible, but for normal humans, that certainly sounds better. Like that Mitch Hedberg joke, when an escalator is out of order it becomes stairs. When a Waymo breaks it should become a car.
by MBCook | 2025-12-21 23:23:05+00:00
> The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput.

Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse.

They did such a bad job of handling it people had to go around them, making things less safe.

We know what people are like. Not everyone is OK doing 2-3 mph for extended time waiting for a Waymo to feel “safe”.

Operating in a way that causes large numbers of other drivers to feel the need to bypass you is fundamentally worse.
by Aeolos | 2025-12-21 23:23:08+00:00
In my experience, curiosity and intelligence are very strongly correlated. There is a real gap between people with the curiosity and ability to explore and learn, and people without. This is often handwaved as "motivation" but it's more than just that.

In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
by Lerc | 2025-12-21 23:23:08+00:00
I have been doing a lot of little projects using AI, and don't get this experience.

I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.

I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.

I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.

I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.

Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
by emeraldd | 2025-12-21 23:23:24+00:00
My experience with AI code reviews has been very mixed and more on the negative side than the positive one. In particular, I've had to disable the AI reviewer on some projects my team manages because it was so chatty that it caused meaningful notifications from team members to be missed.

In most of the repos I work with, it tends to make a large number of false positive or inappropriate suggestions that are just plain wrong for the code base in question. Sometimes these might be ok in some settings, but are generally just wrong. About 1 in every 10~20 comments is actually useful or something novel that hasn't been caught elsewhere etc. The net effect is that the AI reviewer we're effectively forced to use is just noise that get's ignored because it's so wrong so often.
by gkoberger | 2025-12-21 23:23:38+00:00
Eh, maybe. I have a less myopic view... I think their Imagineers just like pushing the envelope, and there's a difference between awesome tech vs things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.

Nothing about all that tech makes me think Olaf could withstand a hug from an excited kid.

Disney does a ton of R&D that doesn't directly make it into the parks, such as smokeless fireworks (they donated the patent for this) and their holotile floor (basically an endless VR room you can walk around). I imagine they don't know the practicality at the start, like any good R&D.