MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-08 09:40:38+00:00
Many of the old games and movies still play back well with Ruffle installed (https://ruffle.rs/). Newgrounds embeds it by default for old interactive flash media that they couldn't convert directly to video.

It's not a perfect fit, but it works. The speed of Ruffle loading on a page is similar to that of Flash initializing, so you can arguably still make flash websites and animations to get the old look and feel if you stick to the Ruffle compatibility range. The half-to-one-second page freeze that was the norm now feels wrong, though, so maybe it's not the best idea to put Flash components everywhere like we used to do.

Runescape proved that Java could be a pretty decent system, but so many inexperienced/bad Java developers killed the ecosystem. The same is true on the backend, where Java still suffers from the reputation the Java 7 monolithic mega projects left behind.
by einpoklum | 2025-12-08 09:43:52+00:00
> 2. How are they handling IT security?

Well, now, they can handle it more seriously, which before - they couldn't quite. That's because Microsoft - your company - is one big security breach. You are known to pass information that gets into your hand to the US federal government's intelligence agency, and you probably use it for all sorts of commercial purposes, like training AI models, directing advertising etc. So, by installing Microsoft Office, especially Office365 and cloud facilities, they were ensuring a security failure.
by miohtama | 2025-12-08 09:43:55+00:00
Everyone is free to use alternative CI/CD workflow pipelines. These are often better than Github Actions.

These include

- https://circleci.com/

- https://www.travis-ci.com/

- Gitlab

Open source:

- https://concourse-ci.org/ (discussed in the context of Radicle here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658820 )

- Jenkins

-etc.

Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.
by Kbelicius | 2025-12-08 09:44:14+00:00
Bitcoin was envisioned by its creator to be used as a currency. To buy and sell stuff using it. If you ask today what is bitcoin you'll be told that it is a store of value. The purpose of money is not to be a store of value. It can be, but that is not its purpose which the case of bitcoin clearly illustrates.

> Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses".

And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?
by baumschubser | 2025-12-08 09:44:37+00:00
I got an Amstrad PCW handed down to me from my dad as my first PC around the same time.

Booted always with disk 1 and that was Locoscript and learned typing on that thing.

When I discovered there is a second disk that boots you in some dark and hidden alternative mode (read: CP/M) I felt like a hacker.

Hidden inside this cave was the only program the manual mentioned in this section: Logo! I did not know that my PC could display anything except characters and it was. so. amazing. to see self-drawn lines on that thing.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-08 09:44:41+00:00
Oh, if you want a full fat JVM, then you want CheerpJ https://cheerpjdemos.leaningtech.com/SwingDemo.html#demo

Takes a few seconds longer to load because it loads all of Java Spring, but it still performs just fine on my phone (though the lack of on screen keyboard activation makes it rather unfortunate for use in modern web apps).
by balamatom | 2025-12-08 09:44:57+00:00
>Cooperate with their fellow citizens and fix their banking system

That's exactly what Bitcoin was for.

I don't know where you live, but most places it's the banking system which fixes the citizens, not the other way around.

Only way I imagine being able to fix a bank is with a brick through the window. It's why one level up from where I'm at banks are closing their physical locations, keep no cash, and only have people for 1-2 hours in the morning when only the most obedient are awake and not occupied.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-08 09:45:02+00:00
Investment for ideological reasons is basically "I like what this company is doing and want to see it succeed/want to make my returns on investment via it", and that investment helps it succeed, to at least some degree. You also get the opposite: "I don't like what this company is doing and don't want it to succeed/don't want to make money from this activity, so I won't invest in it". ESG investments were largely built up from this (much as they generally turned into box-ticking exercises as opposed to a useful distinction). Of course this is generally going to make less money than "I just want to make money/predict winners in the marketplace", but that's not everything people want to do with their money.
by FieryMechanic | 2025-12-08 09:45:15+00:00
I bought a vehicle early this year. In the UK we have supposedly instant BACs transfers.

However because opaque anti-fraud stuff, that I am not informed about, I was stuck in the middle of a field trying to convince someone in a call centre that the car I could see with my own eyes (and I had done all the appropriate checks) does indeed exist. This whole process took almost an hour because their anti-fraud team has a two hour response time.

There are obstacles in the banking system that make doing legal transactions difficult.
by _jzlw | 2025-12-08 09:46:35+00:00
How do you handle packages? I want scripts to a be a single file with a shebang, not a repo with a requirements.txt that I need to run in a venv. To me, this is the biggest blocker to using Python for any non-trivial scripting (which is precisely the kind where I wouldn't want to use bash), but I'd like to know how others deal with it.

C# scripts let you reference packages in a comment at the top of the file, for example:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...
by pbkompasz | 2025-12-08 09:47:35+00:00
There is a lot of money "wasted" on intermediaries due to the closed nature of the global financial system e.g. 3-5% fees for updating a row in a database. Besides those it allows other novel products that traditionally required trusted entities: - p2p lending - reputation systems - p2p insurance Also we have things like Open Banking i.e. sending money instantly for free which banks started implementing in 2015, one year after Ethereum mainnet went live which suddenly allowed people to send fiat money instantly and (almost) free. Banks and fintech companies having competition is a good thing for consumers.
by quantummagic | 2025-12-08 09:48:51+00:00
But humans do the same thing. How many eons did we make the mistake of attributing everything to God's will, without a scientific thought in our heads? It's really easy to be wrong, when the consequences don't lead to your death, or are actually beneficial. The thinking machines are still babies, whose ideas aren't honed by personal experience; but that will come, in one form or another.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-08 09:48:59+00:00
This is making me feel quietly vindicated in pushing back on migrating our Jenkins/Ansible setup to GHA simply because corporate wanted the new shiny thing. Fortunately the "this will be a lot of work, i.e. cost" argument won.

Mind you, CI does always involve a surprising amount of maintenance. Update churn is real. And Macs still are very much more fiddly to treat as "cattle" machines.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-12-08 09:49:11+00:00
> I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision by their client.

Because they are an expert in their field and the client, presumably, isn't? I can't imagine another field—hairdressing, construction, financial advice—where the client would reject the paid expert's viewpoint so readily and firmly.
by Grisu_FTP | 2025-12-08 09:49:20+00:00
I agree, it has been lots of fun testing around in the KVM. Recently a GrapheneOS update even included the Button to attach to the "screen" of the VM. It also has GPU passthrough iirc?

When i have more freetime during the holidays i will test further. I especially want to try how it works when i combine stuff like steam + fex + Proton or run other GPU stuff
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-08 09:49:24+00:00
You make several good points, and I appreciate that they appear well thought out.

> What previously took creative human work now became a mechanical transformation of input data.

At which point I find myself wondering if there's actually a problem. If it was previously permitted due to the presence of creative input, why should automating that process change the legal status? What justifies treating human output differently?

> then free software is dead. No more freedom to inspect and modify.

It seems to me that depends on the ideological framing. Consider a (still entirely hypothetical) world where anyone can receive approximately any software they wish with little more than a Q&A session with an expert AI agent. Rather than free software being dead, such a scenario would appear to obviate the vast majority of needs that free software sets out to serve in the first place.

It seems a bit like worrying that free access to a comprehensive public transportation service would kill off a ride sharing service. It probably would, and the end result would also probably be a net benefit to humanity.
by bluecalm | 2025-12-08 09:50:08+00:00
In the current election system also almost no one can do anything to verify the results. The percentage is way higher than 95%. There are many arguments against electronic voting but the current system is terrible and insecure.

>>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.

And it's currently not the case at all.

I think blockchain is a terrible idea for about anything. Electronic voting is hard. Voting is hard. It doesn't change the fact that the current system is a complete security joke .
by dotancohen | 2025-12-08 09:50:29+00:00
You're going to laugh, but this is why I stick with AWS. They've twice helped me with billing issues on my personal account - as in an actual human helping me. They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments at my day job. They just demonstrate great customer service to me as a small client.

So they have me as a loyal customer. And advocate, it seems.
by skeledrew | 2025-12-08 09:52:38+00:00
This really hits, solidifies and expands on thoughts I've been having for a while now. So many refuse to see or acknowledge it, but we're quickly approaching a point of reckoning which will require a major overhaul of the current dominant economic system.

The labour for wage model is rapidly becoming obsolete for the many, and a way forward that doesn't necessitate people working in order to gain access to the necessities of - modern - living needs to be paved. Otherwise it'll be grim for the vast majority when global automation of value creation gets upwards of say 85%. It's already pretty grim for an appreciable, though still relatively limited, number.
by finaard | 2025-12-08 09:52:51+00:00
Also check out the pull requests on that repo if there's something useful - in my case I've been using eat as single terminal instance for a while now - but for replacing stand alone terminals just opening multiple instances via multi-sh or similar isn't really helping for finding the terminals again. My solution was patching eat to allow buffer renames to the terminal title, and for ssh sessions, initially set the terminal title to the host I'm connecting to. Now I can easily find the terminals when switching buffers.

On top of that I'm using eyebrowse to have multiple workspaces, and some hooks around buffer switching that switch to the workspace a buffer is on instead modifying the current workspace.
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-12-08 09:53:36+00:00
There are massive P2P economies already built in most third world nations that work on crypto. They prefer stablecoins but will happily accept BTC as well. It's a serious enough problem that they've started using code words to refer to crypto currencies ("goat" for USDT, "chicken" for ETH, etc.)

If a corrupt third world government is scared of a piece of tech, it is, imo, good tech
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-08 09:54:22+00:00
> but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.

Only if the other party notices in time that you did this. You are reliant on active monitoring of the blockchain to know that your transactions actually happened. And the more you want to scale (i.e. the more transactions you do on a single Lightning channel without settling it on the BTC blockchain), the bigger the risk becomes.
by croes | 2025-12-08 09:54:42+00:00
> "The EU woke Stasi commissars are about to understand the full meaning of the 'Streisand Effect,'" Musk fumed. The "Streisand effect" refers to when an attempt to keep something discreet backfires.

They try to keep it so discreet that they posted in on Twitter.

And woke and Stasi in one sentence proves that Musk doesn't have a clue what neither woke nor the Stasi is
by globular-toast | 2025-12-08 09:54:50+00:00
What is there to get? Do you get sports betting or lotteries? People play games. They invent arbitrary rules with real consequences and try to "win".

Back in school we used to do things like "dare" people to do something or bet on a coin toss or something with the stakes being a snack or a desirable bit of stationery. I feel like everyone believes there is some clear boundary where things suddenly become "grown up" and "real". Do you remember when you became "grown up"? No? Nobody does. The secret is it never happens. The only difference is children have no "real" assets to play with.

What makes some derivative traded on Wall Street, like a "synthetic CDO", any more or less meaningful than alt coins?
by pndy | 2025-12-08 09:54:54+00:00
Free tier includes auto-fill, import/export, standard password generator. While paid includes multi-device synchronization, more than 200 entries in the vault, and no limits on browser extension. There's this "security tier" feature but I'm not sold on this.

I won't be surprised if their original 2FAS application will soon switch from optional donation to standard subscription.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-12-08 09:54:59+00:00
> Can you give an example of "solicited advertising"? I have never heard of such a thing, and can't imagine what it might be.

The only thing I would consider solicited is when I decide that I want to see product information. Everything else is just some chapter from the narcissists prayer: "and if I did, it wasn't that bad"
by tgv | 2025-12-08 09:55:21+00:00
I found it hard too. Perhaps the difference with the other people responding is the size the font is rendered. On my screen, the distance between the top of a "d" and the bottom of a "y" in the body text is 7mm. That corresponds to font size 18 in Word, or 22px in the browser, so basically a chapter heading.
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-12-08 09:55:49+00:00
You say this right when your central banks went on a massive money printing spree, shot up inflation beyond their own baseline for years, and have created a frankenstenian K-shaped economy where everyone who is not in the top 10-20% is getting actively poorer

It doesn't take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but you really can't ignore the inflation issues inherent in fiat currencies anymore.
by kragen | 2025-12-08 09:56:16+00:00
You mean, in 01999? I'd have to see that, because my recollection of that time is that JIT was generally considered unproven (and Java slow). That was 9 years before Chrome shipped the first JavaScript JIT, for example. The only existing commercial products using JIT were Smalltalk implementations like VisualAge, which were also slow. Even HP's "Dynamo" research prototype paper wasn't published until 02000.

Or do you not count Merced as "shipping"?
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-08 09:57:02+00:00
It is extremely easy to convince yourself that the current system works. Numerous people volunteer to work in election monitoring every year, and any person who is not sure can take a day or two off work to do so at their next election.

Plus, the system overall is dead simple, first grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-12-08 09:57:23+00:00
> Some will feel belittled and undermined.

This has always frustrated me. You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!

The 'problem' (it's a problem from my pov) is that clients simply think they know better when it comes to digital/computer/online stuff. They're used to browsing the web, so they think they know what a good website is. They know how to write a letter in MS Word, so they think they can write good web copy. Etc.
by Rebuff5007 | 2025-12-08 09:58:01+00:00
The expertise offered here is "how to build a website". If the client is insisting that the dev use a specific javascript library, that would be odd.

The client here is just requesting specific content on their website, similar to someone requesting a granite countertop in their kitchen; that seems fine, even if its not particularly classy or aesthetically pleasing to the contractor.
by frankhsu | 2025-12-08 09:58:11+00:00
I love this product immediately after typing something in it. For the foreseeable future, I'll be using it as my first choice when I want to jot down anything.

I've used products like Evernote and Notion before. Sometimes I just want to write down a fleeting idea, but other products are becoming increasingly cumbersome and slow to launch.

However, if I'm going to subscribe a plan for it, I'd like some extra features, such as direct voice recording then speech to text or the ability to sketch directly on my phone.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 09:58:21+00:00
> That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing?

You added a bunch of stuff in front which isn’t substantiated as being an effect of private equity or unique to it.

Most complaints about PE tend to boil down to complaints about, in the extreme, private ownership, and in the specific, leverage or non-local control. Those are legitimate complaints that attach to PE. But not necessarily. And in some cases, not in most cases.

> it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time

Sure. They get the multiple. They can now build more.
by FabHK | 2025-12-08 09:58:25+00:00
Indeed. The crypto crowd seems to assume that the options for your savings are cash or bank deposits, or crypto. That's nonsense. A balanced portfolio of stocks (with some bonds maybe to reduce vol and improve your Sharpe Ratio) handily beats inflation. Heck, even bonds alone have mostly had positive real yields.

This also supports and funds the productive economy, unlike crypto.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-08 09:59:09+00:00
A CPU made with ALUs like 74181 would take alone a PCB of ATX or eATX size densely populated with integrated circuits and consuming much more power than an entire computer consumes today, while being slower than a tiny microcontroller with a cost of less than a dollar, which also includes enough memory for a practical application.

I call such a CPU as not useful.

It can be a very useful experience to design such a CPU, but you can simulate the design in a logic simulator and you gain nothing by building it.

As a valuable computer building experience, it is more useful to use much older components than digital integrated circuits, where you can see nothing without special instruments, e.g. you can build interesting computer blocks, like adders, registers, counters etc., made with electromechanical relays or with neon glow lamps, where you can see with your eyes how they function.
by tralarpa | 2025-12-08 09:59:24+00:00
I searched a little bit and found these numbers for t-shirts in a 20 foot container:

- Shipping container from China to the US: $3000-$9000 (tariffs?)

- Number of t-shirts per container: 35000

How much heavier are jeans than t-shirts? 10 times? That would mean an increase of $2.50 if container shipping costs double.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-12-08 10:00:29+00:00
Do we know that for a fact? You described them as a "web development consultant", but I couldn't tell for certain what their exact role on this project was. Their services page (https://www.nicchan.me/services/) lists both "Web Application front-ends" and "translate your designs into a scalable system", so I think they offer a range.
by ozgung | 2025-12-08 10:01:04+00:00
For Flash vs iPhone case, it was indeed mostly politics. People were using Flash and other plugins in websites because there were no other alternative, say to add a video player or an animation. iPhone was released in 2007 and app store in 2008. iPhone and iPad did not support then popular Flash in their browsers. Web experience was limited and broken. HTML5 was first announced in 2008 but would be under development for many years. Not standardized yet and browser support was limited. Web apps were not a thing without Flash. Only alternative for the users was the App Store, the ultimate walled garden. There were native apps for everything, even for the simplest things. Flash ecosystem was the biggest competitor and threat for the App Store at that moment. Finally in 2010 Steve Jobs addressed the Flash issue and openly declared they will never support it. iPhone users stopped complaining and in 2011 Adobe stopped the development of mobile plugins.

Adobe was in a unique position to dominate the apps era, but they failed spectacularly. They could have implemented payment/monetization options for their ecosystem, to build their own walled garden. Plugins were slow but this was mostly due to hardware at the time. This changed rapidly in the following years, but without control of the hardware, they had already lost the market.
by JosephjackJR | 2025-12-08 10:01:10+00:00
On consistency once the dataset spills off local storage: the entire lattice is fixed-size, block-aligned, and memory-mapped, so the kernel pages it exactly like RAM. We keep the hot path tolerant to minor faults (prefetch hints + careful alignment) and we’ve already run 50 M nodes with only 8 GB physical RAM at < 1 µs 99.9 %-ile. Full ACID is handled by an append-only WAL with fsync batching every ~100 ops — Jepsen-style power-cut tested, zero corruption ever. Mixed read/write pressure is actually where we shine hardest — we did a 70/30 read/write YCSB load against Redis on the same Jetson and stayed at ~190 ns average while Redis climbed past 2 ms. Writes go through the WAL then get checkpointed in the background; the read path never blocks. Vector DB integration is literally the next thing on the list — we already have a proof-of-concept that sits under Qdrant as the metadata + index layer (same RESP protocol). Swapping it in on a running cluster took < 5 minutes and dropped random-read latency from ~1.4 ms to the 180 ns range. Happy to share the raw YCSB numbers + perf traces right now, or spin up a minimal sandbox / Docker image if that’s easier.