MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vessenes | 2025-12-23 23:16:37+00:00
All points well taken for sure. I especially like 'too small to trigger anyone' as an appealing defensive strategy. But I'm not sure you're too small to matter, even now. Hopefully that's received as good news :)

As a thought experiment, I just googled up small Italian tech companies that are publicly traded, and found, for example, DHH - an Italian hosting and content services company trading on Borsa Italiana (Growth I presume, it's a very small company) - earnings of 3.7m euros right now on a slow growing ~30m+ in revenue, market cap of 110m or so as far as I can tell. Were they to add 3.5m in net income to their company, their market cap would likely push to 150+m -- they'd have doubled their earnings. So, it might be worth 50+mm to them (or quite possibly a lot more if they could pair that with some growth and more exploitative margins) to pick this niche up.

To be clear, I wasn't pushing you toward a hyper growth strategy; it wouldn't suit you, and I think the CMS market probably isn't suitable in any event, even if you wanted to.

But, maybe a way to think of it is this, while there is risk in any strategy, it's worth minimizing the risks of any chosen strategy as part of your responsibility to your stakeholders (employees, family, shareholders, customers, self -- choose your preferred order).

In this case, if I were on your board, knowing the infinitely small amount I do about you guys, I'd probably suggest you at least have a structured growth plan in place -- that is, have growth targets, understand how to drive them, and assess success as you go. Nothing about that implies accidental enshittification or cultural rot; just managing this aspect of your business as well. If you haven't been doing that so far, when/if you need these skills, you'll be glad you have them. In the interim exercising them gets you more control of your destiny, whether that's aimed at getting everybody more time off for things that matter or cash or hitting the next 'stable' size of organization -- it's more that the tool is a useful one to develop.

As far as deciding what to do - always the founder's curse/blessing! I'm on the side of developing as much of a toolbox as possible, it just adds optionality. Keep it up!
by WackyFighter | 2025-12-23 23:16:47+00:00
That isn't it. Generally whatever the majority of users tend to use that where the majority of focus goes.

The vast majority of people that were using Linux on the desktop before 2015 were either hobbyists, developers or people that didn't want to run proprietary software for whatever reason.

These people generally didn't care about a lot of fancy tech mentioned. So this stuff didn't get fixed.
by ufo | 2025-12-23 23:17:35+00:00
That was already the case in previous versions of Lua. You could assign to the loop variable but the assignment would be overwritten in the next loop iteration.

https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.3.5

The loop count was fixed at the start of the loop. One of the reasons for this was performance. For loops behave differently if the step count is positive or negative, and it's a bit faster to compute that once, before the loop, than to repeat it every iteration.
by RealityVoid | 2025-12-23 23:18:37+00:00
> There is nothing to prepare for because the only possible war between the USA and China is a nuclear war and such a war has no victor.

I think there are 2 false statements here. First, you could have conventional conflict alone, the same way you had WW2 without extensive use of chemical weapons.

Second, there are possible paths to have a winnable nuclear war, actually, the US did have one a couple of decades ago and it won. I do agree that saying this out loud though is dangerous because the reason for nuclear taboo is also based on the perception of "end of world" it has.
by londons_explore | 2025-12-23 23:18:41+00:00
A word processor can save it's state at an arbitrary point... That's what the save button is for, and it's functional at any point in the document writing process!

In fact, nearly everything in computing is serializable - or if it isn't, there is some other project with a similar purpose which is.

However this is not the case with video codecs - but this is just one of many examples of where the video codec landscape is limiting.

Another for example is that on the internet lots of videos have a 'poster frame' - often the first frame of the video. That frame for nearly all usecases ends up downloaded twice - once as a jpeg, and again inside the video content. There is no reasonable way to avoid that - but doing so would reduce the latency to play videos by quite a lot!
by tim333 | 2025-12-23 23:19:41+00:00
I think the usual thing that any users can flag stories and people try to keep politics out of HN unless it's something unusual.

This probably is - 474 comments currently on this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361024

There are presently eleven 60 minutes censored stories up on HN.

It's been a busy day for Trump related news what with that and some Epstein stuff.
by whstl | 2025-12-23 23:20:41+00:00
That's an old ASP.NET Web Forms / ASPX thing that was IIS-based. IIS would just compile .cs files into a temporary folder when first running. So the first request takes like 5s or something.

It's not the new .NET Core AOT feature, GP was building the DLLs and packaging the website locally.

Not GP but funny enough I ran into a similar problem with a team that also didn't know compilation and was just copy/pasting into a server.
by windexh8er | 2025-12-23 23:20:51+00:00
> There's no good reason to discourage people from writing overlays, unless one is doing so for commercial (i.e., anti-competitive) reasons

Where did I discourage them? I have no vested interest in any competition. And what I said can be publicly validated: their pricing isn't exactly competitive.

> "After years of SSH tunnels, IPsec headaches, and the ssh log horror movie, I wanted something simpler: install, sign in, get work done."

OK, again - they all solve for this. What's different?

> For example, one might be a Layer 2 overlay whilst the other is Layer 3

OK, I've been doing VPNs a long time. What does this have to do with anything?

> If everyone thought IPsec and OpenVPN was "good enough" then Wireguard and Tailscale would not exist

OK. Thanks? This isn't a protocol discussion. This is a product discussion built on existing protocols. Netrinos has brought zero new to the plate comparatively at the underlying level.

> I still use an unpopular non-commercial L2 overlay from before Wireguard existed that is smaller and faster than anything else I have ever seen

A lot of tools like that exist. If it's "unpopular" there's, generally, a reason why. It could be: niche use case, it could be: doesn't solve a majority of people's problem. But since this is such a super secret L2 overlay I guess we'll never know.

> IMHO, the more overlays that exist, the better

This isn't an overlay. This is a VPN as a service - and my question was intentional: why should I even trust Netrinos. This is a VPN.
by rizzom5000 | 2025-12-23 23:20:58+00:00
> fixed someone else's incompetence

This is basically a full-time job for many senior engineers. It may as well be the job description. Thing is, most of these 'leaders' are not capable hiring competent engineers - as if they're capable of identifying competence. You do not want to end up at one of those organizations - but they are everywhere.
by Ayanonymous | 2025-12-23 23:21:21+00:00
It’s not just smart TVs—pretty much every internet-connected device or service today seems to follow the same playbook: wrap a tracking mechanism inside a “convenient” or “personalized” feature. Whether it's TVs, phones, assistants, or even fridges, it’s becoming harder to tell what’s genuinely useful vs what’s just surveillance in disguise. The normalization of this design pattern feels more concerning than any single instance. Anyone else feel like this is just the default architecture of the modern consumer web now?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-23 23:22:11+00:00
That may have been from a generation that’d been out for many months or a year, or was built on a CPU and chipset that’d been out for quite some time already.

The problem is that Linux can’t handle hardware it doesn’t have drivers for (or can only run it in an extremely basic mode), and LTS kernels only have drivers for hardware that existed prior to their release.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-23 23:22:21+00:00
> We need to amend the constitution to guarantee our privacy. It should be a fundamental right.

As far as government intrusion into our privacy, it's addressed by the 4th Amendment's guarantee - that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and that our rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.

The challenge is that courts repeatedly and routinely support and protect the government in it's continual, blatant violation of our 4A protections.

This has allowed governments at every level to build out the most pervasive surveillance system in human history - which has just been waiting for a cruelty-centric autocrat to take control of it.

And for the most part, we have both parties + news orgs to thank for this. They've largely been united in supporting all the steps toward this outcome.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-23 23:22:39+00:00
Nonsense. Not a false claim. Vince died in a car crash here in LA.

LA Times - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-12-22/...

BBC - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx25rled0ylo

NPR - https://www.npr.org/2025/12/23/nx-s1-5653307/call-of-duty-vi...

Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/22/vince-zampel...

Variety - https://variety.com/2025/digital/obituaries-people-news/vinc...
by mxmilkiib | 2025-12-23 23:23:45+00:00
"guiding star" is what popped into my head, search notes that the North Star can be called that, and sailors don't just head towards the North Star, so I guess it kinda works, but "guiding star" has what that phrase means in the name, something to be guided by rather than toward

I also thought "blue skies", but that's more open-ended, just a (nice?) space

(this makes me think of cybernetics vs systems theory, and the "relational turn" with society, but that's enough half-baked thoughts)

((which made me think of https://www.halfbakery.com but this is tangential to the point))
by pengaru | 2025-12-23 23:24:34+00:00
If these things include WiFi hw it's not so simple.

You'd likely be surprised what proprietary WiFi-enabled consumer products do without your knowledge. Especially in a dense residential environment, there's nothing preventing a neighbor's WiFi AP giving internet access to everything it deems eligible within range. It may be a purely behind the scenes facility, on an otherwise ostensibly secured AP.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-23 23:24:42+00:00
There's a variety of reasons, but many of us don't want any of the "smartness" and all of the stupidity that comes with "Smart TV's" these days, but don't really have comparable "dumb" options at similar or cheaper price points. The Telemetry (ACR), unremovable copilot app getting added to LG TV's, or all the Ad's Samsung are cramming into their "smart" garbage are three prime examples, but certainly not the only reasons I hate smart TV's (or really any device marketed as "smart") these days.

Most importantly though, can you even get non-smart TV's these days that aren't super budget items? To my knowledge that's pretty much not a thing anymore (yes there are presentation displays and large format monitors, but that gets into the weeds fast about feature/panel/spec differences, not to mention price differences)
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-23 23:26:17+00:00
Is it though? I have not personally used these libraries, but a cursory google search reveals several options:
- cloudflare/STPyV8: [0] From cloudflare, intended for executing untrusted code.
- Pythonmonkey: [1] Embeds spidermonkey. Not clearly security focused, but sandboxing untrusted code is literally the point of browser js engines.

It's a little less clear how you would do this from node, but the v8 embedding instructions should work https://v8.dev/docs/embed even if nodejs is already a copy of v8.

[0]: https://github.com/cloudflare/stpyv8
[1]: https://docs.pythonmonkey.io
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-23 23:26:26+00:00
Most non-shitty people probably picked it up from Meme stock sub cultures and wallstreetbets

Of course, one should ask themselves why so much of that culture is fed from and feeds into outright hateful people like nazis and Eugenicists and vague wife haters, and conspiracy theorists who "aren't nazis" but sure seem to believe everything is the fault of the jews.

"Gorillion" as I saw it was about the "Ape" context of wallstreetbets discourse. The Ape framing is actually non-hateful, referencing the new Planet of the Apes movies where someone makes a dumb analogy to a bundle of sticks: "Ape together strong"

They are similarly fans of calling people and things retarded, but that was getting reddit itself to nag them. So they switched to "regarded", because they aren't very clever.

Other gems of this community include frequent references to making "wife changing money" and an insistence that after GME totally turns out to not have been a scam and they bring down the entire american economy through literal shenanigans, that they will all collectively be crowned king, and totally won't oppress anyone, but also they relish the expectation that they will be able to smugly say "I told you so" to all the people suffering in their new regime.

They also adore doing the kind of "theory crafting" that is usually done by the most crazy person you know trying to "prove" bill gates did 9/11 because of that wingdings thing from 20 years ago.

But culture leaks, so this person might have just picked it up somewhere.
by metalman | 2025-12-23 23:26:41+00:00
there are various earlier, and perhaps current designs for grass strips, where differnt species mixes, and work are prescribed for different zones, as the ends of the runnways where landings occur can be reenforced, but taxi and take off runns can be less heavy duty.
agricultural colleges were(are?) tasked with this sort of thing.
we have a very large formerly paved airport localy, that has gone back to grass all by itself, and is now mowed, but it generaly only sees light planes, but the underlying gravel bed and drainage systems are still intact, and so could be used for landing a heavy jet in an emergency, but with a number of 9000' paved runways quite close, that has not happened yet.
in any case,the load bearing capacity of different soils and terains is quite well understood, and heavy jets have emergency landed in crop fields unharmed, and then been flown out after some modest preperations
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-23 23:26:49+00:00
> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec

This isn't given. For example the company that makes smart light switches doesn't provide a code entry pad and the company that makes the alarm doesn't provide a light switch. If they were interoperable I'd have a better system. Futhermore they'd both sell more widgets, as I'm holding off on further units in case I find a better third option and end up disposing of my current ones.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-23 23:27:04+00:00
Always interesting when people as talented as Bellard manage to (apparently) never write a "full-on" GUI-fronted application, or more specifically, a program that sits between a user with constantly shifting goals and workflows and a "core" that can get the job done.

I would not want to dismiss or diminish by any amount the incredible work he has done. It's just interesting to me that the problems he appears to pick generally take the form of "user sets up the parameters, the program runs to completion".
by 2001zhaozhao | 2025-12-23 23:27:05+00:00
If I were predicting the bubble to burst and API prices to go up in the future, wouldn't it be much better to use (abuse) the cheap API pricing now and then buy some discount AI hardware that everyone's dumping on the market once the bubble actually does burst? Why would I buy local AI hardware now when it is at it's most expensive?
by enraged_camel | 2025-12-23 23:27:20+00:00
>> Often you will get a request, sometimes (or quite often) you have no idea what is driving it, like for example "reduce rate limiting for xyz service."

At my company, we do not allow tickets that prescribe a solution. A ticket can only describe a problem or a need. The engineer is then responsible for starting a conversation with the stakeholder(s) to discuss which solution might work better for them. They then implement that solution.

I know that larger companies have multiple teams that sometimes create tickets in each others' queues. I think this is a mistake. In multi-team environments, requests should go through some sort of custodian or gatekeeper who is responsible for making sure the problem or need are documented fully. This person can be a product manager or a scrum master. It should not be an engineer, though.
by vessenes | 2025-12-23 23:27:23+00:00
Oooh, I hate this.

"The Earth is a sphere" -> nope

"Water freezes at 32F" -> depends

"Apes and Humans share a common ancestor" -> not a fact, although an extremely likely theory. The site's definition about fact mentions observability. I'd accept "Ape and Humans share 99.x% of DNA, indicating common ancestry" as a fact
Show HN: qckfx – Record your iOS simulator sessions, replay them as tests
by chw9e | 2025-12-23 23:27:36+00:00
I built this because I hate writing tests but I also hate shipping bugs.

qckfx records what you're already doing. You tap through the simulator to check your work, and it replays those sessions to catch visual regressions and crashes. No SDK, no code changes, no test files.

How it works: finish a feature, click around in the simulator, hit Cmd+Shift+S. That's your test. Cmd+Shift+T to run it before you push.

It's free, runs locally, and installs via Homebrew: brew install --cask qckfx/tap/qckfx. I'm a solo dev (10 years iOS, ex-Meta) and this is early. Feedback welcome.

https://qckfx.com
by cosmicgadget | 2025-12-23 23:27:53+00:00
Kavanaugh asking the president to use the cheat code:

> On the current record, however, it
does not appear that the President has yet made the
statutorily required determination that he is “unable” with
the U. S. military, as distinct from federal civilian law
enforcement officers, to ensure the execution of federal law
in Illinois. (The President of course would have great
discretion to make that determination, as the State itself
acknowledges.

And of course Thomlito doing the Fox News routine:

> The Government’s declarations show that U. S. Immigra-
tion and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in and
around Chicago have been the target of unprecedented sab-
otage and violence since June of this year. Hundreds of ri-
oters have converged at the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity facility in Broadview, Illinois, the only intake and
processing center for ICE operations in the Chicago area.
These rioters have been organized, gathering offsite and ar-
riving in vans, then getting picked up several hours later
by vans returning with new rioters. They have arrived
armed with shields, gas masks, protective padding, and
other tools for physical combat. And they have blocked en-
try and exit at the ICE facility, physically assaulted person-
nel attempting to enter or leave work, significantly dam-
aged the building, and vandalized both Government and
personally owned vehicles.
by calderwoodra | 2025-12-23 23:28:02+00:00
In software engineering, "senior" or not usually means you can be trusted to take on certain problems vs. others.

In US primary school (an industry I've never worked in), this might be close to something like teacher, curriculum planner, assistant principal, principal, district supervisor, etc.

As you progress further in your field and hone your skills and knowledge, the scope and impact of your responsibilities should grow.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-23 23:28:28+00:00
> First, I disagree that "user emails can be brute-forced" is a serious security issue.
> I mean, sure, it's a security issue, but on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being "security issue, we'll fix in next point release" and 10 being "All-hands until this emergency patch goes out, and we keep the system offline while fixing it", this is definitely a 1.

Jesus no.

Aside from this now being an argument on semantics, someone enumerating every customer/user account you have is serious.

It opens the door for privacy leaks, targeted attacks (like password attempts, phishing, or account lockouts)

If you don't want to take that seriously, thank you for your honesty, I will ensure that I never have an account on any service you work on.
by whstl | 2025-12-23 23:28:45+00:00
Agree.

If one is unable to work alone but manages to join a new company with an inflated title, people will notice. They're gonna have to keep job-hopping until they find a place that doesn't notice the bad performance anymore.

This is demonstrable by the amount of CVs with "12 jobs in the last 6 years" in my reject pile.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-12-23 23:28:47+00:00
I'm interested: the only one that I can think of that has some limitations is the second amendment? Are there others?

As to the first amendment: Although not equal to that of adults, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that "minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection." Only in relatively narrow and limited circumstances can the government restrict kids' rights when it comes to protected speech. (Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205 (1975).)
by david_shaw | 2025-12-23 23:29:33+00:00
Yes, it's the least reliable. Thanks for summarizing the data here to illustrate the issue.

It's often seen as the "standard" or "default" region to use when spinning up new US-based AWS services, is the oldest AWS center, has the most interconnected systems, and likely has the highest average load.

It makes sense that us-east-1 has reliability problems, but I wish Amazon was a little more upfront about some of the risks when choosing that zone.
by Ayanonymous | 2025-12-23 23:29:40+00:00
The article makes some good points about rekindling a love of reading, but in small spaces like mine it’s not just about motivation — it’s a logistical puzzle. When your bookshelf becomes a stack of teetering towers and you’re living in a rabbit hutch of an apartment, the next “reading goal” becomes “figure out how to store all these books.” Anyone else battling space constraints for your library at home?
by jessriedel | 2025-12-23 23:30:56+00:00
It's quite a bit about that, but it doesn't detract from my point. Mechanical disturbance alone can spread cancer and increase mortality.

"The risk of tumor seeding after liver biopsy is 2.7%"

https://easl.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Hepatocellular-Ca...

Tissue containment systems for
uterine morcellation

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/up...
by enraged_camel | 2025-12-23 23:31:00+00:00
>> So the first request takes like 5s or something.

I haven't worked with IIS in more than five years, but couldn't you change some setting to infinity so the thread never sleeps... or something like that? I remember the "5 second" thing being a problem with commercial IIS apps we deployed, and that's always how we avoided it.