MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sph | 2025-12-18 10:28:24+00:00
I made a Show HN once, for my project. It provided a lot of eyes, users, and useful comments. But as it often happens, the first time I posted it it got lost into the cacophony and no one cared. I reached out to the mods, asked if I could qualify for the second chance pool [1] and my project had, finally, a chance in the spotlight.

Hacker News is too large. There's too many people and honestly not many hackers. The voting system is silly. What rises to the top is the common denominator, not what is truly interesting to any niche.

Another thing to know: a post with too many comments vs upvotes will be sent to the shadow realm. This is claimed to help deal with hot-button topics, but I've seen many interesting post that suffer the same fate because people have a lot of interesting things to share. I've seen it happen on a post about Forth of all things, with the greybeards coming to chime about something few care about, and it got hidden pretty quickly. Given the numbers, this will be the fate of your post as well.

Only dang knows how this place works. You can get an inkling of its working by being here a while and piecing it together from his comments.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
by gaigalas | 2025-12-18 10:29:31+00:00
What I truly enjoy is software that has:

- One tiny piece of extremely clever abstraction.

- A huge amount of simple pieces that would be more complex without that tiny piece.

In other words, the clever abstraction can be justified if it enables lots of simplicity. It has to do it right now, not in the future.

If your kernel is complicated but writing drivers is simple, people won't even notice the abstractions. They will think of the system as "simple", without realizing there is some clever stuff making that "simple" possible.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-12-18 10:29:35+00:00
I understand, it’s not a direct contract, but they’re infringing on copyrighted material to create their software and not following what they agreed.

Expecting to benefit from copyright in their own product while ignoring the license of all the products they used, that’s what bothers me, it’s hypocrisy. It’s open sourced software, free like speech, not like beer.

PS: I didn’t vote on any comment.
by piker | 2025-12-18 10:29:49+00:00
I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does take a long time to ship stuff. That said, he pulls off some compelling games with relatively minimal resources.
by piazz | 2025-12-18 10:30:39+00:00
Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk.

https://smart-notes.xyz

Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.

It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-12-18 10:30:48+00:00
> These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.

This is not really your average front-page at the moment, and in fact it feels significantly more geared towards curiosity and less towards commercial interests compared with the usual. Partly because it's the holiday slow down but you see the same effect on weekends, which is telling. And IMHO hacker news is consistently more curious when America is sleeping.

HN desperately needs tags, which would serve everyone well, whether you're really here for curiosity or for all the corporate news. I'd really like to be able filter out most of the stuff for "working professionals" even if it is still legitimately technical (for example the recent docker and github news). What I usually want is all the hobby tech / PLT / open-source / science / learning-oriented stuff that's left over after that filter. I can imagine various reasons why forcing a "feed" style front-page is advantageous to some people.. but let's just say it's not about promoting curiosity.
by dvh | 2025-12-18 10:31:08+00:00
There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?
by pjc50 | 2025-12-18 10:31:14+00:00
It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden.

UK: OFCOM are phasing out the fax support requirement https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infra...

(I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more")

Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
by komali2 | 2025-12-18 10:31:20+00:00
> When teenagers aren’t trusted to walk over to a friend’s house or play in the park, when they almost never have a part-time job where they can earn a paycheck and meet expectations that aren’t purely artificial, then I think it’s much harder for them to have a realistic, non-algorithm-driven worldview and concrete life goals they can work toward.

This, and the car-centric design of the American suburb, I think are leading to an increasingly alienated generation of kids. I grew up in suburbs and I couldn't even safely bike to my friend's house because the sidewalk would randomly end before arriving at his neighborhood, and the stroad next to it was at 45mph speed limit (thus in Texas: 60mph) and mostly filled with massive pickup trucks that probably couldn't even see me. So, my options before my parents got home were to play WoW and browse 4chan or do my homework, and if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan.

Imo this resulted in me developing an "internet personality" aka "being a piece of shit." I was into manosphere stuff, mildly zenophobic, incredibly transphobic, and insufferably cynical. Getting to college and seeing the disgust on people's faces when I'd drop a 4chan joke was a complete culture shock to me. Took me a good 2 years to adjust to "normal society," by then I also had to overcome a reputation as an asshole.

I can't even imagine what it's like for kids like me these days now that there's full on weaponized Discords trying to convince them to shoot up schools for the lulz. At least on 4chan that kind of stuff got banned or mocked.
by pnt12 | 2025-12-18 10:32:02+00:00
There's a python course in plursight that I loved, it's quite the deep dive into the language and I learned a lot.

One day I was looking for it and couldn't find it - turns out it was archived and ranking much lower in search, because it was a handful years old. But apart from some syntactic sugar, the new python versions don't change the course that much!

I found it: Python Fundamentals + Beyond the basics + Advanced, all retired. Highly recommend for someone who wants to get proficient at the language. And a big thanks for Robert, these videos really helped me get become "the python expert" at my last 2 companies.

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire
by bayindirh | 2025-12-18 10:32:49+00:00
I have a pretty firm grip on life and touch plenty of grass both literally and figuratively.

However, when something I care about crashes and burns once in a blue moon, I make sure to put the fire out, at least to make it survive till regular hours. Things I care about can be both business and personal, and nobody bugs me for them.

Maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about people we don't personally know, while we are at it.
by mulle_nat | 2025-12-18 10:33:54+00:00
Nice, but it's too late I needed a different API for future use in my custom sprintf so I made mulle-dtostr (https://github.com/mulle-core/mulle-dtostr). On my machine (AMD) that benchmarked in a quick try quite a bit faster even, but I was just checking that it didn't regress too badly and didn't look at it closer.
by rsanek | 2025-12-18 10:33:58+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bl...
by andix | 2025-12-18 10:34:21+00:00
I was surprised by the same thing, a tool I run that uses Next.js without me knowing before.

I noticed this, because Hetzner forwarded me an email from the German government agency for IT security (BSI) that must have scanned all German based IP addresses for this Next.js vulnerability. It was a table of IP addresses and associated CVEs.

Great service from their side, and a lot of thanks to the German tax payers wo fund my free vulnerability scans ;)
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 10:35:19+00:00
I'm not drawing evidence or making an argument in some parliament, it's an offhand comment about a common behavior I keep seeing repeated, basically me sharing a pattern I seem to notice every now and then.

I'm not trying to claim every American only care about money, only that when Americans compare countries, they tend to compare monetary values like GDP, gross salaries or other similar values, and your weekend hack (cool at it is) fitted that pattern I've seen before.

Again, obviously not all Americans are the same as each other, then elections wouldn't be needed for starters, and I'm sorry if my comment came off as dismissive or harsh, it really wasn't my intention, I just aimed to share a reoccurring pattern I come across.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 10:37:58+00:00
> ChatGPT has personalization settings that you can use to set part of the system prompt

That's not true, which field do you believe this to be? Because all of the fields I currently see in ChatGPT do have an effect on your conversations, but they're not just raw injections into system/developer prompts, it's something else.

Try using the API with proper system/developer prompts, then copy-paste that exact same thing into ChatGPT's "personalization settings" and try to have the same conversation, and you'll get direct evidence that it isn't actually the system prompts, but they're injected somewhere into the conversation.
by hi_hi | 2025-12-18 10:38:07+00:00
I just want to say I found this quite an insightful comment. I similarly would love to use a pay-as-you-go pricing model as a way of safely trying out various SaaS services.

Unfortunately I feel it is not in the SaaS businesses interests, who want to replicate the gym membership model where the 70% who don't use the service are supplementing the other 30% who use it frequently.
by braza | 2025-12-18 10:38:14+00:00
The only potential aspect that might be bad at least for me is that, even with Udemy having a bigger variance in terms of general quality Coursera will impose it course aesthetics, rigidness in the syllabus, and bring a lot of people not in the market to give the courses.

I like the idea of having some professor of high credential US university given lectures about the things in some accessble way and I think this has a huge value, but at least for me, since Udemy is more about tactical courses in 10 out of 10 times I will go with the person in the market that pulled a course que a great and non-exhastive content bringing all the tips and tricks of the market, even if he/she does not make the bad in the background.

I do not see those 2 things co-existing if Coursera impose it.
by palata | 2025-12-18 10:38:16+00:00
Copyleft licences "care about the user" as in "as a user, I want you to be able to patch the code you run so I enforce it in my licence". It's a different philosophy from permissive licences that say "companies can use them in their closed, proprietary product, I just want them to mention somewhere that they use my code". Note that more often than not, those using permissive licences don't even bother to follow that simple rule.

As a user, I'm happier with copyleft. I like to take my Marshall smart speaker as an example: that thing doesn't get any updates, ever. But it connects to the Internet. The app absolutely sucks, the connectivity is passable at best (often frustrating), but the hardware itself is nice (it looks nice in my living room and the sound is good when it works).

If all the open source software running inside that thing was GPLv3, Marshall would have to provide me with a way to patch it. So at the very least I could make security updates myself. But because Marshall used permissively-licenced dependencies, they locked it down in such a way that I can't do that.

The permissive licence helped Marshall, but for me as a user, the code may as well be proprietary.
by p_l | 2025-12-18 10:38:59+00:00
After going through a bunch of docs and making sure I had the right reference.

The "legacy" part of Vulkan that everyone on desktop is itching to drop (including popular tutorials) is renderpasses... which remain critical for performance on tiled GPUs where utilization of subpasses means major performance differences (also, major mobile GPUs have considerable differences in command submission which impact that as well)
by jstimpfle | 2025-12-18 10:39:27+00:00
I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games.

Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked

> But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.

What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-12-18 10:39:53+00:00
Of course I could in C.

Intel and Nvidia are both offering both C and Fortran compilers, so I was looking at both. I know C well but I decided to not look at it as a presumed default.

When I used C like this in the past, the intrinsics were very low-level, e.g. wrapping specific Altivec or SSE instructions or whatever. I see see it has OpenMP intrinsics, though, which I’m sure I’ll try later.

If I use a library, I’m breaking up the operations and don’t give the optimizing compiler an opportunity to take operations into account together.

With Fortran, I can give the operations directly to the compiler, tell it the exact chip I’m working with and it deals with it.

It would be fun, when I have some time, to go rewrite it in C and see how it compares.
by ncruces | 2025-12-18 10:40:01+00:00
Most/all of those are individually automated.

Someone checks that they ran successfully, and vouches for it.

Automating the automation can be counter productive.

Like the release process is triggered automatically by a tag, then fails after an hour long sequence of complex steps, which forces you to re-tag, but by then your tag is out there.

Or, simply, it's a bad idea to run the entire process from scratch, but you automated it such that it's easiest, so you fix something about it and the only way to test the release process itself is to release, and you now need half a dozen releases to get it right.
by reedf1 | 2025-12-18 10:41:17+00:00
> Around 35% of American families have been investigated by CPS

What??

> Fully 50% of Black voters in our poll agreed that allowing a 10-year-old to play unsupervised at a park for a few hours was grounds for a CPS call. 33% of white voters and 37% of Hispanic voters said the same.

I am speechless. Has so much changed in the 20 odd years since I was a kid? I was playing outside unsupervised from maybe age 9. What honestly are the kids supposed to be scared of?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-18 10:41:35+00:00
I don't think that's it.

There's definitely a kind of frenetic adversity in the whole college admissions process, at least for kids who are inclined to go that route. If anything, it has gotten much worse over the past 30 years; it's much more stressful than it used to be, and it's easy for teens to imagine that every little thing carries high stakes.

If by "adversity" you mean helping the family put food on the table, I certainly agree that there's less of that. Today we have more weird, more detached, and less rational forms of adversity.
by donatj | 2025-12-18 10:41:46+00:00
The utter rent-seeking audacity of charging by the minute for action runners you run on your own server...

Charge a flat fee per Action, sure. There is a tiny cost on GitHub's part associated with the API calls for starting and stopping, but if my build takes 8 hours on a self-hosted runner there is no more cost to GitHub than it taking 10 seconds.

That's the whole point of self-hosted runners.

Maybe there was more outrage elsewhere, but I was frankly confused at the seeming lack thereof here on Hacker News.
by johnisgood | 2025-12-18 10:41:46+00:00
Why were you scrolling, what were you scrolling for? Were you trying to fill some void? :D

I do scroll on Instagram, but it was mainly to share some reels with my girlfriend, no other purpose. It was not addiction. I tend to forget to check hers (which she does not like so I try not to), and when I check hers, I look at some reels to send back, then I close the app.

I did scroll on Facebook when I started using it recently, and it might be leaning towards the addiction side, but I stopped myself from doing it because it is a waste of time and I realized everyone is arguing there, and their arguments are horrendous. I feel like were I to read it all day it would dumb me down.

But yeah, I think the best move is to not play at all. Use Facebook only when you absolutely must. Same with anything else. If you have Discord, you may use it for discussions, whether technical or not, but it can be just as addictive as the other website.
by palata | 2025-12-18 10:41:51+00:00
It also has an impact on contribution. In my experience with small open source projects, if I licence my library permissively, people will almost never contribute or open source anything. They will gladly ask for bugfixes and features, though.

If I use a copyleft licence (I like EUPL or MPLv2), it doesn't mean that they will open clean PRs, but at least they have to publish their changes in their own fork. It has happened to me that I could go read a fork, find a few things that were interesting and bring them back to my project.

With permissive licences, the risk is that those (typically businesses) who keep their fork open source probably don't see a lot of value in their fork, otherwise they would have made it private, "just in case".
by Syzygies | 2025-12-18 10:44:06+00:00
> However, I have questions: "Turns out the quantity they needed exists, but couldn't be described in their notation" What is this about? Sounds interesting.

There are hierarchies of numbers (quantities) in mathematics, just as there are hierarchies of patterns (formal languages) in computer science, based on how difficult these objects are to describe. The most widely accepted hierarchy is actually the same in math and CS: rational, algebraic, transcendental.

In math, a rational number is one that can be described by dividing two integers. In CS, a rational pattern is one that can be described by a regular expression (regex). This is still "division": Even when we can't do 1-x or 1/x, we can recognize the pattern 1/(1-x) = 1 + x + x^2 + x^3... as "zero or more occurrences of x", written in a regex as x*.

In math, an algebraic number is one can be found as a root of a polynomial with integer coefficients. The square root of 2 is the poster child, solving x^2 - 2 = 0, and "baby's first proof" in mathematics is showing that this is not a fraction of two integers.

In CS, an algebraic pattern is one that can be described using a stack machine. Correctly nested parentheses (()(())) is the poster child here; we throw plates on a stack to keep track of how deep we are. The grammars of most programming languages are algebraic: If the square root of math is like nested parentheses, then roots of higher degree polynomials are like more complicated nested expressions such as "if then else" statements. One needs lots of colors of plates, but same idea.

In math, everything else (e, Pi, ...) is called trancendental. CS has more grades of eggs, but same idea.

One way to organize this is to take a number x and look at all expressions combining powers of x. If x^3 = 2, or more generally if x is the root of any polynomial, then the list of powers wraps around on itself, and one is looking at a finite dimensional space of expressions. If x is transcendental, then the space of expressions is infinite.

So where were the Greeks in all this? Figuring out where two lines meet is linear algebra, but figuring out where a line meets a circle uses the quadratic formula, square roots. It turns out that their methods could reach some but not all algebraic numbers. They knew how to repeatedly double the dimension of the space of expressions they were looking at, but for example they couldn't triple this space. The cube root of 2 is one of the simplest numbers beyond their reach. And "squaring the circle" ? Yup, Pi is transcendental. Way out of their reach.

When you have a hammer you see nails. When you have a circle you see doubling.

Yes, this is all Galois theory.
by TrackerFF | 2025-12-18 10:44:17+00:00
I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends.

Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurricular activities.

Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate, at the same time. While many kids, both teens and younger, reporting that they're not getting enough space.
by tbensky | 2025-12-18 10:45:17+00:00
https://www.youhere.org: "Want to know who showed up?" is the tag line. It's an app-based attendance service for teachers/coaches/band directors/conference organizers, etc. I'm a teacher and it scratches an itch I had (students not showing up to class). Been hitting the $500/month more and more often now (even after server fees).
by sokoloff | 2025-12-18 10:45:34+00:00
I might need four different (distinct) roles filled but only have budget for three employees. I’d be prone to advertise (and genuinely recruit) all four roles, and hire the first three that I find a good fit for, delaying the fourth until/if additional budget frees up.

I might be willing to hire for two different levels of seniority/experience, but only one xor the other, not both.

Or be willing to hire for a role in Boston, London, or Zurich, but only one of those.