MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschild | 2025-12-30 11:20:40+00:00
You get of what you put in. (Sort of)

I had a lot of good books that I finished reading and wouldn't realistically touch again.

Whenever I went to browse for some books I would leave one of them in exchange. Over time, the quality went up because other people started doing the same.

To be honest, I did curate the available books at it as well.
Obvious crap (self-published conspiracy theory stuff) was thrown out. At some point you will also have to simple throw out some old ones if they never get taken. Space is limited and a 50 year old book that is collecting dust is not useful to anyone.
by maccard | 2025-12-30 11:20:51+00:00
> I personally find them easy to ready anyway, with tools like delta[1] which make things super nice to read. Also if you use a text editor such as neovim you can integrate these things into your editor and get beautiful diffs right there.

All I can see here is “if I use two extra tools, I can almost have as good an experience as vscode (or IntelliJ or whatever) gives me out of the box”.
by knorker | 2025-12-30 11:21:04+00:00
If you think this is about snobbery, then I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood the problem.

This is more comparable to color being turned off. Sure, if you're completely colorblind, then it's not an issue. But non-colorblind people are not "snobs".

Or if dialog is completely unintelligible. That's not a problem for people who don't speak the language anyway, and would need subtitles either way. But people who speak English are not "snobs" for wanting to be able to understand dialog spoken in English.

I've not seen a movie filmed and played back in high frame rate. It may be perfectly fine (for me). In that case it's not about the framerate, but about the botched interpolation.

Like I said in my previous comment, it's not about "art".
by wolvoleo | 2025-12-30 11:21:19+00:00
Yes Mac is the exception. They still have a real app there. On windows they're discontinuing the real app for an electron one (or Webview2 as they call that)

It's unfortunately just a webview to their cloud outlook. If you have an account that's not with Microsoft they will pull your entire mailbox into their cloud (though they don't charge for it). Just pulling directly from another mailserver is something they don't care about.

I'm surprised the search is so bad on Mac too. But spotlight has degraded a lot. When it first arrived in tiger it was great but when I was last on Mac 3 years ago it was indeed pretty bad.
by w4rh4wk5 | 2025-12-30 11:21:47+00:00
This was a relatively old project that used a C program as build system / meta generator. All you needed was a working C compiler (and your shell to execute the first line). From there, it built and ran a program that generated various tables and some source code, followed by compiling the actual program. The final program used a runtime reflection system, which was set up by the generated tables and code from the first stage.

The main reason was to do all this without any dependencies beyond a C compiler and some POSIX standard library.
by pm3003 | 2025-12-30 11:21:53+00:00
The EU law applies, but companies get out of it by:

- encouraging you to take multiple tickets (so you can't claim compensation on the whole trip and becaise of missed transfers).

- saying it's not their doing (DB specialty).

- in some cases accepting an "alternate schedule" (typically by changing your ticket at the company's suggestion) will void any claims.

In some cases you have better chances hiring a taxi for 2000km and forcing the company to pay.

On the opposite, on (very expensive) French TGVs you get compensation starting at 30 minutes delay (connections counted) whatever the reason and SNCF will do their utmost to bring you to destination or ensure you get accomodation.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-30 11:22:51+00:00
Mad genius stuff, this.

However... scripting requires (in my experience), a different ergonomic to shippable software. I can't quite put my finger on it, but bash feels very scriptable, go feels very shippable, python is somewhere in the middle, ruby is closer to bash, rust is up near go on the shippable end.

Good scripting is a mixture of OS-level constructs available to me in the syntax I'm in (bash obviously is just using OS commands with syntactic sugar to create conditional, loops and variables), and the kinds of problems where I don't feel I need a whole lot of tooling: LSPs, test coverage, whatever. It's languages that encourage quick, dirty, throwaway code that allows me to get that one-off job done the guy in sales needs on a Thursday so we can close the month out.

Go doesn't feel like that. If I'm building something in Go I want to bring tests along for the ride, I want to build a proper build pipeline somewhere, I want a release process.

I don't think I've thought about language ergonomics in this sense quite like this before, I'm curious what others think.
by sdoering | 2025-12-30 11:22:52+00:00
This. Exactly this. Even relatively well working tools (from my experience and for my project types) like Agent OS are no guarantee, that Claude will not go on a tangent, use the "memory files" the framework tells it to use.

And I agree with your sentiment, that this is a "business field" that will get eaten by the next generations of base models getting better.
by gethly | 2025-12-30 11:23:22+00:00
I didn't say it would not run and I am happy that Go is being used in gaming like this. But it's like buying a Koenigsegg and using to to drive into your near by grocery store as concurrency is at the heart of Go and having it run on a single core, or rather, i assume, thread, is not the best use case for it.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 11:23:49+00:00
I'm not sure, skimmed the article and came across this:

> She cannot open a bank account anywhere in the world or have a credit card, because she has been placed on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of the U.S. Treasury Department, which targets money laundering and terrorism.

Are you saying this isn't true then? She's not actually on OFAC, but instead just targeted via Visa/MC?
by puzzlingcaptcha | 2025-12-30 11:23:52+00:00
I have my own travel story involving DB. I had a ticket for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt am Main to Warsaw. When I tried to check-in online a day before the flight it told me I had to do it at the airport. I fly a bit, so I knew what that meant - they overbooked the flight. The next day I got my "no aircraft entry guaranteed" boarding card of shame at the airport and learned at the gate that they overbooked the plane by three persons! After explaining my EU passenger rights, I got them to confirm my €250 compensation and since I was in an adventurous mood headed for the Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof train station.

The manned DB Travelcenter was still open so I walked in and asked for an international ticket to Warsaw. The gentleman (who spoke fluent English) typed a bit on the computer and told me he cannot sell a ticket for the Berlin-Warsaw leg of the journey due to a "system error on the Polish side". I knew that probably meant the Berlin-Warsaw-Express is at full capacity again and they don't sell tickets with no seat indicated for that route. I asked for a ticket to Berlin instead (€207, 2nd class) and went for a hamburger - still had about an hour until the train.

The train was initially supposed to arrive delayed 5 minutes but that was soon to change. The delay kept ticking up to 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour (around this time the DB travelcenter closed for the night) then two hours then cancelled altogether. I wasn't sure if my ticket is valid for the next train (the DB website was a bit vague about that) so I called my friend in Hamburg who confirmed I was good to jump onto the next train which would arrive on schedule in another three hours. I tried getting a Capri-Sun from a vending machine but it got stuck and wouldn't fall out. So I sat at the empty station with noting but rats as company until 3AM when the next Berlin-bound train arrived on time. In Berlin I got out at Sudkreutz and jumped onto a FlixBus to Poznań (€22) and stayed the night over at my friend's place (I badly needed a shower at that point) before taking a train to Warsaw the next day (€16, 2nd class).

Now, I technically did eventually use my Frankfurt-Berlin ticket but I was quite annoyed at DB so I applied for a reimbursement due to a cancelled train, which was granted in full. I also applied for reimbursement of the plane ticket from Lufthansa which was also granted. With the additional €250 compensation for denied boarding I actually made money on that little adventure but I probably wouldn't do that again. Gotta check in earlier from now on.
by ben_w | 2025-12-30 11:23:53+00:00
My experience moving to Germany from the UK in 2018 was only one step harder than that from bureaucracy — two appointments, one for social security and the other for an ID card. Not even that I had a much poorer grasp of the German language than I realised was a problem*, as the bureaucracy is mostly bilingual and when it isn't has interpreters.

The only actual hard part was just that the rental market in Berlin has vastly more demand than supply.

* hopefully next month I pass a B1 exam, which tells you how hard it has been for me to get fluent.
by 0xreskue | 2025-12-30 11:24:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the technical half of a two-person team. I partnered with an English teacher (1.5M followers) to build a voice-first language learning app.

The goal was to solve the "Intermediate Plateau". Most apps (like Duolingo) are great for vocabulary, but they gamify the process so much that users become addicted to "streaks" rather than actually speaking.

*The Experiment (Dev + Creator):*
We have $0 marketing budget. I handle the product/engineering, he handles the distribution. We are betting that "Product + Audience" is enough to compete with VC-backed giants.

Stack:

- Mobile: React Native (Expo). We needed to ship iOS and Android fast with a single codebase.
- Voice: 11Labs. We cloned the partner's voice. The main engineering challenge is minimizing latency to make the conversation feel natural (we are currently optimizing the stream buffer).
- Logic: OpenAI (Custom system prompts for roleplay scenarios like "Job Interview" or "Customs Officer").
- Backend: Supabase.

We launched few days ago after getting rejected 10 times in 14 days.
We were stuck in a loop with Design Guidelines for the Paywall. Imo they were not checking the updates as I was not submitting a new build (it was handled by RevenueCat), I had to textually explain that for them to approve the app.

I’m happy to answer questions about the React Native <-> 11Labs integration, the latency challenges, or the partnership structure.

PS: If you want to try it, this link gives 50% off the first month: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6755333340&c...
by wiether | 2025-12-30 11:24:24+00:00
As a Todoist heavy user, I was intrigued by their switch to Superlist.

According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy

Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features.

So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.
by lorenzhs | 2025-12-30 11:25:39+00:00
Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)
by MrSkelter | 2025-12-30 11:25:40+00:00
This is a common misconception. Commons are well maintained in healthy societies. Over extraction being punished by the group.

Moreover private owners optimize for wealth under capitalism, not preservation. Look at why oil companies want to do to the sea and arctic. Or the replacement of Amazonian forest with pasture for beef grazing.

African countries suffer under the poverty created by colonial extraction of both resources and people, followed by being charged for the privilege of having their resources taken, and saddled with unpayable loans. Those loans also placing them in a position where they are forced to allow western countries to continue to extract, and are prevented from protecting their national interests.

If Africa was allowed to own its wealth and develop without negative interference (assassinations, extraction, the world bank, foreign militaries) it would be the richest region on the planet.
by diarrhea | 2025-12-30 11:27:10+00:00
> git on the command line is the power tool. The VS Code plugin is the training wheels version.

I don't disagree with your underlying point, but git is perhaps the worst example. It is a horrible tool in several ways. Powerful yes, but it pays too large a price in UX.

I've only ever used git through the CLI as well, but having switched to jujutsu (also CLI) I am not going back. It is quite eye-opening how much simpler git should be, for the average user (I realize "average user" is doing some heavy-lifting here -- git covers an enormous number of diverse use cases).

What jujutsu-CLI is for me (version control UX that just works) might be VSCode's GUI git integration for other people, or magit, or GitButler, or whatever other GUI or TUI.

Who cares about training wheels? If the real deal is a unicycle with one pedal and no saddle, I will keep using training wheels, thank you very much.
by znpy | 2025-12-30 11:27:55+00:00
I love this.

The main components of my home infra is a smart-managed ethernet switch (Zyxel GS1900E) and an HP Microserver Gen8. I also have some thinkcentre tinys.

I'm really interested in the server cabinet, if I can fit my ethernet switch in there I might pull the trigger and buy the same cabinet!
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-30 11:27:56+00:00
> Then got myself the local residence card one morning

Well, exactly. Some countries require/required registration and residence card. That did not exist in the UK when it was in the EU, you just showed your passport/ID card when you needed to prove your right to be there (basically once in a blue Moon). Even now EU residents don't have any physical documents.

The National Insurance number @pdpi mentioned is unrelated as everyone has one once they work and an appointment is not always required to get one, and you can actually start working before you get one.

If you work as an employee there is also usually nothing to do regarding tax.
by mschild | 2025-12-30 11:28:10+00:00
The web search feature isnt great.
With the bridge youre unecrypting the emails and letting Thunderbird have full access so its as good as whatever Thunderbird (or other programs) have implemented.

Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-30 11:28:24+00:00
It is certainly possible that AI is the one great disruptor that we can’t adapt to. History over millenia has me taking the other side of that bet, seeing the disruptions and adaptations from factory farming, internal combustion engines, moving assembly lines, electrification, the transistor, ICs, wired then wireless telecommunications, the internet, personal computing, and countless other major disruptions.
by sethammons | 2025-12-30 11:29:01+00:00
It means that if you zoom out, things look more similar. Similar patterns, similar problems and solutions, but different components.

All the various shades of red are all red. All news is engagement bate (if it bleeds, it leads), but every piece of news is different. You are in a forest in region X and I am in a desert in region Y, both could be dealing with the same problem of keeping warm at night. It's all different, and yet still the same.
by denysvitali | 2025-12-30 11:29:25+00:00
At least in Switzerland banks can choose to not use Play Integrity, but they generally don't want to.

Yuh, which once was owned by both Postfinance and Swissquote, works without Play Integrity. Support for GrapheneOS is confirmed - see https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/is...

The real issue is that most "legacy" banks have to comply with stupid regulations that force them to come up with these stupid solutions.

Banks are lazy and find the quickest way to comply with said regulations - simply by enabling Google Play Integrity.

About the whole US thingie - yes, that's true, and it's what happens if you get sanctioned. I'm pretty sure russians (and other people from sanctioned countries) have similar limitations elsewhere.
In Switzerland US nationals have huge problems in opening accounts because of the whole bank secrecy law that allowed many americans to hide money from the IRS in Switzerland.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-30 11:29:33+00:00
They want to get there (embedded ads that look like content), but right now it's not so easy - how can they confirm to the advertiser that the ad was seen? What are they gonna do? Put in a 700-character long link in the conversation?

I'm pretty certain that the ChatAI providers want to show ads, but until they can bill for it, they aren't going to.

At some point the billing will work, and then they will.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-30 11:29:44+00:00
I would advise against it. Hanging your entire personality onto a single nail like it's a hat. Bad practice in general, and it goes double for when the nail you're trying to hang it on is a mental disorder.

If you admit that "autism sucks in the contemporary environment", then, it's pretty clear that there would be people that have it and would want to be rid of it - if only they had that option. Currently, the options they have are "seethe" and "cope" - not a good place to be in. This alone would be enough of reason to look for a cure.

And then there are all the people who lose the "autism lottery" - and end up on assisted living for the rest of their lives. The short straw is really short - you could try an "autism is not a disorder" speech on them, but, not all of them are capable of communicating.

This, too, would be a reason in itself to look for a cure to autism. Unfortunately, what was discovered so far makes an easy solution extremely unlikely.
by DamonHD | 2025-12-30 11:29:44+00:00
Prefix your title with "Ask HN: "?

I spent my whole 'career' creating small start-ups, usually with no money, and made it to (early, kinda) retirement, so it can be done. I often did consultancy on the side to help.

I am no sort of amazing success, but if you'd like to chat further in private you can contact me through the info in my bio.
by dugmartin | 2025-12-30 11:30:26+00:00
We have a small local company that takes bulk book (and cds, dvds, video games, vinyl records) donations. That company has couple of retail used bookstores and also sells both retail and wholesale online but, according to their owner, most of what they get is sold for pulp.

My wife is an elementary school reading teacher and runs a yearly family book night where she takes book donations she gets all year and fills a bunch of portable tables in the gym with kids (and adult) books that are free for the taking. What is left over is taken (by me) to that local company and dumped in huge bins. If you are looking to get rid of a bunch of books I'd also suggest contacting your local schools to see if they take donations.
by flumpcakes | 2025-12-30 11:30:52+00:00
> Just the other day ChatGPT implemented something that would have taken me a week of research to figure out: in 10 minutes. What do you call that speedup? It's a lot more than 10x.

Can you share what exactly this was? Perhaps I don't do anything exciting or challenging, but personally this hasn't happened to me so I find it hard to imagine what this could be.

Instead of AI companies talking about their products, I think the thing to really sell it for me would be an 8 hour long video of an extremely proficient programmer using AI to build something that would have taken them a very long time if they were unassisted.
by jemmyw | 2025-12-30 11:31:30+00:00
It's a code editor. It's not that much more complex than vim. It doesn't do magic to your codebase that makes development different. I've written plugins for vim, neovim and VSCode... VSCode at least has well documented interfaces for everything (edit: well ok not everything, there are some difficult gaps in the docs), and it's pretty clear how things work under the hood. Neovim is fine too, lua is nice. Vim plugins I didn't enjoy much.
by wolvoleo | 2025-12-30 11:31:56+00:00
It depends on the country. And Spain is not as simple as you say. Even getting the NIE is very difficult due to the foreign police not making enough appointments available. And expensive immigration agencies hoarding those appointments to make money.

Then you need a social security number exist is different than the NIE, you need empradonamiento, you need to register with the health service and you need to set up your tax if you're going to work here (or if you live there more than 180 days of the year)
by barishnamazov | 2025-12-30 11:32:02+00:00
I have worked in monorepos for large codebases. In those, file trees are completely useless because you can't fit the repo layout to your mind. Also, the file trees are so large that when I'd ask a coworker using VSCode to open a file, they'd usually take a few seconds trying to locate it (on remote ssh, it even takes a bit to load files to expand directory as well).

For smaller code bases, I usually read the repo first and I'm able to learn what exists while working through it.
Ask HN: Does enterprise GenAI adoption come from constraint, not intelligence?
by genum_Lab | 2025-12-30 11:32:25+00:00
Most GenAI discussion still centers on making models more capable — more creative, more general, more “intelligent.”

But while working on enterprise automation, we’ve been arriving at a different conclusion:

Enterprise adoption seems to come from constraint, not intelligence.

In practice, over 80% of enterprise data is unstructured: emails, documents, messages, transcripts, speech-to-text. When LLMs are used freely on this data, results are hard to trust or automate.

We’ve had more success applying strong constraints and what we’d call weak semantic grounding: using LLMs to detect predefined business signals and map them into fixed, verifiable outputs.

Dates.
Events.
Entities.
Status changes.

Under these conditions, LLMs start behaving less like reasoning engines and more like semantic infrastructure — predictable, testable, and usable in real workflows.
This insight also changed how we think about tooling. At Genum AI, we’ve been treating prompts as code: versioned, tested, regression-checked, and deployed like software. That discipline made the constrained approach workable in practice.
We’re not claiming this replaces creative or open-ended GenAI — it feels complementary. But for automation-heavy environments, this seems to be where things actually scale.

Curious to hear from others here:
- Have you seen constrained LLM setups outperform open-ended ones in production?
- Is this just a modern take on classic NLP, or a new category enabled by LLMs?
- Where do you think this approach fails?

Looking for honest feedback and counterpoints.
by Zak | 2025-12-30 11:32:35+00:00
Probably not, because whatever Google is calling its remote attestation scheme this week (SafetyNet? Play Integrity?) has a way to check where the app was sourced and whether it has been altered.

Google is an asshole for making this. When Microsoft first proposed a scheme like that for PCs under the name Palladium, everyone knew it was a corporate power grab. Somehow, it got normalized.