MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-12-09 05:53:27+00:00
Is transport the bit that reels the tapes? I watched a YouTube video recently about these that said that it seems all these modern ones are using basically the same mechanism from a PRC factory, and thus the minimum size is quite large.

Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.

Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.

I don't have the video saved sorry.
by culebron21 | 2025-12-09 05:53:39+00:00
If I remember Windows 95/98/XP correctly, these icons were in menus only if there was the same icon on the panel. This would let you see there's a shorter way to do the action.

Right now icons indeed just add clutter.

They also make you think how could the designer depict a concept.

For example, why should "Save" button look like a diskette. What if it was Jesus, like the Christ Redeemer statue. That actually could be a funny game, like in the post, to invent icons.
by dang | 2025-12-09 05:53:54+00:00
This comment breaks HN's guidelines in many ways. Can you please review them and stick to the rules? We're trying for something quite different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. If you meant your comment as an amusing meta play on intolerance, then I'm sorry for misreading. That would of course be much better, but after a bit of wavering I concluded that you actually meant what you were saying here.
by phplovesong | 2025-12-09 05:54:31+00:00
You should not compare bitcoin to "the banking industry", but instead to say a stock. Apple is worth more than the entire crypto industry, but for arguments sake lets say they are the same.

So you should instead compare bitcoin to APL stock. How much energy is APL (and APL alone) stock using? This is hard to measure, but probably a fraction of a fraction of the bitcoin energy use.
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-12-09 05:54:39+00:00
This story should be bigger news on HN not maybe just for the aquihire but for the statement of intent market signal the future has Johnny Ive's vibes both OpenAI and Meta have now poached top people from Apple AVP teams + Meta is increasing focus on the Ray Ban formfactor + neither has a mobile phone hardware ecosystem to fall back on as source of compute so next couple of years progress in VLM, DETR, Splats, etc might be shaped by the new interfaces and I am well psyched up to see where this puck is going !!
by raincole | 2025-12-09 05:55:29+00:00
> that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup

And it's a cancerous engineering principle. People say NullPointerException is the one billion error, but (the misuse of) Postel's Law on web frontend is a multi-billion error. Once one mainstream browser decided to "tolerate" an error, websites would start relying on that behavior, making it a permanent feature of web.

If browsers were less tolerant the whole frontend development would be much smoother. The past decade of JavaScript framework farce would have probably never happened.

The proper way to deal with syntax is making better tools: linters, interpreters and compilers that spew clear error messages. Not trying to 'tolerant' errors.
by zoklet-enjoyer | 2025-12-09 05:55:40+00:00
From what I've heard, that seems to be the case. I suppose that's part of why legit Walkmans are going for so much now. I love cassettes and it would be cool to have a good portable tape player again, but it really can't compete with my phone. Unless we go back to carrying around all the individual things a phone can do. It's tempting but just not as convenient.

I still play around with tapes at home. I have a modded player with speed controls, a couple of decent tape decks, and a 4 track recorder. I have a couple of loop tapes to play around with too. But yeah, as a portable music format, not sure I want to go back to that.
by jochem9 | 2025-12-09 05:56:01+00:00
Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.

The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-09 05:56:06+00:00
>not reliable enough to use blindly

I've been building things with Claude while looking at say less than 5% of the code it produces. What I've built are tools I want to use myself and... well they work. So somebody can say that I can't do it, but on the other hand I've wanted to build several kinds of ducks and what I've built look like ducks and quack like ducks so...

I've found it's a lot better at evaluating code than producing it so what you do is tell it to write some code, then tell it to give you the top 10 things wrong with the code, then tell it to fix the five of them that are valid and important. That is a much different flow than going on an expedition to find a SO solution to an obscure problem.

A good quality metric of your code is to ask an LLM to find the ten worst things about it and if all of those are all stupid then your code is pretty good. I did this recently on a codebase and it's number 1 complaint was that the name I had chosen was stupid and confusing (which it was, I'm not explaining the joke to a computer) and that was my sign that it was done finding problems and time to move on.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-09 05:57:34+00:00
No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the business and political fabric of things and so ultimately able to sustain market shifts.
by jasonjayr | 2025-12-09 05:58:12+00:00
https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-which-settings-s...

According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw)

The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you could keep 8 bits per sample cleanly, but the actual data size would probably be much smaller than that. Keep in mind, besides the mechanical wear and tear, seeking in the digital data would be tricky, the data stream would have to lose some of that raw data size for framing + synchronization marks.
by manmal | 2025-12-09 05:58:33+00:00
I‘ve had a similar feeling before Opus 4.5. Now it suddenly clicks with me, and it has passed the shittiness threshold, into the „often useful“ area. I suspect that’s because Apple is partnering with Anthropic and they will have improved Swift support.

Eg it‘s great for refactoring now, it’s often updating the README along with renames without me asking. It’s also really good at rebasing quickly, but only by cherry-picking inside a worktree. Churning out small components I don’t want to add a new dependency for, those are usually good on first try.

For implementing whole features, the space of possible solutions is way too big to always hit something that I‘ll be satisfied with. Once I have an idea on how to implement something in broad strokes, I can give a very error ridden first draft to it as a stream of thoughts, let it read all required files, and make an implementation plan. Usually that’s not too far off, and doesn’t take that long. Once that’s done, Opus 4.5 is pretty good at implementing that plan. Still I read every line, if this will go to production.
Show HN: Civic Compass – Find which govt offices serve your address in India
by abhikvarma | 2025-12-09 05:58:49+00:00
We built this after someone on Reddit asked "What's the DRO for Koramangala?" (DRO = District Registrar Office, needed for property transactions in India). Turns out there was no way to find this. Bangalore has five DROs but no public mapping of which areas they cover.

We then realised the same problem exists for almost every civic service: ward offices, police stations, electricity boards, water supply. Citizens have no easy way to know which office handles their area.

Enter an address, get all relevant civic bodies for that location. Currently live for Bengaluru only.

Tech stack: Go backend, React frontend. We load GeoJSON boundary files into memory and do point-in-polygon queries.

The main bottleneck to expanding is data. Government boundary data is scattered, inconsistent, and often requires RTI requests. We've included an RTI template in the repo for anyone who wants to help add their city.

Would love feedback on: - Is the UI/UX clear? - Ideas for sourcing boundary data at scale - The API design for adding cities (see CONTRIBUTING.md)

Happy to answer questions about navigating Indian bureaucracy or the technical implementation.
by isodev | 2025-12-09 05:58:55+00:00
I wonder why in every movie about Steve Jobs, he is somehow "inventing" the mp3 player / iPod as a better alternative to the walkman, only to find ourselves in 2025 wanting to buy a walkman and not even knowing what iPod is?

Same for vinyls and CDs btw. Maybe music is more than just a fancy animation of album arts.
by pjbk | 2025-12-09 06:00:05+00:00
Statements like these always brings me to memory the opening line of Hamming's Numerical Methods book: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. It is very easy to get carried away and forget that - in particular today when processing power grows exponentially. Even more when we know there are a myriad of problems that are uncomputable, literally, and human common sense and intuition (insight) are as relevant now as ever.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-12-09 06:01:18+00:00
It's inflation, simple as that. The US left the gold standard at the exact same time that productivity diverged from wages. Coincidence? No.

Pretty much everything gets more expensive, with the outliers being tech which has gotten much cheaper, mostly because the rate at which it progresses is faster than the rate at which governments can print money. But everything we need to survive, like food, housing, etc, keeps getting more expensive. And the asset class get richer as a result.
by masklinn | 2025-12-09 06:02:33+00:00
> No it doesn't.

Yes it does.

> As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)

Either child you was incompetent or your player was very good at error recovery, because I personally saw a number of car CDs thrown out as the car’s stereo was unable to read them anymore.
by ares623 | 2025-12-09 06:02:48+00:00
They’re not very good. As the other comment said, they all use the same mechanism. It gets the job done, but that also means the “premium” models are rip offs. Basically lipstick on a pig, so to speak.

Sadly I don’t see new mechanisms appearing anytime soon. But there is still hope. There have been new film cameras with modern innards recently released.
by martinpw | 2025-12-09 06:03:21+00:00
The article only talks about LA becoming coal free. It looks like there is still a very small amount of coal used in other parts of the state:

https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-10/trump-embraces-dirty-...

coal’s share of California’s power mix would fall to below 0.2% when Intermountain goes offline
by aryehof | 2025-12-09 06:03:22+00:00
> “AI always thinks and learns faster than us, this is undeniable now”

No, it neither thinks nor learns. It can give an illusion of thinking, and an AI model itself learns nothing. Instead it can produce a result based on its training data and context.

I think it important that we do not ascribe human characteristics where not warranted. I also believe that understanding this can help us better utilize AI.
by anigbrowl | 2025-12-09 06:03:51+00:00
What distinguishes an Eames chair on display at the Cooper Hewitt from the same chair on display at MoMA or countless other museums in the world? What distinguishes it from the same chair on display, and for sale, at the Herman Miller showroom?

What, if not the stories that the institutions who collect these objects tell about them?

One of them is near enough to be a visited by me on a day trip. I can understand design museums being essentially franchised showrooms for contemporary culture objects, but I think he asks some reasonable questions about the point of curation and the role of museums in moden society.
by groby_b | 2025-12-09 06:04:06+00:00
Postel was wrong, and it's got nothing to do with tolerance of other people, and everything with solid engineering (or encouraging the absence thereof). It mattered for rapid adoption, it is the curse of any stable system.

But if we must make stretched analogies, I'll give you instead "The Standard You Walk Past" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg

It's making a pretty compelling case that keeping standards matters, "anything goes" is a bad idea, and it does all that in the name of tolerance towards other humans.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-09 06:04:57+00:00
> Fatah knows they would lose an election in the West Bank to Hamas, this is something neither Israel or Fatah wants, hence no elections.

Nice story, but Fatah actually negotiated and agreed to details for all-Palestine elections with Hamas; Israel declined to allow them to occur.

> They tried all-Palestine elections in 2006[0], that backfired spectacularly. Hamas was elected in what were generally considered free and fair elections, pretty hard to get a good election outcome if a majority or at least a plurality of the population wants to elect terrorists.

The US and Israel call all resistance to Israeli occupation terrorism; the PLO (not the Fatah faction but the whole umbrella organization), which is organizationally coextensive with the Palestinian Authority, is a Congressionally-designated foreign terrorist organization which has had Presidential waivers allowing certain interactions since 1993.
by Arrowmaster | 2025-12-09 06:05:10+00:00
So everything I say in this comment is unlikely to have any real impact if you were to replace the cables and retest, but I'm saying it for educational purposes. The reason the specs are strict is not because it cannot be done on less but because the acceptable margins for error and risk are lower in non consumer settings.

That switch does have metal around the ports but I could not find any indication in a datasheet that it designed to accept shielded cables. I also don't know what other devices you are connecting to the switch. Proper usage of shielded twisted pair needs the shielding to make contact to ground on both sides of the cable. I was taught years ago that using a shielded cable with neither side grounded or just one side grounded had the potential to turn the shielding into an antenna and make interference worse than with an unshielded twisted pair cable.

The flat cable is concerning. Flat cables are not part of any twisted pair spec. There tends to be two kinds of flat ethernet cables. The first being completely flat with no twisted pairs at all and the second kind having each pair twisted around each other but then the four pairs are parallel in the falter sheathing. The second kind is better and from the pictures that cable might be the second kind. However 33 meters is very long for a flat cable. Ideally you shouldn't use them but if you have to keeping them very short like under 2 meters is ok.

The pages for the other two cables never even show the cables but what looks like 3d renderings. I personally do not like that and it makes me think less of the vendors. I doubt any of the three cables would pass a full qualification test for Cat7 but they are probably completely indistinguishable from qualified Cat5e (since you are only using 1g) unless you are using them next to high voltage power conduits or next to a high power broadcast antenna. This just comes down to "Cat7 consumer products are a marketing scam."
by davnicwil | 2025-12-09 06:05:47+00:00
thanks! It's something I've batted around with a few friends who've tried it. I agree it's not totally clear.

On desktop, you get a little popover menu with all available formatting when you highlight some text. On mobile, it's always there when you select.

I was thinking along the lines of something like a little help icon (?) that might toggle it on desktop, some sort of overlay that only appears on first use, or just a real simple tutorial video or something. I'll think on it. Thanks for the feedback!
by Nursie | 2025-12-09 06:05:53+00:00
Mine was great too, but it just never took off quite the same, maybe because of price. 'originals' were expensive, and so were recordable discs.

There was also (IIRC) built-in DRM, so you could record digitally from a CD or read-only minidisc to a writeable minidisc, but not then from writeable minidisc->minidisc. Even recording from analogue to minidisc resulted in something that would be restricted.

But this is all just rehashing things that have been talked about many times over the intervening years. They were great, but they never quite made it and then mp3 ate its lunch.
by instagib | 2025-12-09 06:07:14+00:00
I can’t find the exact MDMA study for PTSD but after reading the study participants rejection criteria for it; it seemed like few could qualify.

I saw a new procedure available in Mexico for 8k for psychedelic treatment with Ibogaine. Still schedule 1 like MDMA in USA.

It looks like there has been a few MDMA trials for ptsd even though the FDA denied more widespread testing.

https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-rejected-mdma-as...
by epec254 | 2025-12-09 06:07:23+00:00
I LOVE this, exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Here’s the issue - all my meetings have confidential, sensitive info. I can’t use a version you host (or well, I could, but you won’t be willing to do the 6 month security review I need).

Can you give me a version I can host (or run locally) and I give you some $ one time or per year?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-09 06:08:35+00:00
> credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government. It doesn’t matter at all that there exists cases of government abuse.

What about cases of private abuse? Suppose you're using Paypal or Stripe and they lock your account for no apparent reason. Money you were paid for goods you've already shipped is now locked up, stolen from you, with no explanation or recourse.

> Imagine if the same house buyer bought the house from the scammer using crypto: There would be zero ability, even in principle, to get anything back. Those coins are gone. Even a perfect government with unlimited power could not recover them.

Suppose someone commits fraud by having you send them $50,000 in computer hardware or precious metals or bearer bonds. What happens? The government arrests them, seizes the goods and ultimately returns them to the owner. It's not any different when it's a hard drive with a private key on it instead of a bag of expensive rocks. But then they can't just take your stuff, i.e. reverse a transaction, without due process -- which is good.

Meanwhile the scammer in that case is the property owner in cahoots with the government. If the government isn't corrupt then there is no scam, because then either the person you're paying actually owns the property and having paid them the agreed upon price that is now your real estate, or they don't own it and then when you go to confirm that they actually own the property the non-corrupt government says that they don't and then you don't pay them.

> I’m sorry your country has shit courts and never helps you. Mine does. My credit card company’s fraud department does.

Except when they don't. US banks are not exactly known for their customer support, and their fraud departments don't have the investigative resources of a government. If Alice says she sent the goods and Bob says he didn't receive them, how's the bank supposed to know who's lying without sending them both to court? But every time they get it wrong they're a party to a theft.
by davnicwil | 2025-12-09 06:09:18+00:00
Good shout.

I'm going to give everyone who signs up today full access to everything and access to those features will be grandfathered in to any future plans.

The plans as you see them now are just rough shape anyway just to launch something!

--

UPDATE

alright that should be implemented now, and all existing signups ported (if I got everyone :-)

Everyone is now on the 'Business' plan (full access to everything) on signup
by Atlas667 | 2025-12-09 06:11:35+00:00
"Pariah", they've had the longest embargo on earth (which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths), they had 90% of their whole countries infrastructure bombed by the US, and the Korean war has been called a genocide in the North by many scholars.

The world doesnt make sense if you ignore history.

They probably hack for the same reason the west does it: attack/defense and money.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-09 06:11:35+00:00
Yeap, it comes across as anemoia false nostalgia pining for a "utopia" than never existed. I had Weird Al and Metallica on cassette and a cheap-o, bulky Walkman and Koss Porta Pros. It didn't really ever play at a constant speed and ate batteries like they were free. When CDs came out (which was actually around 1981), they were a million times better, but it took forever to get the Discman down to a halfway decent price and not skip like crazy on the slightest bump. A good example of a portable CD player that worked well was the '94 Sony D-828K Car Discman that also wasn't just for cars.

And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)

Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-12-09 06:12:13+00:00
Maintaining an external database as a replacement takes you off the blessed path, is it's own hassle to maintain high availability, and tarnishes the shiny hyperconvergance story. I'd be a lot more interested if Kine offered an embedded HA database like YugabyteDB, CockroachDB, TiDB, etc.
by setr | 2025-12-09 06:12:44+00:00
I always just used it to confirm your last action on a POST —> GET sequence. Eg confirming that your save went through/rejected (the error itself embedded & persisted in the actual page). Or especially if saving doesn’t trigger a refresh so success would be otherwise silent (and thus indistinguishable from failing to click).

You could have the button do some fancy transformation into a save button but I prefer the core page being relatively static (and I really don’t like buttons having state).

It’s the only reasonable scenario for toasts that I can think of though.
by tadfisher | 2025-12-09 06:13:01+00:00
More than that, HTML5 specifies how browsers handle "broken" HTML. There's a super-precise algorithm that dictates what to do for unclosed tags, how to fix up the DOM for incorrect nesting, specific fallbacks/behavior for invalid attributes, and so much more. I would say this algorithm, along with its element/attribute-specific components, are where most of the HTML5 effort was applied, and continues to be such for newer Web APIs.

Browsers "trying their best" was like half of the Browser Wars, and what HTML5 was largely created to address. The other half being nonstandard ActiveX crap and IE-specific JavaScript.