MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quitit | 2025-12-13 15:08:22+00:00
Yeah it seems odd, and if Apple won't tell him or do anything, it might be because they can't: such as circumstances of an active police investigation.

We are obviously not going to get a fuller idea about this situation from a blog post, and while I won't assume that the author has done anything wrong, there have been similar stories in the past where the affected individual was deliberately withholding the whole, much more illegal, story.

Presuming his innocence: What could have happened here is that the gift card he's purchased has been marked as part of a scam operation. Apple gift cards are frequently used for "tax bill" and "police fine" scams in Australia (where they are sold there is often signage informing people of that.) So potentially this person is accidentally roped into that.

Also it's not entirely unheard of to purchase gift cards for long-time users (who would normally just use their linked credit card), as the cards are often sold in the retail space with a 10% discount, or can be redeemed as rewards through points/loyalty schemes.

With all that said, at this point if he's not getting anywhere, he should approach a lawyer, as they'd be able to petition on his behalf (whether that is to Apple or to the state of Tasmania.)
by bsbdgw33 | 2025-12-13 15:08:23+00:00
We have some training modules at work(large telco) that are essential but are not easy to teach properly without lot of individual attention and supervision. And every year there are more trainees, systems getting more complex etc. Now senior staff dont have to waste their time with all the hand holding and patience testing( trainees dropping out after 3 months of work because they were afraid to ask questions). Its hard to convey what value there is in a system that has infinite patience to sit and hand hold till the trainee reaches the finish line. We are still learning how to exploit that, but it already feels like its going to save a loy of senior staff time.
by kragen | 2025-12-13 15:09:09+00:00
If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.
by stockresearcher | 2025-12-13 15:09:13+00:00
I think they are selling off old stock and exiting the TV business. Searching various sites in the US shows only a basic 50” 4K TV. A few years ago, they had a very wide variety of offerings - I bought a 65” 4K dumb TV from them. Amazon (US) shows a wide variety of available-to-buy computer monitors, so that is probably their focus at the moment. It’s probably a lot more lucrative.
by gregben | 2025-12-13 15:10:11+00:00
I'm currently (mostly) living in Emacs with a few shell buffers and using gptel to interact with Anthropic, Google, and Open Ai LLMs, as well as running smaller LLMs locally. This is after decades of vi, then vim, then Emacs. Still a neophyte though given the enormity of the Emacs "ecosystem". One critical thing about Emacs: Running an Emacs daemon (for days or weeks between restarts) takes things to an entirely different level. It becomes a useful operating system. The key for me was moving from mutt to mu4e for email. Once I moved my email management into Emacs things improved dramatically, productivity-wise. Oh, and what made me switch to Emacs from Vim in the first place was org-mode.
by chuckadams | 2025-12-13 15:10:18+00:00
There's a lot of different decisions to make with every individual widget, sure, but I was talking about political boundaries, not physical ones. My point is that it's possible for a single team to make decisions across the stack like whether it's primarily server-side, client-side, or some mashup, and that stuff like l10n and a11y should be the things that get coordinated and worked out across teams. A lot of that starts with keeping hardcore True Believers off the team.
by somehnguy | 2025-12-13 15:10:19+00:00
I still think the value prop is dubious for a device like this.

> turn stuff on or off remotely

Why? Nearly all modern humidifiers have a sensor to measure humidity and will cycle on and off based on the setpoint. Getting to the setpoint also takes time so I don't see any reason someone would want to turn it on and off based on presence.

> (turn on/off based on outside sensors or the current electricity price...)

Not sure why the outside sensors would matter, it's concerned with the inside humidity which again it has a sensor to read. The amount of electricity these take to run isn't worth even mentioning.

> get status alerts ("tank empty, refill")

So you can refill it remotely? You have to be present to fill it anyway - just look at the thing and you'll know its water level

I say all this as someone who also run Home Assistant and automates various things.
by csomar | 2025-12-13 15:10:53+00:00
> I now do not trust any bank.

It baffles me how much this community is opposed to Bitcoin (and fails to delimit it from the rest of the crypto-scams on going) when, for me, it is existential. When you go through 1-2 experiences of bank-freezing and you realize your life is literally at stake here, the abstract debates about energy consumption or speculative bubbles feel like they come from completely misinformed individuals.

It's like watching someone on a rail track arguing not knowing what is about to hit them.
by Zigurd | 2025-12-13 15:11:30+00:00
Fusion will be slow to commercialize. Proof of concept is going to be much harder than for fission reactors. But if and when POC is attained, building commercial fusion reactors will not have as nearly much project risk, much less waste management risk, no proliferation risk, and much less financial risk in decommissioning. If you screw it up you can expensively damage your reactor, but you don't spread fallout, and you don't have to guard your waste like it's plutonium.

Neither fission nor fusion are going to put any juice on the grid before the AI bubble resolves, and then the financial calculations will be totally different.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-12-13 15:12:28+00:00
> Now am I supposed to bundle up all those 450 initial applications that got filtered out just to send them a nice polite email that their resumes didn't even fit the position they applied for? From a pure business perspective this is a straight waste of time.

It's not paper, dude. It's a Select-All operation and then a matter of removing the one person who you did choose to hire. It doesn't have to be personalized. That straw-man is a pure invention of your imagination. A rejection email that says, "You didn't get the job. We hired someone else." as coarse as it is, would be infinitely less insulting, stressful, discourteous, etc. than just flat-out ghosting.

There's no complex "automation" to set up. This is something that programs since the 90s have been able to do.

You could argue that this doesn't align with the software/workflow that you're using, but that's on you (and if this is your actual dayjob, you have no excuse, and the article's and other commenters' remarks about basic lack of respect and human decency are spot-on).
by hansvm | 2025-12-13 15:13:12+00:00
Nice. I was looking at building an object store myself. It's fun to see what features other people think are important.

I'm curious about one aspect though. The price comparison says storage is "included," but that hides the fact that you only have 2TB on the suggested instance type, bringing the storage cost to $180/TB/mo if you pay each year up-front for savings, $540/TB/mo when you consider that the durability solution is vanilla replication.

I know that's "double counting" or whatever, but the read/write workloads being suggested here are strange to me. If you only have 1875GB of data (achieved with 3 of those instances because of replication) and sustain 10k small-object (4KiB) QPS as per the other part of the cost comparison, you're describing a world where you read and/or write 50x your entire storage capacity every month.

I know there can be hot vs cold objects or workloads where most data is transient, but even then that still feels like a lot higher access amplification than I would expect from most workloads (or have ever observed in any job I'm allowed to write about publicly). With that in mind, the storage costs themselves actually dominate, and you're at the mercy of AWS not providing any solution even as cheap as 6x the cost of a 2-year amortized SSD (and only S3 comes close -- it's worse when you rent actual "disks," doubly so when they're high-performance).
by andai | 2025-12-13 15:13:36+00:00
>"But Joy had followed me back because she was curious, you know, and she was standing in the hallway. We turned around, and Joy says: 'Needs work,' and turned out and walked away."

This part reminded me of the Black Triangle (2004):

https://archive.ph/qqOnP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698753
by vladms | 2025-12-13 15:13:39+00:00
We do have resources inefficiently allocated (too much accumulation towards one end of the scale), but "shifting" those to the rest will have its challenges, people are complex and sometimes unreasonable (for example: there is housing available but people prefer living badly in a place where they feel they have a chance at some point to live better - big cities usually - rather than villages with few opportunities)

I feel that saying "we have the resources" ignores the difficulty of allocating them better, which is the hardest part. Compared to 20 years ago we have amazing software tools and hardware capabilities, and still many large projects fail - it's not because they don't have the resources...
Show HN: High-Performance Order Matching Engine in C++20 (2.2M ops/SEC)
by kpiyush8826 | 2025-12-13 15:13:47+00:00
I built this to explore low-latency C++ patterns.

It uses a sharded architecture (one thread per symbol group) to avoid mutex contention during matching. Recently moved to int64_t fixed-point pricing and added memory compaction to prevent leaks in long-running processes.
by kibwen | 2025-12-13 15:13:54+00:00
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption

Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-13 15:14:20+00:00
Not at all, cross platform means executing the same application in many platforms, regardless of the hardware and OS specific features of each platform.

Cross-compilation is useless if you don't actually get to executed the created binaries in the target platform.

Now, how do you intend to compile from GNU/Linux into z/OS, so that we can execute the generated binary out from the C compiler ingesting the code written in GNU/Linux platform, in the z/OS language environment inside an enclave, not configured in POSIX mode?

Using z/OS, if you're feeling more modern, it can be UWP sandboxed application with identity in Windows.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-13 15:14:34+00:00
Yes they do. Someone got banned for Cuba sanctions [1], others I don't know the context [2], and for others media attention is enough [3].

[1] https://www.onlinehaendler-news.de/recht/urteile-entscheidun...

[2] https://www.sbs-legal.de/blog/update-sbs-legal-erwirkt-zwei-...

[3] https://www.test.de/Leserfall-Wenn-Paypal-ein-Kundenkonto-ei...
by mrweasel | 2025-12-13 15:14:35+00:00
> the page was written by ChatGPT

I wonder in that's why it's all over the place. Meta engine written in Zig, okay, do I need to care? Gateway in Rust... probably a smart choice, but why do I need to be able to pick between web frameworks?

> Most object stores use LSM-trees (good for writes, variable read latency) or B+ trees (predictable reads, write amplification). We chose a radix tree because it naturally mirrors a filesystem hierarchy

Okay, so are radix tree good for write, and reads, bad for both, somewhere in between?

What is "physiological logging"?
by watwut | 2025-12-13 15:15:38+00:00
Pope did some little Hitler criticising, just not enough and Vatican kept neutrality. Meanwhile catholic priest Tiso became a president and literally presided over killing of Slovak Jews and their persecution.

Today you have catholic priests openly promoting semi fascist politicians and parties. Pope is taking side in that too.

You dont see people who want pope to be super neutral take issue with these. You dont see them take issue with Vance using his catholicism to tie his policies to catholicism.

What US is doing now is not an abtract politics eith no tie to religion - they claim to speak for European christianity. If pope stay silent, it will ve taken as confirmation.
by lapcat | 2025-12-13 15:16:34+00:00
> That sentence smells like AI writing, so who knows what the author actually thinks.

The author has been a professional writer since long before LLMs were invented: https://hey.paris/books-and-events/books/

LLMs were trained on books like the ones written by the author, which is why AI writing "smells" like professional writing. The reason that AI is notorious for using em dashes, for example, is that professional authors use em dashes, whereas amateur writers tend not to use em dashes.

It's becoming absurd that we're now accusing professional writers of being AI.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-13 15:17:01+00:00
If you are HN you know how to RTFM, I guess.

The Fix: Lock it Down:

Go to Settings > Screen Time.

Tap Turn On Screen Time (if not already on) and set it up for your child.

Tap Use Screen Time Passcode and create a passcode that the child doesn't know.

Go to Content & Privacy Restrictions (under Screen Time) and turn it on.

Tap Allowed Apps (to disable camera/other apps if needed) and Change Restrictions.

Under Content & Privacy Restrictions, find Date & Time Changes and set it to Don't Allow Changes or Require Password.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-13 15:17:13+00:00
Well, see, we learned nearly a century ago that when someone aggressively expands and you give in to them to maintain "peace in our time", you don't get peace for very long. You wind up with more dead bodies, not less.

Fighting when it's needed leads to more dead this week than abject surrender would cause, but if history is any guide, it leads to fewer dead bodies this decade.
by schiffern | 2025-12-13 15:17:34+00:00
>we introduce the Collision Realization And Substantial Harm (CRASH) Clock

The needless forced backronym is another clue. It's Cargo Cult technical writing.

Why did this need to be a (badly done) acronym at all? It's a countdown to a collision, a collision clock, but of course "crash" (in all caps no less) sounds worse, and science writing needs sciencey acronyms don't ya know...
by luke5441 | 2025-12-13 15:17:45+00:00
Germany ate the captialism/markets/privatization for everything bug. If one wants to be optimistics it is that we are currently figuring out how to construct competitive markets (e.g. Flixtrain/Austrian/French rail is starting to compete on the rail network managed by DB).

In the decades they converted the German rail service (DB) into a stock company (AG) that is 100% owned by the state. The plan was to make it profitable then IPO it. So DB started to stop investing in order to become profitable short term. It never became profitable, so couldn't be floated. Now it also has a large infrastructure neglect debt on top (and is still 100% owned by the state with this weird structure with a CEO).

If it were a startup, one would just let it fail (creative destruction). Since it is obviously critical infrastructure, they should really have thought of this before. But same could be said about banks before 2008.
by manquer | 2025-12-13 15:17:56+00:00
It does not.

Power purchase agreements are priced differently and usually written to guarantee power at a predictable price, think of it like reserved instances and spot on the cloud. Bulk of workloads don’t care or benefit from spot pricing.

Also Modern neoclouds have captive non grid sources like gas or diesel plants for which grid demand has no impact to cost. These sources are not cheap but DC operators have not much choice as getting grid capacity takes years . Even gas turbines are difficult to procure these days so we hear of funky sources like jet engines.
by njarboe | 2025-12-13 15:18:03+00:00
"Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things, one of the strangest was telling me that I could physically go to Apple’s Australian HQ at Level 3, 20 Martin Place, Sydney, and plead my case."

This does not seem strange to me and could be a course of action. When I moved my domains off Google because of this type of "banned without recourse" possibility, I found a registrar that had a physical address, small office, and people listed on the company website (porkbun) so in the worse case I could fly to the office and straighten things out.

No mention of even going to an Apple store. Maybe the nearest one is very far away from him?
by sgerenser | 2025-12-13 15:18:24+00:00
That’s not an accurate summary of the article. The problem was that Kodak stuck to the photography business for too long. As the article states, in the early 2000s they were the number one seller of digital cameras. It just turns out making consumer digital cameras was a “crappy business” as their CEO went on to say. Fujifilm diversified into healthcare, cosmetics, and making LCD display films.
by bwfan123 | 2025-12-13 15:19:04+00:00
My father passed many moons ago, and the family wanted access to his icloud account and they did not have the password. This was a huge struggle. Finally, after weeks, we were able to reset the password, but only because we had access to the email he used. In retrospect, perhaps it is a good thing that Apple restricts access like this for privacy and security. But in this digital age there should be other mechanisms in scenarios like this. What if i wake up from a coma, and forgot all my passwords and have not recorded them physically anywhere ?
by mcv | 2025-12-13 15:19:28+00:00
You don't care that massive unaccountable corporations control all our data, devices and connectivity, and can lock us out of all of that on a whim or accidentally, and refuse to fix the problem?

This could happen to anyone. It can happen to people trusting Apple with their data, to people using Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other big cloud platform.

This deserves everybody's attention, and also a massive lawsuit to force these corporations to treat our data more responsibly.
by vladms | 2025-12-13 15:19:52+00:00
Depends though what you mean by "do not use Google". Having an Android phone with a Google account logged in will not affect you much. If they would block one account you just create another.

Having all your emails on Gmail and used for external services (bank, insurances, etc) is a different story though. I prefer to pay my email provider, at least they will care a bit more than they do for a free account...
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-13 15:20:17+00:00
Those ads are optional. You can just pay for it. Its actually pretty good value for the money.

Edit: I forgot to mention Family Link. Once you have a family membership (maybe even before?) You can also use Googles family link to enable a restricted mode that hides adult content for specific accounts.

You actually get a pretty great experience for the whole family for about $20/month.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-13 15:21:42+00:00
Exactly, it's a to easy to when people go "Simply set boundaries", "just do this", "use this". A lot of parents don't have a resources, either in terms of mental, energy, resource, knowledge and what not to fight and protect their children from things that are designed to be addictive, hell most of them are stuck in the same hell as their kids.

Not acknowledging that this stuff is hard, and being made unnecessarily hard by commercial interest show a lack of understand and respect for the situations. These also aren't bad parents, they try, but it's an uphill battle for many.
by tekchip | 2025-12-13 15:21:49+00:00
For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor account on the other end receiving that money and required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds) which requires keeping a balance. These are the people having big problems when their account gets locked and their funds are no longer available. The blow back does potentially effect you if you return an item and then the vendor can't issue the refund because the account is locked.
by kragen | 2025-12-13 15:22:55+00:00
It would be very surprising if that were true, given the LWIR emittances in the NASA paper cited in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212591.

I totally believe that you can get significant percentage improvements with the right mix of particle sizes, but the LWIR emittance of just about all nonmetals was upwards of 75% the emittance of an ideal blackbody. That puts a ceiling of about ⅓ (4:3) on the possible improvement on that end. And plain old whitewash has a reflectivity upwards of 90% in the visible, while the best known materials, such as polished silver, are something like 96%, so you might get 3:2 on that end—but probably won't even get 2:1. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/bulletin/07/nbsbulletinv7n... is one older reference on this, but https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=90... gives plots of silver mirrors' reflectance by wavelength, polarization, and angle of incidence.

As a side note, what people have been painting their houses with for thousands of years isn't normal milled limestone; it's slaked lime, which forms limestone by absorbing CO₂ from the air over about a month. Modern whitewash has milled limestone mixed into it, but the morphology of the final surface isn't very similar to milled limestone in a transparent binder.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-13 15:23:18+00:00
I don't understand where the definitions of the highlighted terms comes from. The plugin one makes sense, but the one for "meta" doesn't really seem to, especially in the context of the sentence it's used in, or the reference to `get_post_meta` below:

> Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.

Did AI generate and insert these "helpful" definitions?
by losvedir | 2025-12-13 15:23:41+00:00
Not sure how relevant it is, but I finally decided to dip my toes in last night and write my first agent. Despite paying for ChatGPT Pro, Claude Pro, etc, you still have to load up credits to use the API version of them. I started with Claude, but there was a bug on the add credit form and I couldn't submit (I'm guessing they didn't test on MacOS Safari, maybe?). So I gave up and moved on to OpenAI's developer thing.

Maybe they should do less vibe coding on their checkout flow and they might have more users.
by wozzio | 2025-12-13 15:24:23+00:00
I've been consulting on EKS/GKE cost optimization for a few mid-sized companies and kept seeing the same pattern: massive over-provisioning of memory just to be safe.

I wrote a simple CLI tool (bash wrapper around kubectl) to automate diffing kubectl top metrics against the declared requests in the deployment YAML.

I ran it across ~500 pods in production. The "waste" (allocated vs. used) average by language was interesting:

Python: ~60% waste (Mostly sized for startup spikes, then idles empty).

Java: ~48% waste (Devs seem terrified to give the JVM less than 4Gi).

Go: ~18% waste.

The tool is called Wozz. It runs locally, installs no agents, and just uses your current kubecontext to find the gap between what you pay for (Requests) and what you use (Usage).

It's open source. Feedback welcome.

(Note: The install is curl | bash for convenience, but the script is readable if you want to audit it first).