MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hattmall | 2025-12-18 07:15:32+00:00
It's a hard sell because most self employed and middle income people actually had reasonable insurance and then the ACA completely screwed them. Sure single payer and universal coverage would be great but how could you trust Democrats to do it when the last healthcare bill was basically one of the worst things to ever happen to the country. ~95% of people that don't work for insurance companies would be better off under the previous system. Just expand Medicaid to include people unable to get insurance due to pre-existing conditions and eliminate coverage maximums, or just say anything over 2 million in a year goes through Medicaid.

The ACA is just a huge transfer of tax payer money to insurance companies.
by dizhn | 2025-12-18 07:15:35+00:00
The only way I've envisioned fail2ban to be of any use at all is if you gather IPs from one server and use them on your whole fleet and I got it running like this for a while. Ultimately I decided that all it does is give you a cleaner log file since by definition its working on logs for attacks/attempts that did not succeed. We need to stop worrying about attempts we see in the logs and let software do its job.
by rozenmd | 2025-12-18 07:16:35+00:00
I run OnlineOrNot - https://OnlineOrNot.com

It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)

I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.

Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.

Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
by edent | 2025-12-18 07:16:50+00:00
Do you want to know a secret?

Sometimes my friends post on social media platform A "Hey, I've just posted on platform B. Upvotes appreciated."

Or a newsletter will say "please share this post on…"

Or people on Discord / Slack / Matrix will say "people are being mean to me on platform C, where are my defenders at?"

HN feels organic - and is pretty well moderated - but it isn't immune to family & friends giving something an initial boost.

But if no one wants to discuss it, the post will falter.

As for the other levers, it is hard to say. Sometimes the posts I've worked hardest on with the most detail just die a death. But the half-finished thought casually tossed off will Do Numbers. Outrage sometimes works, but it is a fickle friend to tame. Catchy titles aren't clickbait (despite what some people say) but they work best when they are descriptive.

And, finally, people can and do resubmit stuff. What doesn't work at 0900 Monday will be popular at 1700 Tuesday. Why? That's just the way it is.

In the end, it is all luck. But, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get.
by kinj28 | 2025-12-18 07:17:16+00:00
What I meant was there are collection of genes responsible for error correction. If there is a failure in duplication then these genes have not done their job.

Thought experiment, again as a layman, was to see if these genes responsible for error correction at the base level can be fixed or bolstered and that will act like a cancer vaccine. But looks like from other comments that this is even more harder!
by defen | 2025-12-18 07:17:21+00:00
> I never understood there is a relationship between quadratic equations and some kind of underlying mathematic geometric symmetry.

In a polynomial equation, the coefficients can be written as symmetric functions of the roots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta%27s_formulas - symmetric means it doesn't matter how you label the roots, because it would not make sense if you could say "r1 is 3, r2 is 7" and get a different set of coefficients compared to "r1 is 7, r2 is 3".

Since the coefficients are symmetric functions of the roots, that means that you can't write the roots as a function of the coefficients - there's no way to break that symmetry. This is where root extraction comes in - it's not a function. A function has to return 1 answer for a given input, but root extraction gives you N answers for the nth root of a given input. So that's how we're able to "choose" roots - consider the expression (r1 - r2) for a quadratic equation. That's not symmetric (the answer depends on which one we label as r1 and which we label as r2), so we can't write that expression as a function of the coefficients. But what about (r1 - r2)^2? That expression IS symmetric - you get the same answer regardless of how you label the roots. If we expand that out we get r1^2 - 2r1r2 + r2^2, which is symmetric, which means we can write it as a function of the coefficients. So we've come up with an expression whose square root depends on the way we've labeled the roots (using Vieta's formulas you can show it's b^2-4c, which you might recognize from the quadratic equation).

Galois theory is used to show that root extraction can only break certain types of symmetries, and that fifth degree polynomials can exhibit root symmetries that are not breakable by radicals.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-18 07:18:10+00:00
It's all about balance, in the end. If you do too much of one thing your business will fail. If you don't do enough of another, your business will fail too. And they're the same thing...

The trick then is to do just enough of everything to avoid disaster and to move as fast as you can to get to a realm where you can actually afford to do it right. Most start-ups initially cut corners like it is crunch time at the circle factory, which then usually catches up with them at some point either killing them or forcing them to adapt a different pace. Knowing exactly when to put more or less attention on some factor is the recipe for success but nobody has managed to execute that recipe twice in a row without finding things that no longer work, so it remains a dynamic affair rather than one you can ritualize.

And that's where checklists shine: repeated processes that are well defined and where change is slow enough that the checklists become 'mostly static', they still change but the bulk of the knowledge condensed in them stays valid over multiple applications.
by code_biologist | 2025-12-18 07:18:59+00:00
This consideration reminds me of two other lines of research:

- Producing organisms with capable, healthy mitochondria requires mitonuclear compatibility (mitochondrial genome is from mother, nuclear genome is from both parents, energetic capacity and regulation requires both genomes to coordinate) and evidence is that organisms select highly for offspring that have higher mitonuclear compatibility and more capable mitochondria. Offspring that don't have capable enough mitochondria don't make it to term. For example, mammals are more permissive about mitonuclear compatibility than birds (who have extremely high energetic requirements) so mammals are more fecund, but we're also more likely to get cancer from inefficient mitochondria throwing off reactive oxygen species.

- Chris Palmer, a Harvard medical school MD psychiatrist, put out a book a few years ago hypothesizing most mental disorders as brain metabolic disorders — brain mitochondria problems. I've seen mixed reviews on the hypothesis (which I like) but it sure is interesting.

Taken together these imply: 1) some people get more energy than others at a biological level, 2) that impacts mental health, 3) there are interventions that can improve the energy baseline we each were given (as discussed in Palmer's book/talks).
by nospice | 2025-12-18 07:19:45+00:00
A good portion of it is just pure chance. There are relatively few people patrolling new submissions, and if something doesn't get a couple of upvotes in the first hour or so, it just disappears down the memory hole. So, you'll sometimes lose even if your content is good.

Another part of the equation is topic and tone. There's no sophisticated algorithm, but it's an eclectic forum, so if your post sounds like pure marketing or self-promo, it will probably not make it far. You need to offer something of value to readers, not to you.

An interesting quirk of the system is that people who upvote or comment on stories don't necessarily read them. A lot of HN discussion boils down to people reacting to the prompt in the subject line. There are publications that learned how to game this. I don't think it's a template worth following, but it sells...
by wickedsight | 2025-12-18 07:21:50+00:00
I was applying for a while last year. Spending hours to write a cover letter and then either hearing nothing or getting a canned rejection letter is super frustrating. I've come to the conclusion that putting effort into an application is time wasted, so from now on AI is writing pretty much every single one of my cover letters.

Doing that allows me to send out 5 applications in the time it normally takes me to do 1. Since I've seen no actual correlation between effort and success, I figured quantity will give better results than quality. Of course, I might put in actual effort for an opening that I find really interesting, but that's an exception.
Show HN: A Save Data Calculator for the Roguelike Gacha Chaos Zero Nightmare
by zittur | 2025-12-18 07:22:08+00:00
I kept messing up Save Data calculations in Chaos Zero Nightmare and losing important rewards at the end of runs, so I built a small mobile-friendly calculator to track everything properly.

It runs well on a phone while the game is open on PC and handles tier caps automatically.

Built with Vite + Tailwind.

Feedback welcome: https://www.cznsavedata.com
by layer8 | 2025-12-18 07:22:54+00:00
It’s certainly okay to link to a previous discussion, but “duplicate” implies that you think the present submission shouldn’t exist, and the previous submission doesn’t actually provide any discussion.

The fact that a previous submission didn’t gain traction isn’t usually interesting, because it can be pretty random whether something gains traction or not, depending on time of day and audience that happens to be online.
by lovich | 2025-12-18 07:23:00+00:00
Because some animals are more equal than others and the government has decided that companies are not only citizens but the more equal group.

Half the shit companies do that gets them a fine would land any individual in jail for committing the same action, but we let them get away with just paying it off. Simultaneously we give those organizations the same rights.

It’s a system with three classes of citizen where the rich and corporations have a better right to responsibility ratio and the average human has a much worse ratio
by thoughtpeddler | 2025-12-18 07:24:14+00:00
Look into the emerging literature around "needle-in-a-haystack" tests of LLM context windows. You'll see what the poster you're replying to is describing, in part. This can also be described as testing "how lazy is my LLM being when it comes to analyzing the input I've provided to it?" Hint: they can get quite lazy! I agree with the poster you replied to that "RAG my Obsidian"-type experiments with local models are middling at best. I'm optimistic things will get a lot better in the future, but it's hard to trust a lot of the 'insights' this blog post talks about, without intense QA-ing (if the author did it, which I doubt, considering their writing is also lazily mostly AI-assisted as well).
by jimbohn | 2025-12-18 07:24:24+00:00
>There is absolutely not a one to one relationship between a job and a job ad.

Isn't this a problem? It means companies are wasting individuals' time (hence money), whereas companies are in a better position to hedge the risk. Would it be legal if I started, for example, posting fake apartment ads and not show up (because the apartment doesn't even exist)? Would it be ethical?
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-18 07:24:47+00:00
Let's resolve this right now: It's bad.

No... it's worse than that; it's THEFT, and monumentally offensive. It's time that everyone, EVERYONE stop giving entities a free pass on stealing from us by deliberately wasting our time.

In every aspect of life, every hour of our day, we're being ripped off. From the assholes blocking the passing lane, to "ghost jobs," to non-functioning subscription-cancellation phone numbers and Web forms... people should be going apeshit about the despicable and unpunished theft of our time.
by tikotus | 2025-12-18 07:25:09+00:00
https://cluesbysam.com

I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-18 07:25:11+00:00
HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate, that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely useful. If you're looking at it to try to understand it then you might as well try to understand a rat or a mouse. You won't understand it because it isn't there to be understood, it just is, like any other organism.

The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.

The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.
by wisty | 2025-12-18 07:25:48+00:00
It must fill some purpose though. I doubt it's entirely just marketing in most legitimate companies.

Effectively a/b testing job adds?

Or trying to get a range of candidates so they can find a good fit?

Let's say you have, like, 10 jobs to do but you're only going to hire two people (either loading them up with more work, or internally reshuffling responsibilities, probably a bit of both).

So you advertise for every role in your ideal team, then get the two candidates who plug the most holes, or look like the best fit.

I feel dirty suggesting it, but it probably happens.
by igogq425 | 2025-12-18 07:27:28+00:00
You deny the obvious and argue with superficial platitudes. Show me a country anywhere in the world that is thriving despite being defenseless against the encroachments of a nearby superpower. I can't think of one. If you need more examples, the former Soviet countries near Russia have a similar problem.

Without the Marshall Plan, Germany would probably be an agricultural country with a below-average GDP, just like Ukraine. You would have to be completely clueless to believe that weaker countries can develop freely and independently of the influence of the major powers in whose sphere of influence they find themselves.

If you believe that the differences in economic performance and political stability in different countries have other causes, then say so openly instead of beating around the bush.
by jianzong | 2025-12-18 07:28:46+00:00
I have been building an iOS net worth tracker app as a side project for more than 5 years now:

https://www.percento.app

I was an accountant for 3 years before I switched my career to be a programmer, then I kept coding for 10+ years in big tech companies and had always wanted to build a product on my own. Eventually, I found the niche to combine my finance knowledge and my iOS skills into this App and happily building for a few years.
by da_grift_shift | 2025-12-18 07:29:23+00:00
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves; I asked if that means Apple’s supply chain of Blackhawk Network, InComm, and other gift card vendors is insecure, and he was unwilling to comment.
by cachvico | 2025-12-18 07:29:56+00:00
Hey Dan, I think you're going to love what I've built.

The next release (a couple of days out) displays the relative altitude for all of your buddies - so you can immediately see who's above or below you.

On the iPhone, that info also lives in a Live Activity on the lock screen so you don't have to take your gloves off to see that essential info! (Android lock screen support will be coming right after).

If you'd like to help test the feature out, I'd really appreciate it - just drop me a message via https://pistepal.app/support and I'll link you up with an annual subscription.

Cheers!
by ZuoCen_Liu | 2025-12-18 07:30:19+00:00
Charging for self-hosted runners was always a strategic misalignment. The primary reason teams use self-hosted is not to save money, but for security (VPC access) and specialized hardware (GPUs/ARM). Adding a tax on infrastructure that GitHub doesn't even provide or maintain felt like double-dipping. Glad to see they realized this before eroding more developer trust
by Xylakant | 2025-12-18 07:30:42+00:00
When we post a job ad on LinkedIn, I already get 30 spam answers in the first few minutes, people that have obviously spent not a single second reading the requirements. And you want to further automate this? I’ll just ask my people person to automate the response.

We really try to spend the time to answer every application, but since AI generated applications have become a thing, we have decided to not answer those. Why should I spent time if you haven’t spent the time?
by onion2k | 2025-12-18 07:31:58+00:00
When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.

As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.

If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-18 07:33:27+00:00
> A key part of reviewing a paper is reading it without preconceptions

I get where you are coming from here, but, in my opinion, no, this is not part of peer review (where expertise implies preconceptions), nor for really anything humans do. If you ignore your pre-conceptions and/or priors (which are formed from your accumulated knowledge and experience), you aren't thinking.

A good example in peer review (which I have done) would be: I see a paper where I have some expertise of the technical / statistical methods used in a paper, but not of the very particular subject domain. I can use AI search to help me find papers in the subject domain faster than I can on my own, and then I can more quickly see if my usual preconceptions about the statistical methods are relevant on this paper I have to review. I still have to check things, but, previously, this took a lot more time and clever crafting of search queries.

Failing to use AI for search in this way harms peer review, because, in practice, you do less searching and checking than AI does (since you simply don't have the time, peer review being essentially free slave labor).
by bingo-bongo | 2025-12-18 07:33:43+00:00
Coming from FreeBSD and pf, all Linux firewalls I’ve tried feels clunky _at best_ UX-wise.

I’d love a Linux firewall configured with a sane config file and I think BSD really nailed it. It’s easy to configure and still human readable, even for more advanced firewall gateway setups with many interfaces/zones.

A have no doubt that Linux can do all the same stuff feature-wise, but oh god the UX :/
by dtolnay | 2025-12-18 07:34:12+00:00
In implementing Rust's serde_json library, I have dealt with both string-to-double and double-to-string. Of the two, I found string-to-double was more complex.

Unlike formatting, correct parsing involves high precision arithmetic.

Example: the IEEE 754 double closest to the exact value "0.1" is 7205759403792794*2^-56, which has an exact value of A (see below). The next higher IEEE 754 double has an exact value of C (see below). Exactly halfway between these values is B=(A+C)/2.

A=0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625 B=0.100000000000000012490009027033011079765856266021728515625 C=0.10000000000000001942890293094023945741355419158935546875

So for correctness the algorithm needs the ability to distinguish the following extremely close values, because the first is closer to A (must parse to A) whereas the second is closer to C:

0.1000000000000000124900090270330110797658562660217285156249 0.1000000000000000124900090270330110797658562660217285156251

The problem of "string-to-double for the special case of strings produced by a good double-to-string algorithm" might be relatively easy compared to double-to-string, but correct string-to-double for arbitrarily big inputs is harder.
by da_grift_shift | 2025-12-18 07:34:15+00:00
Update posted at https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/:

Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves; I asked if that means Apple’s supply chain of Blackhawk Network, InComm, and other gift card vendors is insecure, and he was unwilling to comment.
by anilakar | 2025-12-18 07:34:54+00:00
I never truly understood complex numbers until I had to take signal processing in my sophomore year. I had held a technician class-equivalent ham radio license since I was 12 but digital signal processing was pretty much nonexistent in the exams and training material.

It was common knowledge you had to work with filtering and intermediate frequencies because negative frequencies would be reflected along the 0 Hz axis and overlaid on the positive frequencies but mirrored. With complex numbers you suddenly were able to downconvert signals directly to the baseband and keep negative frequencies separate.