MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Macha | 2026-02-24 17:48:46+00:00
I doubt these card readers would prevent someone leaving the part of their building they’re in, as that’s a lesson written in charred corpses and was a foundational aspect of health and safety becoming a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

In theory it might prevent access to other buildings, but equally often the card readers are around doors of mostly standard glass or near internal windows of the same.

So if that’s the motivation, it doesn’t seem like a particularly effective mitigation
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-24 17:49:46+00:00
> essentially just providing a clock

"providing a clock" is not something to dismiss though. Arithmetic plus looping will give you a Turing machine, so you do need both or you're just showing the ability to do arithmetic.

And a proper Turing machine doesn't need an extra line of template html for each iteration. It's much easier to forgive finite memory, since a small amount of memory can go for billions of years while an iteration limit runs out fast.

This one passes all the bars, but I do think the bars were overall legitimate.

> many still claim that even as much as hovering your mouse on a specific part of the screen makes css not a programming language.

That bar is pretty silly.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-24 17:49:49+00:00
An issue in the chat format is that all these models seem bad at recognizing when they have extraneous information from user that can be ignored, or insufficient information from the user to answer the question fully.

This issue is compounded by the lack of probabilities in the answers, despite the machines ultimately being probabilistic.

Notice a human in a real conversation will politely ignore extra info (the distance to car wash) or ask clarifying questions (where is the car?).

Even non-STEM people answer using probabilistic terms casually (almost certainly / most likely / probably / possibly / unlikely).

I suspect some of this is to minimize token usage in the fixed monthly price chat models, because back&forth would cost more tokens.. but maybe I'm too cynical.
by paxys | 2026-02-24 17:49:53+00:00
Because that is what the SEC was created for, and (in theory) it is their job to protect regular invesors from market risks. Now how effectively that works is a different conversation, but at the very least you have reporting requirements, earnings releases, material disclosures, insider trading laws, SIPC insurance, circuit breakers etc. A regular joe trying to invest in a "private opportunity" meanwhile is absolutely going to be taken for a ride.
by dugmartin | 2026-02-24 17:49:54+00:00
Eons ago I developed a site+Windows app called 24Link (I know, horrible name) that let you run a tiny ~50KB web server in your taskbar and point it as a folder on your machine. If you visited 24link.com/{username} you would get a full page iframe that pointed at your IP:port hosting the 24Link webserver and/or a not available message if the app heartbeat failed. It quickly got to around 50K users and I thought with the then inevitable switchover to ipv6 everyone could run it. Alas both 24Link and ipv6 failed to break out but I think something in that vein could still work.
by mholt | 2026-02-24 17:49:55+00:00
Thanks for sharing this, we like it a lot. Mohammed Al-Sahaf implemented this for us so that releases can be made by a quorum of maintainers rather than being blocked by me every time.

Here's the first release done with it: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/tag/v2.11.0-be...

And you can see the PR flow where the action happens: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/pull/7383
by rectang | 2026-02-24 17:51:23+00:00
Applying cost-cutting analysis as an intellectual exercise...

Airline ticket sales are so price driven that for much of the market, losing some percentage of bags won't change purchase decisions.

I wonder if it's possible to identify which bags are from budget customers and for Kansai Airport to cut corners for those, accepting a certain loss percentage and saving money. It may not be:

> In addition to monitoring bags with sensors, employees also patrol the area to check for dropped bags. According to the airport management company, this additional step significantly reduces the risk of lost baggage.

I think you either patrol for all dropped bags or give up the patrols entirely, assuming that bags from first-class and budget passengers end up in the same area.
by tptacek | 2026-02-24 17:51:47+00:00
No they didn't. They were picky at the seed stage. They were picky in their first priced round. They were picky in every subsequent round. There was never a point where they wanted your money. The most promising companies fight off investors when word gets around they're raising.

There is never a point in the lifecycle of any of these companies where they wanted random retail investors with no network on their cap tables. The kinds of companies that do want those investors tend, for clear reasons, not to be the kind you want to invest in.

You don't want accreditation rules relaxed or eliminated. You simply want Stripe to be a public company instead of a private one. Fair enough, but Stripe doesn't want to be a public company.
by gmd63 | 2026-02-24 17:51:49+00:00
We have a bunch of socially minded people providing free value in the form of open source that enjoy the gift they are giving to others. When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations - who employ people to search for exploits, without fixing them, to suck up as much wealth as possible - I'm not surprised they would want to take a step back and ask for a share of that.

And that's totally fine under the same market mechanics you're recommending. If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.
by markus_zhang | 2026-02-24 17:51:54+00:00
I’d kudos his parents. The parents deliberately brought themselves out of the picture, but as a parent I know how hard it is.

No, I don’t mean it is hard to feed a kid and educate him a bit. That’s like at least 70% of the parents can do. What is remarkable is that they not only found Terence’s interests and nurtured on it, consistently without any major error. God you have no idea how hard it is. So many constellations have to be on the right places. And it’s definitely way more than luck.

For a starter, as a parent of a five years old kid, I always feel I failed and will fail my kiddo. I’m so unsatisfied with my own lives that my mind has to be focused on improving myself other than devoting time for anyone else, including my wife and my son. I know my son has some potential, just like pretty much every kid out there, but I didn’t, and won’t take the time to learn early education and use the knowledge to nurture him properly. I know he has some shortcomings that could use some guidance, but I don’t want to spend months, years to figure that out. I’m swarmed by my own thoughts and needs. That’s why I always tell my friends, don’t get a kid if you are not contend with life —- you won’t have the capacity.

And then there is the question of what to do even if I have enough time. Kids aren’t robots. They don’t automatically do things you want them to do, which is understandable. But when you have to fight for simple things in life, or fight with wife if you don’t always agree on certain things, God it’s such a mess that struggling to live like a normal human being is not a trivial task.

Anyway, I’m really glad that his parents brought out the best of him, and his brother’s too. They should be recognized for that.
by nathan_douglas | 2026-02-24 17:52:01+00:00
I hadn't heard of this before and found it really interesting and entertaining. This reminds me of the Ediacaran and Cambrian critters... where one looks at fossils of things like Hallucigenia and marvels at the different paths that evolution could've taken.

The video called me out when it mentioned that the query language might seem scary or dirty to some of us - and it does! My eyelid twitched when I saw the example on screen - but it's still really interesting to me to think about a database as the source of the OS primitives, rather than an application running within a more standard OS and using the OS's conceptual framing.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-24 17:52:15+00:00
I'm not building a queue, but a lot of things on s3 end up being queue-shaped because it's very easy to compose many powerful systems out of CAS + "buffer, then push". Basically, you start with "build an immutable log" with those operations and the rest of your system becomes a matter of what you do with that log. A queue needs to support a "pop", but I am supporting other operations. Still, the architecture overlap all begins with CAS + buffer.

That said, I suspect that you can probably beat SQS for a number of use cases, and definitely if you want to hold onto the data long term or search over it then S3 has huge options there.

Performance will be extremely solid unless you need your worst case latency for "push -> pop" to be very tight in your p90.
by hmokiguess | 2026-02-24 17:52:27+00:00
I remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff.

Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
by darkwater | 2026-02-24 17:53:02+00:00
> In Google's announcement in Nov 2025, they articulated a pretty clear attack vector. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...

This reeks of "think of the children^Wscammed". I mean, following this principle the only solution is to completely remove any form of sideloading and have just one single Google approved store because security.

> A related approach might be mandatory developer registration for certain extremely sensitive permissions, like intercepting notifications/SMSes...? O

It doesn't work like that. What they mean with "mandatory developer registration" is what Google already does if you want to start as a developer in Play Store. Pay 25$ one-time fee with a credit card and upload your passport copy to some (3rd-party?) ID verification service. [1]
In contrast with F-Droid where you just need a GitLab user to open a merge request in the fdroid-data repository and submit your app, which they scan for malware and compile from source in their build server.

[1] but I guess there are plenty of ways to fool Google anyway even with that, if you are a real scammer.
by onli | 2026-02-24 17:53:14+00:00
Maybe it was like that for a while? But flickr allowed image downloads, there was a dropdown in the UI with the available sizes for years. And it had an API (+stable URLs) to download images.

It's possible they did not allow the way you tried to access images directly, to enable control of the downloads for the photographer. But I think you misjudged the behaviour back then, they were pretty open.
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-24 17:53:18+00:00
These "questions" just seem like a trap/disingenuous. The people "asking" commonly have decided the answer and are just looking to reinforce that by playing "No true Scotsman" with other people's productivity increases.

We have software written in what is essentially an obsolete platform (a RAD solution from the 1990s). We've been slowly hand rewriting it into React. A single developer converts one by week by hand, and the results are good (we still have over a hundred).

We've developed an internal tool to turn the software's definition files into a single XML, and then are feeding it through a multi-process Codex pipeline (multiple instruction files, that product intermediaries), which ultimately outputs a "90%" working React page.

Our developers then PR the output, fix/adjust/test, and release. We've gone from one per week for a single developer, to roughly three per week without a marked quality loss.

It is taking care of most of the repetitive parts of the work, and allowing our developers to spend more time in technology they're familiar with (React) instead of legacy stuff. Is it perfect, no, but the cost/benefit is clear.
by tutorialmanager | 2026-02-24 17:53:58+00:00
Some divorce laws seem to have the goal of being fair on average no matter what happens in many cases. Other laws seem to desire fairness in a few cases while causing unfairness in many more.

In California now, If you don’t understand why there are so many false claims of domestic violence at the beginning of a custody battle you may be in for a world of hurt.

In the case of someone I know, the wife’s notes from a meeting with a prospective attorney included “DVRO=$”

DVRO is Domestic Violence Restraining Order.
For 10 months he only saw his kids with 3rd party supervised visitation costing $100 per hour.
by rurp | 2026-02-24 17:54:07+00:00
That's an incredibly vague standard and courts have repeatedly declined to get involved in second guessing management decisions. Aside from outright fraud or negligence executives can claim almost any business related decision is in the interest of shareholders because they have a reasonable expectation that the future benefits outweigh the costs. Judges aren't going to be delving into financial projections and expense reports to override the leaders of a business.

A widget company could sponsor a soccer team or whatever and say the costs are worth it. Or that same company could not do that and say it's not worth it. Two opposite decisions that both would count as acting in the interest of shareholders.
by sdwr | 2026-02-24 17:54:43+00:00
It's a fine argument, just rough around the edges:

Human brains use redundancy and the physical independence of neurons to build new pathways over time.

Current LLMs have no redundancy and brittle weights. Their technology and architecture fundamentally prevents them from learning.

I think our understanding of consciousness is developing as we build new edge cases. We have a machine that understands and reacts, but can't learn, grow, or "be" over time in a meaningful way.
by wazoox | 2026-02-24 17:55:13+00:00
In 2000 I was in a startup which used yellow and blue colours for all its graphic design (website, app, etc). For a big trade show (IBC Amsterdam) someone thought it would be cool to give away M&Ms, but only in yellow and blue of course ! So we bought many bags of M&Ms, and sorted them out by hand... That wasn't a good use of our time, plus we had tons of red, brown and green M&Ms to eat while working and we were getting diabetic fast.
So Marie called Mars to ask if it was possible to buy only yellow and blue M&Ms for our trade show. And you know what happened? Mars sent us a huge bag of each colour for free !

In the following years, they made it possible to order custom M&Ms (for a price...) and how you can even have your logo on them.
by abathologist | 2026-02-24 17:55:15+00:00
I did a few days of AoC in 2020 in λProlog (as a non-expert in the language), using the Elpi implementation. It provides a decent source of relatively digestable toy examples: https://github.com/shonfeder/aoc-2020

(Caveat that I don't claim to be a λProlog or expert.)

All examples showcase the typing discipline that is novel relative to Prolog, and towards day 10, use of the lambda binders, hereditary harrop formulas, and higher order niceness shows up.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-24 17:56:05+00:00
I don't know. What percentage of HN commenters really have serious aspirations for being a YC founder? 0.01%? 0.001%? Im not sure "What will YC think of me" is really that much of a driver of commenting behavior here.

People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never will. But, there are enough of them and their billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large followings. This is widespread behavior and not about wanting to be a startup founder.
by john_strinlai | 2026-02-24 17:56:19+00:00
if you ignore all the bitter, jealous, and/or obnoxiously pedantic people, kind of? if you mention age in a post (like, sub-18 age), you will get comments about silver spoons and privilege, as well as other comments about how the age of the person shouldnt even be mentioned because it doesnt matter, etc. you also have all of the regular nitpickers, "this is just x but with y" people, etc.

i would not let my kids, at least at their current ages, do a show hn. it is not even close to the same experience as it was/is writing an idea to nintendo or whatever and getting a cool letter back.
by altruios | 2026-02-24 17:56:52+00:00
> We have no cure. I don’t want to know.

This is an incredibly short sighted, fragile-ego protecting, selfish instinct.

Making plans while you are cognizant is valuable, and the sooner you know, the longer and better plans you can make. Making plans with friends and family should be done sooner than later with these kinds of things.

It absolutely helps to personally to know, but people avoid emotional pain like the plague. So they delay and delay and then the emotional pain is amplified anyway when things come to ahead. It really is better to rip that band-aid off sooner... I think.
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-24 17:56:57+00:00
Oh why even mention time constraints, we all know damn well it's financial. Every corp on the face of the earth is constantly cost-cutting everything to the bone to justify more bonuses and higher executive compensation, while making sure the service or products provided are just barely good enough where people don't stage outright riots.

In the sixties, the C-suite earned 21 times what the line worker did. In 2024 it's almost 300 times. So every single time you're dealing with a product that's been value-engineered to where it barely functions, or service people paid too little and empowered too little to actually help you, or stuck in a long ass line because they won't hire enough people, or stuck talking to some damn robot because people are expensive, it's beyond a safe bet that you have an executive or several to blame.
by purple_ferret | 2026-02-24 17:57:07+00:00
Braintree had $1.53 trillion TPV in 2023[0], and it's just a subsidiary of Paypal which has tanked to $40 billion market cap despite revenue and profit that are probably lightyears ahead of Stripe.

Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end.

[0]https://www.paypal.com/us/braintree
by thebitvader | 2026-02-24 17:57:07+00:00
More often than not, I struggle to get a clear picture out of JIRA when following up on development tickets. Between boards, projects, and custom fields, it is hard to see what actually needs attention. https://jiralens.com/

To scratch my own itch, I built a free tool where you upload a full CSV export from JIRA and get a simple analysis of what to focus on across all your boards and projects.

Feel free to try!
by scarmig | 2026-02-24 17:57:09+00:00
I agree that all our theories of consciousness are deeply inadequate. And it it were purely a scientific question, I'd be fine holding off on this question. But consciousness plays a huge role in most theories of ethics, and agnosticism with a negative prior will inevitably lead to unethical actions, if there are any beings that exist outside our "is it human?" heuristic.

Other adult humans? Babies? Fetuses? Brain dead patients? Severe Alzheimer's? Higher apes? Mammals? Vertebrates? Jellyfish? Trees? Organic aliens? Inorganic aliens? A pile of dirt?

Without a good theory of consciousness, we can't answer yes or no for any of them. And yet we don't have a good theory of consciousness and still want to make ethical decisions. What do? We have to rely on gestures toward a theory of consciousness and make decisions based on it, despite its flaws.
by taeric | 2026-02-24 17:57:22+00:00
On those points, I never intended a disagreement.

My only point was that in some cases it can be easier to reason with the structured steps that go to each other. Specifically, it was far easier than I expected when I started playing with that style later in life.

It was funny, as I originally put in some labeled breaks in a tight java event loop at a big company. Every wave of new employees would try to refactor into something that didn't need that. Every wave introduced a crap ton of bugs before reverting to the labeled break.

At least in that case, I granted that it was a slightly difficult part of the program to reason about. Was doable, but still difficult. What was a huge surprise to me was how much easier it was to put together a set of steps if I wasn't trying to bend them into the control structures of most programming languages.

I suspect the big thing that made this easier for me, was that you are encouraged to have the steps such that they don't jump from the middle of the step. You have what you are going to do, then you have a choice of what to do next. If you find that you wanted to jump out from the middle of a step, you break that into two steps.
by kotaKat | 2026-02-24 17:57:30+00:00
You can’t even win with adding more scare screens because as soon as Epic isn’t allowed to bypass the scare screens, they’ll sue you.

Just like they went after Samsung for adding friction to the sideload workflow to warn people against scams.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/30/epic-games-sues-samsung...
by midnightdiesel | 2026-02-24 17:57:34+00:00
Enshittification strikes again. For a normal user, the software seems to be getting worse and more cumbersome, and the company seems to continue focusing solely on pushing business- and enterprise-centric features that I have no use for. They'd do well to offer a non-pro type subscription for users who don't want all of that. Instead, though, I and a lot of others will simply be canceling.
by alistairSH | 2026-02-24 17:57:44+00:00
Biden's desired policy was none of the additional funding would be used to increase audit rates for <$400k returns.

The IRS didn't follow the intended policy, getting bogged down in the details of how they would define that threshold (primarily, would somebody who understated their income to get below the threshold count as "under 400k and audited").

Not really sure why the OP is so upset - either way, the payback on additional funding to the IRS is almost universally stated as revenue-positive.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-02-24 17:57:57+00:00
> It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad until Thiel gave us that clip of him getting stumped by the "should humanity survive" question.

One "good" thing that came out of that thing.

I think main problem is that many people just think of them as "just a normal person but richer". But no. You don't get to that level of power by staying normal.

Hell, I remember when people pointed at Bill Gates going "see, you can be billionaire that puts their money to good", and while even before PDFiles got posted he had long history of being a piece of shit, now at least that stopped
by everforward | 2026-02-24 17:58:03+00:00
Maybe? That gets sort of awkward for frequently updated things like Reddit where there might be 10 dictionary versions between what you have and the current version. You’d need something that decides whether to get an incremental update or a new dictionary, and the hoster has to store those old dictionaries. Feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

You could compress things with gzip if the dictionary doesn’t work well, but to my understanding gzip compresses repetition. There’s less repetition in smaller chunks, so worse compression ratios. Eg compressing each comment individually has a worse net ratio than compressing all the comments at once.

It would also be annoying to merge a bunch of individually compressed blocks back together, but certainly an option