skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One view of this is HN sports two ranking algorithms: the front page and /active. A few months after discovering /active, I found I was not looking at the front page. I've come to the conclusion it's gamed (not by HN of course, but the various tribes flighting for attention), and yes the primary mechanism for that is flagging.

Having two ranking algorithms is very bluesky'ish in some ways, and thank $DIETY it does. The front page reminds me of other sites that have voting systems. I don't know how to describe it - but I get the sense they all tend to favour articles the tribes like fighting about. /active has much less of that feel.

The comments on HN also suffer from the same tribal warfare effect - with the comments the tribes like fighting over rising to the top. That isn't so bad - because it means you can often just skip the top couple of comments to go fossicking for the insightful gems.
For completeness, it does say “one month, one year or forever” in the linked FAQ and makes clear it’s not recurring. GP rephrased the FAQ.
I mean... ish? There is something to be said for a minimal styling, but there is clearly an aesthetic change to things. As an easy example, wallpaper used to be far more common, and was often far more busy than the neutral colors people insist on in homes nowadays. Not just more colorful, but with designs on them.

You can see the same with dishes. Clothes. Book covers.

I can agree that I don't want everything to look like a riot, as it were. I do sometimes think a bit more color would be nice.
You speak oddly of people like they are monolithic and lacking perceptive nuance (more like animals than any people I know). In the US, of all places, there is tremendous heterogeneity. What are the key elements that you know of “they”?
You consider it _more_ palatable that every trip you take could potentially be publicly accessible information?
Show HN: Website to help Canadian seniors check their benefit eligibility
Hey HN!

I’m working on a project called PensionHelper — a simple, accessible web app designed to help Canadian seniors (and their caregivers) check what government benefits they’re eligible for.

Too many older folks miss out on programs like GIS, CPP, and OAS because the process is confusing, full of jargon, and often hidden behind clunky Service Canada interfaces. PensionHelper aims to fix that. The app is mobile-first and designed with trust and calmness in mind — big fonts, soft visuals, no clutter. Would love your feedback!
People are free to choose not to run red lights.
Hi Scott! Are the posted salary ranges annual?
With nod to neighbor Russia, Finland to quit global landmines ban
For me the site is incredibly snappy. Amazing. As in i clicked Australia, clicked ABC TV and it all loaded in milliseconds.
Particularly if you can narrow down a couple brands where it tends to be a single cell or two that goes poopy while the rest are still good. Driving around picking up dead batteries that only have 1-2 good cells per pack is a thankless job.
It says "all platforms" but does not list Linux. Is Linux support planned?
Seems like more of a special case than a different thing altogether
HallOumi
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.
I mean, I'm not going to change your mind. I don't want to. I've read the book. I found it very helpful in a practical sense, while at the same time as finding it horrifying.

>that's simply the way most, if not all, people are; it's a failing that's almost universal.

Again, I don't disagree with you that this is a problem for the median person. My point is that, for the most part, I'm not really interested in being close friends with the median person. Friends in a sense? Sure. Chat at a bar? Sure. But not people I really talking about interesting things with. The median person isn't going to mesh very well with my personality.

The ivory tower was an isolated tower for a reason. Intellectuals were literally under threat of execution for the vast majority of human history. The underlying currents for that are basically reflected in the assumptions that Carnegie makes.

I want intellectual friends. I want be shown that I'm wrong. I learn something when I'm wrong. I understand that's not a common trait, but it's how I am, and how I want to be.
An increase in bandwidth costs is an increase. There's nothing disingenuous about that.

I imagine it also takes a toll on server, power, and maintenance (staff time) costs as well.
NASA cut $420M for climate science, moon modelling and more
I'm really surprised that these folks go with Signal over something like Element or another Matrix client. Element/Matrix is already used in other places within the Government and has a better UX for team collaboration while maintaining high standards of encryption, so you would think that would be the default.
No point. YC doesn't want this to be discussed.

Let's go somewhere else instead.

And/or maybe start something else?
How to Lock Down Your Phone When Crossing the U.S. Border
AWS is probably guarding their IP, there is a chance McKinsey is just making things up, you can't verify it.
I’ve had the idea of recreating tv channels on my plex server by using tv guide data from the late 90s early 00s

The insurmountable part of that project would be getting the guide data.

You don’t know what other people will want in the future
Show HN: Is My App Secure?
Hey! Just like the title says, I’m hoping for some (nice) feedback on whether my app is secure. For context I build this with cursor + supabase and I’ve seen some horror stories so I want to be certain I don’t have any serious security vulnerabilities as we grow 400+ users so far! Thanks in advance :)
These guys are so cheap you know they didn’t add them in
MAS can be used as an OIDC IdP, and in future MAS will be embeddable in Synapse so you can use your homeserver as an IdP in the way you want, all in one package.

That said, MAS is deliberately not a very featureful IdP - it's focused on being the glue between Matrix and OIDC. If you want a more sophisticated IdP then you'll still want to run a dedicated one.
In theory, Congressional investigation w/ power of subpoena and an ability to hand out prison sentences. Also in theory, if they lose office, subsequent admin needs to be able to prosecute. Assuming we can vote again in the future
> I assume that Meta has a backdoor into WhatsApp conversations

They don't need a back door when they control the front door: the app. End-to-end encryption doesn't protect the endpoints.

(In other words, your concern is warranted.)
I found the Twitter thread that I believe was the source of this; claims that they granted money to culture war institutions:

https://x.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633

I love Wikipedia as a free source of history, but I have no interest in donating money to them as a proxy in the culture war.
I didn't watch the event this morning but am I correct there's still no screen reader on the switch? If this is the case Nintendo's lack of accessibility efforts is shameful.
Matt's only real problem is not owning his ambition openly.

Trying to publicly argue the moral high ground was a stupid, unforced error.

It didn't need to be moralized at all. Just make the changes you want to make, piss off a vocal minority, then get back to winning and making boatloads of money by executing exceptionally.

The problem, I suspect, is that Matt values how certain people perceive him more than he values winning. It's unfortunate, because he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
> Non-profits have staff and they have to pay them.

Being the devil's advocate, there are are quite a lot of smaller non-profits that are entirely volunteer-run. While Wikipedia's mission might inherently be big enough to merit a few salaried employees, I can't fathom why they need so many. As per Wilde's famous quip, it seems to me that "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy".
> Name a major statement by a Democrat

Name a major Democrat. There is none. After 3 electoral cycles when party bureaucracy each time crowned the candidate instead of a candidate rising through the primaries the party has no leaders anymore - note the difference between a leader and a top bureaucrat, the Dems have no deficit of the latter.
I wonder if the colors were programmatically extracted from the photographs
When I heard the tale of how the coffee break came to be — created so workers wouldn’t need an afternoon break — I find myself unable to separate the coffee from that fact. It was a tool used by Capitalists to keep the workers working. Now its so prevalent that no one can see the original causes.
I've tried to send bookmarklets to my family and they never "get" them. An extension like this is perfect. Thanks for your work!
> The Signal app can be used as a honeypot to plant a pseudo-secure messenger

Given its open source nature that would be exceedingly difficult.

> The Tor network was deemed the culprit of anonymity and secure connections not long ago. We all know how it went.

What are you talking about? Tor is still the uncontested king of low-latency anonymity networks.
Discussion (118 points, 83 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560885
With Romans, at least, the typical (and incorrect) popular narrative is that they were initially austere - and that period is when their civilization achieved its peak - and then became decadent and ruin followed.
Recall and Recognition on Minimalism (in Brand Identity) [pdf]
I think the fine print in a report is not an issue but the incendiary blue sky headline is.
Unless they pull out something really cool and revolutionary this is probably just a fax machine.

Outside of the corporate world email is almost a legacy protocol. Like phone numbers we have one because we need to but do not really use it that much anymore.

I believe email was de facto replaced by WhatsApp, iMessage, Social media and OpenID almost 20 years ago.

Just ask a gen Z or Alpha when was the last time he sent an email.

Now they are gonna try to ride the wave of the Big bad tech escape but Proton has a 10 years lead here.
>> For example, can people in Europe use a service that is fully based in Europe.

As long as it's still owned by Mozilla it's subject to the whims of the US government.

There are already many good European mail services (e.g. Proton Mail).
> This is not entirely true.

My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible).

> I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy

Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)?

> then do what's needed to support it

What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade!

> Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good

This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!
I am really enjoying seeing this use-case for PoW gain popularity. Hopefully it normalizes the technique and it can start to become more common for anti-spam systems.
A few months ago I would have been excited and telling my friends. But no longer. I had long been an outspoken Firefox advocate in my city. Fix your trust issue.

Trust once lost is not easily regained.
Kombo (YC S22) | Engineering Manager | Berlin | In-office (with flexibility) | 80k-110k + equity | https://kombo.dev
We are a small (~35), fast-growing (tripled revenue last year) team building a unified API for HR systems. We are looking to hire an engineering manager to help us manage one of our product squads.

I haven't yet finished writing the job spec but I still wanted to put this out there already for the HN hiring thread. You can get a feel for what our engineering culture is like based on the job posting of our Product Engineering position: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Kombo/5446702e-cf0b-4a53-9400-0be2d...

Feel free to contact me at arne@kombo.dev - I'm the CTO and leading the hiring process!
nailed it (and ty for the welcome!)
There are many broadcasting laws worldwide, many quite archaic. Even Radio Garden got meaningfully restricted in the UK (only licensed national radio stations are allowed by a high court ruling). I worry for projects like TV Garden but they are undoubtedly very cool.
> executive insurance
> It's not my fault we're doing badly, I brought in a team of best in class consultants and even THEY couldn't help us turn things around yet - it must be the macro economy, industry headwinds,

its unreliable insurance, since board may not buy this excuse.
In my opinion, yes. On the other hand, I have been using KOReader for many years. When I started using it, it was very rough. At one point there was a fairly significant overhaul. Since then, there have been smaller incremental changes (which amount to a lot across the years). Of course, opinions of user interfaces will vary.

I am not going to claim that it is perfect. They cram a lot of functionality in there that serves a very diverse audience. The volume of options is going to have a negative impact is going to have a negative impact for anyone wanting a simple, to-the-point interface. The diverse audience bit means that virtually noone is going to be interested in a majority of the features, even though I suspect that a majority of users will interested in a combination of features that they won't find in other products.

While I may have been a bit unfair in saying that most commerical reading software is geared towards selling novels, I don't think that assessment is too far off base. Most software does appear to be designed for people who just read novels. KOReader is geared towards people who care about features that other reading software rarely provides.
I suppose scalping hadn't been as severe globally
or in US until recent NVIDIA GPU launches?

For years, it was absolutely massive for iPhone launches.

It was amusing, if not a little frustrating. News coverage would always show it as evidence of fanatical Apple fans. But (especially after the first year or two) it was pretty clearly mostly flippers/scalpers.
I replaced mine with sticks using hall effect sensors. The stick replacement process isn't easy, but also not too bad. When I first opened my joycon, a spring flew across the room and I had a hell of a time trying to find it.
That's not how bandwidth metering works at all.
Clad (YC W'23) | Full Stack Software Engineer | New York City

About: Clad is construction management software for infrastructure.

We're building a compound startup to build infrastructure (telecom, roads, utilities, etc.) faster and cheaper.

Progress: Since this time last year, we've 8x'd revenue, and >3x'd customers.

Role: Looking for a full stack software engineer to join our team of 4.

Tech Stack: Typescript using Remix

JD: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clad/jobs/YHGyRSf-full...
Something I found myself paying attention to as I was getting tired of cars and looking towards training for a motorcycle is what colors stand out, not just high-visibility clothes but the vehicle too because you want to be seen. Once you've tuned your eyes into looking it's shocking how many riders are pure black when they're more vulnerable on the roads. It's an interesting exercise when you're walking around a city onto a new street with cars parked up to see how quickly you can count how many there are, I found it can be difficult to separate out cars with how common black is now, and the less common brighter colors really stand out.
> The Feynman Lectures on Physics

> Highly understandable

Haha, I love the Feynman Lectures, but the only reason I can make head or tails of it is because I'm using it to brush up on subjects I've already studied before
I understand now. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
from the above post:

> April 1, 1999
>
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Forward to the past?
The idea behind Velty is to let you consume your YouTube videos mainly in chronological order, without being at the mercy of the YouTube algorithm.

Sorry, I don’t plan to add that feature.
Check out the TV show, then. Brit 60s fun with Roger Moore, before he was a Bond!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055701/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
I hope for the best but plan for the worst:

I don't think people want to change email addresses very often. How do I know Mozilla will still be doing this in 5-10 years? (Edit: Others have pointed out that, if we can bring our own domains, technical users can retain their address. However, for non-technical users that's not an option.)

Also, I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start (except for TB contributors) and providing a free tier later - reverse of the usual way of launching a product. Maybe this is a soft launch to shake out the bugs and build a little momentum, and you can pay if you want to take part?

Mozilla could do something awesome here. I hate to say it, but here is a chance to start fresh and make big, legacy-breaking changes to Thunderbird. The new audience - which should become the vast majority if they are successful - won't care if it's not like the old Thunderbird (possibly unlike many on HN). Here is a chance to do something special and the mail client is all most users see or understand.
Location: Germany (UTC +1/+2), EU citizen
Remote: preferred
Willing to relocate: possibly
Technologies: C# and previously C++ and Java, prefer functional style and privately dabble with F# and Haskell. I know SQL, Azure, Docker, high performance computing (Monte Carlo simulations), see also CV
CV: https://stash.ldr.name/wwtbh/rcv-202504-774f.pdf
Email: whoshiring-774f /-\T ldr D()T name

I work in mathematical finance so a lot of domain knowledge in that area (derivatives, pricing, probability theory).

I am looking for work in other domains as well.

Happy to provide you with a full CV personally.
Trump has maintained he has the power to declassify things with his mind alone, so I'm sure this is entirely true. Whatever they were talking about, bam, it's no longer classified.

At least they're using Signal, I guess. Can you imagine if this leaked and they were using something like Telegram!?
True, but I think this misses the deeper dynamic nature of such things. Trump is the symptom, but these voters were also reacting in their turn. It is highly unlikely that this exact sequence of triggers will immediately repeat themselves.
A few months ago I would have been excited and telling my friends and community. But no longer. My long term endorsement is over.

Trust once lost is not easily regained.

Fix your trust issue.
From what I understand, de minimis exemption has also been removed.

That is a huge, huge deal. It effectively means that all goods imported from China will be slapped with a 30% import tax, as soon as said goods arrive the US border / customs.

Usually what happens then, is that the courier will pay that tax, and then bill the recipient later on - as well as charge some fee/fees for the work done.

This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.

If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.

(That's just from the most obvious consumer example...then you have pretty much everything else. Goods, commodities, etc.)

EDIT: I found more info here https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.

a $1 item with $1 shipping will end up costing you as much as $52 after June!
Well said

Stimulus
I’ve had that happen to me at a new job. It disnt make my new employer shine.
To be clear I have no expectation the stock will do anything when this is revealed.
How to tell people you don’t know how carrier grade internet connections work.
Right, Agent-based models are only useful as “exploration” tool, you cannot really use them for forecast because there's an impractically high number of parameter to tune.

Micro-founded macro economics models (say DSGE) are much easier to tune based on available historical data so they are much preferred, and nobody seams to care that they have the same predicting power as astrology.
> Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature.

No, dude. Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? Or whether it follows the correct tab focus order? I don't think I could be more clear about what I'm saying in my last comment. Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Signal, Element, etc do not stack up.

> Making a smooth app isn't that hard.

Yes, it surprisingly is. Multiple chat apps in 2025 still fail at this.

> Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.

This isn't even in the realm of what my point was.
History has always been what the winner makes of it, and with self-destructing messages that winner's task just got much easier.
Choosing to click on it so you can be mad is really a you problem.
I’m convinced they don’t think it’s okay, they just think whatever Fox News tells them endlessly is what’s okay

If Fox News tomorrow changed their tone and message all those sheep would change

It’s that simple
Tom, what a small world. Seems just like yesterday we were at Inspire 9 together!
Why? I think it sounds cool. Are you embarrassed that it doesn't sound "corporate" enough?
Earlier in my career the clients system was not powered at all, I did:

"Is it plugged in and switched on?" A: Yes, to a powerboard.

"Is the powerboard plugged in and switched on?" A: Yes.

I did the onsite visit and found the powerboard plugged into itself.

Normally I would facepalm and curse the idiocy but... it was a care respite facility and they had more pressing issues to deal with that I wouldn't want to deal with - their role is heroic I feel.

And an easy win already makes my day so I sorted it, told them it was fixed with a smile, and continued on.
Just finished that feature. Volume saving is available now on youtube and insta if you update.
Maybe he was significant to a lot of hackers. The death was also untimely, which reminds us to cherish the time we have. Many of us are in our 50s or 60s.