MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-08-12 16:09:14+00:00
I fully agree. Official looking redirect URLs are a dream come true for scams and phishing attacks.

The goo.gl link shortener hasn’t accepted new links for many years. Over 99% of the links had no recent activity. The play was to scrape the web for old goo.gl links that went to expired domains, register the domain, and then you have a goo.gl URL that you can send wherever you want, indefinitely.

Nearly all of the angry blog posts, Tweets, and HN comments missed this and jumped to the conclusion that it was purely a cost cutting measure, but link official-looking open redirect URLs are a big deal in the security space.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-12 16:09:56+00:00
I've used their public site for a few private projects, mostly in habit from when private projects in GH were limited to paid accounts. The collaboration was a bit better at that time imo.

I'm not sure that I would choose it for self-hosting over gitea, forgejo or straight up ssh+git on a remote system, which works well enought for a personal backup target.
Launch HN: Design Arena (YC S25) – Head-to-head AI benchmark for aesthetics
by grace77 | 2025-08-12 16:10:03+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Grace from Design Arena (https://www.designarena.ai/) - we’re building a crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated visuals (websites, images, video, and more). We put AI models and builder tools in head-to-head comparisons that get voted on by real users from around the world. Think “Hot or Not” for the AI era :)

(Btw, when we say real users we mean real users, so you may get a captcha on the site. Sorry, but we have to use every bot protection available! We only want human ratings, for obvious reasons.)

Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPyEQnuVgeI

We didn’t set out to build this - we were actually working on an AI game engine. But we found that models sucked at look-and-feel. Even when the output code was usually functional, most visual aspects lacked the soul that makes great graphics feel alive.

So we built a this-or-that game, just for ourselves, to figure out which generated outputs had the best graphics. To our surprise, that turned out to be more exciting than the original idea—it turns out this is a widespread problem! We did a Show HN a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542578) and that was partly what convinced us to make this benchmark thing our actual product.

State-of-the-art models might be winning IMO gold, but they are still putting white text on a white background. There needs to be some measurement of what’s good and what isn’t (yes, there is such a thing as good design!), and it sure isn’t going to come from LLMs.

We come from engineering backgrounds (Apple and Nvidia) with a love for design; we know when we like or dislike something, even when we can’t say why. This-or-that / hot-or-not games are made for domains like this: Design Arena’s goal is to make everything stupidly simple so humans can just do the easy part: like-vs.-dislike. Which also turns out to be the valuable part, because what’s easiest for humans is actually the part that the AIs can’t currently do.

Since our Show HN, we’ve extended our initial set of ~25 LLM models to 54 LLM models, 12 image models, 4 video models, 22 audio models, and 22 vibe-coding tools (like Lovable, Bolt, v0, Firebase Studio, and more). In this last category, we’ve been surprised to find that agentic tools that were not specifically marketed as vibe-coders like Devin performed exceedingly well in the builder category, outperforming dedicated builder tools like Lovable, v0, and Bolt.

Our users are mostly devs who want to spin up a frontend, or designers who want to spin up design variants faster. In both cases, Design Arena provides a quick way to find out which options are better than others. Dev-or-designer needs to make the final calls, because there’s no substitute for good judgment. But this type of formatting can really help.

We plan to make money by offering version testing as a service to companies that need to quantify improvements in their product between builds.

This is the first time we’ve ever worked on something like this! We’d love to learn from you all and look forward to your feedback.
by empath75 | 2025-08-12 16:10:22+00:00
Most "rationalists" throughout history have been very deeply religious people. Secular enlightenment-era rationalism is not the only direction you can go with it. It depends very much, as others have said, on what your axioms are.

But, fwiw, that particular role-playing game was very much based on trendy at the time occult beliefs in things like chaos magic, so it's not completely off the wall.
Ask HN: Are leetcode interviews going away?
by ryandvm | 2025-08-12 16:10:34+00:00
For years, many companies have leaned heavily on leetcode-style algorithm problems in their interviews. I know many of us have always felt this was a questionable signal for real-world engineering skill, since most software engineers rarely (if ever) write novel algorithms during their day-to-day.

Now, with LLMs performing extremely well on these problems, the gap between “can solve interview puzzles” and “can do the job” seems wider than ever. In reality, a competent engineer today is quite likely to use an LLM to help solve such problems, so now the skill we’re testing in an interview isn’t even how they’d work in practice.

So my question is: Where do you think the software engineering interview process is heading next? Will we move toward more real-world scenarios? Systems design? Pair programming with AI in the loop? Something else entirely?

Curious to hear what trends you’re seeing or experimenting with at your companies.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-12 16:10:38+00:00
I'm kind of suspicious of the water for datacenter stats, because I'm skeptical of the extent to which evaporation-based cooling is used rather than just air-to-air cooling. Wouldn't this result in visible plumes of condensation, as it does with power station cooling towers?

Also commercial water rates appear to be about £2.50 / cubic meter.

Desalination depends on electricity prices, which are fairly high in the UK at the moment.
by im3w1l | 2025-08-12 16:10:38+00:00
I agree that it is not ideal. But addressing some of the specific point brought up:

1. a) The list doesn't need to be hardcoded, it could be a configuration. b) So trust doesn't need to be permanent. c) It could be decentralized in the sense of allowing different people to have configs 2. Miners not on the list can still participate just with lower weight in the case of a fork. And they still get full reward.
by ryao | 2025-08-12 16:10:46+00:00
Storing pictures and emails in a data center does generate heat, but it is negligible. Also, claims of data center water usage are heavily overstated. Some do, but only during summer months. I assume the reason for the UK’s asinine advice is because of they think there is a link between heat generation and water usage at data centers. While a link does exist, it is not straight forward.

I have only ever toured a data center once, but the one I toured had no water usage by the cooling infrastructure as far as I could tell. However, the facility’s APUE was something like 1.7, which is high. I have read that some facilities with impressively low APUE numbers use water during particularly hot summer days, which is presumably for evaporative cooling. Unfortunately, I have yet to see one of these facilities in person to know the details beyond what has been publicly written.

If it counts for anything, I have hundreds of commits in OpenZFS. I know some things about data centers from a mix of professional contacts since my work is used in them (which is how I got the tour in the first place), and personal interest in the subject, but I am far from an expert on all aspects of how data centers work. Speaking of which, I doubt there is any one person who is an expert on all aspects of how data centers work, since the knowledge is spread across multiple types of experts. A physicist would not be my first choice of expert when asking questions about data centers. A data center technician would be a better person to ask.
by steveklabnik | 2025-08-12 16:11:31+00:00
> I find C compilation extremely fast exactly because of headers.

The header model is one of the parts that makes compiling C slower than it could be. This doesn't mean that it is slow, but it's fast in spite of headers, not because of them.

> In C you can split interface and implementation cleanly between header and c-file and this enables efficient incremental builds.

That's not what does, it is the ability to produce individual translation units as intermediary files.

> Rust also does not seem to have proper separate compilation.

Rust does separate compilation, and also has efficient incremental builds. Header files are not a hard requirement for this.
by pinum | 2025-08-12 16:11:37+00:00
Instead of shutting down completely, why not this:

For goo.gl links that were created by google, continue redirecting them as normal. For others, show a warning page explaining to the user that the link wasn't created (or vouched for) by google. If they press an "agree" button, still don't show a clickable link, but instead show it as plain text to be copied.
by ta1243 | 2025-08-12 16:11:44+00:00
Depends how intergrated you are. If you're using it as a code repository fine, if you're tying your workflows into it with pull requests, actions, maybe a third party CI which ties to it, and use it as part of operations then it's a major problem

I just approved a PR which added a user to one of our AWS accounts for example, if github is down then that PR can't be approved, the update can't work and the user can't access that account
by BizarroLand | 2025-08-12 16:11:51+00:00
I won't argue that the usage can change, and I could see how it could also be used to imply that one's posterior moves in a pleasing manner, but in my experience it has only been used to indicate an issue:

Marjorie Kimmerle & Patricia Gibby, "A Word-List from Colorado," in Publication of the American Dialect Society (April 1949) has this entry for the term hitch:

hitch: n. A crick ; a limp. Used only in the expression "He's got a hitch in his git-along." Said of horses and people. OED, A limp, a hobble, an interference in a horse's pace.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/283244/hitch-in-...
by lazide | 2025-08-12 16:13:08+00:00
Yup. Like previously, westerners could have gone their whole lives with no clue the Hindutva existed [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva] - Hindu Nazis, basically. Which if you know Hinduism at all, is a bit like saying Buddhist Nazis. Say what?

Which actually kinda exised/exists too? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichirenism], right down to an attempted coup and a bunch of assassinations [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Blood_Incident].

Now you know. People be whack.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-08-12 16:13:14+00:00
I've had a related idea for a while now.

Instead of how LLMs operate by taking the current text and taking the most likely next token, you take your full text and use an LLM to find the likeliness/rank of each token. I'd imagine this creates a heatmap that shows which parts are the most 'surprising'.

You wouldn't catch all misspelling, but it could be very useful information to find what flows and what doesn't - or perhaps explicitly go looking for something out of the norm to capture attention.
by euleriancon | 2025-08-12 16:13:24+00:00
Here is a list of items that matter for an American. It is much worse if you are from Hong Kong or Taiwan.

1. Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter (basically all major American social media platforms) are not accessible without a VPN. Some major VPN providers have also been banned as well. The counter argument is that many Huawei products are also banned. But I actively use Harmony OS on my Huawei smart watch. I can view Bilibili content, XiaoHongShu, QQ, and other platforms on any device without issue.

2. State media propaganda. My first time seeing state movies was shocking how in your face the propaganda was. It is completely blatant. From talking with locals about it, they recognize it as propaganda (although the Chinese word for propaganda doesn't have the same negative connotation as in English). I haven't watched state sponsored news to get a feel for their bias, but from the amount I have seen they are certainly selectively with their content. Everything focuses and the achievements Xi JinPing has recently achieved. The idea of a media outlet reporting on something silly the president has done is absurd.

3. The surveillance infrastructure in China surpasses even the UK. The number of cameras almost looks like a gag. Once again, the nature of how opaque the government is means it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty what they use the data for, but they certainly collect a lot.
by ta1243 | 2025-08-12 16:13:27+00:00
I use self-hosted jira, it's a great product, but I have full control over my teams tasks and workflows and as a tiny team we make them work for us (subject, description, comments, occasional linking to other tickets, assigned to, and status of "open", "blocked" or "done")

Most of the problems I hear about are micromanaging product managers. That's not the fault of the tool itself per-se.
by jlokier | 2025-08-12 16:13:41+00:00
For the users, via the Chrome brand, and via being pre-installed on Chromebooks and Android. By far most users run Chrome, not Chromium forks, and this would continue after a competent acquisition.

Whoever owns Chrome decides exactly what software most users run for web browsing, decides future web standards in practice, decides which kinds of extensions most users can use, decides the limits and carve-outs of adblockers, codecs and web features, has all the telemetry, and in future decides what AI-driven "presentational" modifications to web pages will be done, and what semantic scraping and uploading will happen automatically in the browser.
by netsharc | 2025-08-12 16:13:54+00:00
I'd have massive schadenfreude if red tape prevents him from leaving on his plane. "You need fuel? Oh we have plenty here, but as military we can't just give you fuel, your government needs to buy it from our government who'll talk down the chain of command to us.".

"You want to fly? Your violation of the airspace laws means you're not allowed to use Chilean airspace anymore... sorry Gringo."
by saurik | 2025-08-12 16:14:02+00:00
YugabyteDB is also a fork of PostgreSQL. Last year, they got around to rebasing from 11 to 15, and spent some time working on better isolating their changes to make that easier going forward.

https://www.yugabyte.com/blog/yugabytedb-moves-beyond-postgr...

> When we set out to make YugabyteDB Postgres-compatible, we took a fork of Postgres, and modified all of the operations that use shared memory or storage to instead talk to our LSM- and Raft-based distributed storage and transaction layer.
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 16:14:15+00:00
True, which was solved like 8,000 years ago by religion/culture, saying you have to marry and support the mother of your children.

It wasn’t perfect of course. Abuse has always been a problem.

Yes, everyone has greater absolute freedom now that we have divorce, and abuse victims are better off, but we have not developed a functioning cultural replacement for the previous cultural arrangement. So, now we have a smaller abuse problem and 2 new problems: both spouses having to maintain excellent careers just in case they get divorced (at the expense of their children and their relationship with their children), AND for those relationship relationships that do end, one or both are still in trouble, as now two households have to be supported with the same amount of income.

I’m not proposing a solution. It’s hard. But I’m just pointing out how we specifically ruined this by completely throwing away the idea of marriage for life and replacing it with “marriage until you’re tired of the person”

PS: I’m divorced (though no kids with that marriage) and remarried, so I’m not pretending to be a moral authority.
by jszymborski | 2025-08-12 16:14:26+00:00
I think that's fair. 301works.org[0], for example, requires its members to upload their DB to Internet Archive, but IA keeps it private. They then ask for the technical control of the domain to be transferred 301works.org in the event of the site's closure so they can continue serving the traffic.

I do think that, however, that a service can keep their DB public _iff_ users know that's the case before creating links. Often times, folks are just shortening public links, but it is true that people sometimes share "private" links (e.g., Google Doc private links, etc...) which shouldn't be enumerated.

[0] https://archive.org/details/301works-faq
by appease7727 | 2025-08-12 16:14:39+00:00
Gods, for some reason GitLab consumes 5-10% of a CPU at all times. I spent weeks trying to get it to calm down to reduce our AWS spend. Absolutely no changes no matter what I tried. On my 2013 Xeon server at home it's even worse.

GitLab is great, I really do enjoy working with it. I hate running it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-12 16:14:42+00:00
Back in 2015 or so I was working for a startup trying to train language models for comprehension of clinical notes. We didn't have transformers then, but you could do the same "predict the next character" or "predict the next word" thing.

We had the worst problem with the models getting stuck and repeating themselves but these were character level models so they repeated gibberish or just a few words and wouldn't get stuck in such a ruminative depressive kind of dialogue the way that Gemini was doing there.

Back then it was obvious we had problems with coherence in terms of remembering that it was a 69-year old male patient named "Phil" and we talked to experts who'd say "we could give it a memory but it wouldn't help it understand better". In retrospect, transformers were the answer to the problems we were having at that company and at a later company I worked at that was using CNN models -- that and subword tokens.
by ggreer | 2025-08-12 16:14:44+00:00
Apple is what, less than 20% of phone sales? So it's hard to see how that constitutes a monopoly. And if banning 3rd party apps is enough for a lawsuit, then why doesn't that apply to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo for their game consoles? Why doesn't it apply to Amazon's Fire tablets, or Kindles, or Huawei phones, or Oculus headsets? All of those devices have similar restrictions.

Unless customers are coerced or misled, or returns/refunds are difficult, I don't see the need for government intervention. Apple's software restrictions hurt the iPhone's market share. The same goes for charging high fees for app purchases. Customers and developers can (and often do) choose other devices for being less restrictive about what software can be run on them. If an informed adult chooses a locked down platform because they prioritize other features, why should the government stop them?

I can see an argument for requiring labeling (similar to warnings on cigarettes), but a total ban seems like overreach.
by Chris2048 | 2025-08-12 16:15:20+00:00
> the UK had the very best seat at the table.

> The UK had so many carve-outs and exemptions

The EU had many things that didn't benefit the UK, which happens when you don't share a mainland with the rest of Europe. e.g. Schengen area didn't make as much sense for UK,

The UK got to not adopt the euro, but then it's currency was particularly strong in the first place. The Rebate is usually what is spin as the great advantage given to the UK, but was mostly justified by the fact that the UK didn't benefit as much from agricultural subsidies.
by NtG_UK | 2025-08-12 16:15:25+00:00
My first “modem” was this fantastically beige 300-baud hand-me-down acoustic coupler from 1984: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13106/Epson-CX-21-Ac...

A family friend came round and used it to hook up my Atari ST to a local BBS. Mind-blowing. I got a brief glimpse of the future that day.

Local calls not being free, I wasn’t allowed to repeat the experiment until we signed up for MSN in 1996.

Didn’t stop younger me switching on the acoustic coupler with no computer attached and trying “communicate” with it by making “shhhh” noises into the cups :D
by kqr | 2025-08-12 16:15:51+00:00
I disagree. Lockout, Dreamhold, Lost Pig, and So Far are new games but in the old style. Plundered Hearts is literally one of the old games (though ahead of its time).

I'll grant you that 9:05 and For a Change are somewhat more modern: the former has easy puzzles, the latter very abstract puzzles.

I disagree new text adventures are not about puzzles and winning. They come in all kinds of flavours these days. Even games like 9:05 pace their narrative with traditional puzzles, meaning we can measure forward progress just the same. And to be fair, LLMs are so bad at these games that in these articles, I'm merely trying to get them to navigate the world at all.

If anything, I'd argue Adventure is a bad example of the genre you refer to. It was (by design) more of a caving simulator/sandbox with optinal loot than a game with progress toward a goal.
by jl6 | 2025-08-12 16:15:59+00:00
Yes, water is a renewable resource, and like other renewable resources the thing we should be concerned about is not the fact that it’s used at all, but how and where it is used.

Water usage matters in water-stressed regions. In other regions, conserving other resources will matter more.

If you take the stance that data centers are bad because they use water, and thus your usage of data centers should be reduced, then you are likely to be optimizing the wrong thing in many cases.

Simplistic advice to delete emails to save water may well cause less efficient usage of resources whose conservation matters more.
by ekianjo | 2025-08-12 16:16:14+00:00
You probably want to consider the OrangePi RV2 board instead (I wrote about it here: https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-revi...). I own the original VF2 as well, and the RV2 from OrangePi is much faster, and software support is miles better too.
by pengaru | 2025-08-12 16:16:17+00:00
I presume it's highly subjective.

For a busy cafe that's always short on seating and struggles to keep up with fulfilling orders, they want nothing to do with laptop squatters.

Every other case I imagine it's desirable to have at least some regulars presumably employed enough to be working from a cafe using modern tech.

One common problem I've noticed is van lifers and other quasi homeless folks spending ~zero money stinking up the place just for the free power and internet.

Now that battery life and cell-tethered internet is so good, some of my favorite urban cafes have adopted a no-outlets no-wifi approach, while still having tons of seating and allowing folks to be present with their computers all day. They just have to provide their own internet and power, which serves to exclude the true parasites while selecting for folks with $$ to spend because they have state of the art gadgets with their own unlimited data plans.
by muzani | 2025-08-12 16:16:33+00:00
Credit to a severely depressed friend for this one. After doing the cycle of therapist, pills, self-help books, etc, what helped the most was housework. It didn't solve the problems, but it kept her going day after day.

There's actual research on happiness a while back, and it ended with the concept of flow. Csikszentmihalyi found that people were unhappiest when watching TV and happiest when doing something of moderate challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

But why is TV the natural response to stress?

I think people in an exploitative culture have trouble with work. There's the mindset that the rich are where they deserve to be because they exploit, while the scrubs that work hard are where they deserve to be because they're exploitable. So there's an aversion to productivity, and people think the escape is apathy.

But there's also some human nature to be productive and contribute; unproductive genes would likely go extinct. And there's also a desire to be challenged. A desire to move things from a state of chaos to order.