MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by w0de0 | 2025-08-20 09:03:19+00:00
Every party system in the United States - there have been several [0] - has been a duopoly. This is a natural outcome of a first past the post, single representative per district electoral system (see also: the UK).

The extremity in current politics - and among elected politicians wielding power, such is to be found much more on the right - is in part a function of two trends: the gerrymandering of those districts, and the tendency for states and areas to become more ideologically homogenous. (I’m not sure of the latter’s root cause - perhaps internal migration or new media consumption patterns.)

Both of these trends tend to shift the political competition in those districts, be they states or house districts, towards purity tests over compromise. One wins a primary by being the most extreme; if the primary matters more than the general, extremity increases generally.

If you want to reduce extremity, fight partisan redistricting.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_Unite...
by therealpygon | 2025-08-20 09:04:16+00:00
I think there is an infinite capacity for LLMs to be both beneficial, or negative. I look back at learning and think, man, how amazing would it have been if I could have had a personalized tutor helping guide me and teach me about the concepts I was having trouble with in school. I think about when I was learning to program and didn’t have the words to describe the question I was trying to ask and felt stupid or an inconvenience when trying to ask to more experienced devs.

Then on the flip side, I’m not just worried about an intern using an LLM. I’m worried about the unmonitored LLM performing intern, junior, and ops tasks, and then companies simply using “an LLM did it” as a scapegoat for their extreme cost cutting.
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-08-20 09:05:57+00:00
Agent-specific guidance like this rubs me the wrong way as well. The SoTA coding agents shouldn't need this much babysitting IMO. There are valid things that are not code that should be a part of the repository, like code formatting preferences (but ideally as linter rules the agent can just run, not prose), information about structuring of the code base (but as CONTRIBUTING.md or something else human-centric which the agent should pick up), documentation (either as source or as a link, again, not agent-centric) etc. I might be blanking on something that is truly agent-only and doesn't fit in a human-centric document or location better, but even if I am, that should be a minimal amount of instructions compared to what should go into the human-centric prose in the code base and be more widely valuable than just for the agent.
by roarcher | 2025-08-20 09:06:09+00:00
The article's premise is "some animals are better at specific things than humans, therefore humans are not exceptional", or stated differently, "humans are only exceptional if they're the best at literally everything".

It seems obvious to me that this is a fairly useless definition of "exceptional" that would not be accepted in any context other than an ideological one.

Yes, HN is better without shallow dismissals. Perhaps we should extend that idea to shallow articles as well.
by Lio | 2025-08-20 09:06:19+00:00
Yep, I agree with this.

Jean Boussier wrote this execellent examination of CPU bound Rails application and why making use of multi-processes is probably a good idea.

Even if you're not using CPU bound it's still daft to leave performance on the table you don't need to.

For the most part if something is a bit slower than it needs to be it still makes more sense to take the obvious bottle necks out before you rewrite the whole system in another language. Especially with YJIT and forcoming ZJIT availible.

1. https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/01/23/the-myt...
by troupo | 2025-08-20 09:06:27+00:00
Well, it's Google who jumped at the opportunity citing their own counters and stats.

Just like they did the last time when they tried to remove confirm/prompt[1] and were surprised to see that their numbers don't paint the full picture, as literally explicitly explained in their own docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS...

You'd think that the devs of the world's most popular browser would have a little more care than just citing some numbers, ignoring all feedback, and moving forward with whatever they want to do?

Oh. Speaking, of "not just Google".

The question was raised in this meeting: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11146#issuecomment-275... Guess what.

--- start quote ---

dan: even if the data were accurate, not enough zeros for the usage to be low enough.

brian: I'm guessing people will have objections... people do use it and some like it

--- end quote ---

[1] See, e.g. https://gomakethings.com/google-vs.-the-web/
by ben_w | 2025-08-20 09:06:31+00:00
While I would expected higher variance as the evolutionary gap increases, IMO the null hypothesis should be that their qualia are the same space as ours.

We're pre-paradigmatic for qualia, we don't know what structures (brain or otherwise) give rise to it in order to guess what set of qualia can be had by any given system. Until we do, I can't even quantify my expectations on the variance from increased evolutionary distance, I don't even have a quantity to express the variance of.
by ajb | 2025-08-20 09:07:58+00:00
So, it sounded interesting but they have bet too hard on the "developer marketing" playbook of "just give the minimum amount of explanation to get people to try the stuff".

For example, there is a quick start, so I skip that and click on "core concepts". That just redirects to quick start. There's no obvious reference or background theory.

If I was going to trust something like this I want to know the underlying theory and what guarantees it is trying to make. For example, what is included in a cache key, so that I know which changes will cause a new invocation and which ones will not.
by lmm | 2025-08-20 09:09:11+00:00
Realistically the answer is probably that countries accept a certain risk of collisions in the interest of good international relations and the resulting tourism and business. They might also trust visitors to pay more attention. There are rules that attempt to restrict the abuse of IDPs (e.g. available for a max period of 1 year and only available in your home country, and in some countries it may be illegal for people on longer-term visa statuses to use them), but it's all tradeoffs. I can imagine that e.g. Uber might be lobbying politicians to make them less widely available, and they may succeed.
by omgtehlion | 2025-08-20 09:09:13+00:00
Yes it is. In hft (or any algo trading nowadays) it is commonplace to use usermode networking since like ~2010 or even earlier.

The part of NICs address space is mapped to a process (control registers and memory rings), and whole driver just runs in your process without going through the kernel. Of course, it ignores usual stuff like firewalls, iptables, etc, but who cares when all you need is the lowest latency possible )
by lloydatkinson | 2025-08-20 09:10:48+00:00
I'm still happy that a few of my blog posts have hit the frontpage here. Two were rants about fake agile[1] and standups[2], which helped me feel not so unhappily alone at the state of the industry. There were others too, such as my post on why I think browser push notifications are terrible, another one was a stupid kludge to fix Cloudflare breaking my SVGs.

There is also another one about dark/light modes that made it to frontpage but got some pretty nasty comments which surprised me, especially from one person in particular who seemed to make it their mission to write absurd comment after absurd comment ironically acting like exactly the kind of person I described in my blog post.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074861

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557347

It's always a pretty scary few minutes suddenly seeing a traffic spike, my usual thought is "oh no today isn't going to be good", which is mostly a thought process I have thanks to Reddit being incredibly toxic and unpleasant almost 100% of the time. Any time my blog posts have made it there I dread taking a look at the comments.
by amonith | 2025-08-20 09:11:25+00:00
Still happens here, especially when people publish open source libraries. "Why should I use your library, when there's ABC that does XYZ much better?" and other variants, as if the original poster was selling something. Doesn't happen as often when people publish final projects/products (even closed source).

Maybe it's just a dev thing. Some programming languages can have some really toxic fandom :D
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-20 09:11:53+00:00
> Raphaël Graven, known online as Jean Pormanove, was well-known on the streaming platform Kick. The 46-year-old former soldier was regularly beaten and abused by two other influencers during livestreams.

We need a new definition for influencers. I won’t deny adults the right to do what they want with their lives / life, but in this case influencers doesn’t feel accurate and transparent.
by businessmate | 2025-08-20 09:12:24+00:00
We’ve published a new paper arguing that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) should now be treated as a legacy framework. GEO was useful between 2020–2024 when AI assistants leaned on structured data, UGC, and citations. But in 2025, it fails for three reasons: Volatility: 40–60% of AI answers about brands change monthly. Fragmentation: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity all use different pipelines. Hallucination risk: Even “cited” answers can be fabricated or misleading. We propose AI Visibility Optimization (AIVO) as the successor framework. AIVO measures citation density, entity authority, and visibility decay across LLMs and connects visibility loss directly to revenue exposure. Paper link (SSRN): [insert link once live] Curious what HN thinks: is GEO worth keeping alive as a term, or should the industry move on?
by xnoyzi | 2025-08-20 09:12:53+00:00
Last month I talked to a cold email operator who runs insane volume.

when he showed me his stack, I noticed something:

he was paying over $300/month just to use custom APIs in Clay.

not the whole product. Not the data.

just the permission to use his own APIs.

That felt… wrong.

so I built a stripped-down Clay alternative.

same core functionality, no bloat, almost 10x cheaper.

I thought that would be enough.

then my inbox exploded with one specific request:

“Can you add something like Claygent?”

Now it’s in.

an AI Agent that enriches, calls APIs, scales workflows, all in one place.

And yes, it’s still not Clay. That’s the point.

if you do cold outreach, scraping, or enrichment, and want to see it in action, I’ll happy to share access and hear what you think
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-20 09:13:40+00:00
I’ve had a couple of things make the FP. One was #1 for a while.

I submitted them both, but I don’t usually submit stuff, and most of my submissions are one-pointers. These were tutorials or side projects that I thought might be useful to folks. I guess some people agreed.

Most of my karma is comments. There’s really almost no value for me, in limelight. My work is usually “below the radar,” so to speak, and I’m retired. I’m not looking for work or notoriety. I actually kind of like hanging around the joint. I spent most of my career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and that’s sort of what I get, here.
Show HN: LiftMRR – a lightweight tool for Stripe users run automated campaigns
by gagarwal123 | 2025-08-20 09:14:04+00:00
Hi everyone,

After trying out a few SaaS ideas, one thing kept frustrating us: getting users to convert from free trials to paid. We noticed the simplest solution was well-timed email campaigns — reminders, feature highlights, even simple “here’s what you might be missing” messages.

But setting up these automated flows is harder than it should be, especially if you just want to connect Stripe and quickly target trial users.

So we’re working on LiftMRR.com — a lightweight tool to help Stripe customers run automated campaigns that encourage trial → paid conversion. It’s still early stage, please do give it a try and would love to hear your feedback?
by egorfine | 2025-08-20 09:14:29+00:00
In Poland - basically almost every large city, from Warsaw to Torun. In Croatia I have been in Split and in Dubrovnik.

I'm looking at things like pavement construction, overnight leftover trash on the streets, quality of business signs, cleanliness of buildings, bike parking spots and infrastructure on them, % of restaurants trying to scam you, etc. That sort of things.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-08-20 09:15:25+00:00
I see the groundhog day problem as a feature, not a bug.

It's an organizational challenge, requiring a top level overview and easy to find sub documentation - and clear directives to use them when the AI starts architecting on a fresh start.

Overall, it's a good sign when a project is understandable in small independent chunks that don't demand a programmer/llm take in more context than was referenced.

I think the sweet spot would be all agents agree on a MUST-READ reference syntax for inside comments & docs that through simple scanning forces the file into the context. eg

// See @{../docs/payment-flow.md} for the overall design.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-20 09:16:23+00:00
> Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has killed at least 13,883 civilians, including 726 children, injuring many more, according to the Mission’s August 13 press release.

In comparison to the USA and Iraq (and the WMDs):

“Approximately 200,000: The number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/iraq...
by stanko | 2025-08-20 09:16:30+00:00
Thank you! You can also think of the vector shapes as a kind of skeleton. I think that is one of the reasons it works well. Moving the limbs or increasing the size creates the illusion of movement and breathing. But it works well only while the grid is smaller and can hide the underlying shapes. Once the vectors start to emerge, it breaks the illusion. You could definitely improve it to work better at larger sizes, but I think you would need to introduce more constraints, which limits the random factor of the generator.

If you end up using something similar in your game, I would love to see it!

edit: It seems that I need to make the RSS link more prominent :)
by ahdanggit | 2025-08-20 09:16:42+00:00
The company I work for has a legitimate service that runs on the loopback (it provides our web apps APIs for some device integration) hopefully its just as simple as the user accepting the prompt else we'll be drowning in support. We had to go the path of the local service because they killed NPAPI. I've been thinking about using web serial as an alternative but Firefox doesn't support it.

That being said, I think this is an overall win, hopefully Firefox implements it in a consistent manner as well.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-20 09:19:12+00:00
Generation is the thing where you don't even need the government to own the infrastructure. Just don't prevent anyone who wants to from building a power plant and then have the grid buy electricity from whoever supplies it at the lowest price.

It's the transmission and distribution which are the "natural monopoly" -- the government should own the utility poles -- but that's also a thing where there is a non-trivial amount of labor involved for tree trimming and storm damage etc.
by Nextgrid | 2025-08-20 09:19:55+00:00
Source: all those websites with annoying "cookie banners" where it's easier to accept than to decline.

The GDPR does not approve of that (it should be as easy to consent as it is to decline, otherwise the consent is void for GDPR purposes). Not to mention a lot of them aren't even implemented properly and personal data is leaked to third parties before any consent is given.

But everyone does it and keeps doing it (there's an entire ecosystem of those "consent management platforms" that include built-in features to breach it, including per-country variations so you can vary your non-compliance depending on the ferocity of that country's DPA and your risk-appetite).

And this is just the tip of the iceberg - I've seen things inside organizations that are not compliant either, but there's no point even talking about those if even the basic and obvious things like online consent flows not being enforced.

Here's a report from Noyb exposing the reality on the ground, quite a contrast with the tech-bros' fear-mongering: https://noyb.eu/en/data-protection-day-only-13-cases-eu-dpas...
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-20 09:20:16+00:00
We all want to move to local models eventually for privacy and reliability.

They don't (and won't) have infinite context without trickery or massive €€€ use.

The current crop of online LLMs are just running on VC money slightly tapered with subscriptions - but still at a loss. The hype and money will run out, so use them as much as possible now. But also keep your workflows so that they will work locally when the time comes.

Don't be that 10x coder who becomes a 0.1x coder when Anthropic has issues on their side =)
by marginalia_nu | 2025-08-20 09:20:24+00:00
I think I've been on the HN front page something like 30 times now since August 2021, with maybe half of those hitting it out of the park and lingering for over a day.

There are real diminishing returns in terms of follow-up traffic and follow-up effects. As to be expected, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is something that generally happens over time as the novelty of whatever you're writing about wears off. The good part is that as part of this you'll gradually get more regular readers, so there's less pronounced feast-or-famine cycles.

(Here I don't measure visits as there's so much bot traffic noise especially on anything that hits HN, but mostly focus on whether I get actual engagement, if people reach out to me, send me emails and so on)

I think ultimately a blog post isn't interesting because it's on HN, it's on HN because it's interesting.

Tryharding with regards to the HN frontpage is more likely to come at a cost of writing quality, and thus reducing the likelihood of making the front page.
by derelicta | 2025-08-20 09:21:33+00:00
I'm not demonising their culture. It's like saying that if I tell people Nazi Germany was bad, I'm automatically spitting on Germany's culture.

Also, you'd be surprised that mamy Tibetans are very happy under democracy and don't want to see the return to pedo-monarchy, as so many westerners pretend.

Also I'm sorry but don't pretend we love freedom of speech in the West. Go to the UK and try saying "killing children is bad. I support Palestinian Action" and see how it goes for you.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-20 09:21:47+00:00
I would not say "unambiguously" when it comes to natural languages.

And no, "America" may have referred to the US when I was a kid and here in Central Europe we had Back to the Future type of shoes with the American flag, yeah, and I would not say unambiguously so.

If someone says "America" to refer to a place, they really ought to specify if they want you to understand them.
by microtonal | 2025-08-20 09:22:09+00:00
efficiency

Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.

The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?

Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.

Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
by tifkap | 2025-08-20 09:22:17+00:00
This is most likely an attempt to connect to a webserver on your own device to collect data and/or do tracking.

Remember back in June when Facebook/meta got caught tracking users trough a webserver on Android phone thought Messenger and Instagram? Same thing.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940
by bodge5000 | 2025-08-20 09:23:18+00:00
An interesting anecdote for you about just how much an exe/dmg equivalent may be the missing link to mass adoption:

My older brother needed a new laptop. A little bit of background about him, he is not technically inclined at all and doesn't want to be. He uses Siri to operate things like alarms and reminders on his iPhone because he doesn't know how to use them. I even offered to show him, he doesn't want to know. This is someone for who an alarm clock app is too technical to get involved in.

So anyway, he needed a new laptop, and I of course had a fair collection of Thinkpads so gave him one of them; loaded up with Fedora (Gnome as the DE). I installed the basics he uses, pretty much just Chrome and the Spotify Desktop app.

He's been using that for a few years now and far less than having difficulty with it, he actually loves it, and says (I suppose mostly due to the speed of it) that he wouldn't want to go back to Windows.

Now obviously Flatpak can install everything he uses there, but I think for most people, that being an option rather than a requirement is scary. Windows doesn't have the option of using .exe, thats just how you install things, like it or not (*yes I know there's winget and whatnot, but you've gotta be pretty in the weeds to even be aware that exists). And if you want to install some non-free software, you can find yourself in a difficult position.

Clearly from my brothers case, Linux is now at a point where anyone can use it, I do think the last missing link is a unified executable/installer, that works across distros (in his mind, he's not using Fedora, he's using linux) and works in the same way as exe and dmg. And not just as another option either (see xkcd 927), but as a core requirement of shipping on Linux, and that's a far more difficult problem to solve.
by benterix | 2025-08-20 09:23:29+00:00
The author has a point about CI being a build system and I saw it used and abused in various ways (like the CI containing only one big Makefile with the justification that we can easily migrate from one CI system to another).

However, with time, you can have a very good feel of these CI systems, their strong and weak points, and basically learn how to use them in the simplest way possible in a given situation. Many problems I saw IRL are just a result of an overly complex design.