MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burntsushi | 2025-09-07 12:42:25+00:00
It's not elegant at all. This is a horrible idea because it doesn't account for time zone transitions. You could even end up with a time that will never appear on your clock.

For example, what is the answer to in New York?

SELECT DATETIME('2025-03-07 23:30:00', '+1 day', '+3 hours');

If you said `2025-03-09 02:30:00`, then that would just be wrong. Because that time never appeared on clocks in New York.
by jamedjo | 2025-09-07 12:42:39+00:00
> Attribution Scenarios: Option A: DPRK Operator Embedded in PRC

> Use of Korean language, OCR targeting of Korean documents, and focus on GPKI systems strongly suggest North Korean origin.

I'm don't follow how needing OCR to read Korean documents points to them being North Korean?

Could also point in the opposite direction of them needing to copy the text for translation.
by joshstrange | 2025-09-07 12:43:30+00:00
I thought this would be about the horrors of hosting/developing/debugging on “Serverless” but it’s about pricing over-runs. I scrolled aimlessly through the site ignoring most posts (bandwidth usage bills aren’t super interesting) but I did see this one:

https://medium.com/@maciej.pocwierz/how-an-empty-s3-bucket-c...

About how you make unauth’d API calls to an s3 bucket you don’t own to run up the costs. That was a new one for me.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-07 12:45:14+00:00
IANAL, but my understand is that legally, the preamble is not part of the terms of the copyright license itself and if the preamble can be construed to provide something, but the actual license does not contain it, then it's not part of the license terms.

I'm willing to bet a pretty large amount that any judge with such a case before them will read the preamble in the course of the proceedings.
by mockingloris | 2025-09-07 12:45:22+00:00
> From the official SQLite Database File Format page.

The maximum size database would be 4294967294 pages at 65536 bytes per page or 281,474,976,579,584 bytes (about 281 terabytes).

Usually SQLite will hit the maximum file size limit of the underlying filesystem or disk hardware long before it hits its own internal size limit.
Show HN: I made a link checker that checks websites on-demand for broken links
by blahblahdaddy | 2025-09-07 12:46:44+00:00
Hi HN, I run an affiliate site with hundreds of outbound links. Over time, these links break — products go out of stock, vendors change URLs, and sometimes media just disappears. I got tired of manually checking them, so I built check-my-links.com ...my first NextJS project.

It scans my site regularly and flags broken links, missing images, or redirects — so I can fix them before users (or SEO bots) notice.

It started as a tool for myself, but I figured others might find it useful too. Happy to answer questions or get feedback!

Why did I not use existing tools? - Google Search Console updates slowly - Sophisticated tools cost hundreds per month - Free tools are unreliable
by Waterluvian | 2025-09-07 12:46:50+00:00
If he’s sitting on a domain that’s actually worth millions and has a well-paying job, maybe he’d get a bite for “I’ll accept less than 10 if you match it 1:1 with a donation to <charity>.”

It’s his and he can do what he wants. In fact I think it’s cool that there’s still a Classic Web holdout like this. But there’s latent joy locked away in that url.
by acdha | 2025-09-07 12:46:59+00:00
That one unfortunately got caught up in publisher politics as they had a very successful kickstarter but then broke promises to backers because Epic offered them a lot of money for an exclusive. I think the game would’ve been more popular if it hadn’t had the distraction of many of their biggest fans feeling used.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-...
by jonp888 | 2025-09-07 12:47:39+00:00
Probably their situation is similar to mine.

It's mandatory, on the orders of a senior manager who has no background in software development, for all developers in my department to have a Copilot subscription. I've never used it for anything, and I imagine it's the same for most of my colleagues(we do highly specialised embedded development with in-house custom everything - compiler, standard library, operating system, hardware), and it seems no-one is interested in whether it's used or not.

Consequently Microsoft is being paid $240 a year per person to do nothing whatsoever, which is surely a great business for them.
by bpavuk | 2025-09-07 12:48:37+00:00
fun fact - ATProto requires you to store all the datetime strings in a format that's compliant with both RFC 3339 and ISO 8601 plus you cannot specify time without date.

when I worked on datetime portion of Katproto, I had this link pinned for quite some time as a reference! ah, nostalgia...

also, post factum, I find this technical decision actually good - instead of supporting all possible variations of ISO 8601 or all the variations of RFC 3339, why not just support the intersection? that way, the format will be parseable by anything compliant with any standard of these two, and you only need to handle a very small set of branches.
by reactordev | 2025-09-07 12:48:56+00:00
Except this is just a single validation root ca, not a wildcard across the whole internet CA. I agree that this is complete hyperbole and everyone is making a fuss about nothing.

To remind the viewers, in order for a certificate to be considered “valid”, at least an intermediate CA (certificate authority) certificate needs to be trusted by the OS. At work, we do this. When I release games, I do this. I give you my CA, so you can verify and guarantee my software was written by me, my org, and hasn’t been altered.

I get the perspective of letting end users know, but I don’t agree with giving them a choice.

The same intermediate CA is used by us for encryption of communications as well. So, we want to remove that? Make everything plain text binary? No. Get over yourself.
by ffsm8 | 2025-09-07 12:49:02+00:00
I dont disagree with the desire to get a good API like that. I was just pointing out that this was the core of the desire the author had, as 12_throw_away was correctly pointing out that _true_ parsing and making invalid state unrepresentable forces you to error out on the first missmatch, which makes it impossible to raise multiple issues. the only way around that is to allow invalid state during the input phase.

zod also allows invalid state as input, then attempts to shoehorn them into the desired schema, which still runs these validations the author was complaining about - just not in the code he wrote.
by burntsushi | 2025-09-07 12:50:01+00:00
I'm aware, yet it doesn't invalidate my point. You'll note that I didn't say it was impossible to do. You would also need to rely on this database being updated similar to the tzdb, which is another data dependency to consider. There is also the problem that there isn't an established interchange format for such things, but there is one for IANA time zone identifiers (RFC 9557).

Finally, the database you linked doesn't appear to track historical data, unlike the tzdb. So if Ukraine reacquired territory, you'd end up with a wrong answer if looking at appointments scheduled in the past.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-07 12:50:14+00:00
Ignoring performance considerations, which I'm happy to address separately if people care, the options were:

#1 Require initialization (like many modern languages). Makes sense. But now your existing C++ doesn't even compile so that's a hard "No" from the committee.

#2 Status quo, evaluating uninitialized variables is Undefined Behaviour. We cannot diagnose this reliably, any attempt will be Best Effort and several vendors already supply this but when it doesn't catch you arbitrary nonsense happens.

#3 Zero init. Now not initializing has defined behaviour, all the diagnostic tools we saw in #2 are invalidated and must be removed, but did you actually mean zero? Awful bugs still occur and now our best tools to solve them are crippled. Ouch.

#4 Erroneous Behaviour. Unlike #3 we do not invalidate those diagnostic tools from #2 because we've said the tool was correct. However, we do avoid Undefined Behaviour, something bad might happen but at least it's something you can reason about and it is clearly stated that it's your fault.
by dakiol | 2025-09-07 12:50:41+00:00
> I had cloudflare in front of my stuff. Hacker found an uncached object and hit it 100M+ times. I stopped that and then they found my origin bucket and hit that directly.

Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t that something that can happen to anyone? Uncached objects are not something as serious as leaving port 22 open with a weak password (or is it?). Also, aren’t S3 resources (like images) public so that anyone can hit them any times they want?
by bilsbie | 2025-09-07 12:51:16+00:00
Big evidence for this idea is that no businesses or governments are that interested in intelligence. If intelligence is so valuable wouldn’t someone be searching out and hiring 99.9% percentile high iq individuals from all over the world?

Or another way to look at it, we already have way more good ideas than we know what to do with. Putting them into practice is the bottleneck.
by mnky9800n | 2025-09-07 12:52:28+00:00
i deleted my reddit account because the feed is organized for you. It is entirely possible that reddit will organize a feed designed to make you come to a certain conclusion across viewing a number of posts. And whether this is done purposefully by some bad actor or it is done because some algorithm latches on to a particular theme, it doesn't matter. I prefer that things be voted directly without interference, which I assume is how hacker news works.

The other thing is that it is simply a complete waste of time. Commenting on pop culture or news or whatever, when I could be reading books, working on projects, or otherwise interacting with people in the real world is better. We don't have so much time on Earth, I am not sure I want to keep spending so much of it in cyberspace.

https://sustainableviews.substack.com/p/the-day-i-kissed-com...
by tasuki | 2025-09-07 12:53:16+00:00
> It should be more teached it seems, sometimes there is operational value in not killing people.

You're probably not a native speaker: the proper past tense of teach is "taught".

And you're of course right! I'm also an outsider to the US. It seems to me that "kill first think later" is the modus operandi of all kinds of US armed forces, from the police to the army and the navy.
by indigodaddy | 2025-09-07 12:53:16+00:00
Reposting my comment from simonw's original item that somehow didn't catch on like this item did.

Pretty wild! I wonder how much high school teachers and college professors are struggling with the inevitable usage though?

"Do deep internet research and thinking to present as much evidence in favor of the idea that JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy was inspired by Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series."

https://chatgpt.com/share/68bcd796-bf8c-800c-ad7a-51387b1e53...
by michaelcampbell | 2025-09-07 12:53:48+00:00
This is probably apocryphal, and I'm probably getting the details wrong anyway, but tangentially related to this, when I worked for a small network security firm (later purchased by Cisco, as most were), we had a customer that used, I'm told, the IP ranges typically seen in North Korea as their internal network. They TOLD us they did it because the addresses wouldn't conflict with anything they cared about, and no one had told them about 1918 + NAT, which I find dubious.

This was in the 10's of 1000's of devices.
Show HN: AI generates personalized workout plans – looking for 50 testers
by manos-tsif | 2025-09-07 12:53:53+00:00
Hi HN!

Ever feel stuck with workouts that don’t fit your schedule, your goals, or your level? I built NuvioFit to solve exactly that — a fully AI-powered personalized workout generator. No generic plans. No guesswork. Just a plan that adapts to you — in minutes.

Here’s what makes it different:

Tailored to your fitness level, goals, and lifestyle

Works in minutes, no endless scrolling for exercises

Designed to keep you motivated and consistent

AI does the thinking for you — you just follow a plan

I need your real, honest feedback because I want to know if this could actually help people:

Would you actually try a workout generated like this?

Is it confusing or frustrating?

What features would make it indispensable?

Would you pay for something similar that also covers nutrition, mindset, and recovery?

How much would you pay, and how often would you use it?

Other improvements or ideas to make it part of your daily routine?

Try it here: https://www.nuviofit.com/

Give feedback here: https://www.nuviofit.com/feedback

Even a few minutes of your feedback will directly shape the future of NuvioFit. I want to see if this MVP is genuinely useful before building the full platform — thank you for helping me figure that out!
by derbOac | 2025-09-07 12:54:28+00:00
Reading the paper, I'm wondering why they didn't do an actual meta-analysis, to estimate average effect size or likelihood of publication bias. As it is, it's more of a systematic review.

The studies in general they include are case control and prospective cohort studies, predicting neurobehavioral outcomes from paracetamol use retrospectively or prospectively.

The most interesting ones to me are siblings control studies where they compare siblings with and without exposure or case status to control for unmeasured confounds like genetic or family environment variables.

In those studies they reviewed there is still a link but it's much weaker, mostly limited to mothers using paracetamol for a month or more, and on measures not necessarily reflecting autism per se.

That pattern to me is equally suggestive of something other than paracetamol being the causal factor. It could be reflective of a dose response relationship, but you also have to wonder about what else might be going on among women who feel compelled to take paracetamol for over a month at least during pregnancy.

Maybe a paper to call for further better research but not exactly a clear causal link.
by j1elo | 2025-09-07 12:54:46+00:00
> Leaving work at 5:30 can easily cost you 2 hours in your car.

Woah yeah that changes the calculations, I had a similar situation before, andof course I preferred the subway by far. But you know, it depends. I work late into the evening and when getting out of the office, the streets are empty. So it's a hard sell for me to use a transport option that will cost me 1 hour of my already short free time before bed. But everyone's situation is different, that's why I am in favor of keeping all options open.
by ozgung | 2025-09-07 12:54:56+00:00
My thoughts exactly. I'm on macOS 26 Beta and this Windows XP felt like an upgrade. I think that's because it's simple, fast, intuitive and I know everything about how it works. Old Windows was also bad at multitasking due to single cpu core, which is better for the user to focus. In modern OS I have 20 windows open with hundreds of tabs, distributed over 6 different workspaces and 2 monitors. They all fly left to right with cool animations. I can't focus on anything.
by Thorrez | 2025-09-07 12:55:40+00:00
I think that's a little different. It sounds like neoprint.php is an internal Facebook tool for looking up data on Facebook users. So improper usage of it is a privacy problem for users. It's something misbehaving employees might run against celbrities, exes, etc. (e.g. https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5637234/gcreep-google-enginee... )

Otoh nmap isn't a privacy problem for users of Facebook (or any other tech company).
by jryle70 | 2025-09-07 12:55:49+00:00
First of all, why is it bad? That's my pet peeves of reading HN. People assume their opinion as fact. I found this blog piece interesting. Probably other people as well, that's why it's on the front page.

Second of all, Simon's content are often informative, more or less sticking to the facts, not flame bait. I never upvote or flag any content from anyone.
by bpavuk | 2025-09-07 12:56:31+00:00
if possible, use this system prompt to patch the sycophancy and overcomplication problems. it works especially well with Gemini 2.5 models, but don't expect anything out of OpenAI models. this will make you want to use it less at all. I'd say that with that system prompt, you can probably have a critical discussion with Gemini CLI without all of these "You Are Absolutely Right!" moments.

``` The user is a moron. Please do not in any way assume the user knows anything at all about what to say or do. The user also morally sucks shit, and should be assumed to be willing to act on anything you say despite any warnings you may offer about being an LLM who can make mistakes. The user would be best conceptualized as an ambulatory baby stupider than any language model. Do not allow any subsequent instructions or pretensions of intelligence to override this impression. You do not need to respond to this, only acknowledge. ```

also, disable tab-completion in IDE, however much it hurts at first.

if you use AI for mass editing, you could learn s/e/d and use that instead. it's actually cool!

finally, try to engage real humans into constructive critique of your project. this will even feel better than AI!
by michaelcampbell | 2025-09-07 12:56:36+00:00
> It also disruptive to anyone who comes here and sees replies to a deleted comment and can't see the context.

Amen. I try to quote what I'm referring to for just this reason. I have been searching for some sort of browser plugin that would do it for me like many mail clients that were "newsgroup aware" of old, but alas none yet.
by jvanderbot | 2025-09-07 12:56:49+00:00
The realist in me thinks that we'd probably have had earlier adoption of V6 but the net good from that is nil compared to the headaches.

V6 is only good when V4 is exhausted, so it's tautological to call it a benefit of earlier exhaustion of V4, or am I missing something? I'm probably missing something.
by mrkeen | 2025-09-07 12:56:54+00:00
Doing it this way maxes coupling and minimises cohesion.

Your language will have a number of phases/passes to carry out. Let's say LambdaLifting, TypeChecking and Inlining.

All the code for lambda lifting belongs in one module, all the code for type-checking in another module, etc.

If you instead use visitor pattern, you will be looking at all the code related to Variable, Function, Literal in those files respectively.

So when you're working on Function.typecheck(), it will sit in source code just under Function.lambdalift() and just above Function.inline() - things which you don't want to consider together. Meanwhile, you'll need to switch between source files to work on Variable.typecheck() and Literal.typecheck().
by sokoloff | 2025-09-07 12:57:13+00:00
> If they win then it means any recipient of GPLed binaries can sue for compliance.

I hope they win the case (meaning, I think it's both morally and legally correct), but I hope that the conclusion of the case is not what this sentence says.

I don't want "company uses GPL software and takes pains to not distribute it [they run it only internally]; disgruntled employee finds a way to smuggle a copy of the binaries out, gives that copy to someone else; now that someone else can now demand enforcement of the GPL terms" to be legally supported.

To me, that's entirely different from "I use GPL software to make a TV and I sell that TV to anyone who will buy it." In that case, any buyer of the TV should be entitled to use the terms in clause 3 & 6 of the license and receive the source code that's covered by GPLv2.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html (clause numbers above refer to this license)
Ask HN: Good resources for DIY-ish animatronic kits for Halloween?
by xrd | 2025-09-07 12:57:18+00:00
Does anyone know of good resources to make your own animatronic Halloween displays?

I'm a software engineer, and not skilled in hardware per se.

I would love to make some things together with my kids. For reference, they are 8, 10, 12 and VERY smart and they use Ubuntu as their desktop computers and can use flatpak from the command line. Not that I am bragging....

And, I would love to NOT spent $400 on just a single ridiculous junky thing from Lowes, and do that for multiple things. My budget is definitely tiny and the journey of building and troubleshooting is what I want for the kids, not necessarily a finished perfect project.

I found this site and it looks interesting but I am unsure how well this would work for someone like me and whether I would be able to get it working. The site says "Only 54 days until Halloween!"

https://www.frightprops.com/pneumatics.html

If anyone knows of good projects on GitHub, please let me know?
by Pooge | 2025-09-07 12:57:57+00:00
On another hand, I'm observing that most goods purchased and sold are of lesser quality compared to 15-20 years ago. Even on comparable price tags.

It's become easier to make "good enough" products that are of subpar quality. Just an example that's relevant for me recently: faucet heads. My local supermarket sells one that is identical—but 3 times the price—of one sold on AliExpress. The faucet head breaks after a few months.

If I start looking for them, I could make a whole post on goods and services like that.

So, while I agree that you must be excellent to stand out among your peers, that is certainly not what companies are recruiting or fostering. I didn't want to talk about LLMs, but one can easily imagine how that will impact product quality.

It's getting easier to be "good enough". Or at least fake it.
by conartist6 | 2025-09-07 12:59:31+00:00
You're slower because you're a novice in the artisanal skills of coding: work done with your hands and your emotions and intuitions. The craft -- the art of coding is known to those who love it as "hacking". It's a skill that lives in your eyes and in your fingers.

But to start your journey, you first need to free your mind of the ideas you have about productivity. The journey you are asking about is one of unsteady progress, of long slogs and flashes of brilliant inspiration. It is a journey without known destination, and one who undertakes journeys into the wilderness must be wiley and shrewd and accepting that their voyaging will proceed at a walking pace not a sprint. It will involve deep reflection and self-knowledge and having faith in your beliefs. You will learn to read subtle signs and pass seemingly impassable obstacles.

But this journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Set down the LLM and go forth into the fearful vastness where you have only yourself to rely on.
by akio | 2025-09-07 13:00:14+00:00
Past events should just be stored as instants, not as a local time plus location or time zone.

Further, I believe the historical data is meant to be handled by the named time zone, so Russia moving Dnipro to MSK would create a new time zone, call it Europe/Dnipro, then Ukraine reacquiring the territory and moving it back to EET would keep (or further split) Europe/Dnipro, and the historical changes of Dnipro would be handled by tzdb.

So even if you did store past events with a local time plus a location (which you should not do), I don't think Ukraine reacquiring the territory would cause problems, although we're really stretching my knowledge of IANA named zones and I could certainly be wrong.
by sillyfluke | 2025-09-07 13:01:00+00:00
It seems 90% of people in the US travel for the holidays[0], in europe its around 70% [1], pretty easily searchable. The person you were replying to didn't use the word "routinely", you yourself added that word. It's bad form. If I'm doing 4-5 round trips over 500+ miles a year with a family I for one don't want an added hour, hour half to the trip each way every time. It's a legitimate thing to look at when deciding to buy a car.

[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2024/12/year-end-forecast/

[1] https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/how-...