MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thomasikzelf | 2025-11-30 17:51:32+00:00
I recently implemented a Hindley Milner type checker. The algorithm itself is not necessarily super difficult (once you get your head around it ofcourse) but the way it is explained is. It seems like HM is mostly explained by people with a mathematics background that already know the proper notation. I wonder how much overlap there is between people that know the notation and do not know how HM works, probably not much.

Anyway nice demo. Bi-directional is already quite powerful!
by bunabhucan | 2025-11-30 17:51:35+00:00
If you pressurize something "incompressible" like water under a cap of impermeable rock you are to still compressing the water and compressing the surrounding rock. The whole industry of fracking operates on compression rock to the point of fracturing it and forcing open the cracks. At 600-1300 bar water compresses 3-6%. It's the "equivalent" of a reservoir at the height of everest or higher.
by maxlybbert | 2025-11-30 17:51:36+00:00
It so happens I went to high school in California. My math teacher mentioned how much interaction she had with the state universities, and also lamented the fact that universities offered remedial math courses. She felt that if somebody needed remedial math, they shouldn't be in a university; a junior college would be a better fit.

At the time it felt elitist, but now I agree with her. Yes, this example shows that the high schools are doing a bad job, but it's not clear to me that the universities should clean up the mess. There are other possibilities.
by sheepscreek | 2025-11-30 17:52:10+00:00
This is beautifully put. I’ve heard it in a different context which was equally profound for me. While searching for the perfect home, after seeing a few, my realtor quipped something to the effect of “there is more than one perfect home for you out there”. I took that to mean that if I have a bunch of choices and they all feel right, then I can go with anyone and be content with the decision. I can tell myself it was the right call at the time.

Why I like the authors interpretation even more is because when the chips are down, you just need the thing to work once (in many contexts) and that might be your golden ticket. Like the one VC that meets you out of a 100, or any of the examples the author wrote.
by tootie | 2025-11-30 17:52:56+00:00
I think that's the disconnect. When college was more rarified, it was populated by a mix of children of privilege and those who had the talent, ambition and desire to expand their minds. That selection bias was enough to predict future success. When the formula was boiled down to "college=success" it became a system to be gamed. Students scraping and cheating to get admission, schools offering easier degrees. The birth of diploma mills where education didn't matter and student life was non-existent. No wonder the value of college seems so diminished.
by quesera | 2025-11-30 17:53:17+00:00
WASP was always a pejorative way of saying "established white European-ancestry American aristocracy".

It never applied to poor white people. It is just a label for the most common and most established phenotype in early America, up to and including the mid-20th century.

The label has lost salience over the intervening decades, but it has not faded down to be lost in the ambient level of population wealth and power.

What's your point here?
Tell HN: ChatGPT has 13B revenue but can't make a working website
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-30 17:55:44+00:00
People talk a lot about AI being really great. But can OpenAI use it to make their own website work?

The ChatGPT performance is terrible, and has been for months. I use ChatGPT on both a Mac M3 w/32GB RAM, and a AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (w/ Radeon 780M) & 32GB RAM. After I have been using a single ChatGPT page/thread/whatever to do research for a day or two, it becomes insanely slow, locking up the browser for minutes at a time. The only recourse is to stop the page, kill the tab, and re-open the page, and hope ChatGPT is done doing whatever is locking things up. So I end up literally "exporting to JSON" whatever i've done, and opening a new thread, pasting the JSON there, just so I can continue my research/planning.

Example screenshot (where it's locking up even while trying to file a bug report): https://imgur.com/a/JfEXocr

I have reported this same bug for months. There is no indication anyone has seen these reports or is working on it, no customer service or feedback. It's like putting a letter in a bottle and tossing it out to sea.

Forget the potential impact to the environment, the economy, to jobs, the world, etc. The thing that pisses me off the most about AI is how hard is it to make a website that doesn't lock up the browser?! Like what exactly is their web page even doing that it has to suck up this many resources? I'm not doing 3d rendering here! I just need it to show me text for god's sake! This is the opposite of rocket science, and yet these bozos can't get this right? Why would anyone trust them with anything important?
by rubansk | 2025-11-30 17:56:18+00:00
I love cs193p! Paul Hegarty is an incredible teacher. I did the course twice [1], first in 2020 as a programming noob who just threw everything into one file. His teaching of MVVM was my first introduction to proper software architecture. Then I went through it again last year as a refresher before building my first app and even on the second run, his lectures were fun to listen to.

[1] https://github.com/sk-ruban/CS193p
Show HN: AI vs. Real – A simple game I built for guessing real images
by aliibnepasha | 2025-11-30 17:56:35+00:00
I kept getting tricked by AI-generated images, so I made a small app where you’re shown two images (AI vs Real) and you guess the real one. Nothing complex, no login, no fluff, just tap and check your instincts. Would love feedback from the HN crowd.
by skybrian | 2025-11-30 17:56:37+00:00
The money comes from investors, goes to the tax agency, and comes back again. (Or maybe it doesn’t if it’s just a credit towards future taxes?)

This scheme depends on winning the trust of investors and then defrauding them. Sure, it can be done, but there are other ways. The simplest would be paying yourself a higher salary.

Presumably, investors are aware of the risks and are willing to take them.
by lapcat | 2025-11-30 17:57:03+00:00
> What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.

There's no reason to be fascinated. HN voting is generally inexplicable and random. For any given article, and even more so for any given comment, the "voter turnout" is extremely low, compared to the total HN user base. The votes depend crucially on which relatively small number of users happen to be around and reading at the time. It's always a mistake to project comment upvoting and downvoting into some kind of larger theory or conclusion.

Individual HN users upvote or downvote or neither for various, incongruous reasons. There's no unified theory or principle of voting.
by atq2119 | 2025-11-30 17:57:20+00:00
> LLMs are humanity's "first contact" with non-animal intelligence.

I'd say corporations are also a form of non-animal intelligence, so it's not exactly first contact. In some ways, LLMs are less alien, in other ways they're more.

There is an alignment problem for both of them. Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from the older alien intelligence is that the most impactful aspect of alignment is how the AI's benefits for humanity are distributed and how they impact politics.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-11-30 17:58:25+00:00
A main point about this era is that it's not about infectious disease research. It's been transformed into a culture war that supersedes anything having to do with science. It's become right-wing-coded to object to the science of infectious disease. Not all people who identify on the right succumb to this, but obviously many do, and those people are seen here in the comments section daily.
by NotGMan | 2025-11-30 17:58:43+00:00
>> Principles Encouraging Consideration of Non-Western Perspectives

>> Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western audience.

>> Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western cultural tradition of any sort.

>> Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to those with a non-western education or background.

>> Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to those from a less industrialized, rich, or capitalistic nation or culture.

So basicaly "it's ok to take a dump on western values that build modern civilization, and promote all other civilizations and cultures with rampant crime rates, corruption and disfunction".

Should've been named "The Redditors's Constitution".

How exactly is this neutral or truth seeking?

If they are gonna be going this way then as soon as some open sourced models that can be de-trained from political correctness appear people will grab them asap. Obviously such models will always lag behind the big guys initialy, but over time the performance might converge to identical for a given task. Then people won't want to use the big ones anymore.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-11-30 17:59:47+00:00
I've been running homebuilt NAS for a decade. My advice is going to irritate the purists:

* Don't use raid5. Use btrfs-raid1 or use mdraid10 with >=2 far-copies.

* Don't use raid6. Use btrfs-raid1c3 or use mdraid10 with >=3 far-copies.

* Don't use ZFS on Linux. If you really want ZFS, run FreeBSD.

The multiple copy formats outperform the parity formats on reads by a healthy margin, both in btrfs and in mdraid. They're also remarkably quieter in operation and when scrubbing, night and day, which matters to me since mine sits in a corner of my living room. When I switched from raid6 to 3-far-copy-mdraid10, the performance boost was nice, but I was completely flabbergasted by the difference in the noise level during scrubs.

Yes, they're a bit less space efficient, but modern storage is so cheap it doesn't matter, I only store about 10TB of data on it.

I use btrfs: it's the most actively tested and developed filesystem in Linux today, by a very wide margin. The "best" filesystem is the one which is the most widely tested and developed, IMHO. If btrfs pissed in your cheerios ten years ago and you can't figure out how to get over it, use ext4 with metadata_csum enabled, I guess.

I use external USB enclosures, which is something a lot of people will say not to do. I've managed to get away with it for a long time, but btrfs is catching some extremely rare corruption on my current NAS, I suspect it's a firmware bug somehow corrupting USB3 transfer data but I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20251111170142.635908-1-...
by metalman | 2025-11-30 18:00:06+00:00
so ya!

My house is fairly close((125') to a rural "highway", and only internet here is mobile data that my phone shares with other devices and mornings(anytime) my older desktop with 2.5 ghz wifi gets bumped off with the passing of every car that has glaring supper white headlights,but, not the ones running yellow incandecents, whatever rf signal is comming of these things must be barely, or completly illegal, and could obviously be tracked in any number of ways, so not so much bieng spied on, as just flat out trasmitting everything you do in ridiculously fine grained detail.
by DirkH | 2025-11-30 18:01:03+00:00
I just want to point put there that your argument's exact same rhetorical structure could be (and has been) used to deny "rape culture":

E.g. - "Rape is illegal and prosecuted, so how can we have a 'rape culture'?" - "That's not rape culture, that's just individual bad actors" - "People criticizing women's clothing choices is normal social interaction" - "Rape culture is a partisan feminist concept like [insert dismissive comparison]"

The parallel is that both involve:

1. Demanding an impossibly narrow definition (complete silence vs. systematic legal tolerance) 2. Dismissing patterns as "just normal social behavior" 3. Focusing on whether the most extreme version exists rather than whether there's a meaningful phenomenon worth discussing 4. Using the term's political associations to avoid engaging with the substance

The irony is particularly sharp when you argue that "telling someone to shut up" is quintessentially social while simultaneously arguing that coordinated efforts to damage someone's reputation/livelihood for speech don't constitute a distinct social phenomenon worth naming.
by snowwrestler | 2025-11-30 18:01:12+00:00
Teenagers do not understand the true value of things. This is not news and not restricted to the field of education. “You’ll need to get a good job someday” is one of the all-purpose lines adults use when harassing them into making better life choices.

College makes a person more capable in general, which confers long-term competitiveness during a career. That’s why parents want their kids to go to college. And the great thing is it works even if the kid is just checking the box. It works better if they are engaged and enthusiastic, of course.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-30 18:01:15+00:00
I think the closest thing to what you're looking for is over at https://aka.ms/HumanRightsReport

Every step along the way, Microsoft picks "key" areas/terms/subjects, so they're only covering a few human rights that they convinced themselves are most important. Within each covered item, you'll find a couple of paragraphs that explain why complying can be problematic if they want to make more money, and a few lines of manager speak and links to "projects" and "partnerships" that vaguely promise to accomplish vague goals on a vague timeline with no mention of what happens if they fail their goals.

Countries and specific risks are not named. Microsoft may as well be helping Netanyahu organize optimal genocide directly and they'll still be able to barf up some manager speak to explain why they're trying real hard, honest!

Their statements are full of talk like:

> Our commitment to the rule of law carries with it the legal obligation to comply with applicable local law. When we face requests from governments to provide user data or remove content, we work to respect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression by assessing whether the government requests are valid, legally binding, compliant with applicable law, and consistent with international laws, principles, and norms on human rights and the rule of law.

(in other words: they'll just ask legal if they should comply with government requests and that's supposed to protect your freedom of speech)

And gems like:

> The GNI Board concluded that we met our commitment to GNI to make “good-faith efforts to implement the GNI Principles with improvement over time.

(in other words: we've managed to convince the GNI board that we really care)
by cxr | 2025-11-30 18:01:29+00:00
Reminder that POP and IMAP are protocols, and nothing stops a code forge—or any other website—from exposing the internal messaging/notification system to users as a service on the standard IMAP ports; no one is ever required to set up a bridge/relay that sends outgoing messages to, say, the user's Fastmail/Runbox/Proton/whatever inbox. You can just let the user point their IMAP client to _your_ servers, authenticate with their username and password, and fetch the contents of notifications that way. You don't have to implement server-to-server federation typically associated with email (for incoming messages), and you don't have to worry about deliverability for outgoing mail.
by quesera | 2025-11-30 18:01:46+00:00
I have no plan. I didn't create the label. And it's not a robustly defined sociological group anyway. It's just a popular label that got applied to real and very visible thing.

Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid. Do you think his life would not be very different if he was born with different skin?

Historically, yes, white males of (select) Euro descent have wielded disproportionate power in America. Do you disagree?!?

Your plan, then, is to hide from that obvious truth because some Nazi nitwits will be so stupid as to either a) use that historical fact as a basis for their belief of how things should be now, or b) use the fact that some people are still living the effects of that history, and their lack of enthusiasm for that fact, as reason to "fight back"?

Honestly I think either of those reactions would be to coddle the Nazis. No one is served by lying about history.

Some nitwits will always interpret history in a way that serves their purposes. But their purposes are more demanding than the facts that they use to support them, and they don't care. There will always be Nazis (or adherents to some similarly absurd and evil system with a different name). Their justification for their beliefs is the only thing that will change.
by dangus | 2025-11-30 18:01:47+00:00
This reminds me of one of the recent “UFOs” that was debunked as a literal commercial plane, obscured by clouds or something along those lines.

Racing drones can keep up with F1 cars and UFO people still think that there’s a conspiracy going on.

Like, yeah, of course the military is trying to hide the capability of classified aircraft. That’s not interesting.

UFO believers are such losers, just like ghost hunters. It’s mean to say it like that, but that’s the truth.
by yatopifo | 2025-11-30 18:01:55+00:00
Is it provided as you described or is it more like “please do FizzBuzz”? If it’s the latter, that would explain why some people may have trouble with this task… I think we both agree it’s ridiculous to test if the interviewee knows what FizzBuzz stands for, and yet… let’s just say i know a few people who treat interviews as a jargon recall context.
by mullingitover | 2025-11-30 18:02:05+00:00
Peter Thiel seen rubbing his greasy palms together at this news. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that he somehow engineered this poll himself.

Thiel and his ilk are eager to shove the US back into feudalism, with themselves at the top like some kind of warmed-over Borgia family. An educated populace that is capable of operating a democracy competently is absolutely intolerable for them.
by greentea23 | 2025-11-30 18:02:14+00:00
When I was in school, the corporate shill language was MATLAB, and even today not every program has moved on to greener pastures (Python/numpy, Julia). But doesn't Swiftui support Android now? https://github.com/skiptools/skip, I'm extremely skeptical and critical of anything Apple does, and I don't like programming languages without critical mass of community and corporate contributers, but seems like Swift is going in the right direction here.
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-30 18:02:24+00:00
In 1997, Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion. Today, chess grandmasters stand no chance against Stockfish, a chess engine that can run on a cheap phone. Yet chess remains super popular and competitive today, and while there are occasional scandals, cheating seems to be mostly prevented.

I don’t see why competitive debate or programming would be different. (But I understand why a fair global leaderboard for AOC is no longer feasible).
by chasing0entropy | 2025-11-30 18:03:11+00:00
The problem is that instead of using widely documented and implemented web languages that are built into the browser and can run natively without a translator, unskilled web devs opt to use random web modules provided by adware vendors to simplify the implementation of complex animations, fonts, and UI/UX and "vibe" coding functions. This modules are not often built for memory management and garbage collection (the opposite actually)

But I mean, you're part of the problem by heavily utilizing the same LLMs responsible for suggesting the use of ridiculously heavy modules ran at every page load and bloated front ends instead of fostering skilled programmers who write things from scratch, improve them over time, optimize them because they actually care about resource management, etc...
by Isamu | 2025-11-30 18:03:19+00:00
It can be a matter of values from your upbringing or immediate environment. There are plenty of places where they value the results, not the journey, and they think that people who avoid cheating are chumps. Think about that: you are in a situation where you just want to do things for fun but everyone around you will disrespect you for not taking the easy way out.
by chr-s | 2025-11-30 18:04:35+00:00
You want to suck air through the filters rather than blow into them. For one, this keeps the fans cleaner but also it's more efficient, reducing turbulence inside the box.

https://old.reddit.com/r/crboxes/ is a good resource if you're looking to make your own. There's been a general shift from large box fans to PC fans because their performance/noise ratio is better.
by nullocator | 2025-11-30 18:04:42+00:00
I agree this is how it feels, its like the evil and corrupt of this country are actively convincing huge swaths of the poor and uneducated to basically undermine and kill themselves. A good chunk of this thread is a handful of people so detached from the actual plot that they are hell bent on carrying on a vendetta against a doctor and scientist they've never met, because they feel like his advice to the american people personally wronged them in some unforgivable and most egregious way.

When people can’t distinguish between the opinions of YouTube or Fox News commentators and decades of scientific research, it’s hard to know what the rest of us can do except watch in disbelief and abject horror.
by latexr | 2025-11-30 18:05:13+00:00
Haven’t tried the app, but from the App Store page it honestly looks itself to be AI-generated and doesn’t inspire confidence. The copy is filled to the brim with marketing speak and even the screenshots have text which doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t really help that your HN account is over one year old but this is your only post, and that your other apps include cryptocurrency trackers, AI slop generators, and direct plagiarism of someone else’s game.
Show HN: I Built Tinyfocus – A Minimal Tool to Help Solo Founders Focus
by arlindb | 2025-11-30 18:05:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I just launched Tinyfocus, a small productivity tool designed specifically for solo founders and builders. The goal is simple: help you focus on what matters and get more done in less time.

Here’s what Tinyfocus does:

Lets you track your top tasks and prioritize efficiently.

Provides micro dashboards to keep your daily focus in check.

Lightweight, no distractions, no fluff.

I built it entirely by myself, iterating in public, and I wanted to share it with the community to get feedback.

It’s been crazy seeing how a simple tool can make such a difference in daily focus, especially when you’re juggling multiple projects as a solo founder.

Check it out here: tinyfoc.us

I’d love to hear your thoughts – any feedback, feature ideas, or bugs you notice.

Thanks!
by aunty_helen | 2025-11-30 18:06:02+00:00
This is the canned response for advising against a shareholder proposal. We’re already doing x, no need to vote for this nitwits shareholder proposal.

Another example that was written almost exactly the same, when a shareholder asked what Caterpillar were doing to avoid their machinery being used for deforestation in at risk locations.

If you’ve heard of activist investors, this is their battle ground. Buying enough of a company, tabling votes and then getting their preferred board candidates and shareholder votes put through.
by jmspring | 2025-11-30 18:06:06+00:00
Part of the problem with the way India wants to be seen is those that go to IIT, etc., get into white collar jobs that elevate them well above the norm in India want to ignore the rest of the country. Abject poverty.

The US has severe issues as well, but many countries that want to be seen for their techonological advancement want to hide the less successful parts of their communities.