MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-11-07 14:07:17+00:00
>humans are, in an astonishing twist, wired to assume that if they're being replied to, there's a mind like theirs behind those replies

Interesting, not part of my experience really (though I'll need to reflect on it); thanks for sharing. It's a little like when people discover their aphantasia isn't the common experience of most other people.
by Thorrez | 2025-11-07 14:07:35+00:00
The AI is available 24 hours a day, for hours-long conversations, and will be consistently sycophantic without getting tired of it.

Is a human able to do all of those? I guess someone who has no job and can be "on-call" 24/7 to respond to messages, and is 100% dedicated to being sycophantic. Nearly impossible to find someone like that.

There are real friends. They're willing to spend hours talking. However, they'll be interested in the person's best interest, not in being sycophantic.
by sausagefeet | 2025-11-07 14:08:24+00:00
I'm the CTO of Terrateam. For "why not rust", I have found the downsides of Rust not compelling enough to use it. We don't need close-to-metal performance. We don't really need the borrow checker, a GC is fine. We are immutable by default so the borrow checker doesn't help much there.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-11-07 14:08:28+00:00
OpenRA (Command & Conquer), CorsixTH (Theme Hospital), ET: Legacy (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) and FreeCiv (Civilization) are the examples I have spent the most time playing. I know there are others targeting games like Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic but I haven't played them and I'm not sure if they are as mature.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-07 14:09:51+00:00
I have used typewriters, keyboard and pen & paper through all my life. Typewriters are out but, pens and keyboards are still there.

I carry two notebooks with me every day. My scratchpad and my diary. Yes, writing on them are more elaborate and slow, but this speed limit creates a feedback loop in my head, making me think twice and write once. As a result, I write more concise and clear. I also remember more when I write with pen and paper.

Keyboard allows more speed, but it's unfiltered, blurry, and not devoid of interruptions.

I'm planning to blog on this very subject with references to actual research, actually, because I can see and feel the difference.
by 9rx | 2025-11-07 14:10:11+00:00
> Most of software isn't engineering, it's just building.

Other way around. The difference between engineering and building is that building refers to the building of a component in isolation, while engineering is about the building an entire system through the combination of multiple components. Most software — and all software that is actually used — is a built system.

> but one places a lot more rigor on the science

That'd be "professional engineering"; sometimes referred to as PE for short. We're talking about engineering (sans professional) here.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-11-07 14:11:05+00:00
>humans are, in an astonishing twist, wired to assume that if they're being replied to, there's a mind like theirs behind those replies

Interesting, not part of my experience really (though I'll need to reflect on it); thanks for sharing. It's a little like when people discover their aphantasia isn't the common experience of most other people. I tend towards strong skepticism (I'm fond of pyrrhonism), but assume others to be weakly sceptical rather than blindly accepting.
by Thorrez | 2025-11-07 14:11:05+00:00
Only if you want to search by account. If you want to search by password, it's free. You can query all your passwords to see which ones are breached, and change those.

> Authorisation is required for all APIs that enable searching HIBP by email address or domain, namely retrieving all breaches for an account, retrieving all pastes for an account, retrieving all breached email addresses for a domain and retrieving all stealer log domains for a breached email addresses. There is no authorisation required for the free Pwned Passwords API.

And searching by account wouldn't tell you anything useful. It would just say "Synthient Credential Stuffing Threat Data". It wouldn't tell you what password to change, because HIBP doesn't know what site the password(s) that it found in "Synthient Credential Stuffing Threat Data" were associated with, and HIBP doesn't maintain a database linking passwords to emails.
by elric | 2025-11-07 14:11:16+00:00
It's not about the email addresses themselves. Those are just the identifier by which things can be discovered on haveibeenpwnd. The point is that when email addresses rae stolen/leaked, they're usually accompanied by passwords, addresses, CC information etc.

In some cases the email address combined with the name of that site that leaked it can be enough to get people in trouble. E.g. "niche" dating sites.
by saaaaaam | 2025-11-07 14:11:23+00:00
The hidden gotcha in the Anthropic judgement (which I think is what you’re referencing?) is that feeding whole books into LLMs is considered legal fair use if you obtain them legitimately.

I suspect we need to wait for the NYT (and others) case to be decided before we know whether scraping sites in contravention of their terms is also fair use for LLM training.

My own opinion (as someone who creates written content on an occasional professional basis) is that if you can’t monetise your content in some other way than blocking people from accessing it then your content probably isn’t as valuable as you think.

But at the same time that’s tricky when it’s genuine journalism, as in NYT’s case.

Obviously user generated content reviewing books online is rather different because the motivation of the reviewers was (presumably) not to generate money. And, indeed, with goodreads there’s a strong argument that people have already been screwed over after their good faith review submissions were packaged up as an asset and flogged to Amazon. A lot of people were quite upset by that when it happened a decade or so back.

So from a ‘moral arguments’ perspective I don’t think scraping goodreads is as problematic as other scraping examples.

(Sorry, none of this was aimed at you - your comment just got me thinking and it seemed as good a place as any to put it!)
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 14:11:51+00:00
The hardware Apple makes is incredible, bar none, which is why is such a shame the OS and application UX is absolutely horrible and continues to get worse with each iteration. If Apple would publicly support Linux efforts on Apple hardware I'd probably switch back in an instant. But until then, I guess I'll continue turning off my desktop at night, and waiting a whole of 15 seconds for the startup in the morning oh the horrors.
by krapp | 2025-11-07 14:12:53+00:00
Mind you, I'm saying this as a hard skeptic only because this is a persistent but weak counterargument, and thus not very useful.

The "alien mummies" and "Buga sphere" came from South America, for instance. You can find UFO and alien contact reports from all over. Brazil has the Varginha incident, the Ariel School incident in Zimbabwe, the Voronezh UFO incident in Russia, Japan Airlines Flight 1628, to name a few examples. The UFO phenomenon isn't at all limited to the US.

Although to be fair, all of that's probably the result of American pop cultural influence.
by ben_w | 2025-11-07 14:13:03+00:00
Had a few of those too.

Mostly, I'm getting things like German ads for my local German supermarket (that I would've gone to anyway without the ad) dubbed badly into English with an AI that can't tell how to pronounce the "." in a price, plus a Berlin-specific "pay less rent" company that I couldn't use even if I wanted to because I don't rent.

But when I get 30 seconds of ads a minute into a video that had 30 seconds of ads before I could start watching… I don't care what the rest of the video was going to be about, I don't want to waste my life with a 30:60:30:… pattern of adverts and "content" whose sole real purpose is now to keep me engaged with the adverts. (This is also half of why I don't bother going to Facebook, every third post is an ad, although those ads can't even tell if I'm a boy or a girl, which language I speak, nor what my nationality is, and the first-party suggested groups are just as bad but grosser as they recently suggested I join groups for granny dating, zit popping, and Elon Musk).
by array_key_first | 2025-11-07 14:13:34+00:00
Well yeah, most software is bad. In fact it's so bad that's its almost unbelievable.

We're all used to it and that's fine. But it's still bad. We're still wasting, like, 10,000x more resources than we should to do basic things, and stuff still only works, like, 50% of the time.
by jm4 | 2025-11-07 14:13:41+00:00
If my company inadvertently made money from scams, I would try to make the victims whole or donate that money. It's so scummy that they sit around waiting to be fined. It's just plain stupid management to document this in emails and not also document a good faith attempt to make it right. I always assume my emails could be made public after my entire mailbox was subpoenaed in a lawsuit my employer was involved in and I was deposed to answer questions about email threads and source code comments from years ago. (I didn't do anything wrong personally, but my employer most likely did.) If I'm going to discuss something that could make me or the company look bad, I'm sure as hell going to write it in a way that's defensible when it gets out.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-11-07 14:13:43+00:00
> I have this weird hypothesis that part of why methodical "correct" software engineering fails is that it succeeds. It is able to manage complexity, which allows complexity to grow without bound.

Interesting thought that. Makes a lot of sense. Will remember it the next time I randomly have a train of thought about software complexity on the bus... Am I normal? does everyone here do that? Of course outside hackernews this is a hopeless question.
by _phnd_ | 2025-11-07 14:14:05+00:00
Yeah, this is a sharp take — the SQL analogy nails how over-specifying prompts kills creativity and pushes outputs toward the median. What’s missing, though, is the emotional side of prompting. It’s not just about keeping things ambiguous, it’s about feeding the model something alive enough that it can reflect something real back. Mix that technical precision with human messiness and you start getting insight, not just casting a wider net.
Show HN: A live release of available domain names our generator found
by _andrei_ | 2025-11-07 14:14:10+00:00
Hi HN!

We've been having fun building a cool domain name generator and we'd like you to try it out.

We're also releasing a bunch of available domain names ideas that our product generated in what we call "freebie sessions".

The link above points to our first freebie session, where every few seconds a batch of available domain names will be released.

What makes SneakyDomains different?

- Shows only available domains (non-premium) - Real-time availability checking, no cached/stale data - Credit-based pricing (no subscriptions, no expiry)

We're giving out 500 credits (1 credit / generated domain) for the first 1000 users. Register an account and use this coupon code to redeem your 500 credits: HN500

Looking forward to your feedback!
by joshmn | 2025-11-07 14:14:19+00:00
It's a bit vague, I'll admit. Users in this space are typically plagued by poorly written emails, or emails that are still, "Hello," if any greeting at all; they also often come from noreplys and close you off from the operator.

By presenting myself as, well, myself, having an informal tone (I mentioned to another user that I talked to everyone as if they were a friend of a friend), and always closing with "if you need anything just reply :)," it was a good way to reach users and to establish the human element.
by piva00 | 2025-11-07 14:14:20+00:00
YouTube Premium Lite used to exist years ago, then they discontinued it in 2024 (I know because I used to be a very happy subscriber), now they brought it back but only in a few selected markets[0].

Google products' bullshit as usual, I never needed/wanted YouTube Music and the other bloat they wanted to force me to pay for, I was happily paying to not have ads...

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?sjid=93860...
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-07 14:14:30+00:00
>I've always wondered why UFOs are only a USA phenomenon

It plain isn't and to claim that it is shows that you have done EXACTLY 0 research into the topic. This kind of bad faith engagement shows an utter lack of curiosity.

UFOs are huge in South America within just seconds you can find hundreds of sightings and discussions about them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_Brazil

https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-went-alien-hunting-on-chil...

Ufos are also a thing above Europe with the Belgian Ufo wave and the Rendlesham Forest incident being well known and seminal cases in UFO Lore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave

Africa also had for example the ariel school incident in Zimbabwe, one of the most well known UFO cases ever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_sightings_in_Africa

Same goes for russia where after the cold war ufo sightings were discussed in offically declassified documents:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005517761.pdf

Must I go on or is that enough to accept that "UNKNOWN THING IN SKY DOES WEIRD THING I DON'T UNDERSTAND" is pretty much a global phenomenon that can and should be scientifically investigated just the same as we would investigate everything else we find anomalous?
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-07 14:15:12+00:00
In the 2010s I had a startup generating a bunch of QR Codes. We generated URLs with a BASE32 variant plus upper case domain and scheme so we could stay within the 5.5 bits per character encoding. I kept trying to explain this feature to people, but it was an uphill battle. To this day I still use upper case w/ URLs JUST-IN-CASE I want to put them in a QR Code.

One minor annoyance I have is the ``git`` command line tools (at least the ones distributed w/ Debian) are case sensitive w/ URLs, so if you try the command:

git clone HTTPS://GIT.BI6.US/TQT

you'll get an error, but

git clone https://GIT.BI6.US/TQT

does what you might expect it to do. This is a very minor nit since no git tool I know directly consumes QR codes and if you made one, you could lower case the protocol section yourself. It's just that all day I'm using URLs that are intentionally upper-cased and the one time I need to lower-case a portion of it, I always forget.

I should probably publish the BASE32 variant we used. Mostly just removed the I's O's and a few other letters that could easily be confused with digits or with other letters.
by cwillu | 2025-11-07 14:15:35+00:00
A material is not always the same material, that's a non-trivial part of what engineering is about managing. Building to code is downstream of engineering, and that's more or less when you can get away with “SPF is SPF”, because the building code is already accounting for the differences in the safety margins and allowed/required techniques, vs the non-trivial difference between spruce, fir and pine.

If you want to do anything outside of what's permitted by the book, that's generally when you call an engineer.

It does seem to me that a lot of calls for formalizing things in software is trying to skip over the engineering step and jump straight to a codebook that crystalizes the common engineered solutions into a list of dos and don'ts.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-07 14:15:36+00:00
Meh, smart high-agency people can write good software, and they can go on to leverage powerful tools in productive ways.

All I see in your post is equivalent to something like: you're surrounded by boot camp coders who write the worst garbage you've ever seen, so now you have doubts for anyone who claims they've written some good shit. Psh, yeah right, you mean a mudball like everyone else?

In that scenario there isn't much a skilled software engineer with different experiences can interject because you've already made your decision, and your decision is based on experiences more visceral than anything they can add.

I do sympathize that you've grown impatient with the tools and the output of those around you instead of cracking that nut.
by joshmn | 2025-11-07 14:15:38+00:00
The bug couldn't have had less to do with streaming, and in the wrong hands would have been worth a significant amount of money—exponentially more than what the Shopify CVE calculator spit out and I replied with at the time. There's more here: https://prison.josh.mn/charges

There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported about the bug isn't how things played out—there's tons of context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the handling of situation. I realize it was the leading headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
by lccerina | 2025-11-07 14:15:52+00:00
And who designed backpropagation? It is not a magical property of artificial neurons or some law of nature or god's miracle. A bunch of mathematicians banged their head on the problem of backpropagation, tossed it to a computer, and voilà , neural networks made sense. Neural networks work so well because someone chooses the right loss function for the right problem. Wrong loss function -> wrong results. It's not magic. Nor it's biology.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 14:16:07+00:00
> CUDA that a couple of years ago, and now CUDA is all but irrelevant

What? CUDA won't be irrelevant for years even if all the competitors figure out the holy grail, the ecosystem doesn't suddenly migrate over night. People learning CUDA today will continue to be find jobs and opportunities across the sector for the near future without any worries.

> but at the same time, the ML architecture space has collapsed entirely and everyone is just using transformers.

That's also not true, the ML space is still growing, and lots of things outside of Transformers, but it requires you to actually look and pay attention, not just browse the HN and r/localllama frontpage.

Overall, these do not seem to be the sentiments coming from someone inside the ML space, but rather from an onlookers perspective.
by calebjmatthews | 2025-11-07 14:16:17+00:00
Just downloaded and tried it on my M1 Mac and the performance was what I'd expect for a game like this, both in and out of battle. Totally smooth and ~15% of CPU usage in both cases. By the way, I love the pixel art, and the gameplay has potential, it's a style I've never personally played before but I could see it being compelling.
by sausagefeet | 2025-11-07 14:16:38+00:00
> The concurrent applies isn’t that big of a deal?

That depends. There are many organizations (we talk to them) which have plans and applies that take 5 - 10s of minutes, some even close to an hour. That's a problem. We talked to one customer that a dev can make a change in the morning and depending on the week might have to wait until the next day to get their plan, and then another day to apply it, assuming there are no issues.

If you're in that position you have two options:

1. Just accept it and wait. 2. Refactor your root module to independent root modules.

(2) is what a lot of people do, but it's not cheap, that's a whole project. It's also a workflow change.

Stategraph is trying to offer a third option: if your changes don't overlap, each dev can run independently with no contention.

Even if one doesn't think contention over state is a big deal, I hope that one can agree that a solution that just removes that contention at very little cost is worth considering.
by the_snooze | 2025-11-07 14:16:41+00:00
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.
by thomasmg | 2025-11-07 14:16:48+00:00
Sure, it's not a big performance drain. For the vast majority of software, it is fine. Usually, the ability to write programs more quickly in eg. Java (not having to care about memory management) outweighs the possible gain of Rust that can reduce memory usage, and total energy usage (because no background thread are needed for GC). I also write most software in Java. Right now, the ergonomics of languages that don't require tracing GC is just too high. But I don't think this is a law of nature; it's just that there a now better languages yet that don't require a tracing GC. The closest is probably Swift, from a memory / energy usage perspective, but it has other issues.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-11-07 14:17:19+00:00
> Everything is aliens and a government cover up to those folks....even when you prove it's a floating trash bag they think you're a fool.

That's a pretty annoying sampling bias and doesn't reflect the community as a whole. There's plenty of rational voices that think most things are just balloons and drones, but they don't comment when it's boring and mundane. In those cases, only schizo voices remain.
by testing22321 | 2025-11-07 14:18:04+00:00
The article isn’t even really about solar.

But in any case, let’s say I agree with you. A ton of rich people have solar and are getting really cheap power. Cool.

Now EVERYONE is going to get free power for a few hours a day, and the “poor” didn’t have to spend a cent to get it. Sounds like a benefit for everyone to me, regardless of how rich they are.

How is it not?
by piva00 | 2025-11-07 14:18:06+00:00
It got so bad that even non-tech savvy people around me learnt to do a lot of research about any product shown on Instagram ads.

To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products.

It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-11-07 14:18:51+00:00
Firstly, Good work.

Ironical but one HN front page item today is this: "Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods, Reuters reports"

Glad you're leaving, hopefully you're in a good place financially. Take a page from Bill Gates and work on something that attempts to improve society. Stay away from surveillance capitalism and enshittification.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 14:19:01+00:00
> how much of ML development these days touches these “lower level” parts of the stack? I’d expect that by now most of the work would be high level

Every time the high level architectures of models change, there are new lower level optimizations to be done. Even recent releases like GPT-OSS adds new areas for improvements, like MXFP4, that requires the lower level parts to created and optimized.