MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ilaksh | 2025-11-23 13:30:21+00:00
Really interesting how many layers of competition were going on. Not only were different computer manufacturers competing with each other, but different generations of computers from that manufacturer were competing, like Atari ST versus Atari 8-bit. I had not realized that.

Anyway, it would be really interesting to find out what Alan Reeve is doing these days. I remember looking up someone who had created a powerful assembler or something for the ZX Spectrum and found out that he apparently became a web developer decades later.
by jschoe | 2025-11-23 13:30:25+00:00
Self-hosting a VPN is not entirely straightforward. If you rent a server from Hetzner, for example, and your IP address is linked to Hetzner, it's obvious that it's not a genuine residential IP address.

What you need is a VPN that provides a genuine residential IP address. It's possible to do this, but not easy to set up for everyone.
by jemmyw | 2025-11-23 13:30:48+00:00
I don't really see why you should support that. In your case your wife is not closeted and living a lie, everything is out in the open. So deciding to change you for someone else, regardless of sex, is no different than if I decided to change my wife for another woman. We give stuff up to make a commitment to someone else. It doesn't always work out and I'm not saying people should stay together when they don't want to, but I am questioning your pre-acceptance of your partner wanting to shag someone else even though that would clearly make you very unhappy.
by MKEPhysics | 2025-11-23 13:31:01+00:00
Author here. This explores identifying the second variation of the Einstein-Hilbert action (δ²S_total) as physical inertia. In the weak-field limit, this reduces to ½mv² and derives F=ma from geometric principles rather than postulating it. Key implications:

Explains equivalence principle (m_i = m_g automatically) Makes testable predictions for ACES mission

Uses only standard GR formalisms. Seeking technical feedback on mathematical errors or prior work I may have missed.

Full paper:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17672563
by echelon | 2025-11-23 13:31:41+00:00
> The economy will stop growing eventually.

That isn't necessarily true. If we find continual efficiency gains, it may never stop growing for thousands of years.

Most growth curves in life are S-curves. Population growth, etc. But technological advancement could continue until we become a type II civilization.

That's absolutely sci-fi speculation, but there are no signs of technological advancement ending.

If each round of advancement increases efficiency, growth continues. I don't see an end in sight.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-23 13:32:06+00:00
> That feature of showing where an account was created was on for a bit and then turned off... it highlights that many accounts implying they are in the USA are actually not and probably not who they claim to be.

I recall that Twitter had a serious account takeover problem which reached the point that eve high profile accounts were hijacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking

Of course owners of dead accounts don't complain.

The way Elon Musk's Twitter decided to render blue checkmarks useless leads me to believe this is by design.
by etoud | 2025-11-23 13:32:20+00:00
I was debugging a RAG system and noticed that “semantic” dense retrievers were oddly good at author names, even when hybrid clearly worked better overall. This post builds a small diagnostic around synthetic (author, topic) queries and shows that proper names carry about half as much separation power as the topic in embedding space. Then I systematically “break” the names (masks, gibberish IDs, small edit-distance corruptions, formatting and layout changes) to see what survives, and find that most of the signal comes from surface form and exact-match bias rather than any deep notion of identity.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-11-23 13:32:22+00:00
I did the cold turkey thing too. No headaches, but what did happen was day 1 I was groggy but functional. Day 2 I was just so unbelievably sleepy, I took the day off work and slept all day. Then all night, and most the next day. By day 4 the sleepiness was wearing off but wow, I was hit with an adenosine freight train. I have had aches in some big muscle groups like my quads, it felt like the day after running a marathon with no training. Turns out this is a known (though not very common) side effect of caffeine withdrawal. It took about 10 days before I felt more or less normal again.
by lowk3y | 2025-11-23 13:33:09+00:00
Hey #infosec community - #BSidesLjubljana is back on track, planning for the 13th of March 2026! Save the date, share the news, participate!

CFP is open - https://cfp.bsidesljubljana.si

#CallForPresentations #CFP #CyberSecurity #SecurityBSides
by anal_reactor | 2025-11-23 13:33:21+00:00
My father had an affair, with a woman. It came to light but remained contained within the family. My parents are still married. The whole situation taught me that life is complicated and sometimes situations that seem morally obvious on the surface can actually be very difficult and have lots of nuance.

When I was a teenager I dated a married man. On paper it's easier to explain "gay dude in a homophobic society" but in reality, he was an asshole and a coward. No empathy for him.
by zdc1 | 2025-11-23 13:34:40+00:00
Yeah, I don't see the point of this article: Markdown has already won.

I have some clients where I will send docs in MS Word/PDF format, but that kind of proves the point: the recipient sets the format. They may not explicitly say anything, but I'm not going to send something if there's a risk of receiving a "how do I open this?"

Also, code blocks are the worst example of it's limitations: just use backticks. Sometimes I want to have a big table or diagram and find that Markdown (/Obsidian) doesn't quite scratch my itch, but then there's always HTML...
by upofadown | 2025-11-23 13:34:57+00:00
This is ultimately a usability issue. The Signal app has a feature called sealed sender. The assumption is that a feature actually does what it is intended to do. Signal makes no effort to inform the user about the limitations of this feature. My experience is that almost all Signal users that actually know about sealed sender think that it actually provides some practical benefit. Users that do not know the limitation of a tool are unlikely to use that tool properly.

This sort of thing is depressingly common in the world of encrypted messaging. It is really common for a user to not know about the requirement to do identity verification with E2EE for example.
by wild_egg | 2025-11-23 13:35:11+00:00
LLMs work great with REST so that's always still an option. MCPs have that nice third party plug and play experience but that doesn't mean we all have to build them.

I make tons of little REST APIs for my agents to use and in the AGENTS.md there's just a list of API entry points with descriptions on what they offer. Agents drive them with `curl` and it all works great.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-23 13:35:34+00:00
Not as affected as it could have been, as long as it can fall back to IMU and magnetometer data. It travels too fast.

Now, does it have a semi-reliable IMU fallback? GPS jamming/spoofing detection, an IMU that survives the conditions? Classified. Best case, you can partially un-fuck the performance with just a software fix.
by clanky | 2025-11-23 13:35:49+00:00
Russia doesn't control X moderation policies or algorithms. These accounts have gained the purchase they have because Silicon Valley and Elon Musk specifically now see it as advantageous to sow racial animus and division, and to scapegoat migrants for domestic problems which are in fact caused by elite looting. This is being done to strengthen the status quo regime, not undermine it.
by somnium_sn | 2025-11-23 13:36:23+00:00
I appreciate the take. I can certainly see your position.

In my mind what we are doing is building a common place to evolve the pattern. I wouldn’t really call it “standardize”, since in the end in this space adoption matters. (Writing a standard is worth nothing if nobody is using it). I expect MCP apps to evolve and iterate independent from the main spec for a while. You are right, it’s early and premature to say “this is done”. That’s the goal with extensions.

I do believe that I rather have commonalities between a Claude.ai and a ChatGPT as a developer (not sure that’s true if I was mostly looking at it from a product perspective). I also think you will see chat providers iterate on top of it, and mcp apps is more a common core than the full thing one can use on every platform.
by carlos_marcial | 2025-11-23 13:36:56+00:00
Great questions! Here's how ChatRAG handles context curation:

1. Intent Detection Per Message

Every message is classified to decide the retrieval strategy:

- conversational (greetings, small talk) → skip RAG entirely - document_search (explicit knowledge queries) → always retrieve - complex/exploratory → adaptive retrieval - tool_required → route to MCP tools instead

This prevents unnecessary retrieval on follow-ups like "thanks" or "can you explain that differently?"

2. Adaptive Retrieval

When retrieval is needed, the system adjusts based on query characteristics:

- Similarity thresholds: 0.45 for general queries → 0.75 for exact data requests - Result limits: 15 for specific queries → 30 for broad exploration - Strategy: semantic-only vs. hybrid vs. temporal-boosted "What was Q3 2024 revenue?" triggers exact_match mode at 0.75 threshold, while "Tell me about the company" uses standard semantic search at 0.45.

3. Conversation History

Full conversation history is passed to the model without truncation—modern LLMs have 100K-200K token windows, and RAG context is freshly curated each turn rather than accumulated.

4. Not Implemented (Yet)

- Conversation summarization/compression - Explicit context window management - "Forget previous context" mechanisms

These would matter at scale or for very long sessions. That said, ChatRAG is a fully customizable boilerplate, and the idea is for developers to keep building on top of it, as I will too.
by hulitu | 2025-11-23 13:38:19+00:00
> The deceased was an older adult with underlying health conditions, according to the DOH.

> The deceased had a backyard flock of mixed domestic birds, and the Department of Health's sampling found avian influenza virus in the flock's environment, according to DOH.

> This suggests that exposure to domestic poultry, their environment, or wild birds was the most likely source of the infection, health officials said.

Analysis is hard.
by Dumblydorr | 2025-11-23 13:38:22+00:00
Why link closeted gay men with Incels? There was no shade of “deserve” or “victim” in the parent comment. Fact is gay men historically have had a very bad time finding love, Incels is a weird subgroup of hateful men with negative viewpoints, unless I’m out of touch with their zeitgeist.

I just think the comparison comes off as unkind to gay men.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-23 13:38:38+00:00
During the 2016 election, it was big in the news that a whole ring of fake-news social media accounts and news websites was run out of North Macedonia.[0] And not out of nefarious meddling in American internal affairs, but because the men involved knew American culture well enough to know that riling up readers in a wealthy but politically polarized country could bring in profit. How fast that story was forgotten.

[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science...
by input_sh | 2025-11-23 13:38:44+00:00
This is different. There are not ideological in nature, they're looking for that revenue share that can change the life of someone living in a low-cost country.

Being pro-MAGA just happens to be the only thing that works really well (aside from gimmick accounts that repost from subreddits). If Elon suddenly made a 180 into being anti-MAGA and tweaked the algorithm to reflect that, these "bots" would switch their message as well.
by globie | 2025-11-23 13:38:55+00:00
We're talking about this line, right?

>The precision of outages (at :29 and :44) matches a network-synchronized clock (NTP).

I think this just correctly points out that if the trigger was something unsynchronized like animals chewing on wires or someone digging underground, you wouldn't have 61% of events occurring at these two second markers. Even if the trigger was something digital but on a machine that isn't NTP synchronized, you would eventually have enough clock drift to move the events to other seconds. 61% combined at two markers (exactly 15 seconds apart) strongly suggests synchronized time.
by lxgr | 2025-11-23 13:39:05+00:00
> 2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images.

Huh? Safari seems to render HDR JPEG XLs without any issues these days (e.g. [1]), and supports wide gamut in even more formats as far a I remember.

[1] https://jpegxl.info/resources/hdr-test-page.html
by eigenspace | 2025-11-23 13:39:28+00:00
Some someone who learned document editing and drafting through LaTeX in my undergrad, I gotta say I'm not sure I'd recommend it anymore to people looking for a new tool.

To me, Typst is the 'weirdly missing' option here. I really see it as the most promising successor to LaTeX, which is not something I say lightly given that I spent years scoffing at the idea of Typst ever displacing LaTeX in my life.
Show HN: I built a simple, fast, privacy-first document scanner for iPhone
by JulienLacr0ix | 2025-11-23 13:39:34+00:00
I’m an indie iOS developer and I built a small tool because I couldn’t find a simple, fast, privacy-respecting document scanner on the App Store.

Most scanners today require an account, upload files to their cloud, or push subscriptions aggressively. I wanted something that opens instantly, works offline, exports clean PDFs, and doesn’t track anything.

So I made Scan.

It opens as fast as the Camera app, processes documents locally, and doesn’t require an account. The design is inspired by the older, simpler iOS UI from the iOS 6 era because I’ve always liked how clean and fast it felt.

I’d love feedback, especially from other developers: – Is the interaction flow intuitive enough? – Does the “privacy-first + old-school design” direction make sense in 2025? – Anything obviously missing for a 1.0?

Happy to answer questions.
by matt_kantor | 2025-11-23 13:39:44+00:00
I may be misunderstanding: are you saying a commit message with a 200-character-long first line could be an example of a "good" message to you/Googlers? To me that seems like something that could almost certainly be summarized further, regardless of how complex the changeset is (if not it's a sign the commit should be broken up into multiple simpler commits).

Can you give me an example of a commit where the "short, focused summary" can only be usefully-expressed in 200+ characters?

Notably, all of the "good" examples in https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/developer/cl-d... have first lines under 72 characters.
by wild_egg | 2025-11-23 13:39:59+00:00
Sadly not. One of the constraints of REST is that the API be completely self-descriptive. If you need out-of-band information like an API spec, then it's basically not RESTful by definition.

I'm using a REST API to read your comment and submit my response — I didn't need to reference external HN API docs. The interface here is fully self-describing.
by kamranjon | 2025-11-23 13:40:36+00:00
Here is perhaps a simpler metric. If the creator of a security focused software is this awful at protecting their own anonymity- why would I trust them in the first place?

If they are revealing their identity so that we can vet their credentials, then it makes sense that they would want us to judge them based on their online persona.

If we believe all of this to be true - it’s not really cancel culture, it’s by design that the creator of SimpleX has implemented this filtering mechanism for their users.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-23 13:40:37+00:00
> Or theres a lot of people who like to troll and propagandize americans for nationalism and racism

I think it's a more coordinated and professional operation that you are suggesting. The US and even western Europe in general has been constantly hammered by Russian bots and professional accounts spewing all sort of extremist and sensationalized content that is aligned with the Kremlin's agenda. It's not limited to Twitter too, as places such as Reddit's conservative subreddit is renowned for being mainly a Russian psyop with barely any US citizen posting there.
by Analemma_ | 2025-11-23 13:40:37+00:00
Getting people to write documentation is already an uphill battle, the reality is it needs to be made as frictionless as possible or they won’t do it. IMO this rules out (La)TeX entirely: it’s just too much work that nobody wants to deal with.

I also have a philosophical issue with writing documentation in TeX: TeX is a typesetting program, i.e. it’s a presentation format meant to look a certain way on a page, while documentation should be agnostic to appearance as much as possible. But that’s more a personal objection.
Show HN: Promptsref – Curated Midjourney SREF library with full prompts
by underwoodxie | 2025-11-23 13:40:41+00:00
I'm a product manager-turned-solo dev, and I'm building Promptsref, a curated Midjourney SREF library with full prompts, images and examples.

Promptsref helps you: Quickly discover good SREF styles without trawling X/Discord/paid PDFs Reuse full prompts + SREF to reliably reproduce a style Explore by “vibe” (comic, cyberpunk, film still, etc.) instead of guessing keywords

Why I built it： I started Promptsref after getting frustrated with Midjourney. As a beginner I kept seeing amazing styles, but they were: 1. buried in long X threads or Discord chats 2. shared as just a code or a partial prompt 3. almost impossible to reliably reproduce later I wanted a place where I could save only the styles that consistently look good, with the exact prompt + SREF + example images in one place. That slowly turned into this project.

How it works： For each SREF on Promptsref I store: the SREF code, the full prompt I used, example images (and sometimes video styles) You can browse by tags and “style vibe”, copy a code you like, paste the full prompt into Midjourney, and usually get a similar result in a few generations. I update the library based on the styles I use in my own work and what the small community around the site seems to like.

Tech details: Frontend: Next.js, deployed on Vercel Backend: Supabase/Postgres to store SREFs, prompts, metadata and favorites

Things I’ve learned / had to work around: Designing search for non-technical creatives is harder than just “add a search box” Keeping SREFs useful when Midjourney updates models requires pruning and re-curating People care a lot about consistency (series, brands, comics), not just one-off pretty images

What I’d love feedback on: If you use Midjourney, I’d really appreciate feedback on: Is the search / navigation understandable? What information about a style do you wish you saw first? Is there a better way to show series / collections of styles? Any obvious technical improvements you’d make to the stack or data model?

Link: https://promptsref.com

Thanks for reading, and I’m happy to answer any questions about the implementation, data model, or the SREF curation process.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-11-23 13:41:11+00:00
But even if companies decided to see how much abuse employees would take, that doesn't explain this. The point of the master's program wasn't to reward the employee; it was to make the employee more valuable for the company.

I think the issue is that companies no longer trust their ability to retain their more valuable employees. Why pay to make the employee more valuable for someone else?
by skerit | 2025-11-23 13:41:18+00:00
The furthest distance a robot on mars has traveled from its landing position isn't even 50km. Over many, many years.

For example, on Nasa's website it says this about Perseverance:

> This map view shows the route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has taken since its February 2021 landing at Jezero Crater to July 2024, when it took its “Cheyava Falls” sample. As of October 2024, the rover has driven over 30 kilometers (18.65 miles), and has collected 24 samples of rock and regolith as well as one air sample.

That's about 8.5km per year.

So I think they would have to land a new one pretty close.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-11-23 13:41:18+00:00
I was interested by the part in the middle talking about society not tolerating women stepping too far out of traditional roles.

I'm a 50-ish years old American man, and I just don't notice anything like that in my own attitudes or of those around me.

I wonder if one or both of us have biased vision, or alternatively maybe we just live in different societies.
by pxc | 2025-11-23 13:41:29+00:00
Personal itches are more varied and strange than corporate itches. What companies are willing to pour time (money) into is constrained by market forces. The constraints on the efforts of independent hackers are different.

Both sets of constraints produce patterns and gaps. UX and documentation are commonly cited gaps for volunteer programming efforts, for example.

But I think it's true that corporate funding has its own gaps and other distinctive tendencies.
by kevin_nisbet | 2025-11-23 13:41:47+00:00
I'm not as sure and would want to consider the angles a bit more.

I ponder how effective this would be against an adversary sufficiently motivated to look like they're not using a VPN. And then does it result in a false sense of trust, since a user thinks the system more reliably detects a VPN then it does. Or an adversary who has bypassed the system to then point to it to build additional trust.
by cynicalcoder | 2025-11-23 13:42:07+00:00
That’s dishonest. Ivermectin is widely prescribed to people too. That’s like calling Ibuprofen a horse anti-inflammatory drug. That doesn’t mean it was an effective covid treatment though. The information from the third world that made it appear like it was seems to have been that it was treating preexisting parasites in covid patients, eliminating a comorbidity and thereby improving covid survival rates. But undiagnosed parasites are rare in the US, so that wouldn’t have worked here.
by Tanoc | 2025-11-23 13:42:22+00:00
The way that the game's instigating motivation is described, that "pick up and go" impatience, is exactly how Runescape used to be. Runescape had such a massive audience of children playing it because it was so stupidly simple. If you knew how to click a mouse you knew how to play the game. Almost everything just involved clicking something once with no keyboard modifiers or context sensitivity. It played in the browser, and the time it took the game to load was usually how long it took for a webpage to load anyways.

That's really the crux of how to make a game that people flock to. Make something where the surface level is so uncomplicated a lobotomized goldfish can use it. But make that interact with a complicated rat's nest of second, third, and even fourth layer mechanics so people enjoy digging through it all. DOOM, Runescape, Tetris, Pokemon, Bejeweled, and Binding Of Isaac all do it (or did, in Runescape's case) and people are still playing all of them even decades later.
by jijijijij | 2025-11-23 13:42:40+00:00
How do you derive trust for the auditing?

Anyway, since we're talking concrete software, could you point to such code reviews from vibe-independent auditors for continuous verifiable simplex builds targeting common communication platforms?

If not, your point is moot for the subject at hand. Decisions have to be made on the basis of reality not cozy fantasies.

I am not sure I run a single piece of software where this is done. Sporadic audits tend to bring evidence of soundness and security, not continuous absence of malicious functionality.