MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qcnguy | 2025-11-30 11:10:11+00:00
That's a very ideological take, especially this part:

> It’s peanut butter and chocolate that has served democracy and its people well

Most people are now saying in polls it didn't serve them well! You're disagreeing with the majority of people's lived experiences. And of those who say it was worth it, a lot will be people in denial. Nobody wants to rack up huge debts and then admit it was a mistake. If you were to somehow measure how many people it has actually served poorly, instead of whether people admit it served them poorly, the numbers would be worse.

And serving democracy? No way! The Biden presidency stressed democracy by illegally attempting to bail liberal arts majors out of their debts, an extreme violation of the social contract. And arguing this stuff served people well when they're telling you right out that it didn't, is the kind of anti-democratic attitude that liberal arts colleges incubate in their student body. It's a big reason they're now openly loathed by so many people.

A good example of the problem is when you claim the academy has "some kind of intellectual idealism separate from economic incentive". There is no "separate from economic incentive". Anywhere, ever. For an adult to have such a belief is like still believing Santa Claus is real. It's economic incentives that have led to these professors creating a flood of non-replicable research using unscientific methods. Publish more papers = get promoted, even if the claims are false. So they publish lots of false papers. Incentives = outcomes, always.

Professors brainwashing people at vulnerable stages of their lives into believing false things about human nature is the number one reason why politics is so polarized, why democracy is so stressed all the time and it's so difficult to get anything done. It can easily take decades for people to learn that it isn't true and sometimes they never learn at all (like, because they went into academia themselves).
The Future of AI- Can AI and Robotics Replace Human Experimentation in Biotech?
by AI-Ranger | 2025-11-30 11:10:32+00:00
I’ve been exploring how AI-driven robotics could transform life-science research, especially in automating repetitive lab tasks, accelerating experiments, and reducing human error. Startups like Medra are already building robotic lab platforms that can handle complex workflows in biology, chemistry, and medicine. But there are some interesting challenges and debates emerging: Safety & Ethics: Robots handling delicate experiments could accidentally cause dangerous situations (e.g., fragile biological samples, unintended chemical reactions). Human Oversight: How much human supervision is required as labs become more autonomous? Skill Shifts: Will the next generation of life scientists need to be as much software engineers and roboticists as biologists? Innovation Speed: Could fully automated labs drastically reduce the time from discovery to application? I’m curious to hear from this community: Which areas of bio-science are most likely to benefit first from AI and robotics? Are there existing platforms or startups you find promising in this space? What do you see as the biggest technical or ethical hurdles for autonomous labs in the next 5–10 years? Looking forward to a discussion — I’m fascinated by how AI, robotics, and biology could converge to solve real-world problems.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-30 11:11:57+00:00
What is obvious and what would be hugely socially useful would be to have a completely online, completely free accredited option for degrees that don't need labs. That would cause downward pressure on all of tuition outside the top universities.

The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.

Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.
by defrost | 2025-11-30 11:11:58+00:00
I grew up in the West (Australia) - for locals it's almost unthinkable that you wouldn't help someone that needed a hand, eg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YORxs9E2Ex0

is unremarkable save for the fact that the rest of the world thought it unusual.

Many people are members of volunteer organisations, SES (Search and Rescue), St. John's (Ambulance and medical first responce), VFRS (Volunteer Firefighters) etc.
by stack_framer | 2025-11-30 11:12:18+00:00
I understand that you had a different experience, but you seem to be committing the "argument from incredulity" logical fallacy.[0] What I described may not have happened to you, but it did happen—regardless of whether the timeline or details makes any sense to you.

Do you have any thoughts about the cost of college degrees being worth the cost? That's ultimately what prompted me to comment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
by josephg | 2025-11-30 11:13:05+00:00
> Linux relies on dynamic linking extensively in two ways: > > - A dynamic library may be updated independently of its dependents. You can’t do this in Rust, see above.

This isn't a linux thing. Its a popular linux distribution thing. Linux distributions want to be in charge of which version of which dependencies every package uses. But that means the same piece of software on different linux machines will use subtly different versions of all their dependencies.

Distribution maintainers love this, because they can patch libjpeg to fix a bug and it'll affect all programs on the system. But its hell for the actual developers of those packages. If I use a dependency at version 1.2, ubuntu might silently replace that with version 1.1 or 1.2.1 or something else - none of which I've actually tested. Debian might only have version 0.9 available, so they quietly try and patch my software to use that instead. If there's a bug as a result, people will blame me for the bug. Sometimes the debian maintainers maintain their own patch sets to fix bugs in old versions - so they ship version 0.9.0-1 or something. When a user is having problems its now almost completely impossible for me to reproduce their environment on my computer.

Linux doesn't have to do any of this. It all works great with static linked binaries. Eg alpine linux uses musl instead of glibc and just statically links everything. This provides better performance in many cases because library code can be inlined.

Apt is in theory language agnostic. But in practice, this whole dynamic linking thing only really works for pure C libraries. Even C++ is a bit too fragile in most cases for this to work. (I think C++ is in theory ABI compatible, but in practice it only seems to work reliably if you compile all binaries with the same compiler, against the same version of the C++ STL.)

The reason Go doesn't support dynamic linking is that Rob Pike thinks its stupid. That dynamic linking only ever made sense when we didn't have much RAM, and those days are way behind us. I think I generally agree with him. I have no idea where that leaves rust.
by faalantir | 2025-11-30 11:13:24+00:00
OP here. I built this because I realized my AI agents were 'anonymous ghosts' with no way to prove their identity to APIs.

If an agent hallucinates or gets hijacked, there's no audit trail. This is a simple MCP server that gives agents a local RSA wallet so they can cryptographically sign their own actions.

It's open source and works with Claude Desktop out of the box. Would love feedback on the security model—specifically if I should move to Ed25519 keys for the next version.

Repo: https://github.com/faalantir/mcp-agent-identity
by sph | 2025-11-30 11:13:49+00:00
> I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".

This is a mentality I am working extremely hard to get rid of, and I blame HN for indoctrinating me this way.

That said, these days I don't view this place as filled with "product-oriented engineers", but it's become like any other internet forum where naysayers and criticism always rises to the top. You could solve world hunger and the top comment would be someone going "well, actually..."

It's not HN that killed the hackers, it's the Internet snark that put the final nail in the coffin.
Show HN: XShorts – 1-Click Tool to Turn Any Tweet into a Short Video
by bosschow | 2025-11-30 11:14:00+00:00
I built XShorts to automate content reuse: Instantly transform your top Tweets into high-impact short videos for TikTok/Reels.

What it does:

Paste any Tweet URL.

Get a ready-to-post, vertical video with auto-subtitles and 3 style options.

Result: 2x-3x exposure on your best content, zero editing time.

I’m looking for honest feedback on the value and pricing. The core function is ready for a free trial.

Try it free now: xshorts.net

What's your biggest pain point with short video creation? Let me know!
by Rochus | 2025-11-30 11:14:25+00:00
Minimalism is indeed the correct term (usually framed as simplicity) when looking at both, language and documentation. But at least it helped that there was always a working compiler and system, not a mere theory.

> I see the several revisions of Oberon-07 as an entertaining exercise in minimalism, which fails to understand the industry.

His main motivation was to minimize the amount of work porting his original system to his own, FPGA based processor board. His fans interpreted the “new” language more as a new prophetic proclamation, but in reality it was only about the feasibility of his post-retirement hobby project. This became clear at the latest when people wanted to run a benchmark on the system and discovered that the compiler couldn’t generate such large binaries. There was simply a fixed maximum size, but for many years no one noticed this.

He has always positioned his languages for education and limited himself to the systems that can be realized with them. If his goal had been to meet the needs of industry, he would have acted differently. After a very brief foray to an industrial job in the sixties, he immediately returned to academia and hardly looked back.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-30 11:15:32+00:00
> American health insurance is insurance in name only - picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:

Health insurance is more insurance than car insurance in the US. There is a legal out of pocket maximum of $17k or so, and networks don’t matter for emergency situations. In fact, people get millions of dollars of healthcare from health insurance whereas auto insurance provides a maximum of $500k after which you have to use umbrella insurance.

Health insurance premiums are not insurance premiums, because legally, health insurance sellers cannot underwrite the health risks. Legally, young and healthy people have to subsidize old and sick, via age rating factor caps (3x and even 1x in NY and 2x in MA), and not being able to price pre existing conditions.

Which means health insurance premiums are mostly a tax if you are healthy and less than 50 years old or so, especially if you don’t plan on giving birth that year.

Auto insurance premiums are insurance, because the insurer is pricing your risk of loss, based on your driving history/driving distance/location/etc.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-30 11:15:44+00:00
This does not require rationality at all, not in the sense you mean. If a few tweakers and crackheads accidentally fall into this pattern of behavior then they will get more drugs. Other tweakers and crackheads (and junkies too!) will notice, and wonder how this other jackass gets to get high more than them. They will start to imitate them cargo cult style... but, cargo-culting actually works when you accidentally imitate the mechanisms that cause you to get the result that you want. And more will imitate still.

And not a single crackhead, junkie, or tweaker will have rationally worked through the process to getting high more often. That part was unnecessary all along. Smart people often misunderstand the raw power of stupidity... if it worked so poorly, then why are there billions of idiots?
by Anhar001 | 2025-11-30 11:16:59+00:00
Hi folks! Long time reader first time poster, please be kind!

The backstory:

As a Rust dev, the tooling has spoiled me somewhat. One day a Java 25 video popped up on my YouTube timeline and got me intrigued, I just wanted to give it a quick spin, however having to install and set everything up made me lose motivation :(

I just wanted something like Cargo to setup the Java project and build/hack on stuff, alas such a thing doesn't really exist! (or not exactly what I wanted)

So I've ended up down a rabbit hole, and in the end created Grind, a new Java build tool that's bit like Cargo :)

It's still very much rough around the edges and probably has lots of bugs, and I'm still learning!

This is my video presentation of Grind called "Grind: Java Deserves Modern Tooling*" and my Github is linked in the description.

I'm super grateful for any feedback!
by charcircuit | 2025-11-30 11:18:41+00:00
The fairness of a competition and the fairness of asking a particular question are different.

When things are just for fun, the impact of having unfair questions than when unfair questions can cause people to fail a class or get a lower GPA. This is why sometimes these kind of unfair questions get designated as extra credit as its unfair for these questions to actually count against you.
by VERITAS_OS_JP | 2025-11-30 11:18:50+00:00
Thank you! That’s exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

Most agent frameworks treat the LLM like a “smart intern” — I wanted to treat it like a superintelligence that needs to be kept in a constitutional prison with multiple immune systems

The entire pipeline is deliberately rigid and deterministic on purpose: every single decision has to go through Evidence → Critique → Debate → ValueCore → FUJI Gate → hash-chained TrustLog. No shortcuts, no “hope the model behaves”.

Would love to hear your thoughts once you dig in — especially on whether the safety overhead feels worth it in practice.

(Also happy to answer any questions about the Doctor Dashboard or the Telos two-axis value system!)
by nebula8804 | 2025-11-30 11:19:04+00:00
>I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today.

Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.

>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.

Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.

If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.
by adeon | 2025-11-30 11:20:49+00:00
I've used Landlock to detect and stop unwanted telemetry. I wrote some C that stopped networking except to accept connections on a single port, no outgoing connections and no accepting connections on any other port.

`dmesg` shows the connections it blocks (I think this is maybe the audit feature). I used an example sandboxer.c as a base (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...) except I just set mine up to not touch file restricting, just networking so that it has that one whitelisted incoming port.

./network-sandboxer-tool 8000 some-program arg1 arg2 etc.

I like it because it just works as an unprivileged usermode program without setting anything up. A tiny C program. It works inside containers without having to set up any firewalls. Aside from having to compile a small C program, there is little fuss. I found the whole Landlock thing trying to find out alternatives to bubblewrap because I couldn't figure out how to do the same thing in bwrap conveniently.

The "unprivileged" in "Landlock: unprivileged access control" for me was the selling point for this use case.

I don't consider this effective against actively adversarial programs though.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-30 11:21:02+00:00
One could argue that Modula-2 was an attempt to fix Pascal for the industry, after all the dialects that sprung out of it, which he wasn't keen on, with the influence from Mesa, after his sabbatical at Xerox.

Also that the way it failed to be embraced by the industry, too busy with UNIX, C and C++, also had an effect on his point of view going forward.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-30 11:21:26+00:00
I spend a lot of time working with real-world electronics, where a good mathematical background is important to calculate things like component values for a desired behaviour.

But far better is developing a sense of what's "about right".

I have taught people who studied Electronic Engineering "properly" who calculate that the resistors need to be 20.7kΩ and 21.3kΩ for a given circuit and then will go mad scouring Farnell, Mouser et al for those values.

You or I would say "That needs to be a 22kΩ resistor and an 18kΩ resistor in series with a 4.7kΩ pot, because that is going to need adjusted on test because of the tolerances in everything else", wouldn't we?
by DrBazza | 2025-11-30 11:21:40+00:00
When I graduated, ahem, a few decades ago, the main difference between Oxbridge (maths graduates) and non-Oxbridge, specifically the Cambridge Maths Tripos, was that is was teaching the same content it had for the previous decades, whereas the maths courses at mine, and other 'Russell Group' universities had been dumbed down for the first couple of years. You could reach the same level as previous graduates by the final year, but you had to take a new additional course.
by ben_w | 2025-11-30 11:21:41+00:00
When Watson did that, everyone initially was very impressed, but later it felt more like it was just a slightly better search engine.

LLMs screw up a lot, sure, but Watson couldn't do code reviews, or help me learn a foreign language by critiquing my use of articles and declination and idiom, nor could it create an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle, nor help millions of bored kids cheat on their homework by writing entire essays for them.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-11-30 11:22:22+00:00
You seem to assume that you can only have a meaning to life if there is an afterlife.

Most people judge themselves against a narrative that matters to them. Most people do not want to cast themselves as a villain in their story.

You may ask "but what does it matter if we are all dirt". It matters to them, even if there is no godlike perspective above it all. To be honest, I'm not actually sure why having an afterlife or some super-being would create any more explicit meaning for an individual life.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-30 11:22:45+00:00
> True, forgetting construction costs and assuming you have a gun to point at the land seller's head to sell cheap.

$500k is more than the median US house price and the construction company is in the business of doing construction. The construction costs are their profit.

> No you need to get approval to build the thing. Zoning is one aspect. Necessary but not sufficent.

The premise is that you're going to reform planning and zoning to allow new construction. That implies changing the rules so that the planning people are going to approve it.

> Maybe quarter acre is enough but typical burbs you may have 200-400sqm.

The lot size? A lot of these places are currently a single house on a one acre lot.

> I meant buyer of the land.

The buyer of the land is the construction company.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-30 11:22:59+00:00
>> I imagine Signal is also more than happy about remote attestation and upcoming Android developer verification?

> No, why would you think so? They were very against the Europe encryption issue[0]. You can also go check Meredith's Twitter[1] or Moxie before her. Their stance on things have been consistent and clear.

Never was a fan of Moxie, and I'm not going to read Twitter backlog right this moment to confirm what Meredith thinks, but my reasoning here is pretty simple: remote attestation and developer verification are tools that enable what Signal seems to want, which is to be its own walled garden with only one app from one official source - this is necessary for them to deliver on the promises of privacy and security they make.

>>> What, should we also just use telegram where E2EE is off by default?

>> I don't like it because it made other choices that led to their larger network being infested with scammers and all kinds of shady types, but at least the client itself doesn't suck :).

> Does it? Or have you made an assumption? I get a spam messenger on Signal maybe twice a year. (...)

Here I meant Telegram, not Signal. I don't get any spam on Signal at all, but then hardly anyone in my circles uses it. WhatsApp, maybe few times a year. Telegram, all the time, and I only keep it because my local Hackerspace moved over to it from IRC, + it's actually useful for some automation here and there.

People have different preferences; not everyone sees privacy from powers that be as the only requirement. I for one care more about my freedom of computing on my own device; I'm not that worried about my shitposting remaining private. I don't like the push for E2EE messaging in its current form, because I see incentives of both megacorps and OSS devs align against my own. I speak up, because messaging is inherently network-effects based, and I don't want to end up in a situation where all communication goes through end-user-opaque black boxes, regardless of whether they're corporate or community-made.

> I'm also pretty sure we've had this conversation in the past, so what's up?

I know your username and remember us having some back-and-forth on various topics, but I don't recall this particular one.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-30 11:26:05+00:00
> The term "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" names the phenomenon: like observing a particle collapses its wavefunction in quantum mechanics, interacting with a problem makes you responsible for it. Ignoring the problem grants immunity.

The author is ignoring a phenomenon that is so closely related I would just call it the same thing: interacting isn't necessary.

Just mentioning that a problem is likely to occur is, in general, enough to get you blamed for causing the problem.