MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skeeter2020 | 2025-11-27 15:07:34+00:00
not conceptually, though I don't know much about crytpo and have 2 questions:

1. can you recognize a capital loss on unregulated products like crypto and NFTs for favourable tax treatment?

2. do the exchanges (from an accounting perspective) trade directly between coins or move through a fiat (i.e. USD) currency?

So it might be more like "trading" stock directly without seeing the cash hit your account, which confuses people as to why they trigger a capital gain. The extra step of calculating the value of the source stock at the time of transaction is being missed.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-27 15:07:42+00:00
Rust protects you about memory use error, on all the other errors you are on your own. I once wrote

> something_something(a, b, 0)

instead of

> something_something(a, b, 1)

No compiler will detect that. Maybe an AI review, but it was like 10 years ago, before the AI era.
by bootsmann | 2025-11-27 15:07:43+00:00
I think you're right. The author is quite wrong on many aspects in my view. One of the central mistake he makes is that creating a profitable startup is mostly a matter of shipping good product i.e.

> Used to be, you had to find a customer in SO much pain that they'd settle for a point solution to their most painful problem, while you slowly built the rest of the stuff. Now, you can still do that one thing really well, but you can also quickly build a bunch of the table stakes features really fast, making it more of a no-brainer to adopt your product.
by ycombigrator | 2025-11-27 15:07:55+00:00
Hassabis is absolutely a nerd. Joint honours physics and maths from Oxbridge and a PhD in neuroscience (and a Nobel prize in none of these fields).

His driving interest was always games (master standard in chess at 13, five-time winner of the all-round world board games championship, video game programmer in his teens then his own studio in his 20s).

He's the end game boss of nerdland.
by bhouston | 2025-11-27 15:08:29+00:00
> For coding, you can use AI to write your code. For software engineering, you can't.

You can 100% use AI for software engineering. Just not by itself, you need to currently be quite engaged in the process to check it and redirect it.

But AI lowers the barrier to writing code and thus it brings people will less rigour to the field and they can do a lot of damage. But it isn't significantly different than programming languages made coding more accessible than assembly language - and I am sure that this also allowed more people to cause damage.

You can use any tools you want, but you have to be rigorous about it no matter the tool.
by AlanYx | 2025-11-27 15:09:06+00:00
There are a couple recent developments in ZFS dedup that help to partially mitigate the memory issue: fast dedup and the ability to use a special vdev to hold the dedup table if it spills out of RAM.

But yes, there's almost no instance where home users should enable it. Even the traditional 5gb/1tb rule can fall over completely on systems with a lot of small files.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-27 15:09:52+00:00
What I don’t understand is that how is this automatically good for startups?

Say I have a startup that vibe codes “AI for real estate”. What about customer acquisition?

On the other hand, if I’m Zillow, why can’t I just throw a developer on the same feature and automatically have a customer base for it?

If you look at most of the YC funded startups these days, they are just prompt engineers with no go to market strategy and some don’t even have any technical people and are looking for “technical cofounders” that they can underpay with a promise of equity that will statistically be meaningless.
by w23j | 2025-11-27 15:11:37+00:00
We use a similar approach.

Fun fact: A query like this will, once in a blue moon, return more than limit (here 1) row, since the inner query is executed multiple times and returns different ids, which is surprising for a lot of people. If your code does not expect that, it may cause problems. (The article seems to, since it uses a list and iteration to handle the result.)

delete from task where task_id in ( select task_id from task order by random() -- use tablesample for better performance for update skip locked limit 1 ) returning task_id, task_type, params::jsonb as params

You can avoid that by using a materialized Common Table Expression. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73966670/select-for-upda...

Also, if your tasks take a long time, it will create long-running transactions, which may cause dead tuple problems. If you need to avoid that, you can mark the task as "running" in a short-lived transaction and delete it in another. It becomes more complicated then, since you need to handle the case that your application dies while it has taken a task.
by joshcsimmons | 2025-11-27 15:12:37+00:00
That's right.

I built and released a game called Autism Simulator recently. Online feedback was overwhelmingly positive but with plenty of gaslighting sprinkled in, e.g. "everybody's a bit autistic", "that just sounds like working in tech".

Minimization is always the default go-to for men's mental health issues.
by jeremyjh | 2025-11-27 15:12:39+00:00
Anyone can very easily avoid training on GPL code. Yes, the model might be not be as strong as one that is trained that way and released under terms of the GPL, but to me that sounds like quite a good outcome if the best models are open source/open weight.

Its all about whose outcomes are optimized.

Of course, the law generally favors consideration of the outcomes for the massive corporations donating hundreds of millions of dollars to legislature campaigns.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-27 15:12:47+00:00
Fair warning: don't bounce off the first paragraph like I did. "Dumb queries" made me think the author was arguing against SQL sophistication — I was halfway through composing a rebuttal about stored procedures and keeping logic in the database before I actually read the rest.

Turns out the article advocates exactly that. The example uses CTEs with multi-table inserts. "Dumb" here means "no synchronous external service calls," not "avoid complex SQL."
by LunaSea | 2025-11-27 15:12:56+00:00
> The Commission is literally our elected government's representatives.

Oh, von der Leyen was elected?

Mertz represents 28,52% of the German people who voted. Who is he actually representing? Definitely not the German people, that's for sure.

> The average voter doesn't know everything about everything. That's the whole point of representative democracy, to elect a representative to deal with the intricacies of governance.

No, representatives are there to represent the opinions of their electorate. It has nothing to do with knowledge.

Representatives have teams of assistants that actually do have knowledge. No representative is writing laws themselves. That's why you see laws being lifted straight from industry lobby groups' legal teams.
by quotz | 2025-11-27 15:12:58+00:00
The land grab is Russia's assurance that the crimean pipelines and access to the black sea and the sea of azov remain unchallenged. The pipelines are extremely important to Russia's economy, and they will of course make sure to secure them. Fortunately for Russia, the eastern part of Ukraine also leans pro-Russia, has the most ethnically russian population, votes for pro-russian politicians, and also speaks the most russian, unlike the western part.[1] Russia's strategy is to secure those areas only, since those areas would be the easiest to operate. Russia would never able to rule over the current western ukrainian territories, because of the ethnical and demographical divide.

Russia wouldnt attack both Georgia and Ukraine, and spend billions of resources just for the 0% chance of Ukrainian and Georgian NATO admission. Both Montenegro and Macedonia joined NATO in a matter of months, in the latter case when the regime was toppled. Enabling any talks between NATO and Ukraine/Georgia would be considered extremely terrifying for the national security of Russia.

[1]https://www.eurasian-research.org/publication/geography-of-t...
by mckirk | 2025-11-27 15:13:22+00:00
Unfortunately proving anything about a concrete imperative implementation is orders of magnitude more complex than working with an abstraction, because you have to deal with pesky 'reality' and truly take care of every possible edge-case, so it only makes sense for the most critical applications. And sometimes there just isn't a framework to do even that, depending on your use case, and you'd have to sit down a PhD student for a while to build it. And even then you're still working with an abstraction of some kind, since you have to assume some kind of CPU architecture etc.

It really is more difficult to work with 'concrete implementations' to a degree that's fairly unintuitive if you haven't seen it first-hand.
by 21asdffdsa12 | 2025-11-27 15:13:54+00:00
I deeply dislike the inherent ideology of psychology. Liberalism, the idea of a health individual does not pay any idea to the shared whole, suffering which may be "noble" for the common good and rights and privileges awarded for suffering in such. I find such a ideologically loaded construct and the inherent biases (idealizations and an inability to talk about the cultural framework and tradeoffs) quite unhelpful for understanding, helping and as a basis for societal meta-communications.
by freedomben | 2025-11-27 15:14:28+00:00
I've thought about this as well, especially for the case when it's a company owned product that is AGPLed. It's a really tough situation, because the last thing we want is competitors to come in and LLM wash our code to benefit their own product. I think this is a real risk.

On the other side, I deeply believe in the values of free software. My general stance is that all applications I open source are GPL or AGPL, and any libraries I open source are MIT. For the libraries, obviously anyone is free to use them, and if they want to rewrite them with an LLM more power to them. For the applications though, I see that as a violation of the license.

At the end of the day, I have competing values and needs and have to make a choice. The choice I've made for now is that for the vast majority of things, I'm still open sourcing them. The gift to humanity and the guarantee to the users freedom is more important to me than a theoretical threat. The one exception is anything that is truly a risk of getting lifted and used directly by competitors. I have not figured out an answer to this one yet, so for now I'm keeping it AGPL but not publicly distributing the code. I obviously still make the full code available to customers, and at least for now I've decided to trust my customers.

I think this is an issue we have to take week by week. I don't want to let fear of things cause us to make suboptimal decisions now. When there's an actual event that causes a reevaluation, I'll go from there.
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-27 15:14:36+00:00
It is perfectly obvious to me and to the vast majority of people. That is why they didn't bother defining it further.

> An ox & cart fits the bill for "machine" with that lens

No it doesn't. I don't think you thought this through. The cart itself cannot do anything without something else acting on it. An ox is obviously not mechanical (it being an animal) which is what is propelling the cart. Therefore it is not mechanically propelled.

If it was a person a bicycle then would be more ambiguity. But it is commonly understood that a bicycle (excluding e-bikes which are mopeds) is not a "motor vehicle", because it is propelled by the rider.
by TonyAlicea10 | 2025-11-27 15:14:39+00:00
I think there's a difference between using an LLM as an editor and asking the LLM to write something for you. The output in the former I find to still have a far clearer tonal fingerprint than the latter.

And whose to say your idiosyncratic expressions wouldn't find an audience as it changes over time? Just you saying that makes me curious to read something you wrote.
by vinioyama | 2025-11-27 15:15:42+00:00
Hi, I’m the creator of Eigenfocus.

I built it after bouncing between tools that were either too rigid or too complex. The core idea is that *views are projections*: the same data can be reorganized instantly by status, assignee or labels. Views can be boards, grids or other types.

It’s self hosted, lightweight and includes built-in time tracking and reporting.

I’m still iterating and would love feedback, especially on balancing simplicity and flexibility in PM tools.

*Website:* [https://eigenfocus.com](https://eigenfocus.com) *Repository:* [https://github.com/eigenfocus/eigenfocus](https://github.com/eigenfocus/eigenfocus)

Happy to get new ideas and feedback!
by anticodon | 2025-11-27 15:15:44+00:00
Infrastructure is not only cars/buses. It is also: roads (paved roads), electricity lines, water pipes, bus stops, traffic lights (you won't find many traffic lights in SEA countries), train stations, railroads, etc.

It's evident if you live for several months in almost any SEA city, that they lack even basic infrastructure. I'm sure it's not only matter of negligence, they simply cannot afford many things that people in developed countries see as granted.
by jeremyjh | 2025-11-27 15:16:21+00:00
Courts applying legal analysis to existing law and precedent is also an operation of democracy in action and lately they've been a lot better at it than legislators. I don't know if you've noticed, but the quality of our legislators has substantially deteriorated since the 80s, when 24-hour news networks became a thing. It got even worse after the Citizens United decision and social media became a thing. "No new laws" is really the safest path these days.
by NotGMan | 2025-11-27 15:16:42+00:00
>> content moderation policy - which allows “everything” on its store that isn’t defined as “trolling” or “illegal” - is a gift to autocrats who have weaponised the law to achieve their ends.

Well it is illegal as per Russian government.

>> But it won’t block blatantly Russian-backed disinformation games like Squad 22: ZOV, unless a country has passed laws to ban specific propaganda (e.g. two German states banning ‘Z’ as a hate symbol).

Well yes since it's not illegal.

Also: who defines what is disinformation? The author obviously! We can trust him for sure!

>> Time for regulatory action?: As it stands, Steam’s content moderation policies actively strengthen censorship bodies like Roskomnadzor at the expense of its players, its developers, and democracy at large. And with the platform consistently showing that it can’t (and frankly doesn’t want to) get its house in order, it is time for digital content regulators and policy makers to finally bring the Wild West of the global games industry under regulatory control.

Really ironic, since it was the woke people that forced deplatforming of everyone who was not on their woke side and demanded they be banned from work and online platforms.

We all know what woke dictatorial people like the author really want: complete control over store policies under the guise "we are the good guys, and we know what must be banned and what not, so listen to us!".
by jmtame | 2025-11-27 15:18:39+00:00
Rust has so many compelling features as a game. It was the first game where I felt like I thought about it while I wasn't playing it, because your character remains "in the game" and your base can be raided even if you log off. I don't play a ton of online games, but that was a very new and different concept when I first discovered Rust.

The game reminds me of sitting down at a poker table in a casino. It's very unforgiving - you grind, invest a lot of time, and make calculated bets as to whether you can win or lose a raid, but you can instantly lose everything in a failed raid.

I wish someone would make a browser-based version that was fun to play, and I've thought about it for some time, but the struggle is scoping an MVP that is as compelling given the constraints (eg a 2d or top-down version makes it harder to do things like build multi-story buildings and raid them).
by latexr | 2025-11-27 15:18:41+00:00
Practicality matters. For example, even if you choose not to harm other living things, you cannot avoid stepping on and killing the occasional insect. Theoretically you might be able to do it, but you’ll stop having a life. But you can still do much in line with your beliefs, such as not killing animals for food.

If GitHub were the sole game in town, maybe (probably) they wouldn’t have switched. But it isn’t, and they found something which in their view is an acceptable replacement and less worse. So yeah, maybe they don’t ethically agree with everyone on every thing up the chain, but they apparently agree with them more. That matters. You take a stand where you are able to.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-11-27 15:19:03+00:00
I don't really understand the position you are presenting, but the idea of being reimbursed for money invested in an unsecured asset - forget about the wild volatility of crypto - seems very naive. A few things:

* a country may step in to prop up failing markets or even companies, but they do this outside of a bankruptcy process, and rarely (never?) directly.

* an owner of an unsecured asset like crypto would one of the last in line when processing the bankruptcy (funny enough, the tax obligation of the company would be right near the top)

* you don't pay tax on your trades, but based on the outcome at the time of the trade.

* most countries tax individuals based on residency, and I think there's a good argument that you do get benefits both the physical and societal. You can decide if it's "worth it" but I'm not sure how it's "accidental". It's definitely true that the linkage between paying capital gains taxes and driving down a newly paved road is long and complex.
Ask HN: Extracting the same table from PDF layouts?
by oliver236 | 2025-11-27 15:19:16+00:00
I’m processing a large volume of PDFs (30–40 pages each) with inconsistent layouts. Each document contains one specific table I need to extract, but every company formats it differently.

Current stack: – Azure Document Intelligence (prebuilt) – preprocessing (PyMuPDF → image → filters) – a multimodal LLM to turn the detected table into clean JSON

Main issue: – To localize the table, I currently rely on template-specific configs. At scale, this becomes unmanageable because there may be hundreds of unique layouts.

Has anyone solved this class of problem? Looking for strategies for: – robust table localization across many templates, – hybrid rule-based + ML approaches, – layout-based detection, – or “templateless” methods that generalize better.
by cm2187 | 2025-11-27 15:19:21+00:00
Technically any motherboard can become a NAS, but there are desirable features.

- low idle power consumption since your NAS will be sitting doing nothing most of the time - pretty much any desktop MB will do

- fast networking, 1gbe means ~100MB/s transfers, nicer to have 10gbe. Limited benefits beyond 10gbe in practice.

- enough PCIe lanes to connect enough drives. HDD of course but nice to have a separate fast SSD array plus SSD caching. You might also want a SAS HBA if you are looking enterprise drives or SSDs (and even for SATA SSD you will get a better performance via a HBA than through the motherboard). Some people also want a graphic card for video transcoding

- ECC memory

- IPMI - once you start using it it becomes hard to give up. Allows you to manage the server remotely even when switched off, and access the BIOS via a web interface. Allows you to keep the server headless (i.e. not have to go plug a screen to understand why the server is taking so long to reboot).

I'd say a good candidate for a NAS motherboard would be something like a supermicro X11SSH-LN4F, you can find used ones pretty cheap on ebay.
by Joeboy | 2025-11-27 15:19:21+00:00
> Is this something that generally goes beyond school?

The things that make you vulnerable change depending on what year and situation you're in. I can very much get behind the idea that you should consider whether your legacy sense of what makes you vulnerable is relevant to your current circumstances. I'm not so much behind the "freely dispense the rope people will use to hang you" version.
by tikhonj | 2025-11-27 15:19:44+00:00
The overall trend has been the opposite though, hasn't it? People used to buy a new phone (or new laptop/etc) every couple of years because the underlying tech was improving so quickly, but now that the improvements have slowed down, they're holding onto their devices for longer.

There was an article[1] going around about that recently, and I'm sure there are more, but it's also a trend I've seen first-hand. (I don't particularly care for the article's framing, I'm just linking to it to illustrate the underlying data.)

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/how-device-hoarding-by-ameri...
by paulwetzel | 2025-11-27 15:20:03+00:00
I think Voyager is not just a space exploration project, but more a demonstration of technical ingenuity. Sure, the probe probably collected great data just by being where no other probe was before, but to be real: I don't know nearly enough about space exploration research to get excited about the results and mostly just looked at the pictures.

What amazes me about the device and the mission as a whole is the sheer challenge of operating a device that is so far away, you have to use the prefix light to make the scale understandable. I like devices, that have been engineered to something close to perfection. I think aircraft a cool because they so very rarely fail. I think that pacemakers are amazing, because they can not fail. This is another example, and perhaps one of the greatest: a spacecraft that is running for 40+ years in the harshest environments and still works.

And that's not even touching the emotional and somewhat existential thoughts that comes with the scale and distance this little guy has traveled.
by vrighter | 2025-11-27 15:20:14+00:00
Yes it is, there's no rule saying you can't manually mess with the state transition function while designing and building the chain. It's still a fixed function at runtime. It's just that you don't need to do so in the first place, because this is done already after the markov chain has been evaluated, if temperature is set to nonzero (and some systems don't even really allow you to use zero temperature, they only allow you to make it really small)
by briancmoses | 2025-11-27 15:21:29+00:00
Somebody else shared this, but I'm the blog's author. I think you're asking good questions, but they're not from the point-of-view of the people who actually benefit from these blogs.

I've answered the "You build one every year?" question quite a few times over the years.

These blogs have a shelf life. After about a year, newer hardware is available that's a better a better value. And after 2-3 years, it starts to get difficult to even find the many of the parts.

I don't replace my NAS every year, but every now and then I do keep my yearly NAS for my own purposes, but 2026 won't be one of those years.

> How does one establish the reliability of the hardware...?

One guy on the Internet is--and always will be--an anecdote, I could use this NAS until its hardware was obsolete and I'd still be unable to establish any kind of actual reliability for the hardware. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or money required to elevate beyond being a piece of anecdotal data.

However, there's a sizable audience out there who have realized that they need some kind of storage beyond what they already have, but haven't implemented a solution yet. I think if you put yourself in their shoes, you'll realize that anything is better than nothing in regards to their important data. My hope is that these blogs move that audience along towards finding that solution.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-27 15:21:31+00:00
I don't know either, I haven't read the Culture books (yet) either so I can't really evaluate that.

I do believe he read a lot of sci-fi in his youth, if only because that would fit the pattern of a young boy who doesn't get along well with their peers and turns towards solitary pursuits like computer programming. He seems exactly the sort to have read lots of Heinlein.