MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BenoitEssiambre | 2025-11-25 17:26:04+00:00
Unix and Linux would be your quintessential examples.

Unix was an effort to take Multics, an operating system that had gotten too modular, and integrate the good parts into a more unified whole (book recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...).

Even though there were some benefits to the modularity of Multics (apparently you could unload and replace hardware in Multics servers without reboot, which was unheard of at the time), it was also its downfall. Multics was eventually deemed over-engineered and too difficult to work with. It couldn't evolve fast enough with the changing technological landscape. Bell Labs' conclusion after the project was shelved was that OSs were too costly and too difficult to design. They told engineers that no one should work on OSs.

Ken Thompson wanted a modern OS so he disregarded these instructions. He used some of the expertise he gained while working on Multics and wrote Unix for himself (in three weeks, in assembly). People started looking over Thompson's shoulder being like "Hey what OS are you using there, can I get a copy?" and the rest is history.

Brian Kernighan described Unix as "one of" whatever Multics was "multiple of". Linux eventually adopted a similar architecture.

More here: https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-11-25 17:26:17+00:00
>While doing so, it expands Kagi ecosystem of privacy-respecting, user-centric products (that we have begun fondly naming “Kagiverse”) to now include: Search, Assistant, Browser, Translate, News with more to come.

Are people really interested in those other than Search?

>A bold technical choice: WebKit, not another Chromium clone

Only real choice for iOS so not sure what the bold choice is for an Apple-centric browser.
by echelon | 2025-11-25 17:27:49+00:00
Not at all!

I'm trying to sell Rust to someone who is worried about it. I'm not trying to sound elitist. I want people to try it and like it. It's a useful tool. I want more people to have it. And that's not scaring people away.

Rust isn't as hard or as bad as you think. It just takes time to let it sink in. It's got a little bit of a learning curve, but that pain goes away pretty quick.

Once you've paid that down, Rust is friendly and easy. My biggest gripe with Rust is compile times with Serde and proc macros.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-25 17:28:28+00:00
> it's more that there is no need to remove something that already works just to remove it.

There actually is. Support for old systems isn't free. Mistakes in the past are hard to fix and verify on these old systems. Particularly, the fact that there's not a whole lot of devs with access to dual pentium pro systems to verify changes which would affect such systems.

That means that if there's a break in the kernel or elsewhere that ultimately impacts such system they'll hear from a random retro computing enthusiast which takes time from everyone to resolve and review patches to fix the retro computer.

Time is precious for open source software. It's in limited supply.

I get doing this for fun or the hell of it. But you do need to understand there are costs involved.
by kiitos | 2025-11-25 17:28:35+00:00
the distinction between "concurrent use" and "concurrent modification" in go is in no way subtle

there is this whole demographic of folks, including the OP author, who seem to believe that they can start writing go programs without reading and understanding the language spec, the memory model, or any core docs, and that if the program compiles and runs that any error is the fault of the language rather than the programmer. this just ain't how it works. you have to understand the thing before you can use the thing. all of the bugs in the code in this blog post are immediately obvious to anyone who has even a basic understanding of the rules of the language. this stuff just isn't interesting.
by AndrewDucker | 2025-11-25 17:28:48+00:00
Committees are how you discover what the problems are and agree solutions.

No single person is going to understand all of the history and legality involved, or be able to represent the people on all sides of this mess.

Yes, this means discussion, investigation, almost certainly months of effort to find something that works, and lots of compromise. That's how adults deal with complex situations.
Google attacking human thought with Gemini in Google Keep
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-11-25 17:29:09+00:00
The blue box question that has been added to the blank slate note taking app is perhapse the most insidious short circuiting of the natural human thought process I've ever seen in a note taking app.

Why would I use an app that lets me track my thoughts when it actively tries to derail my thought process at the most critical moment (the blank slate moment.)
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-25 17:29:14+00:00
Yes and I think many of us remember childhood with rose-colored glasses. My 1970s "middle-class" parents had one car. My mom had to drive my dad to work and pick him up so that she could have a car during the day. When my brother and I were older and in school she worked part time. We lived in a simple ranch-style house. We almost never ate out or went anywhere out of town. Entertainment was going outside and finding something to do. Something like going to a movie was a rare treat. I think of it all fondly today, never with a sense that I had missed out on anything.

Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine. Kids really don't care as long as they feel secure.
by ryanjshaw | 2025-11-25 17:29:23+00:00
I play Roblox with my daughter from time to time and we have lots of fun. I’ve explained the dangers to her (strangers messaging, gambling style games, etc), and I see it as an opportunity to teach her while she still listens to me. When she’s older and I’m not privy to everything she does on a computer I don’t want her stumbling across these things uninformed.

A portion of her pocket money goes to Robux, which she saves up for special outfits (eg halloween) or creatures in her favorite game about birds. No different from the hobbies many adults have - except I use it as a teaching opportunity about saving, buyer’s remorse etc., again while she’s still young and listening.
by robobully | 2025-11-25 17:29:24+00:00
A month ago, the team behind the SHA-3 has published an RFC for TurboSHAKE and KangarooTwelve: secure hash functions that employ the same primitive as SHA-3, but with reduced number of rounds to make it faster. K12 is basically a tree-based hash over TurboSHAKE.

https://keccak.team/2025/rfc9861.html
by bondolo | 2025-11-25 17:29:34+00:00
I had a conversation the other day at a birthday party with my friend's neighbour from the building. The fellow is a semi-retired (FIRE) single guy. We started with a basic conversation but then he started talking about what he interested in and it became almost unintelligible. I kept having to ask him to explain what he was talking about but was increasingly unsuccessful as he continued. Sure enough though, he described that he spent significant time talking with "AIs" as he called them. He spends many hours a day chatting with ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini (and I think at least one other LLM). I couldn't help thinking "Dude, you have fucked up your brain." His insular behaviour and the feedback loop he has been getting from excessive interaction with LLMs has isolated him and I can't help but think that will only get worse for him. I am glad he was at the party and getting some interaction with humans. I expect that this type of "hikikomori" isolation will become even more common as LLMs continue to improve and become more pervasive. We are are likely to see this become a significant social problem in the next decade.
by mort96 | 2025-11-25 17:30:15+00:00
> do you want to have 4x more capacity at 1/100th the reliability?

Yes.

QLC SSDs are reliable enough for my day-to-day use, but even QLC storage is quite expensive and I wouldn't want to pay 4x (or realistically, way more than 4x) to get 2TB SLC M.2 drives instead of 2TB QLC M.2 drives.
by fatbird | 2025-11-25 17:31:43+00:00
My wife was a teacher and sexual health educator for most of her career (grades 8-12).

When I was getting sex ed, part of the teacher's responsibility was grounding us in basic facts to dispel word-of-mouth myths that were patently absurd to anyone with any experience (like "sneezing after sex prevents pregnancy").

My wife's tasks was to explain that the hardcore porn they'd all seen was unrealistic in the same way that action movies completely misrepresent fights and stunts, and the real world doesn't work that way. Her problem was that she was arguing with video evidence that it could. The kids aren't unhinged, but they're definitely misled in a completely different way than we were.
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-25 17:31:54+00:00
Apparently “codependency” means something significantly different to what I guessed (which was interdependency, depending on each other). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codependency:

> In psychology, codependency is a theory that attempts to explain imbalanced relationships where one person enables another person's self-destructive behavior,[1] such as addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement.[2]

> Definitions of codependency vary, but typically include high self-sacrifice, a focus on others' needs, suppression of one's own emotions, and attempts to control or fix other people's problems.[3]
by rar00 | 2025-11-25 17:31:56+00:00
hmm, can't tell if complete bullshit or a work of genius.

On the one hand, the approach overlaps a lot with my thinking, and has some original tweaks (like the emotionally valenced reward signals). Saying that as someone from a robotics/AI background nowadays involved in GenAI, with a few years of phd research on NeuroAI, curious about molecular neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle (as conceptualised by Karl Friston and Mark Solms).

On the other:

- this plausibility dilemma is the hallmark of LLMs

- has all the buzzwords imaginable

- no code, no raw outputs, no official confirmation (by ARC)

- Agentic AI play, walled demo page

I might just be too hopeful (and gullible)...
by mikepurvis | 2025-11-25 17:32:27+00:00
Unit tests are for testing branchiness— what happens in condition X, what about condition Y? Does the internal state remain sane?

Integration tests are for overall sanity— do a few happy paths basically work? what about when we make changes to the packaging metadata or roll dependencies forward?

Going unit-test free makes total sense in the case of code that doesn't have much in the way of branching, or where the exceptional cases can just be an uncontrolled exit. Or if you feel confident that your type system's unions are forcing you to cover your bases. Either way, you don't need to test individual functions or modules if running the whole thing end to end gives you reasonable confidence in those.
by abetusk | 2025-11-25 17:32:32+00:00
I think this is getting traction because of the new Odyssey movie coming out.

I find Mary-Beard satisfying to watch. I'm having trouble finding it but she was on a panel and asked about the fall of Rome and her response was something to the effect of "Asking why Rome fell is the wrong question. A better question is why was it so successful in the first place."

Her reasons were, if I remember correctly, though Romans were brutal, for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.

From what I gather, Mary-Beard's reasons for why Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people and succumbing to corruption. I remember her saying that Rome was on the knife's edge of collapse many times and that it was more about their successes that pulled them through than about avoiding failure.

Just as an aside, I've heard that the concept of cyclops might have been from finding old mammoth skulls. The hole in the middle is for the nose cavity could be mistaken for an eye socket. Many pictures show cyclops as having tusks.
HubSpot forms are under attack by bots–how do you protect CRM data?
by rayyanabrar76 | 2025-11-25 17:33:06+00:00
We manage $50–100K/month in Google Ads, and this year we’re seeing sophisticated bots hitting HubSpot forms. They’re bypassing visual reCAPTCHA, dynamically filling form fields, and flooding our CRM with fake submissions.

Behavior-based pre-submit checks (patterns, devices, IPs, timing) helped reduce spam. For high-traffic campaigns, real-time bot filtering tools like Clickfortify were especially effective.

Has anyone else run into this? What solutions have worked for you to block advanced bot traffic without disrupting real users?
by lossolo | 2025-11-25 17:33:26+00:00
It's hyper individualism that is fueling this type of capitalism, the notion that you owe nothing to anyone and other people in society are not your concern, society itself is not your concern, it’s only about what you want etc. It's like a pond, if you follow hyper individualism, you will extract as many fish from the pond as you can, without caring what happens next or others using the pond, and the fish will not be able to reproduce for future generations, others will not be able to get as many fish as they need etc. It needs to be balanced. As you say, there is something in between that can work, we do not need to choose only between extremes.
Show HN: We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-25 17:33:50+00:00
Hi HN! For the past bit we’ve been building Flowglad (https://flowglad.com) and can now feel it’s just gotten good enough to share with you all:

Repo: https://github.com/flowglad/flowglad

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6H0c1Cd2kU

Flowglad is a payment processor that you integrate without writing any glue code. Along with processing your payments, it tells you in real time the features and usage credit balances that your customers have available to you based on their billing state. The DX feels like React, because we wanted to bring the reactive programming paradigm to payments.

We make it easy to spin up full-fledged pricing models (including usage meters, feature gates and usage credit grants) in a few clicks. We schematize these pricing models into a pricing.yaml file that’s kinda like Terraform but for your pricing.

The result is a payments layer that AI coding agents have a substantially easier time one-shotting (for now the happiest path is a fullstack Typescript + React app).

Why we built this:

- After a decade of building on Stripe, we found it powerful but underopinionated. It left us doing a lot of rote work to set up fairly standard use cases - That meant more code to maintain, much of which is brittle because it crosses so many server-client boundaries - Not to mention choreographing the lifecycle of our business domain with the Stripe checkout flow and webhook event types, of which there are 250+ - Payments online has gotten complex - not just new pricing models for AI products, but also cross border sales tax, etc. You either need to handle significant chunks of it yourself, or sign up for and compose multiple services

This all feels unduly clunky, esp when compared to how easy other layers like hosting and databases have gotten in recent years.

These patterns haven’t changed much in a decade. And while coding agents can nail every other rote part of an app (auth, db, analytics), payments is the scariest to tab-tab-tab your way through. Because the the existing integration patterns are difficult to reason about, difficult to verify correctness, and absolutely mission critical.

Our beta version lets you:

- Spin up common pricing models in just a few clicks, and customize them as needed - Clone pricing models between testmode and live mode, and import / export via pricing.yaml - Check customer usage credits and feature access in real time on your backend and React frontend - Integrate without any DB schema changes - you reference your customers via your ids, and reference prices, products, features and usage meters via slugs that you define

We’re still early in our journey so would love your feedback and opinions. Billing has a lot of use cases, so if you see anything that you wish we supported, please let us know!
by vuciv | 2025-11-25 17:34:38+00:00
Author here. I've always been fascinated by the Sorites Paradox (at what point does a pile of sand become a heap?), so I decided to run an experiment to see how different LLMs handle vague predicates.

I didn't just want a text answer, so I measured the probability logits for "Yes/No" tokens across pile sizes ranging from 1 to 100M grains.

Key takeaways: 1. Prompting "Is this a heap?" directly is useless (the model just agrees with your framing). 2. Few-shot prompting creates a fascinating sigmoid "heapness curve" for most models (Mistral, DeepSeek). 3. Llama-3-8B was the outlier—it remained perpetually uncertain (probs ~0.35-0.55) across almost the entire range. I argue this is actually the most "philosophically honest" reflection of how humans use the word.

I have a feeling that there is an optimal prompt for this type of experiment, but struggle to find it, or even know if I have found it. The charts in the post are rendered in-browser using the data points I collected. Curious to hear your thoughts :)
by zwnow | 2025-11-25 17:35:06+00:00
I often talk indirect because lots of things are obvious to me and dont need to be explicitly verbalized in a conversation so I am expecting my conversation partner to keep up with my pace. I know its possible because I met people that are able to do so. Although most are not. I dont talk to teach or to be taught. I value teaching and learning but regular conversations are not a place I learn from or I teach at. I've grown up with a lot of trauma and a lot of topics simply have no meaning to me, that's why I regard a lot of conversations as pointless.

For me to regard a person as worth talking to it requires them to either have lived through similar trauma, be a master at some craft, have some (to me) interesting hobby or a lot of life experience to talk about. I simply dont want to talk about someone's favorite sports team or some trash tv stuff. A lot of topics are also above my head so I zone out easily.
by abhgh | 2025-11-25 17:35:19+00:00
You don't - the way I use LLMs for explanations is that I keep going back and forth between the LLM explanation and Google search /Wikipedia. And of course asking the LLM to cite sources helps.

This might sound cumbersome but without the LLM I wouldn't have (1) known what to search for, in a way (2) that lets me incrementally build a mental model. So it's a net win for me. The only gap I see is coverage/recall: when asked for different techniques to accomplish something, the LLM might miss some techniques - and what is missed depends upon the specific LLM. My solution here is asking multiple LLMs and going back to Google search.
by medvezhenok | 2025-11-25 17:35:23+00:00
The strongest argument is probably that for someone subsisting on the minimal wage, the CPI is not a good representation of their consumption basket (whereas it might be for someone close to the median).

Therefore the adjustment should probably be based on a different number reflecting the actual consumption of households near the poverty line (food would probably be higher than it is in the CPI currently, as one example)
by mindcrash | 2025-11-25 17:35:29+00:00
Given Tor and VPN, and the fact that both are fully acceptable to connect to HN - as far as I know - this would add nothing of substance.

The reason why it works on Elon's kingdom is that - as far as I know - the Onion services died when Elon took over (because the people who cared about those simply left) and over at X - as far as I understand - they really, really try and discourage you from connecting and posting from Tor and VPN.

Also, when people turn discussions into absolute flame wars or decide to post stuff which could turn nasty in the comment section there's always dang. And believe me when I say that even when community moderation fails for whatever reason the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) will get enforced when needed.
by gspencley | 2025-11-25 17:35:43+00:00
> when I'd actually written most of the Wikipedia article on said subject. The irony... Wikipedia doesn't just use unpaid labour, it ends up undermining the people who wrote it.

Surely it would be relatively easy to offer to show the edit history to prove that you actually contributed to the article? And, by doing so, would flip the situation in your favour by demonstrating your expertise?

The fact that you should have to is pretty annoying but also fairly edge case. And if a teacher or institute refuses to review that evidence then I don't think the credential on the table worth the paper it's printed on anyway.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-25 17:36:12+00:00
Seems like a bad idea. LLMs are much more akin to "Data Science" which smells more like Statistics than Peter Noar's "Dataology." If the extent of your programming experience is writing web front ends, it may be difficult to see there's an entire discipline behind databases, operating systems and systematically representing human-meaningful information in a form which can be manipulated by adding machines.

My take on this is AI should be a branch of statistics, if for no other reason than to easily distinguish stats, data science and AI skills from CS skills on people's resumes. This isn't to say AI isn't important, but that CS and AI are two different, but related disciplines. It makes no sense to eliminate one or the other in reference to arbitrary edict.

Oh wait, I forgot to put a dash in my response -- so you would think it was ironically generated by an LLM.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-25 17:36:16+00:00
The name mangling scheme was changed to reflect things other than namespaces and overloading, it was modified to reflect fundamental compiler version incompatibilities (i.e. the ABI)

Optimization level should never cause link time or run time issues; if it does I'd consider that a compiler/linker bug, not an issue with the language.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-25 17:36:53+00:00
> What surveillance are you trying to avoid?

As I said, as much as I possibly can.

> there are a million ways you are being tracked everywhere, avoiding airports means nothing

I disagree. It may not mean much, but it means something. Particularly in combination with avoiding a lot of other "meaningless" privacy intrusions.

You may not feel that avoiding being spied on is a worthwhile activity anymore. That's fair. It's worthwhile for me. I may not be able to do much to avoid this kind of oppression, but I'm not willing to just roll over and take it, either.