MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sunrunner | 2025-11-17 20:03:22+00:00
No mention of The Configuration Complexity Clock [1] which I always think deserves a link, but credit to the author for actually keeping it slim and readable over (IMHO) most of the newer additions to the landscape which either declare themselves as 'obvious' and aren't or just add features such as Pkl's extends keyword, moving us further round the complexity clock.

Of course just adding multiline strings is the start of the rabbit hole, now you need to think about leading line breaks, trailing line breaks, intermediate line breaks, whitespace chomping, and- oh heavens I've reinvented YAML, I think I need to lie down.

[1] https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-comple...
Show HN: Free conflict-resolution tool I built at 68 to help with tough talks
by DeniseJames | 2025-11-17 20:03:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm 68 and spent the last three years learning AWS to build something I wish I'd had decades ago: a tool that helps two people work through conflicts asynchronously.

How it works:

1. Connect & Share - One person registers and invites the other. Each person privately shares their side of the story at their own pace.

2. Align & Choose - Accordia helps you both identify the real problem, then provides solution options for you to choose together.

3. Reconcile - You get an actionable plan with practical steps to implement the resolution strategy.

Everything happens asynchronously. There are no video calls, no real-time pressure. Both people work through it on their own time.

Tech stack: Built entirely on AWS (Cognito for auth, AppSync + DynamoDB for data, Lambda for processing). Everything's encrypted, users can be pseudonymous, and can delete their data at any time.

Why I built this: After decades of botched conversations, I realized the actual talking isn't usually the hard part - it's knowing what to say, how to say it, and understanding what the other person actually needs. Current status: Free beta. I'm looking for honest feedback on whether this actually helps people, what's confusing, and what's missing.

Perfect timing: Holidays bring family tensions. Figured now's the time to test this.

Link: https://accordiapro.com

You can test it with someone you know or use two of your own emails to walk through the flow.

Happy to answer technical questions about the AWS setup or get roasted about my approach to conflict resolution.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-17 20:04:02+00:00
> Under the new rules, Los Angeles landlords whose buildings are covered by the city’s rent stabilization laws — about three-quarters of the market — will be allowed to increase rents by between just 1% and 4% each year, depending on inflation. Currently, landlords are allowed to increase rent between 3% and 8% annually.

Isn’t this just going to pass costs from existing tenants to future tenants who will be given much higher up-front rents?

> Additionally, the study showed that landlord expenses were increasing, in large part because of rising insurance costs and the need to make repairs and upgrades. With few exceptions, the most recent rent stabilized properties are nearly 50 years old and half of them were constructed before 1950.

> Citing a need for landlords to invest in their buildings, the city housing department recommended to the council that it change the limits on rent increases to a maximum 5% annual jump with a floor of 2%, depending on inflation.

There is going to be a lot of deferred repair work. I wonder how many of these will turn into safety issues. What happens if a landlord cannot economically repair some issue they’re required to fix? If they’re caught between rent increase caps and regulations requiring fixes, do they just risk having their property seized?

> But councilmembers whittled down those numbers last week in its Housing and Homelessness Committee, which Raman chairs. Her committee pushed forward a more aggressive plan that would have banned increases altogether if inflation was low enough and capped the hikes at no more than 3%.

To me, it’s insane to even consider banning rent increases altogether. I am surprised this was seriously discussed.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-17 20:04:30+00:00
And suddenly the unimportant records that don't exist but were also a hoax but also implicate the-other-guy are about to be made public... suddenly an "ongoing investigation" is the new excuse.

> The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

-- The origins of Totalitarianism (1951), by Hannah Arendt
by wan23 | 2025-11-17 20:04:56+00:00
Maybe think about it narrowed down to an individual level - maybe you installed a camera or two around your property for whatever useful reasons like monitoring your children, and then later you find out that you are required to share all of your footage with some other entity (e.g. the police) in a way you did not sign up for. Would you choose to release your footage, or would you take the cameras down?
by wahnfrieden | 2025-11-17 20:05:15+00:00
Why are you obfuscating the concern? The issue is not that it is an app that is popularly found on devices!

The issue is that it is an app which is forcibly installed without consent or disclosure, which has privileged access to the system and beyond the scope of the device vendor. To have no care for that reeks suspiciously of nationalistic bias.

edit: Please answer: Which country has backdoor control of the phones via this app?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-11-17 20:05:17+00:00
> (Alpine is great, but I did not try it as a daily driver, it's sort of not intended for that, it seems.)

I can't say what it's "intended" for, but I run stock Alpine on a desktop and a laptop, and postmarketos (an Alpine derivative) on another laptop, and I assure you it works great as a daily driver.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-17 20:05:39+00:00
Is this a surprise? Certainly they benefited from their meme crypto coins and crypto deregulation. I remember reading that the Trump family likely made multiple billions just off crypto-related changes. But also, they are probably trading on every single tariff announcement. Maybe that explains the constant whiplash of tariffs going up and down all over the place. One funny thing to think about is how everyone is upset at Pelosi over her corrupt stock trading. Trump is probably doing it on a larger scale than anyone before him.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-11-17 20:05:53+00:00
I have doubts the nontechnical users/general public will be able to articulate what they need at this level of detail. Things like "account that got wrongly deleted" still implies that the person making the call understands the internals/bad implementation of healthcare or has the capability to discover it.

The HN audience has argued with LLMs enough to know the level of detail they need to make meaningful progress (or when too many details leads it down rabbit holes).
by throw0101c | 2025-11-17 20:05:59+00:00
What is the name of the style found in (e.g.) ISC BIND9:

* https://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch6/#master

* https://bind9.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manpages.html#named-c...

ISC-style? (E/A)BNF-ish?

Personally I like (a) the open/close braces for better stanza navigation, (b) all statements/lines ending with semicolon.

(Something similar was used in (now-EOL) ISC DCHPd, and they've moved to "extended JSON" for their new DHCP server, KEA.)
by glenstein | 2025-11-17 20:06:14+00:00
I think social dynamics are real and must be answered for but I don't think any self-correction or lacktherof has anything to do with subject matter which can be understood independently.

I will never take a proponent of The Bell Curve seriously who tries to say they're "just following the data", because I do hold them and the book responsible for their social and cultural entanglements and they would have to be blind to ignore it. But the book is wrong for reasons intrinsic to its analysis and it would be catastrophic to treat that point as moot.
by apapalns | 2025-11-17 20:06:44+00:00
> codebase with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and go from 0% to 80%+ coverage in the next few weeks

I had a coworker do this with windsurf + manual driving awhile back and it was an absolute mess. Awful tests that were unmaintainable and next to useless (too much mocking, testing that the code “works the way it was written”, etc.). Writing a useful test suite is one of the most important parts of a codebase and requires careful deliberate thought. Without deep understanding of business logic (which takes time and is often lost after the initial devs move on) you’re not gonna get great tests.

To be fair to AI, we hired a “consultant” that also got us this same level of testing so it’s not like there is a high bar out there. It’s just not the kind of problem you can solve in 2 weeks.
by PrairieFire | 2025-11-17 20:07:22+00:00
A future where we carry and manage just one device could be incredible. That said, today, even if iOS weren’t so locked down and more capable of that, I think I’d find myself frustrated. I run on device local llm’s on my iPhone and a heavily quantized 3b parameter model starts to cause the iPhones thermal management to heavily throttle after just a few prompts with light tokens, to the point it’s slower than 1 token per second for inference or response, and the phone gets hot to the touch. Maybe the rumored half iPhone half iPad device could be the eventual platform from which something like this emerges.
by philipkglass | 2025-11-17 20:07:25+00:00
Ask the LLM for information about your topic of choice along with supporting citations. Skim the cited publications to make sure that they exist and actually support the information produced by the LLM. Assuming that the citations pass your checks, post links to them here along with excerpts.

Human-verified information from credible publications is a good thing to share here, whether you originally came across the information from books, search engines, or LLMs. Sharing LLM output by itself is discouraged here.
by jimbokun | 2025-11-17 20:07:28+00:00
This Ted Talk from his wife is also very interesting:

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/behold-my-ted-talk

The topic is agency. Which is a word I hear often used by rarely defined or described in detail.

She talks about agency as being the key to going from drug addict to CEO of a successful organization, and the specific habits that process involved.
by green7ea | 2025-11-17 20:07:32+00:00
I had the opposite experience going from a OnePlus 8T stock to Lineage OS. Having root means being able to reduce the amount of apps and wake up — no google play service was the key. This was a while ago but I went from 1-2 days of battery life to about 4-5 days. This is with light use, screen on time was equally draining with both setups.

I would assume that an iPhone has similar amounts of unwanted background apps and would also be able to gain battery life instead of losing it if rooted. Obviously if you install spyware, you lose a lot of battery life. Funnily enough, I remember that a few years ago, people were surprised to find that uninstalling facebook increased battery life because it behaved much like spyware.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-11-17 20:07:33+00:00
A C with lifetimes would be nice, I agree.

Would be awesome if someone did a study to see if it's actually achievable... Cyclone's approach was certainly not enough, and I think some sort of generics or a Hindley-Milner type system might be required to get it to work, otherwise lifetimes would become completely unusable.
by tavavex | 2025-11-17 20:07:56+00:00
If you want to cause trouble for Loblaws, don't shop at Loblaws and other chains of theirs. Willingly giving them your money, and then performatively "retaliating" by making the life of the minimum-wage employee (who would be here either way) slightly harder is completely useless as a form of protest. This feels like a rationalization for not taking the cart back by trying to hand-wave it to some large systematic actors. But the whole point is that the shopping cart choice is always a hyper-local choice. It's only about you, other customers and the people working at the store, not some distant megacorporation.
by cstrahan | 2025-11-17 20:08:08+00:00
This is very true. But why stop there?

Imagine a future where we have an evolved version of MCP -- call it MCP++.

In MCP++, instead of having to implement a finite list of specialized variants like CreateUserAndAddToGroup, imagine MCP++ has a way to to feed the desired logic (create user, then add that user to $GROUP) directly to the endpoint. So there would be something like a POST /exec endpoint. And then the /exec endpoint can run the code (maybe it's WASM for something)...

Wait a minute! We already have this. It's called programming.

You could have the LLM write code, so that any pipelining (like your example), aggregation, filtering, or other transformation happens in that code, and the LLM only needs to spend the output tokens to write the code, and the only input tokens consumed is the final result.

I definitely am not the first person to suggest this:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mc...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/

... but I can say that, as soon as I read about MCP, my first thought was "why?"

MCP is wasteful.

If you want LLMs to interact with your software/service, write a library, let the scrapers scrape that code so that future LLM revisions have the library "baked into it" (so you no longer need to spam the context with MCP tool descriptions), and let the LLM write code, which it already "knows" how to do.

What if your library is too new, or has a revision, though?

That's already a solved problem -- you do what you'd do in any other case where you want the LLM to write code for you: point it at the docs / codebase.
by mireklzicar | 2025-11-17 20:08:33+00:00
I trained SynthonGPT, a transformer which is trained in the "language" of chemical building blocks and reactions. Those are chosen based on an existing chemical space, so that any valid sequence of reaction and synthon tokens produces a real drug-like molecule you can actually order (or synthesize yourself in one or two steps of synthesis). Thanks to this trick, it has zero hallucinations: in contrast to GPT-5 which often produces invalid or nonexisting structures, as well as previous models (Chemberta, MolGPT etc.).
by jmward01 | 2025-11-17 20:08:59+00:00
Trust is a powerful multiplier. By that I mean if you have trust in your city as a safe place you generally don't see bars on windows and have more open, inviting and usable spaces. You have more businesses and happier people. Right now the web is like the worst crime ridden city in the world. There is 0 trust and it means we can't have nice things. Society builds trust by being open and allowing but with enforcement when things do happen. We need to bring that to the web. Right now the enforcement either happens before-hand by blocking something or not at all. I want good browser features. I want companies to use them for my benefit but I also want social and legal repercussions when those features are abused. We need to build up both of those in a durable way. When people see offending sites they should avoid them and spread the word that those businesses are bad. When they cross the line then we need enforcement of not just civil, but also criminal penalties. Basically, we need to avoid removing features and instead start evolving society to be able to interact in this environment in a way that we can trust it.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-17 20:09:11+00:00
Unlike the Korean place, this soup kitchen isn't charging you.

You're whining about someone else performing an act of charity. If you want better soup, go to a restaurant, not a soup kitchen. The soup kitchen doesn't care about your complaints. The target audience obviously isn't food critics, it's people who meaningfully benefit from free soup.

For a food critic to walk into the soup kitchen and complain is an egocentric act by the food critic that mistakenly assumes the whole world revolves around them. The complaint itself is bizarrely egotistical, entitled, and offputting.
by simo404 | 2025-11-17 20:10:05+00:00
Hi HN, I built a small Chrome extension called TokData Exporter that lets you extract TikTok followers, followings, and video comments directly into a CSV file — all processed locally in the browser. The idea came from a simple problem: TikTok gives almost no way to export your own audience data for analytics, research, or migrations. Most existing “scrapers” rely on remote servers or require API keys. I wanted something lightweight, transparent, and zero-backend. How it works The extension runs only on TikTok pages. It scans the visible follower/following/comment lists using a content script. Everything runs locally — no data is sent to any server. You can download the results as a CSV with one click. No login, no external account, no API. Tech details Manifest V3 Plain JS/HTML/CSS (no frameworks) Uses chrome.scripting + content_scripts CSV is generated client-side Permissions limited to TikTok pages only Why I built it I needed to extract audience lists for competitive analysis and creator research. TikTok makes this surprisingly manual, so I built my own tool and turned it into a simple extension. Link Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hgbojnbdkekhbgbmdda... Source code If you want, I can open-source it — let me know if that’s something you’d like to see. Happy to answer questions or improve it based on feedback.
by amarant | 2025-11-17 20:10:10+00:00
First actual swede to reply here it seems!

It's not a very simple question to answer, but I'll do my best. In general terms, most Swedes trust the government and all government agencies to do their job in a fair and just way, barring the occasional case of incompetence. When a Swede say they don't trust the government, in my experience, they typically mean that they disagree with the current government on matters of policy, not that they suspect it of corruption.

I myself don't trust the current government, in that I think they will likely make the wrong decisions on important matters, I think they have the wrong priorities, and their argumentation is often insincere. I do not, however, suspect them of anything more nefarious than engaging in right-wing populism(by Swedish standards, our default is considerably further left than America's)

A coup attempt by a government official in Sweden, such as we have seen in the USA and Brazil among other places recently, seems to me about as likely as our current prime minister turning out to be a literal lizard-man.

Do note that I'm speaking rather broadly here, and only about my perception of the majority of Swedes. I have ties to northern Sweden and Stockholm, but very few to the south, so regional variance might also be a factor to consider. Most Swedes live in the south, where my connections are few.

Hope this sheds some light for you!
by butvacuum | 2025-11-17 20:10:49+00:00
winners bell SFX

I seem to recall FOIA provides pathways for overloaded clerks in situations where there's mass requests. But, it only grants an extended period in which to respond (eg, 14 days instead of 48hrs). But, you can take escalate with the State government like you can with denied requests.

This is tinted with my knowledge of my Locaal (long a), and the areas I've made FOIA requests with.

And, turns out if you want to affect change- you have to make the bureaucrats care- Not the officials.
by greenido | 2025-11-17 20:11:20+00:00
If you’ve been coding anytime in the past year, you’ve probably heard the buzz about Cursor — the AI-powered IDE that promises to write your code, clean your code, and maybe even refactor your soul.

It’s built on top of VS Code, so it feels instantly familiar. But the moment you hit that shiny AI shortcut, you realize: this thing is smarter than your codebase and hungrier than your wallet.

After a few months of using Cursor — and after accidentally vaporizing a scandalous number of API tokens — I’ve learned how to stay productive and solvent. And yes, the TL;DR is that you can still combine Cursor with Ollama + local models to get many of these benefits for free. Here are my 8 hard-earned tips to make Cursor your loyal sidekick within the limits of your budget.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-17 20:11:22+00:00
That’s pretty lame. Fast cars can be fun to drive, and the acceleration is the fun part, not their top speed or whatever. Note that this limit they’re proposing is more of an annoyance - it’s something you have to manually disable each time you start the car. It’s the same frustrating nonsense we saw with mandatory start stop that you cannot disable permanently.

Other parts of the proposal relating to better battery safety and warnings on battery issues seem like a positive change.

But then there’s this:

> The draft also addresses driver assistance systems, requiring vehicles with such features to verify through biometric recognition or account login that drivers have completed proper training before allowing continued operation.

This just looks like a surveillance tool. Soon we’re going to see cars normalizing facial recognition and uploads of that information. In China, this will be abused by the CCP for all their usual oppressive stuff. But I worry that this will become normal in cars sold elsewhere too.
by kazinator | 2025-11-17 20:11:27+00:00
It seems that reference counting traces both the live and dead space, in the sense that refcounts have to be carefully maintained as the ownership sharing is propagated, and then the finalization of a refcounted object can trigger others dead ones to be identified.

Garbage collection culd also trace both spaces. After we have performed the mark phase of basic mark-and-sweep, we could again go back to the root pointers and traverse the object graph again in the asme way, this time looking for objects which are not marked reachable. Similarly to refcounting, we could do the finalization for each such object and then recursively look for others that are unreachable.

We don't do that for various reasons:

- the belief that it's faster to traverse the heaps, even though in doing so, we it may be necessary to skip numerous free objects.

- the use of a copying algorithm, whereby we moved the live objects to a new heap, so there is no need to trace or otherwise traverse the dead space in detail.

The belief is justified because there usually aren't any free objects when GC is spontaneously triggered. A recursive trace vists the entire graph of objects that were previously live, some of which are now dead. A sweep through the heaps visits all the same ones, plus also some entries marked free (of which there are none in a spontaneous GC pass).

But the recursive traversal involves inefficient dependent pointer loads, poor caching, and the visitation of of the same objecct multiple times. While in the case of dead objects, we can easily tell that we are visiting a dead object a second time (the first time we finalized it and marked it free), we have to account for multiple visits to the reachable ones; we have to paint each one a new color to indicate that it was visited in the second pass.
by themafia | 2025-11-17 20:11:41+00:00
> You’re telling me pagers used by a terrorist organization ending up in the second-hand market.

Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.

> What do you know about Lebanon and Hezbollah?

It's a conflict that's been going on for 30 years that I can remember and I don't think that more kinetic operations are going to accomplish anything other than fomenting an actual genocide.

Did you think gatekeeping was going to work? This conflict has spilled out into the broader world. If it were strictly contained to Lebanon and only implicated Hezbollah then you might have a point. We're well past that.

> How do people end up making such unfounded, unbiased claims so confidently??

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-e...