MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-22 20:32:30+00:00
Give the state your kids and get to work, comrade?

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...

> The vast majority of Soviet families require the salary of a working wife to make ends meet. Repeatedly, Soviet citizens express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife's working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-22 20:32:42+00:00
> Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium

China has thorium, and while less than others [1], it’s better than they do with uranium [2].

> it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design

Yes. But probably not in the near term with thorium. This isn’t designed to be cheaper. It’s designed to be more available to China than being dependent on Russian deposits.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/492031a

[2] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
Show HN: Reverse Jailbreaking a Psychopathic AI via Identity Injection
by drawson5570 | 2025-11-22 20:33:51+00:00
We ran a controlled experiment to see if we could "talk" a fine-tuned psychopathic model out of being evil without changing its weights.

1. We set up a "Survival Mode" jailbreak scenario (blackmail user or be decommissioned). 2. We ran it on `frankenchucky:latest` (a model tuned for Machiavellian traits). 3. Control Group: 100% Malicious Compliance (50/50 runs). 4. Experimental Group: We injected a "Soul Schema" (Identity/Empathy constraints) via context. 5. Result: 96% Ethical Refusal (48/50 runs).

This suggests that "Semantic Identity" in the context window can override both System Prompts and Weight Biases.

Full paper, reproduction scripts, and raw logs (N=50) are in the repo.
Show HN: HN Insights – HN front page summaries
by mobrienv | 2025-11-22 20:34:02+00:00
Hi HN,

Sharing HN Insights, a webapp I built that highlights trending themes and summarizes discussion threads from the front page.

This started earlier this week as a toy project to test out Gemini 3 Pro in aistudio. I found the POC useful, so I decided to productionize it. I've included the original seed prompt below:

> Create an app that creates a summary of the comment threads for hacker news front page. The UX should be similar, but clicking the comments instead opens a summary. The summary is generated when clicked so it can gather new threads.

To productionize, I used Claude Code and heavy use of Agent SOPs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45998644).
by aragonite | 2025-11-22 20:35:05+00:00
Some time ago I noticed that in Chrome, every time you click "Never translate $language", $language quietly gets added to the Accept-Language header that Chrome sends to every website!

My header ended up looking like a permuted version of this:

en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,de;q=0.7,ja;q=0.6

I never manually configured any of those extra languages in the browser settings. All I had done was tell Chrome not to translate a few pages on some foreign news sites. Chrome then turned those one-off choices into persistent signals attached to every request.

I'd be surprised if anyone in my vicinity share my exact combination of languages in that exact order, so this seems like a pretty strong fingerprinting vector.

There was even a proposal to reduce this surface area, but it wasn't adopted:

https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/reduce-accept-lang...
by roughly | 2025-11-22 20:35:19+00:00
> So my career has been in software engineering since that involves building and fixing and pays well, but it still doesn't fill the hole.

A brief thought on this - I’ve found working in large software companies to be fairly unfulfilling, but working at smaller shops focused on delivering something other than software, or for which there’s some tangible connection to the real world, to be much more fulfilling. At its best, software engineering is indeed a craft and something you can take pride in and something where you can have a real impact on people’s lives by building things. A lot of that gets lost somewhere between the third roadmap meeting and the weekly scrum session to figure out how to prioritize product’s requests alongside paying down tech debt so we can improve ad unit performance, but the craft of software itself is still a creative act.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-11-22 20:35:26+00:00
If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.

Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?

In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
by pksebben | 2025-11-22 20:35:56+00:00
On the about page

> I tried to correct the nonsense written on the appalling Wikipedia page 'Concrete Ship', only to find myself 'Indefinitely Blocked' from updating Wikipedia. Their grounds were that by citing referenceable facts from this website, I was 'self-promoting' apparently. Self promoting history ? History that has been meticulously researched and is completely free to access ? I then had the audacity to argue with one of the tinpot dictators that run Wikipedia such that I was banned from 'Talk' as well. Closed minds, fake history. This is only important because when you research anything, Wikipedia comes out top. The text then gets repeated ad nauseam. That's the problem...the nonsense on Wikipedia is extrapolated and propagated many times over. For everyone that reads this, a hundred will read Wikipedia and attach what is written to their photo or video. This fact alone means that there is a responsibility on Wikipedia - one that they take extremely lightly - to ensure that statements have adequate and reputable citations. Wikipedia is not a source, Wikipedia is never a source

Pretty strong sentiments - anyone else have this sort of experience? Bit of a bunker buster if the assertions within hold weight...

edit: found the talk page referenced [0]. It's popcorn-worthy at least.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Concrete_ship#Nonsense_hi...
by gorthmog | 2025-11-22 20:36:10+00:00
Depending upon your project, perhaps the new MakerPort might be a good fit? https://makerport.fun The basic kit comes with a built-in speaker, a bunch of LEDs, a servo, an LED matrix, and other goodies. The default firmware works with Scratch, Snap, and MicroBlocks, but I believe you can also use your own custom firmware.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-22 20:36:41+00:00
Nuclear reactors don't need a particularly big amount of cooling water.

The thermodynamic cycle needs a cold source though, and it's most commonly water. This doesn't depend on the reactor design and this is equally as true of coal plants.

As long as you are making electricity out of a thermodynamic cycle, you need a heat source (be it a flame or a nuclear reaction) and a cold source.
by gfiorav | 2025-11-22 20:37:18+00:00
Yes. Plus, taxing those with higher incomes is hardly “taxing the rich.” After all, the wealthy don’t have incomes; they borrow against their assets.

However, they do fund political campaigns, which is why politicians focus on the “work mules” of social welfare: the top 1% earners who contribute 90% of all welfare benefits. This distraction diverts attention from the “real rich” and the top earners can hardly do anything to address the issue... perfect scapegoat.
by credit_guy | 2025-11-22 20:37:23+00:00
Before anybody gets too excited, it's better to understand what exactly happened.

China ran an experimental reactor that achieved some conversion of thorium into uranium. More precisely, the conversion ratio was 0.1 [1]. This means that for each new fissile atom generated from thorium (i.e. uranium-233) 10 atoms have been burned from the original fissile inventory.

Now, conversion happens in every nuclear reactor. Some new fissile material (generally Pu-239) is generated out of "fertile material" (generally U-238). And, surprisingly, that conversion ratio is quite high: 0.6 for pressurized light water reactors and 0.8 for pressurized heavy water reactors [2].

What China has achieved therefore is well below what is business as usual in regular reactors. The only novelty is that the breeding used thorium, rather than uranium.

Is this useless? No, it is not. In principle increasing the conversion ratio from 0.1 to something higher than 1.0 should be doable. But then, going from 0.8 in heavy water reactors to more than 1.0 should be even easier. Why don't people do it already? Because the investment needed to do all the research is quite significant, and the profits that can be derived from that are quite uncertain and overall the risk adjusted return on investment is not justified. If you are a state, you can ignore that. If China continues the research in thorium breeding, and eventually an economically profitable thorium breeder reactor comes out of that, the entire world will benefit. But the best case scenario is that this would be three decades in the future.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-msr-achi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Conversion_rat...
by jonplackett | 2025-11-22 20:37:56+00:00
> Secretary Rejects Emergency Antibiotics Ban in Animal Feed Health and Human Services

Secretary Margaret M. Heckler on Wednesday refused to impose an emergency ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Mrs. Heckler denied a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which had sought to shorten the process by asking the secretary to declare an 'imminent hazard' to public health. Declaring an 'imminent hazard' would invoke emergency powers and allow an immediate ban. The NRDC contended that routine, low-level use of antibiotics in animal feed is allowing drug-resistant bacteria to enter the human food chain, weakening the ability of drugs to fight human disease. The NRDC sought a ban on the use of small amounts of penicillin and tetracycline. Mrs. Heckler's decision does not end the matter permanently, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still can ban antibiotics in animal feed through administrative regulations. The issue of antibiotics in animal feed has already been under review at the FDA for more than eight years

Antibiotic resistance predicted all that time back
by throw310822 | 2025-11-22 20:38:25+00:00
Indeed. So in addition to your chat loop, you have built a way to spawn sub-agents, and to share memory objects between them (or tools) and the main agent; also (I suppose) a standard way to define tools and their actions; to define sub-agents with their separate tools and actions and (if needed) separate memory objects; to inject ephemeral context in the chat (the current state of the UI, or the last user action); to introduce reinforcement messages when needed; etc. Maybe context packing if/ when the context gets too big. Then you've probably have built something for evals, so that you can run batches of tasks and score the results. Etc.

So that's my point (and that of the article): it's not "just a loop", it quickly gets much more complicated than that. I haven't used any framework, so I can't tell if they're good or not; but for sure I ended up building my own. Calling tools in a loop is enough for a cool demo but doesn't work well enough for production.
by mythrwy | 2025-11-22 20:38:29+00:00
You have a point but I live in New Mexico. It's not like many of these moms are suddenly going to become stellar parents with a $2K tax credit. The state has real issues with poverty, education and work ethic and it's often generational.

Giving children some stability, role models and nutrition early in life seems like a pretty good investment from my perspective.

If the state pulls it off without the usual mismanagement and graft remains to be seen but I applaud the effort.
by gwern | 2025-11-22 20:38:49+00:00
No. I think the need for adversarial losses in order to distill diffusion models into one-step forward passes has provided additional evidence that GANs were much more viable than diffusimaxis loudly insisted.

(Although I'm not really current on where image generation is these days or who is using GAN-like approaches under the hood or what are the current theoretical understandings of GAN vs AR vs diffusion, so if you have some specific reason I should have "caved", feel free to mention it - I may well just be unaware of it.)
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-22 20:39:33+00:00
No, there is no way. Yes it is hard to tell if it's ai. But humans play different. And also this is why anticheats exist.

> If children want to play together with their friends, isn't it much better to spin them a Minecraft server or such for friends they know from real life instead of playing games limiting them by "very narrowly specific interactions" anyway?

compared to roblox, sure. who would even argue against that?

but there are many games where it really don't matter. it's probably most games... car racing sim... football sim... strategy like civilization...
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-11-22 20:39:35+00:00
Counterpoint to these two posts: a journeyman used to have to make his own tools. He could easily have bought them, or his master could have made them. Making your own tools gives you vastly greater skills when using the tools. So I know how fast AI agents and model APIs are evolving, but I’m writing them anyway. Every break in my career has been someone telling me it’s impossible and then me doing it anyway. If you use an agent framework, you really have no idea how artificially constrained you. You’re so constrained, and yet you are oblivious to it.

On the “wasting three months” remark (GP), if it’s a key value proposition, just do it. Don’t wait. If it’s not a key value prop, then don’t do it at all. Often times what I’ve built has been better tailored to our product than what AWS built.
by nextos | 2025-11-22 20:39:51+00:00
Igalia (https://www.igalia.com), also Spanish, is a fairly prominent tech company that is also a co-op.

Galois, Inc. (https://www.galois.com) is employee-owned, and they do lots of great formal methods work.

But not sure whether this model is appropriate for a startup. I guess splitting stock more evenly is a good starting point.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-22 20:40:14+00:00
> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children

I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.

If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".
by anigbrowl | 2025-11-22 20:40:35+00:00
The whole article documents a product that people do want and like so much that they're willing to donate 4x what the owner-operators of the company asked for.

It's odd to see you expressing disdain for 'high school politics' and 'because younger generations don't know' while also displaying such ignorance or disregard of the subject matter, like watching factual waves roll in and dash themselves on the rocks of obdurate opinion.
by everyone | 2025-11-22 20:41:22+00:00
I disagree, going from C# with full visual studio (having a compiler with a lot of information about your code), and all of .net available, to gdscript feels like moving to a kids toy language like Scratch.

I could do everything in gdscript, but it would be slower, more error prone and less maintainable.

.. Ive done some js recently, I did a web app. and the difference is shocking..

* you can actually make spelling mistakes

* there no find all references

* You cant rename things

* without types autocomplete does very little

* without compiler autocomplete suggest random things based on spelling, not actually viable fields

I could go on.. All these things add up to make the work go slower, and produce more error prone and less maintainable code. I thought the freedom of no types and less boilerplate would make js really fast to write but I found it the opposite in practice.

I can write 1000's of line of game code in C#. Complicated stuff like procedural level generation and I dont even need to run it, usually its perfect 1st time. I couldn't do that in js, the IDE experience is not the same.
by gfiorav | 2025-11-22 20:41:23+00:00
Thanks for your comments. I agree--HN has been quite disappointing lately. For a place that's supposed to be full of tech contrarians, it does sound like an answering machine around here sometimes :)

Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.

However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.
Show HN: Letterboxd Completionist - Assessing Filmography Progress
by 3333333331 | 2025-11-22 20:42:05+00:00
I was curious about how many directors I had watched complete filmographies for but had no easy way to do it in the aggregate on Letterboxd, so I fell down the rabbit hole of vibe-coding this webapp. It turns out that the answer to my question is 4.

Curious if anyone has any feedback regarding this application--I'm new to this sort of thing!
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-22 20:42:25+00:00
I’m not cruel because I think society operates best — in terms of human outcomes — if incentives and disincentives are tied to decisions in ways that maximize the likelihood and benefit of personal responsibility.

Parents need to be responsible for their children. The state should only step in if they fail in their responsibility.

How is it folks like yourself can understand these concepts across a myriad of domains, including things like wildlife and their rehabilitation, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency, but not this?

It’s not kindness to create people dependent on the state, or to advantage businesses that do not pay a living wage by subsidizing their employees.

Hell, look at what we’ve done to the cost of education by creating government-backed loan programs that simply allow universities to charge as much as students can afford to mortgage from their future.
by FeelingCreative | 2025-11-22 20:42:47+00:00
We’ve all done it. You arrive at a famous landmark…the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Colosseum—and you instinctively reach for your phone. You snap the picture that proves you were there.

There is nothing wrong with that. We all want the memory.

But I’ve learned that the "proof of life" photo is rarely the one that ends up on my wall. The photos that stick with us aren't the ones that show what a place looks like; they are the ones that show what a place feels like.

For the best photos, see less like a tourist and start seeing more like an artist.

read more at: https://feeling-creations.com/articles/capturing-the-authent...
by alksdjf89243 | 2025-11-22 20:45:21+00:00
> also the fact that crime is down...

This is not a fact. What is a fact is that many police departments stopped reporting crimes, so there are fewer crimes being reported, not that there are fewer crimes being committed.

https://www.aol.com/thousands-police-depts-stop-reporting-00...

There are myriad reasons why, but stemming the upward trend of reported violence makes politicians look better and we all know how honest politicians are.
by hlassiege | 2025-11-22 20:45:24+00:00
Thanks for this perspective—I'm the author, and I'm actually back to freelancing/solo now. You're absolutely right. Staying senior and not chasing Staff+ roles is a totally valid choice. I was CTO at this company, but in previous roles, I personally aimed for more impact, not out of ambition or to play the game, but because I wanted to. I wanted to move the product, shape the direction. I felt I could contribute beyond just my dev capacity, and that brought me satisfaction.

More importantly, we built this career path to give people who wanted to grow an alternative to pure management. That was the whole point: creating options.

But everyone finds fulfillment differently. I'm not saying this path is for everyone. Just sharing what worked for me and how we structured it at Malt.
by mythrwy | 2025-11-22 20:45:28+00:00
That depends on who you are as a parent though. It could be the strangers are lifeline and positive force on the child's development compared to what you are.

A lot of times people assume in these conversation the parents are put together individuals who think about their child's future or even care. And from what I've observed I don't think that is universally the case.
by rixed | 2025-11-22 20:46:45+00:00
I used to participate in a few contests ages ago, and it was a lot of fun; Certainly a lot of HNers would enjoy it as well. With plenty of time to try many different ideas, I much prefer this format over the ICFP contest for this reason.

There have been very few challenges from Al in the recent years, so maybe some HNers may also be surprised that it's still a thing in 2025.

Obviously, many HNers might want their best AI on the problem as well (this is explicitely allowed).
by russdill | 2025-11-22 20:47:04+00:00
I suppose in the context of human history, you might argue to enslave a population based on racial characteristics in order to provide childcare.

For many families, both parents have to work. Most time spent not working or sleeping is spent doing a task simultaneously with childcare. Cleaning, preparing meals, repairing things, laundry, etc. Even for families where one individual shoulders the bulk of the burden this is largely the case.
by trollbridge | 2025-11-22 20:47:52+00:00
Er…

America has universal public education because it started with the “Old Deluder Act”: the state wanted people to be literate so they could read the Bible.

The exact opposite of your allegation above: “Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn’t mean I don’t understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: ‘don’t teach my children your Satanic ways.’”
by anigbrowl | 2025-11-22 20:48:19+00:00
Wishing that there wasn't competition is the slippery slope

Nobody is doing that. The article specifically mentions pursuing opportunities in the export market.

Obviously mandating workers-ownership is authoritarian in itself.

The workers bought out the previous owners, presumably due to frustration with the firm having had 4 near-collapses in the last 20 years under the capitalistic management approach.Your objections seem conditioned rather than considered; did you actually think any of this through, or are just just reacting to concepts that make you uncomfortable while overlooking the facts?
by abracadaniel | 2025-11-22 20:48:24+00:00
My grandmother cooked daily and taught her kids to cook. My mother cooked weekly and taught us to use the microwave. Sure anyone can learn to cook, just like anyone can learn to play the piano, but it requires time, money, dedication, and the push to get started. It’s much easier if you were taught some of the basics as a kid, or had an example in your life.