MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chollida1 | 2025-11-28 14:24:18+00:00
> What would be a good example of the kinds of things a 100 line function would be doing?

For me i see it alto in older video game engines with a switch statement that has 100s of possible states that need to be taken into account.

That kind of code is less common these days but its nice to be able to see all the possible states in a single switch statements vs them all being abstracted away in multiple classes that handle a subset of each state transition.

This is one case where having a super long function makes readability far better than abstracting away the states into multiple classes that all need to be read to understand the state of the world.
Show HN: Dropout. – The uniform of those who walked out and still won
by kengeo | 2025-11-28 14:24:36+00:00
I built dropout. – premium minimalist apparel for founders who took the path less traveled.

The brand celebrates the rebels who defied the traditional system and still won. Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg. Larry Ellison. You.

Launching Black Friday. For those who know greatness doesn't need permission.

https://dropout.lifestyle

Would love feedback from this community. What's your dropout story?
by CuriouslyC | 2025-11-28 14:26:27+00:00
If you think scaling is all that matters, you need to learn more about ML.

Read about the the No Free Lunch Theorem. Basically, the reason we need to "scale" so hard is because we're building models that we want to be good at everything. We could build models that are as good at LLMs at a narrow fraction of tasks we ask of them to do, at probably 1/10th the parameters.
by f1shy | 2025-11-28 14:26:29+00:00
Is clear that the guy has some money to invest in those experiments. But apart from that, what he does, is so many different topics, is just mind blowing.

Even if I had the money and space he has, I could never ever do what he does.

From some videos is clear how much perseverance he has, often he reports about months and months of failure after failure, until he succeeds. I think THAT is the most impressive part of his videos, and what I try to learn from.
by sillyfluke | 2025-11-28 14:26:37+00:00
>A lot of Swiss government services do not need to be available 247 outside of the country.

Obviously without talking specifics it's hard to discuss, but I'd hate to be a Swiss who was traveling abroad and had to access the gov website deemed "not 24/7" in an emergency of some kind (planning travel for the next day for the railway for example), or to finish something due to a goverment imposed deadline.
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-28 14:27:15+00:00
> Just because something didn't work out doesn't mean it was a waste

Its all about scale.

If you spend $100 on something that didn't work out that money wasn't wasted if you learned something amazing. If you spend $1,000,000,000,000 on something that didn't work out the expectation is that you learn something close to 1,000,000,000x more than the $100 spend. If the value of learning is several orders of magnitude less than the level of investment there is absolutely tremendous waste.

For example: nobody qualifies spending a billion dollars on a failed project as value if your learning only resulted in avoiding future paper cuts.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-28 14:27:34+00:00
For a few hours leading to insignificant emissions.

> Now part of that problem is that we more or less constantly export electricity to Germany (but that was because they closed their nuclear plants).

We have previously imported way more. The problem nowadays is that carbon emissions are expensive and even more so when coming from LNG rather than pipeline from Russia.

In other words: our prices were previously more aligned with Germanys because ours were more expensive and Germanys was cheaper.

If you are Swedish, or understand Swedish following from the "we", take a look at this talk starting at 43:40 to understand where the prices are coming from:

https://play.mediaflow.com/ovp/16/88PEO8YFIF

> The main problem domestically in Sweden is that 30% of current electricity generation in Sweden is nuclear, but the _newest_ plants are 40 years old, on top of that the electricity generation needs to increase, steel mills de-carbonizing, more electric cars and so on.

And new built nuclear power won't be online until the 2040s. Are you saying that we should wait until the 2040s to decarbonize those parts of the economy rather than do it ASAP with renewables and storage?

The existing nuclear power fleet has now targetted their maintenance on operation until the 2060s, so it is not like it will disappear overnight.
by petterroea | 2025-11-28 14:28:02+00:00
Frankly whenever people show me some "new SQL killer" it often looks like "SQL with extra steps". Sure, everyone is afraid of joins, but you can often engineer yourself further away from that. Document-oriented database systems are fine, but have downsides.

One of the main reasons I won't be dropping SQL unless I have to is schema. I *love* that data stored in SQL has an inherent schema. As anyone who has dealt with raw JSON will know, it can get pretty ugly when you make changes and either have to migrate everything, or complicate your parsing logic to handle corner cases. As long as I have a sane SQL schema, I can use migrations to make sure all data is in line with a single schema, and that makes reasoning and writing business logic easier. I have worked places where they haven't been as strict about schema as they probably should have been with DDB's and its ugly.

I like when my code is stupid simple because I am dumb and make tonnes of dumb mistakes. Having a database with a strict schema means it is simple to reason about. DDB may seem easy because you can just slap objects in a database, but you are actually just moving the complexity and schema job to YOU the developer. We all make stupid mistakes from time to time, so best to pick tools that makes our job easy, right?

I'm happy to replace SQL but I haven't found anything that gives me the qualities I want yet.
by LexiMax | 2025-11-28 14:28:47+00:00
> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

This is being screamed from the rooftops by nearly the entire creative community of artists, photographers, writers, and other people who do creative work as a job, or even for fun.

The difference between the 99% of individual creatives and the 1% is that the 1% has entire portfolios of IP - IP that they might not have even created themselves - as well as an army of lawyers to protect that IP.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-11-28 14:29:01+00:00
I think there is broad agreement that new models and architectures are needed, but I don't see it as a waste to also scale the stack that we currently have. That's what Silicon Valley has been doing for the past 50 years - scaling things out while inventing the next set of things - and I don't see this as any different. Maybe current architectures will go the way of the floppy disk, but it wasn't a waste to scale up production of floppy disk drives while they were relevant. And ChatGPT was still released only 3 years ago!
by snowwrestler | 2025-11-28 14:29:05+00:00
Some proposed regs would cover uses of AI outside LLMs, some of which tech folks might call “machine learning” these days to distinguish them from LLMs.

Using algorithms to provide personalized pricing would be an example, where like a landlord, retailer, or airline would use an ML service trained on your personal data and aggregated purchase history to decide how much to charge you for a short-term rental, Nintendo Switch, or a plane ticket. Basically, instant underwriting at scale for every single purchase. Just got a new job with a raise? Your next vacation will cost you 26% more for the same experience.
by mrbluecoat | 2025-11-28 14:29:16+00:00
This cracked me up:

> a de facto ban on the use of these services as comprehensive Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions whenever particularly sensitive or legally confidential personal data is involved. For the most part, authorities will likely only be able to use applications like the widespread Microsoft 365 as online storage

Since when is Microsoft 365 the bastion of modern privacy?
by i_cannot_hack | 2025-11-28 14:29:29+00:00
> Initially i asked a AI for standard values

Don't do this, and don't then share the resulting numbers as fact publicly without disclosing you just asked a chatbot to make up something reasonable sounding.

If the chatbot refers to a source, read the source yourself and confirm it didn't make it up. If the chatbot did not refer to a source, you cannot be sure it didn't make something up.

The property measured in the source you linked, "enthalpy of formation", is not the same as the energy required to grow 1g of biomatter. One clue of this is that the number in the paper is negative, which would be very strange in the context you requested (but not in the context of the paper). For the curious: "A negative enthalpy of formation indicates that a compound is more stable than its constituent elements, as the process of forming it from the elements releases energy"

You're feeding yourself (and others) potentially inaccurate information due to overconfidence in the abilities of LLMs.
by vacuity | 2025-11-28 14:30:17+00:00
While the FSF's vision for the GPL is clear, the GPL itself is not so powerful that it is more than a "gift" that has some terms if you want to do certain things you are not obligated to do. It is like a grant that enforces some reasonable conditions so the money isn't just misappropriated. I wouldn't give that to a friend for their birthday, but I think it's reasonable that powerful organizations should not be free to do whatever they want. Not that the GPL is perfect for that use, but it's good.
Obsidian/Joplin does NOT support manual/arbitrary sorting of folders or notes
by lilerjee | 2025-11-28 14:30:51+00:00
When I finally decided to try Obsidian, I discovered that it couldn't sort folders (except for the default alphabetical sorting). Further searching revealed that most note-taking software (including Joplin) didn't allow manual or arbitrary sorting of folders or notes.

I believe manual or arbitrary sorting is a basic function that any bookmark manager or note-taking software should provide.

Why can't most software do this? Is it that difficult?
by amiga386 | 2025-11-28 14:32:26+00:00
That's the collective choice of the authors of those packages. A go module path is literally just the canonical URL where you can download the module.

The golang modules core to the language are hosted at golang.org

Module authors have always been free to have their own prefix rather than github.com, even if they host their module on Github. If they say their module is example.com/foo and then set their webserver to respond to https://example.com/foo?go-get=1 with <meta name="go-import" content="example.com/foo mod https://github.com/the_real_repository/foo"> then they will leave no hint that it's really hosted at github, and they could host it somewhere else in future (including at https://example.com directly if they want)

https://go.dev/ref/mod#vcs

Another feature is that go uses a default proxy, https://proxy.golang.org/, if you don't set one yourself. This means that Google, who control that proxy, can choose to make a request for a package like github.com/foo/bar go to some place else, if for whatever reason Microsoft won't honour it any more.
by moi2388 | 2025-11-28 14:32:30+00:00
Democracy means that the people decide.

Voting once every 5 years for groups which are organised cross-country, but not letting citizens vote cross-country, and this being the only democratic organ and the one with the least power, with no consequences for any of them breaking election promises, is imho not “letting the people decide”, but “oligarchy with the illusion of choice”
by agentultra | 2025-11-28 14:32:35+00:00
> But in the future when they can do non bullshit jobs, then you can go get another one just like every other person out of the billions who has had their job made obsolete by technology. It's not that hard.

This was the argument made by the capitalists after they had jailed and murdered most of the people in the Luddite movement before there was employment regulation.

They ignored what the Luddites were protesting for and suggested it was about people who just didn't understand how the new industrial economy worked. Don't they know that they can get jobs elsewhere and we, as a society, can be more productive for it?

The problem is that this was tone deaf. There were no labor regulations yet and the Luddites were smashing looms as that form of violence was the only leverage they had to ask for: elimination of child labor, social support that wasn't just government workhouses (ie: indentured servitude), and labor laws that protected workers. These people weren't asking everyone to make cloth by hand forever because they liked making cloth by hand and thought it should stay that way.

In modern times I think what many people are concerned about with companies getting hot for throwing labor out into the streets when it's not profitable for them anymore is that there are once more a lack of social supports in place to make sure those people's basic needs are met.

... and that's just one of the economic and social impacts of this technology.
by rbehrends | 2025-11-28 14:33:40+00:00
There is the Parliament's legislative train website [1]. However, it only tracks actual legislative steps, not the intra-Council negotiations, so the proposal's page appears to be have been largely inactive since 2024 [2].

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/

[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-new...
by Xelbair | 2025-11-28 14:33:52+00:00
The issue is that EU does not control the internet, nor all means of communication. Nor perfect form of monitoring exists so question is moot in itself. Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.

and the answer is no but yes - by encrypting everything E2E you can massively reduce harm done, and treat espionage/crime as policy/economic problem instead.
by brynet | 2025-11-28 14:34:07+00:00
With my OpenBSD developer hat on, I'll say we're grateful for hardware donations (from new laptops, to esoteric networking gear, etc.)

https://www.openbsd.org/want.html

Also the OpenBSD foundation is ~5% away from its fundraising goal for 2025! :-)

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2025.html
by redhale | 2025-11-28 14:34:13+00:00
I literally laughed out loud when I got to this line

> Do it right the first time

So easy, why didn't I think of that!? /s

Reminds me of the mental health meme of telling depressed people to just be happier instead.

I don't necessarily disagree with a lot in this philosophy, but much of it is puffery if not accompanied by practical positive and negative examples. If a junior with little experience reads this, I'm not sure if they'll be better or worse off.

For example, "Design for performance early" is dangerous if it leads to premature optimization. But that's not mentioned. Practical positive and negative examples that illustrate the balance between these two concerns would make the advice actionable.
by r_lee | 2025-11-28 14:34:15+00:00
That's the blessing of the KYC/AML laws/regulations for ya.

Moving money needs source of funds, documentation etc... doing any business requires you to doxx yourself to the world and to vendors in the name of transparency.

Luckily though none of this is a problem for large multinationals :) which the EU cares about most in the end
by robocat | 2025-11-28 14:34:17+00:00
Fighting corporates seems like a loser move: the corporate winners (from long copyright terms) would deploy income to politically prevent disadvantageous change.

> You can get one doubling of that by submitting your work to an official "library of congress" data set

Needs to be done at day 0 and made available at day 0 for usage. Maybe with standardised availability for usage e.g. licencing X,Y or Z or non-standard call-us-for-pricing.

The world moves fast and time really matters e.g. look at how the wait for patents to expire affects outcomes
by rivellium | 2025-11-28 14:34:58+00:00
We’ve been building our first MVP this year, and it turned out to be a much harder reality check than expected.

In the post, I break down five early mistakes we made — from wrong assumptions to poor user validation and what we learned the hard way while trying to ship something people actually want.

Nothing promotional — just practical notes and scars from the process. Would love to hear how this compares to your own early MVP lessons.
by _verandaguy | 2025-11-28 14:35:06+00:00
This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).

The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.

Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.

I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.
by cachius | 2025-11-28 14:36:19+00:00
The weight reductions may reduce TCO by one fifth through increased capacity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46075305#46078485

Plus no range reduction in cold conditions. Plus you can store hydrogen long-term for winter. And transport Liquid Hydrogen with huge energy density per truck/ship to remote places. https://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/thre... Sounds like a win for northern quartersphere.
by rutagandasalim | 2025-11-28 14:36:31+00:00
I’ve seen a lot of AI tool lists pop up lately, and most die quietly after launch. I built one myself recently — mostly as an experiment to see what actually drives traffic for small projects like that.

A few things surprised me:

SEO still works if you target low-competition, long-tail keywords.

Submitting to other directories drives better traffic than socials.

People care more about clean UI and fast load times than flashy branding.

Curious how others approached this. What’s worked best for you when trying to grow a small side project or resource site?
by piva00 | 2025-11-28 14:37:09+00:00
Sampling is still done, I'm a hobbyist music producer, and friends with many professionals. They have to clear the samples and pay royalties, and they get royalties from sampled tracks.

It's more cumbersome while being fairer, it hasn't stopped at all the practice. As a hobbyist I do it all the time while my professional friends clear their samples before earning money on their tracks.
by AJ007 | 2025-11-28 14:37:58+00:00
They have the same jurisdiction problem as Signal. So does Delta Chat, Matrix which were mentioned in another response here.

From a practical side, if the client and server are open source then the project is survivable even if the supporting organization is wiped out. For now users don't demand it nor do they understand it. At minimum, the clients must be open source and buildable, all encryption must happen on the user's device and there should be some control over the end server connections. It is also critical that there are near foolproof workarounds for tunneling the traffic in severely locked down countries like China. This is one of the big problems with requiring a phone number, for example. If users in China can't use a communications tool then it's bullshit.

Some projects like Delta Chat are criticized for one reason while the critics take at face value unverifiable claims from other projects. Delta Chat checks a lot of boxes along with user control and deployment of servers.

SimpleX is a good concept but I'm not sure how it can scale -- which is a detail that shouldn't be ignored. How Signal expects to continue with no visible revenue source is another good question.

XMPP should not be written off either. If I had to bet on a protocol having users a decade from now, that's the one. AI coding agents are going to rapidly iterate on improving the front end stuff. With all of the privacy busting age verification coming from the US, I'd be willing to bet the replacement for Discord will be something XMPP based.

On one side the EU funded open source projects to try to break away from the US tech giants, while passing laws to kneecap their own tiny open source alternatives (Cyber Resilience Act etc.) If the US & the EU wants to exist in the next century they need to be going the opposite direction. It was bad enough that western tech companies built China's great firewall and assisted authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

Most end users don't understand that keeping communications secure is not a given, it is really expensive and difficult. Adding wacky, difficult, very expensive or impossible to follow requirements is the fingerprint of EU bureaucracy and not just unwelcome but very dangerous.

For the EU Elon haters -- with the growth of Starlink, Elon Musk or whoever controls SpaceX is going to have a deep view of global internet communications in the years ahead. That will include an ability to block, filter, and allow things either they or those who control Starlink choose. Any regulation which weakens or cripples the security of internet communications is ceding power to that entity, whoever it may be.
by r_lee | 2025-11-28 14:38:47+00:00
And those politicians there form their own little interest groups across members states and vote accordingly, which is the exact opposite of what we think of democracy.

You'd basically have to rely on magic to know how those politicians you vote in will decide to vote on because they join some sect that lobbies them to vote against your interests.

And we all know no voter aside from the 1% will ever think this far. It's exactly like you called it, the illusion of choice