MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by denvrede | 2025-11-25 15:18:46+00:00
Exactly that. It's not an arbitrary dated threshold that lead to "growing up". It was the event of having kids. I'm still able to look at my current life through the lenses of a 25 year old me and hell, that looks bleak. But I can say with confidence that I'm content. Of course there are little things here and there but mostly everything is fine.

I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.
Show HN: Get instant feedback on your startup idea for YC.
by alielroby | 2025-11-25 15:18:48+00:00
Hello HN, I updated the free tool to help founders validate their startups. It currently allows founders to vote on other founder startups like Hot or not .com.

The backstory: I’ve applied to YC 3 times now. I actually haven’t received a response yet, which makes it very difficult to know what to adjust.

Since YC doesn't provide any feedback, I built this feature to allow founders to validate and get feedback on their startup from the community. We also have the ability for founders to comment on each idea and a leaderboard with the best startups. I hope this helps you get the validation you need.

Would love to hear your feedback or if there are other features I should add.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-11-25 15:18:52+00:00
>tool that can translate memory-safe Rust code into memory-unsafe C code

Fwiw, there're two such ongoing efforts. One[1] being an, written in C++, alternative Rust compiler that emits C (aka, in project's words, high-level assembly), the other[2] being a Rust compiler backend/plugin (as an extra goal to its initial being to compile Rust to CLR asm). Last one apparently is[3] quite modular and could be adapted for other targets too. Other options are continuing/improve GCC front-end for Rust and a recent attempt to make a Rust compiler in C[4] that compiles to QBE IR which can then be compiled with QBE/cc.

[1]: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc [2]: https://github.com/FractalFir/rustc_codegen_clr [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1bhajzp/ [4]: https://codeberg.org/notgull/dozer
OpenTransit – A MassTransit Fork
by Nakib | 2025-11-25 15:20:11+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with distributed messaging in .NET and recently mentioned here that I was exploring a MassTransit fork. Today I’m sharing the early stages of that work: OpenTransit, a new open-source messaging framework for .NET.

The project is still in its early days — the documentation isn’t complete yet and the website isn’t fully ready — but the core architecture and design approach are documented enough for early feedback. I’m posting now because I want to shape this with the community, not after everything is “finished.”

My intention is not to run this as a single-maintainer project. The long-term goal is to form a contributor-driven ecosystem, something like an OpenTransit Foundation, where decisions and direction aren’t dependent on one person.

If you're interested in messaging systems, brokers, distributed architecture patterns, or simply want to help guide a new open-source .NET project, I’d appreciate feedback, critiques, and contributors.

Doc: https://opentransitlab.github.io/OpenTransit

Discord (for discussion): https://discord.gg/5UF3BDsp
Show HN: A browser tool that tracks your hands in real-time
by warrowarro | 2025-11-25 15:20:52+00:00
I wanted to mess around with MediaPipe and Three.js, so I built this hand tracking thing that runs entirely in your browser. Point your webcam at your hands and it draws a cyberpunk-style skeleton over them in real-time. No server needed, everything processes locally. The trickiest part was getting the coordinate mapping right so the skeleton actually lines up with your hands and doesn't jitter all over the place. Anyway, thought it was cool enough to share. Let me know what you think!
by bakugo | 2025-11-25 15:20:54+00:00
Are you serious? It's basically impossible to discuss C/C++ anymore without someone bringing up Rust.

If you search for HN posts with C++ in the title from the last year, the top post is about how C++ sucks and Rust is better. The fourth result is a post titled "C++ is an absolute blast" and the comments contain 128 (one hundred and twenty eight) mentions of the word "Rust". It's ridiculous.
by wolttam | 2025-11-25 15:21:06+00:00
Yeah I could distinctly feel my brain shifting into its adult era over the last couple of years (I'm 31)

It was kind of odd. I'm more serious now (but at the same time.. less?). I'm way more easily able to focus on what actually matters in this life. (In saying that, I think it's more likely that my brain has finally decided what's important... in a way I feel like a passenger)
by Spivak | 2025-11-25 15:21:15+00:00
Yes. That is exactly the point. The opposite of nannying is the dignity of risk. Sometimes that risk is going to carry harm or even death. I don't think anyone who is arguing against nannying in this way would bat an eye at the potential cost of lives, that's a feature not a bug.

Constraints on individual liberty as it harms or restricts the liberty of others makes sense. It becomes nannying is when it restricts your liberty for your own good. it should be illegal to drive while drunk because you will crash into someone else and hurt them, but seatbelt laws are nannying because the only person you're going to hurt is yourself. And to get out ahead of it, if your response to this is some tortured logic about how without a seatbelt you might fly out of the car or some shit like that you're missing the point entirely.
by integralid | 2025-11-25 15:21:34+00:00
No, I'm not insinuating anything.

The authors charted human brain and divided it into "eras" where they saw significant changes based on age. Major life events can affect brain structure, and becoming a parent is one of the most important adult life events. Becoming a parent in early 30s is common. Just these facts combined mean that being in early 30s correlates with brain changes somehow. The authors explicitly mention that they know about this, and that they didn't control for this it yet.

Back to your question, I never said anything about maturing. It is a well-known fact, that female brain changes after childbirth. There is also research that suggests that first-time fathers brain changes too. This doesn't necessarily mean becoming more mature.
by shmolyneaux | 2025-11-25 15:21:36+00:00
I would encourage you to give it a try anyways. Unfamiliar syntax is off-putting for sure, but you can get comfortable with any syntax.

Coming from Python, I needed to work on some legacy Perl code. Perl code looks quite rough to a new user. After time, I got used to it. The syntax becomes a lot less relevant as you spend more time with the language.
by saghm | 2025-11-25 15:21:38+00:00
FWIW sudo has been maintained by an OpenBSD developer for a while now but got replaced in the base system by doas. Independent of any concerns about Rust versus C, I don't think it's quite as unreasonable as you're claiming to consider alternatives to sudo given that the OS that maintains it felt that it was flawed enough to be worth writing a replacement for from scratch.
by npteljes | 2025-11-25 15:21:42+00:00
And, for this reason, different entities ship different versions of the Linux kernel (and system) as well.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisquel

The simple statement that it's not 100% open source is not an attack on the effort. It needs to be said, because the blog entry's title is "Pebble Watch Software Is Now 100% Open Source".
by isaacdl | 2025-11-25 15:21:53+00:00
I'm glad it's not just me struggling with the screenshot functionality. I've encountered the bugs you're describing, and recently, I've been encountering an incredibly frustrating one where hitting print screen just...doesn't do anything. The only way I've found to temporarily fix it is to manually open the Snipping Tool (via the Start menu) - then the print screen key starts working again for some indeterminate period of time.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-11-25 15:21:57+00:00
I agree the number of long-term users will not match the download figures.

OTOH, this is an obscure distro so the surprising numbers may be a sign that many more PC owners are trying out a more mainstream distro than Zorin on their old Windows 10 machine.

While the old PC is not actually that old, and in perfect working condition, Linux may have never had as much opportunity for uptake in that regard.
by psychoslave | 2025-11-25 15:22:14+00:00
https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/8b529b3e-337f-42a4-bf36-34fd9e5...

>Here’s a concise and thoughtful response you could use to engage with ako’s last point:

---

"The scale and speed might be the key difference here. While human-generated narratives—like religions or myths—emerged over centuries through collective belief, debate, and cultural evolution, LLMs enable individuals to produce vast, coherent-seeming narratives almost instantaneously. The challenge isn’t just the volume of ‘bullshit,’ but the potential for it to spread unchecked, without the friction or feedback loops that historically shaped human ideas. It’s less about the number of people involved and more about the pace and context in which these narratives are created and consumed."
by simonask | 2025-11-25 15:22:30+00:00
What are you talking about? Rust’s function signature and type declaration syntaxes are extremely vanilla, unless you venture into some really extreme use cases with lots of lifetime annotations and generic bounds.

I seriously don’t get it.

fn add(a: i32, b: i32) -> i32 { … }

Where’s the “Perl-esqueness”?
by turnsout | 2025-11-25 15:22:33+00:00
Yeah, I think younger people don't realize how limiting Netflix's library is today. They used to have absolutely everything. If it was released on DVD, they had it.

Now if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I need to consult an aggregator [0] to figure out where it's streaming.

As a nerd, I was so excited about the early days of streaming, as it felt like the inevitable path for a company like Netflix.

Now though, I'm way past subscription fatigue. I've seen movies I "purchased" on iTunes be silently swapped out for other versions as the licensing changed.

So I recently bought a Blu-ray player for the first time, and I'm assembling a library of plastic discs. This might be the last physical media format for video, so I want to support it and grab some of these titles while they're available.

[0]: https://www.justwatch.com
by patapong | 2025-11-25 15:23:11+00:00
One underappreciated thing about Windows 8 is that even if the start menu was ugly and blocked the entire screen, you could press the windows key, immediately start typing, and then press enter to somewhat deterministically pick the top app. This made it feel quite fast.

Now on more recent windows editions, I find that I often need to wait for the menu to visually appear before it will accept any keyboard input, and the ranking shifts over time and includes web stuff, making this workflow basically useless.

I also really miss the aero look of windows 7... Eye-candy, sure, but I thought it was pretty, clean and modern looking. I am sad they moved away from it.
Show HN: Open-Source Email Verifier
by marcushyett | 2025-11-25 15:23:32+00:00
got tired of paying for email verification saas like usebouncer.com, expensive at scale and often say emails are valid when the server sends accept to anything.

built a simple npm package that does format + dns + smtp checks, plus detects those catch-all domains.

npx email-verifier-check check user@example.com https://github.com/yolodex-ai/email-verifier

any feedback appreciated.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-25 15:23:36+00:00
Rust's `const` is an actual constant, like 4 + 1 is a constant, it's 5, it's never anything else, we don't need to store it anywhere - it's just 5. In C++ `const` is a type qualifier and that keyword stands for constant but really means immutable not constant.

This results in things like you can "cast away" C++ const and modify that variable anyway, whereas obviously we can't try to modify a constant because that's not what the word constant means.

In both languages 5 += 3 is nonsense, it can't mean anything to modify 5. But in Rust we can write `const FIVE: i32 = 5;` and now FIVE is also a constant and FIVE += 3 is also nonsense and won't compile. In contrast in C++ altering an immutable "const" variable you've named FIVE is merely forbidden, once we actually do this anyway it compiles and on many platforms now FIVE is eight...
by staticman2 | 2025-11-25 15:23:38+00:00
You keep using words like "Provider" and "security".

The words "provider" and "security" do not have specific meanings.

I'm practice this could describe anything from:

"I want a guy who is ripped like Conan the barbarian and beats the crap out of anyone who dares look at me funny"

to:

"I want to be a stay at home mom."

To:

"I want a guy with a job who splits rent with me."
by ArcHound | 2025-11-25 15:23:42+00:00
Lol, in this comment chain, I, personally, shall judge all of the quality of human connection based on vibes.

Gamifying the needs depends on the intent. If you care about people wellbeing it's a force for good, if you seek to manipulate the people using advanced mechanisms it's evil.

Ultra popular romance book to balance needs of a woman is okay if the book was written by a human, and even that only as long as there is effort to connect outside of it. It's preferable to trash talk the husband behind his back over a glass of prosecco with 3 and exactly 3 friends.

Keep them coming, happy to answer. Just don't ask me for proofs, here I deal with vibes.
Show HN: A terminal based voice over IP service
by cooper258 | 2025-11-25 15:24:07+00:00
tars communication protocol (just a cool name, i love it). it is a terminal based voip service. yes there are a lot of clients but i wanted a cool one.

you can even integrate this service to make your own client. the core service runs as a linux service, use dbus to communicate with it.

i made this project for Hack Club's Midnight hackathon.

NOTE: I AM FINALISING A FEW THINGS ON THE SERVER SIDE YOU WOULD HAVE TO HOST THE SERVER LOCALLY BY YOURSELF.
by woodruffw | 2025-11-25 15:24:13+00:00
> You’re saying that whatever is in the source repository should be uploaded in the npm index, right? If the code is tagged as release, the built artifact is automatically uploaded to npm. Is that what you’re proposing?

No, I'm saying that the source repository should act as an authentication principal itself. A human should still initiate the release process, but the authentication process that connects the source repository (more precisely CI/CD) to the index should not involve a credential that's implicitly bound to a human identity (because the human's role within a project or company is ephemeral).

As far as I can tell, what got PostHog into this situation wasn't a fully automated release process (very few companies/groups have fully automated processes), but the fact that they had user-created long-lived credentials that an attacker could store and weaponize at a time most convenient to them. That's a problem regardless of whether there's normally a human in the loop or not, because the long-lived credential itself was sufficient for publishing.

(In other words, we basically agree about human approval being good; what I'm saying is that we should formalize human approval without making the authentication scheme explicitly require an intermediating partner who doesn't inherently represent the actual principal, i.e. the source repository.)
by exasperaited | 2025-11-25 15:25:05+00:00
This is interesting and alarming to me because judging by the changes in my life I appear to have entered the age-66 phase more than a decade and a half early despite remaining intellectually curious and physically fit enough.

In the last year or so I have begun to adjust my life expectations. My father was in his nineties when he died, but I no longer believe I will reach my seventies.

Things like this only tend to confirm my sense that I am neurologically ageing at a rate that is unusual.
by adwn | 2025-11-25 15:25:08+00:00
For one, signed integer overflow is allowed and well-defined in Rust (the result simply wraps around in release builds), while it's Undefined Behavior in C. This means that the LLVM IR emitted by the Rust compiler for signed integer arithmetic can't be directly translated into the analogous C code, because that would change the semantics of the program. There are ways around this and other issues, but they aren't necessarily simple, efficient, and portable all at once.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-25 15:25:26+00:00
> Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & frustrations - overall the language has a "pseudocode which compiles" approach, which I appreciate.

I think this is why you don’t like Rust: In Rust you have to be explicit by design. Being explicit adds syntax.

If you appreciate languages where you can write pseudocode and have the details handled automatically for you, then you’re probably not going to enjoy any language that expects you to be explicit about details.

As far as “janky syntax”, that’s a matter of perspective. Every time I deal with Python and do things like “__slots__” it feels like janky layer upon layer of ideas added on top of a language that has evolved to support things it wasn’t originally planned to do, which feels janky to me. All of the things I have to do in order to get a performant Python program feel incredibly janky relative to using a language with first class support for the things I need to do.
by npteljes | 2025-11-25 15:25:28+00:00
1. It's the other way around: because people don't care that much, that's why there is almost exclusively proprietary hardware around.

2. The people who require the "higher grades" of being open source are simply not a large enough market

3. Being open source is not a natural advantage of a product, in fact, it's more of a risk, liability, responsibility, and effort than being proprietary.

Hence, proprietary is the default.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-11-25 15:25:37+00:00
I'm writing this as a heavy python user in my day job. Python is terrible for writing complex systems in. Both the language and the libraries are full of footguns for the novice and expert alike. It has 20 years of baggage, the packaging and environment handling is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, although uv seems to be a minor light at the end of the tunnel. It is not a simple language at this point. It has had so many features tacked on, that it needs years of use to have a solid understanding of all the interactions.

Python is a language that became successful not because it was the best in it's class, but because it was the least bad. It became the lingua franca of quantitative analysis, because R was even worse and matlab was a closed ecosystem with strong whiffs of the 80s. It became successful because it was the least bad glue language for getting up and running with ML and later on LLMs.

In comparison, Rust is a very predictable and robust language. The tradeoff it makes is that it buys safety for the price of higher upfront complexity. I'd never use Rust to do research in. It'd be an exercise in frustration. However, for writing reliable and robust systems, it's the least bad currently.
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-25 15:25:43+00:00
"Infantilize" is a needlessly hyperbolic verb.

I've always found it interesting that laws are set by politics to allow privileges at certain ages (16, 18, 21), but car rental companies - whose motives are more purely data-driven - won't rent to anyone under 25.

I'm certainly not advocating withholding suffrage until 25, but driving... the data is very strong that it would save lives.
by stavros | 2025-11-25 15:26:02+00:00
> how many prompts did it take you to make this?

Probably hundreds, I'd say.

> how did you make sure that each new prompt didn't break some previous functionality?

For the backend, I reviewed the code and steered it to better solutions a few times (fewer than I thought I'd need to!). For the frontend, I only tested and steered, because I don't know much about React at all.

This was impossible with previous models, I was really surprised that Codex didn't seem to completely break down after a few iterations!

> did you have a precise vision

I had a fairly precise vision, but the LLM made some good contributions. The UI aesthetic is mostly the LLM, as I'm not very good at that. The UX and functionality is almost entirely me.
by jongjong | 2025-11-25 15:26:02+00:00
One thing I learned is that I severely underestimated the power of mimetic desire. I think partly because I'm lacking of this compared to the average person.

Anyway, people are hungry for validation because they're rarely getting the validation they deserve. AI satisfies some people's mimetic desire to be wanted and appreciated. This is often lacking in our modern society, likely getting worse over time. Social media was among the first technologies invented to feed into this desire... Now AI is feeding into that desire... A desire born out of neglect and social decay.
by xnorswap | 2025-11-25 15:26:13+00:00
You've never asked someone for a version and got back a version number for a completely different product?

Obviously it depends on your audience, and 3 rounds is exaggerating for the worst case, but in previous places I've worked I've seen customer support requests where the first question that needed to be asked wasn't, "What version are you using?", it's "Are you sure this is our product you're using?".

Actually getting version info out of that audience would have been at least an email explaining the exact steps, then possibly a follow up phone call to talk them through it and reassure them.

If your reference is JIRA tickets or you're selling software to software developers, then you're dealing with a heavily filtered stream. Ask your CS team for a look at the unfiltered incoming mail, it might be eye-opening if you've not done it before. You might be surprised just how much of their time is spent covering the absolute basics, often to people who have had the same support multiple times before.
by chillfox | 2025-11-25 15:26:18+00:00
That's pretty much how I have been using coding agents. I get them to build small cli tools with a --help option and place them in a `./tools` directory. Then I can tell an agent to use the tools to accomplish whatever task I need done.

Usually when I mention a `tool --help` for the first time in a prompt I will put it in backticks with the --help argument.

It works really well.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-11-25 15:26:23+00:00
As one of those commenters: It's actually super easy. It's fine for your product to only be mostly open source. It's definitely completely understandable if you can't open up some of the blobs that you yourself licensed. All I ask is that if you can't actually ship 100% of the software on the device needed to actually provide the advertised features, that you don't make a big headline claiming that it's 100% open source.
by anthonypasq | 2025-11-25 15:26:35+00:00
i think its incredibly difficult for a male to truly become a man without children. it is very easy and seductive to be a manchild forever, whereas society seems to force women to grow up. And its certainly possible for a father to remain a manchild, but i think without that kind of responsibility and focus of having to mentor and keep another human alive its difficult to fully mature.

edit: I am a man