MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ohyoutravel | 2025-11-13 15:34:27+00:00
This ai generated writing is so grating. I would think someone who spend eight years as an SRE (indicating they’re probably pretty savvy and technically competent), would avoid this crap.

Phrases like, “The moment that broke me wasn’t the empty dashboard. It wasn’t the crickets after launch” or “Here’s what I missed: Those competitors weren’t obstacles. They were validation” (random bolding that ChatGPT does omitted) are just so banally awful it makes me weep.
by philote | 2025-11-13 15:34:30+00:00
I use Xreal Air Pros for gaming and sometimes working if I'm mobile. Resolution isn't great, but I find them better than looking at a small-ish laptop screen or the Steam Deck screen. You can definitely read text on them, but maybe not small text. It also helps to have prescription inserts.

And now I'm curious if the Steam Frame allows inserts or fits well with glasses on.
by ivape | 2025-11-13 15:34:32+00:00
You can say the same thing about a stock with low volume and low price. There must be a reason why no one is buying it right? Well, one of the reasons could be that everyone is completely wrong about it. I would avoid believing that since I shifted my strategy into Google (where everyone is) that that is where all the success is. If I told a ML researcher they were better off focusing on web development in the 2010s because that’s where the money is, I would have been hopelessly wrong. Several things can be true at the same time.

Why do some people 10x their money? They have a certain amount of time, money and risk tolerance. Not everyone can sit around and stay invested in certain convictions.

A truly industrial entrepreneur will be like a good investor. Buy the obvious, bet on the not so obvious, and be prepared to keep working on both.
by btown | 2025-11-13 15:34:40+00:00
One of the dangers of automated tests is that if you use an LLM to generate tests, it can easily start testing implemented rather than desired behavior. Tell it to loop until tests pass, and it will do exactly that if unsupervised.

And you can’t even treat implementation as a black box, even using different LLMs, when all the frontier models are trained to have similar biases towards confidence and obsequiousness in making assumptions about the spec!

Verifying the solution in agentic coding is not nearly as easy as it sounds.
by saclark11 | 2025-11-13 15:35:00+00:00
You can do this in Go by making a type declaration defining a function and then adding a method with the same signature on that type, which calls the function. The Go standard library does exactly this with the `HandlerFunc` type [1].

// The HandlerFunc type is an adapter to allow the use of // ordinary functions as HTTP handlers. If f is a function // with the appropriate signature, HandlerFunc(f) is a // [Handler] that calls f. type HandlerFunc func(ResponseWriter, *Request) // ServeHTTP calls f(w, r). func (f HandlerFunc) ServeHTTP(w ResponseWriter, r *Request) { f(w, r) }

[1]: https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.25.4:src/...
by rufus_foreman | 2025-11-13 15:35:16+00:00
For further reference, a 55 year old early retiree who wants to spend $400,000 during the year might sell $400,000 of stock with a cost basis of $200,000 and pay a little over $60k capital gains tax.

The question here is should we continue to subsidize health insurance for that person? Should taxpayers who can work and do work pay for the health insurance of wealthy people who can work and don't work?

It does not sound fair to me, even though I might benefit from it in the near future.
by tptacek | 2025-11-13 15:35:23+00:00
I think you should read the post. It's mostly not about things implementations can improve about the PGP ecosystem on their own.

Then, I think you should talk to professional cryptography engineers. I'd be interested if you could find even one who believes the PGP ecosystem should be kept going. My distaste for PGP is not an idiosyncrasy; it's something I learned from cryptographers, who fucking hate PGP.
Show HN: Turn any webpage into structured data via LLM codegen
by goncharom | 2025-11-13 15:35:51+00:00
Hey HN! I wanted to share a little library I've been working on to leverage AI to get structured data from arbitrary pages. Instead of sending the page's HTML to an LLM, Hikugen asks it to generate python code to fetch the data and enforces the generated data conforms to a Pydantic schema defined by the user. I'm using this to power yomu (https://github.com/goncharom/yomu), a personal email newsletter built from arbitrary websites.

Hikugen's main features:

- Automatically generates, runs, regenerates and caches the LLM-generated extraction code. - It uses sqlite to save the current working code for each page so it can be reused across executions. - It uses OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/) to call the LLM. - It can fetch the page automatically (it can even reuse Netscape-formatted cookies) but you can also just feed it the raw HTML and leverage the rest of its functionalities.

Here's a snippet of what it looks like:

from hikugen import HikuExtractor from pydantic import BaseModel from typing import List class Article(BaseModel): title: str author: str published_date: str content: str class ArticlePage(BaseModel): articles: List[Article] extractor = HikuExtractor(api_key="your-openrouter-api-key") result = extractor.extract( url="https://example.com/articles", schema=ArticlePage ) for a in result.articles: print(a.title, a.author)

Hikugen is intentionally minimal: it doesn't attempt website navigation, login flows, headless browsers, or large-scale crawling. Just "given this HTML, extract this structured data".

A good chunk of this was built with Claude Code (shoutout to Harper’s blog: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/.

Would love feedback or ideas—especially from others playing with codegen for scraping tasks.
by linsomniac | 2025-11-13 15:35:53+00:00
My child has been involved in Hack Club for a number of years, and I support their mission. However, HC do seem to be lacking in "adult supervision", and I understand that is kind of their approach: having the kids figure stuff out on their own. However, there are things that kids, due to lack of experience, just can't figure out for themselves. For example, the reliance on ChatGPT and reluctance to use professional SMEs is a very "immature" attitude.

This sort of cavalier attitude is going to get them in trouble; I'm honestly surprised that this hasn't already gotten them into trouble. Hack Club has enough money that they can easily be a worthwhile target if any of their decisions turns out badly.

I'm going to be a bit oblique here because I don't want HC to take this out on my child, but at one of the HC events, the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening. Another situation led to our child being "ditched" in a foreign city and unsure how to get ahold of anyone on the ground to help.

Hack Club is a great idea, and I'm glad it exists, but I do think that the way it is currently organized is going to end badly.
by bob1029 | 2025-11-13 15:36:14+00:00
2nd+ mover is the best kind of advantage for technology markets. One of the most expensive things is educating the average consumer. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to obtain customers with more specific propositions after they've already drank someone else's koolaid.

For example, if someone created an adversarial/rude variant of OpenAI's offerings I would be very interested. Taking the existing "what works" and targeting segments of that market that are underserved is less risky than direct competition or forging new markets.
by squaresmile | 2025-11-13 15:36:18+00:00
> higher-passenger-capacity trains

Length is limited by platform length and width is limited by tunnel loading gauge and platform sizes. To increase the platform length, you have to do it at most if not all stations. Crowded stations are usually in desirable areas which make it harder to dig or acquire land.

> run more trains

For lines at capacity, I believe it's usually limited by trains dwell time. Longer and bigger trains take longer for people to safely board. To improve this on the train side, you can have more doors and bigger doors. Station platforms also need to be bigger, have more stairs, bigger walkways, etc. Longer trains also make it tougher for train drivers and station staff to open and close the doors safely.

Tough but not impossible problems but many solutions contain trade offs. Only surefire way is to build another line but that costs tons of money.
by guywithahat | 2025-11-13 15:36:21+00:00
One could argue the rails were a success. The article argues deaths went up after privatization, but that's only because the miles being ridden went up significantly as well. Actual deaths per mile are down. Further the drop in ridership in 2021 was due to covid, and the financial strain was caused largely by the rail industry re-investing heavily before covid.
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-13 15:36:33+00:00
Typical Bluetooth latency (in my experience as a HW dev) is 9.5ms. I'm pretty skeptical of 8ms for a proprietary protocol, but in an optimistic sense. I would be shocked if the latency is that high for a custom protocol.

Raw 802.11 with no IP stack can get below 5ms IIRC
by tarsinge | 2025-11-13 15:36:39+00:00
Just a random example on top of my head, animals don’t have language and show signs of consciousness, as does a toddler. Therefore consciousness is not an emergent property of text processing and LLMs. And as I said, if it comes from computation, why would specific execution paths in the CPU/GPU lead to it and not others? Biological systems and brains have much more complex processes than stateless matrix multiplication.
by bluGill | 2025-11-13 15:36:43+00:00
Train drivers are mostly obsolete. More than 20 years ago full self driving trains became a reality in several areas. Since a train cannot stop if something is on the tracks anyway, we can ignore safety issues. The computer tells the track to switch, and then the train to go when the track is clear. When it is time to stop the computer stops, and the doors are exactly in the right place to align with the doors on the platforms.

An automated train is better for everyone. So if your system doesn't have it they should be investing in getting it.

In some cases you need safety people at the platforms, or on the train, but their only useful control is the stop/go button.
by phatfish | 2025-11-13 15:36:47+00:00
I want someone who cares to be driving the train I'm on. They also require in person participation which make outsourcing hard. I'm fine with self driving when the line is designed for it. It will be a very long time before existing lines are self driving, and its not because on unions.

Not really sure why people like moaning about train drivers. Are they jealous a train driver is making more than them? While in the case of tech workers they sit quietly and watch their £65k jobs go to India.
by zahlman | 2025-11-13 15:36:58+00:00
> If you’re checking it at a grocery store it’s likely there’s someone in line behind you waiting to pay

I usually use the self check-out which is usually not at all busy when I get there.

> Waiting for you to count out your pennies

I was explicitly talking about using a debit card, and as I established repeatedly throughout the thread, my country hasn't used pennies for over a decade.

But on the occasions that I pay cash, I do try to make exact change, because that's courteous to the cashier (and also just satisfies my aesthetic sense). I'm quick about this, because being the sort of person who posts on Hacker News, my mental arithmetic is pretty good.

> is the kind of thing that evokes rage in people because it’s so rude.

I've had people in front of me "waste" far more time than that because they had to cancel items (and deliberate over what to send back), struggle to pull things out of their cart, etc. It doesn't bother me. If I urgently needed to be somewhere else I would have planned my trip for another time. It already takes quite a while because I walk both ways (which I also enjoy quite a bit by the way).

People ITT are talking about the value of time, but I can't reasonably value each second equally. Time is not nearly as fungible as money; ten seconds saved on an outing is just not going to translate into ten seconds spent on my projects. Nor can I make myself feel as though every moment not spent on acquiring capital is equally wasted.

And I deeply resent the implication that using XYZ technology to save time is a moral imperative.
by networked | 2025-11-13 15:37:01+00:00
> I'm now experimenting with `age`, which touts itself as "simple, modern, and secure encryption". If needed, I will use `minisign` for signatures.

I have also switched from GPG to age. When I wanted to start signing my open-source software releases because of recent supply-chain attacks, I first thought of Minisign, too. I tried it for binaries and even found a few third-party Git integrations (https://codeberg.org/SkyFox42/git-minisign, https://github.com/sug0/git-signify), then discovered that Git and GitHub supported signing with SSH keys (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72844616). GitHub supports it in the sense that it will indicate a commit or tag is signed. I have adopted this approach: I sign tags with `git tag -s foo` and binaries with `ssh-keygen -Y sign`, and I have put the public key and usage instructions on my site (https://dbohdan.com/pubkeys).

gpg-agent was valuable to me because it let me use `pass` in scripts while maintaining encryption at rest. This prevented me from switching to `passage`. After surveying my options (https://github.com/dbohdan/pago/blob/6aa312e83113498a64abd9a...), I ended up forking pash (https://github.com/dylanaraps/pash) and developing the fork into an age-based password manager with its own agent. The developer of seniorpw has a nice feature comparison of `pass`-like password managers based on age (https://gitlab.com/retirement-home/seniorpw/-/blob/f1584cf42...).

I can say I am happy with the switch. If you use GPG for encrypting files, I can recommend it.
by saghm | 2025-11-13 15:37:19+00:00
I can't read the entirety of this article[1] because it's paywalled, but it looks like they ran their own servers:

> GitHub is currently hosted on the company’s own hardware, centrally located in Virginia

I imagine this predates their acquisition from Microsoft. Honestly, given how often Github seems to be down compared to the level of dependency people have on it, this might be one of the few cases where I might have understood if Microsoft embraced and extended a bit harder.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/tech/796119/microsoft-github-azure-...
by daft_pink | 2025-11-13 15:37:27+00:00
I think there is arguably a correlation based on the following, but no one has shown a causal link. I don't think it's unreasonable to make the statement that some studies have found a correlation or association, but no causal link: https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2025/mount-sinai-s... https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/using-acetaminophen-during-pre...
by xexr | 2025-11-13 15:37:45+00:00
Completely agree with your sentiment.

I also had a couple of projects on their hobby plan and the pain of that rug pull made me swear I'd never use them again, no matter the size or context. I would have happily paid like $15 at the time too, but all they offered was a move to their $40+ pm plan. Insane and a terrible way to treat your users.

Irony is, I loved the brand and would have advocated hard for them otherwise.

At the time, their messaging was all about how, "we are for the enterprise and larger customers, not these piddling little poor plebs".

Well I guess they've belatedly realised that plebs turn into managers and future enterprise customers.

They got rid of Aaron Francis too who I thought did excellent work for them.
by glp1guide | 2025-11-13 15:38:04+00:00
Basically, the gastro-intestinal side effects are the biggest issue, along with CVS (not the store) and possibly eye problems.

That said, the negative side effects look to be incredibly rare and manageable (including via stopping treatment) -- and the positives are quite tremendous.

It's not a magic drug, but it is the first of it's kind with such a skew to the positive on side effects.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-13 15:38:07+00:00
>We’ve observed that, throughout the course of training, SIMA 2 agents can perform increasingly complex and new tasks, bootstrapped by trial-and-error and Gemini-based feedback.

>In subsequent training, SIMA 2’s own experience data can then be used to train the next, even more capable version of the agent. We were even able to leverage SIMA 2’s capacity for self-improvement in newly created Genie environments – a major milestone toward training general agents across diverse, generated worlds.

Pretty neat, I wonder how that works with Gemini, I suppose SIMA is a model (agent?) that runs on top of it?
by brookst | 2025-11-13 15:38:13+00:00
Cynicism is so blinding.

Alternative take: these are incredibly complex nondeterministic systems and it is impossible to validate perfection in a lab environment because 1) sample sizes are too small, and 2) perfection isn’t possible anyway.

All products ship with defects. We can argue about too much or too little or whatever, but there is no world where a new technology or vehicle or really anything is developed to perfection safety before release.

Yeah, profits (or at least revenue) too. But all of these AI systems are losing money hand over fist. Revenue is a signal of market fit. So if there are companies out there burning billions of dollars optimizing the perfectly safe AI system before release, they have no idea if it’s what people want.
by kkukshtel | 2025-11-13 15:38:23+00:00
They have $230m in funding and some of the best CS/AI researchers in the world. People like Skybox labs have already released stuff that is effectively the same as this with far less capital and resources. This is THE premiere world model company, and the fact their first release is a far cry from the promise here feels like a bit of a bellweather.

I agree RTFM is in more of the "right" direction here, and what is presented here is a bit of a derivative of that. Which makes this release so much more crass, as it seems like a ploy to get platform buy in from users more so than a release of a "world model".

https://www.skyboxai.net/ https://worldgen.github.io/
by hylaride | 2025-11-13 15:38:57+00:00
> Does any country have any success stories?

Yes, but it depends on how/why things are done. You don't hear about the successes because it's not a story worth telling.

Charter schools are a good example. They have mixed success when deployed. In many places they're deployed by right-wing politicians primarily to weaken public schools (and their unions). This can be done via a variety of ways, such as letting the charter schools charge extra (thereby essentially subsidizing private schools), allowing the schools to "expel" problem children, thereby dumping the public system with them, etc. The result is usually a framework that isn't designed to actually make education better.

In some places (Sweden is a good example), charter schools were implemented by a centre-left government because all attempts at school reform failed due to a variety of reasons. The result was by most measures successful as the charter schools couldn't pick and choose kids, were still held accountable, and it resulted in the public schools having to stop fighting reform in order to sort of compete.

The Canada line in Vancouver (metro link to the airport) was build on time and on budget and is still run by a P3 company, as is the new REM line in Montreal. The incentives here were ONE company was given a contract with clearly laid out incentives and minimal political meddling after that (as opposed to other P3s where the government is highly involved and subcontracts, etc get doled out to connected firms, etc).

The UK car industry was mostly privatized, but judgement on its post-privatization failure mostly goes down political lines (eg should a government continue to subsidize poorly made cars in the name of employment). Same with most of the rest of industrial Britain, which under public ownership was uncompetitive in most cases. That being said, most would consider Rolls-Royce to be successful and was privatized in the 1980s.

BP's privitization was mostly a success, even with all its issues.

Canada privatized CN rail and it is now one of the most efficient freight railroads in North America.

Telecom privatization in the EU has mostly been a success (though one could argue that the EU has pushed for too much competition, which has meant that while mobile prices are generally very low, it has made it harder for companies to invest).

Many airlines outside of the USA were also publicly owned pseudo-monopolies. Flying is cheaper than it's ever been, even if no longer glamourous.

The TL;DR is of course it's a mixed bag and depends on so many factors. Many UK industrial firms were so poorly run under private ownership that they were so far behind they couldn't catch up and compete once privatization did happen.
by ecshafer | 2025-11-13 15:39:10+00:00
Hackathons can be fun. And I think that people should try and do one or two when they are in college (ideally run by a university, not a shady 3rd party). The microsoft puzzle challenge (idk if that still exists) is also great. These are fun, give you a bit of networking, probably wont get you a job. Your university work gets you a job.
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-11-13 15:39:18+00:00
No one thinks they are a dick. But you are. At least in many instances as many of the comments here and elsewhere point out. I had similar experience trying to start a discussion about something in one of the Homebrew repositories.

The fact that you have many friends who confirm your bias of not being a dick...means exactly nothing. You have people telling you your words made them perceive your comment as being arrogant/blunt and your reply is: I'm successful open-source maintainer and have many friends who think I'm not arrogant and I only take critique from them. Have it your way. But in my eyes, you're being a dick. (Don't misinterpret this as my judgement of your engineering skills. I love Homebrew and it's an incredible feat. Congrats.)
by the_snooze | 2025-11-13 15:39:55+00:00
Yeah, the "you're using it wrong" argument falls flat on its face when the technology is presented as an all-in-one magic answer box. Why give these companies the benefit of the doubt instead of holding them accountable for what they claim this tech to be? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bBfYX8X5aU

I like to ask these chatbots to generate 25 trivia questions and answers from "golden age" Simpsons. It fabricates complete BS for a noticeable number of them. If I can't rely on it for something as low-stakes as TV trivia, it seems absurd to rely on it for anything else.
by oersted | 2025-11-13 15:41:23+00:00
Not every culture has the same standards of politeness. I didn't think it was rude, I think it can be even respectful of their time and intelligence to be concise, plain and direct, as long as you are not literally attacking them.

I mean, the comments under the GPT-5.1 announcement just today were full of people wishing that AI actually responded to them like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904551
by Zr01 | 2025-11-13 15:41:28+00:00
I've often found it helpful in search. Specifically, when the topic is well-documented, you can provide a clear description, but you're lacking the right words or terminology. Then it can help in finding the right question to ask, if not answering it. Recall when we used to laugh at people typing in literal questions into the Google search bar? Those are the exact types of queries that the LLM is equipped to answer. As for the "improvements" in GPT 5.1, seems to me like another case of pushing Clippy on people who want Anton. https://www.latent.space/p/clippy-v-anton