MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johannes1234321 | 2025-11-06 22:04:04+00:00
There are attempts to lösen the control from the U.S. side like a cooperation between Microsoft/Azure and SAP or Google and T-Systems (deutsche Telekom) where the German side would run an "air gapped" region of those cloud stacks.

However I believe the rates in the end were too high to win notable contracts, but I haven't followed along in a while.

https://www.heise.de/news/Digitale-Souveraenitaet-Microsoft-...

https://t3n.de/news/t-systems-sovereign-cloud-google-verwalt...
Show HN: Unify-Simple-Decision-Table
by deepakarora3 | 2025-11-06 22:04:15+00:00
I am happy to announce the open sourcing of unify-simple-decision-table, a simple and straightforward, light weight Java-based implementation of a decision table. It makes defining and executing business rules both intuitive and powerful. Despite its simplicity, it delivers most capabilities that people need and without unnecessary complexity.

At its core, the library allows you to pass input data as key-value pairs and evaluate it against rules defined sequentially in either JSON or Excel-based decision table definitions. It supports both first match and all matches policies with strict or lenient validation modes. It can invoke external Java methods as part of rule evaluation or return values and even embed JEXL expressions to manage more complex rules.

The library allows decision tables to be defined as JSON or Excel files. While JSON based tables are recommended for production (since they can be versioned and tracked), they are not friendly to visualize and update. Accordingly, the library provides methods to convert from JSON to Excel and vice versa so that it becomes easy to visualize and make changes.

Developers can further extend functionality by invoking Java methods or embedding JEXL scripts directly within rule definitions. The library also supports analytics by generating events whenever rules are loaded or matches are fired.

We have used this library internally in American Express with great success and we hope the same for the community. It would be great to discuss and get feedback on the library. Thanks!
by matt-p | 2025-11-06 22:05:12+00:00
I'm a brit.

There's more than an element of truth to this, we do not always dream big enough or take enough risk. We are efficient and frugal sometimes to a fault.

However it's not the whole story, there are actually people who want to swing for the fences, but who cannot and ultimately end up either scaling back, failing, or moving to the US. There isn't good access to early-stage funding here, and there is no real ecosystem either.

We have absolutely obscene amounts of untapped potential, it's infuriating.
by peatmoss | 2025-11-06 22:06:42+00:00
I think the answer here involves licensing and Apple control of the infrastructure, but my first thought was, "I historically trust Apple with my data a bit more than I trust Google, how is this not just trusting Google with my data?"

Apple previously pitched a vision of local-first AI for privacy, but seems to have badly miscalculated the kind of customer experience they could provide. My personal experience is that Siri has suffered greatly.

Case in point, I like to listen to music in the car, and Siri now confidently starts playing artists whose names sound nothing like what I requested. Also maddening "Play [x] on Apple Music" "You'll need to authorize me to use Youtube Music"

Still I live with / pay for so much that is broken based on a kind of Apple privacy vibes inertia. Siri being wired up to more of my personal information plus Apple maybe shipping that data to Google is going to make me reevaluate that.
by aatd86 | 2025-11-06 22:06:55+00:00
I would not be surprised if the universe was somewhat elastic, expands and then contracts and then expands ad infinitam. After all, existence in itself is irrefutable and cannot not exist by definition.

If we subscribe to a theory of the multiverse, set theory, likelihood, and interaction driven evolution based on gradient type of fundamental laws. Locally changing. Obviously everything sharing a fundamental quality that is part of existence itself. But obviously there are sets, there is differentiation. But it is not created, the infinity of unconstrained possibilities exists in the first place and reorganizes itself a bit like people are attracted to people who share some commonalities or have something they need from each other and form tribes. Same processus kind of works for synapse connections, works for molecule formations, works for atoms... etc... Everything is mostly interacting data.

We could say that the concept of distance is a concept of likelihood. The closer is also the most likely.

Just a little weird idea. I need to think a bit more about it. Somewhat metaphysic?
by warkdarrior | 2025-11-06 22:07:40+00:00
One downside of fine-grained sandboxing is the overhead, as each (function) call into a library now has to cross sandbox boundaries.

Even if we assume overhead is magically brought to zero, the real challenge is customizing the permission policy for each sandbox. I add, say, 5 new dependencies to my program, and now I have to review source code of each of those dependencies and determine what permissions their corresponding sandboxes get. The library that connects to a database server? Maybe it also needs filesystem access to cache things. The library that parses JSON buffers? Maybe it also needs network access to download the appropriate JSON schema on the fly. The library that processes payments? Maybe it also needs access to location information to do risk analysis.

Are all developers able to define the right policies for every dependency?
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-06 22:07:41+00:00
Also, and to generalize:

Stop asking me about accepting cookies.

Stop asking me to subscribe to your email list

Stop asking me to review my last purchase.

Stop telling me I need to subscribe to view this content.

Stop asking for my phone number

Stop asking for my income

If I want to do or tell you any of these things I will initiate that myself.
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-11-06 22:08:02+00:00
>Now in modern times many people have moved away from religion, yet most aren't replacing that philosophical void with anything comparable.

They replace it with postmodernism. It's incomparable on the scale of propaganda, yeah.

>nihilism which is even less satisfying

That's a myth. Nihilism is fine if you do it correctly.
by DavidPeiffer | 2025-11-06 22:08:09+00:00
>We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.

What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?

I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.
by nabakin | 2025-11-06 22:08:14+00:00
> type Ia supernovae, long regarded as the universe’s "standard candles", are in fact strongly affected by the age of their progenitor stars.

A key point in the article. From what I understand, this is the main way we measure things of vast distance and, from that, determine the universe's rate of expansion. If our understanding of these supernovae is wrong, as this paper claims, that would be a massive scientific breakthrough.

I'm really interested in the counterargument to this.
by zamalek | 2025-11-06 22:08:15+00:00
This is a double-edged sword.

Zigbee's issue was that anyone could make devices and modify the protocol. Tons of devices are vendor-locked to their first-party hub. Philips attempted to do this recently with a firmware update and only backed off due to extremely bad PR.

Z-Wave has the same "problem" as Matter. You have to pay the consortium per product. Part of that what that pays for is testing, and cross-vendor compatibility is mandatory. As a consumer you are guaranteed that a Z-Wave device will work with any hub (and therefore Home Assistant/completely locally). You own Z-Wave devices.

I ran both in my old home, and used Zigbee devices where possible (Z-Wave devices are often more expensive).

I would much rather have it the way of Z-Wave and Matter. It is the lesser of two evils.
by craftkiller | 2025-11-06 22:08:28+00:00
> What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs?

If you use vanilla emacs without customization, you are going to have a very basic text editor experience. That is fine if you understand that, and understand that you'll need to start adding your own customizations (like enabling eglot for LSP, and company-mode for code completions, etc) in order to get to an experience closer to what you'd get out of the box in an IDE like vscode.

Some people might see vanilla emacs, assume emacs is just a plain text editor, and go back to their fancy IDEs. For them, distros like doom/space would be good for avoiding that initial shock/disappointment.

Another great use for doom/space is to see what is possible. Figure out what bits you like, and then figure out how to enable them in your own vanilla-based config. Essentially window-shopping for your own emacs config.

But in the end, I'd recommend you eventually get to the state I am in: I started with a completely vanilla emacs and then slowly added the bits that I wanted. That way I have only what I want, and nothing that I don't want. I don't get surprised by unexpected features. My breakages are fewer because I use so few packages. My load times are great because I am not loading a bunch of stuff I don't use. I understand everything that is enabled in my config.

You also might want to check out emacs-solo. It's a config that is built based entirely on built-in packages rather than 3rd party packages. I still use some 3rd-party packages like company-mode but it is good to see just how far you can go with the built-in stuff (for example, you probably don't need projectile, you can use the built-in project.el, and you probably don't need lsp-mode, you can use the built-in eglot): https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo
by turnsout | 2025-11-06 22:08:47+00:00
Ah, gotcha—yes, that is actually a pain point and a strange omission. If you need to run backend code for any reason to support your app, Apple literally offers nothing.

IBM at one point offered Swift "serverless" lambdas/cloud functions, which made me briefly hopeful that Apple could do the same, but that service was deprecated years ago, and Apple has shown no motion there.
by blehn | 2025-11-06 22:09:04+00:00
You should filter out authors from the input books in the output. If liked a book by an author, surely I'd read more of their work if I wanted to — recommending them isn't helpful. Along the same lines, I think interesting recommendations tend to be the ones that (1) I like and (2) I didn't expect. The more similar the recommendations are to the input, the more likely I already know them, and the more likely to create a recommendation echo chamber.
by teiferer | 2025-11-06 22:09:41+00:00
> At almost no point has that institution been a net positive

Hard to measure, isn't it. In the eyes of the millions of americans who have at some point in their life been victims or related to or friends of victims of some kind of serious crime, the FBI has often times been helpful and/or the prospect of being caught has been a deterrent for crimes.

You contrast that with all the bad that has come from there, of which there is surely plenty, but how come you claim thay the bad obviously must outweigh the good?
by neilv | 2025-11-06 22:09:45+00:00
> Essentially they draw a hell of a lot of national pride from this 'doing more with less' attribute. It came about out of necessity during ww2.

Two of my best success stories are along those lines, and I thought might hit favorable "10x" and "startup agility and resourcefulness" notes.

But in the US, I think the stories often land with the unspoken reaction of, "strange flex, bro: if that company were better, it would have raised more, and had rapid growth of headcount, on the way to a successful exit."

This might be a good application of LLM to large text corpus: label instances of US startup people of the past 2 decades (i.e., ZIRP, followed by crypto and AI gold rushes) speaking of how much they raised, and also label instances of them speaking of how scrappy they were with limited resources. Compare.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-06 22:09:46+00:00
There's a lot of people saying "All we need to do is maintain libxslt" and a distinct lack of people actually stepping up to maintain libxslt.

I, for one, won't. Not for the purpose of keeping it in the browser. There are just too many other ways to do what it does for me to want that (and that's before we get into conversations about whether I want to be working with XML in the first place on the input side).

> not being lazy developers

Laziness is one of the three great virtues of programming. Every second not spent maintaining libxslt is a second we can spend on something more people care about.

It's a rule for writers, but it applies to software architecture also: kill your darlings.
by qwertox | 2025-11-06 22:09:47+00:00
I've found it much more useful to create an MCP server, and this is where Claude really shines. You would just say to Claude on web, mobile or CLI that it should "describe our connectivity to google" either via one of the three interfaces, or via `claude -p "describe our connectivity to google"`, and it will just use your tool without you needing to do anything special. It's like custom-added intelligence to Claude.
by lukan | 2025-11-06 22:09:48+00:00
There are many reports of CLI AI tools displaying words that humans express when they are frustrated and about to give up. Just what they have been trained on. That does not mean they have emotions. And "deleting the whole codebase" sounds more interesting, but I assume is the same thing. "Frustrated" words lead to frustrated actions. Does not mean the LLM was frustrated. Just that in its training data those things happened so it copied them in that situation.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-11-06 22:10:12+00:00
> The US market doesn’t pride itself purely on unicorns created, but on the fact that it’s a vibrant ecosystem that invests in ideas even if they might not become a unicorn. That fact seems lost on the meaning of the headline

That just seems like spin on what is essentially burning cash. I don't think it's a morally superior posture to invest in things that fail. I assure you VC's are turning down plenty of things because they don't seem like unicorns.

I mean Sequoia invested with SBF while he was playing league of legends in his pitch meeting. We're not dealing with geniuses here.
by suprjami | 2025-11-06 22:10:37+00:00
You're right about "reasoning". It's just trying to steer the conversation in a more relevant direction in vector space, hopefully to generate more relevant output tokens. I find it easier to conceptualize this in three dimensions. 3blue1brown has a good video series which covers the overall concept of LLM vectors in machine learning: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_...

To give a concrete example, say we're generating the next token from the word "queen". Is this the monarch, the bee, the playing card, the drag entertainer? By adding more relevant tokens (honey, worker, hive, beeswax) we steer the token generation to the place in the "word cloud" where our next token is more likely to exist.

I don't see LLMs as "lossy compression" of text. To me that implies retrieval, and Transformers are a prediction device, not a retrieval device. If one needs retrieval then use a database.
by pksebben | 2025-11-06 22:10:46+00:00
You know, I had a think about that the other day - I believe that the volume of bad information might remain stable, while the shape changes. There are some things that LLMs are actually better at than the random mix of human-created data, on average. Subjects that are inherently political or skewed because of a small subset of very vocal and biased outliers. The LM tends to smooth some of those bumps out, and in some places (not all) this flattens out the rougher edges.

I don't think it necessarily bears repeating the plethora of ways in which LMs get stuff wrong, esp. considering the context of this conversation. It's vast.

As things develop, I expect that LMs will become more like the current zeitgeist as the effects that have influenced news and other media make their way into the models. They'll get better at smoothing in some areas (mostly technical or dry domains that aren't juicy targets) and worse in others (I expect to see more biased training and more hardcore censorship/steering in future).

Although, recursive reinforcement (LMs training on LM output) might undo any of the smoothing we see. It's really hard to tell - these systems are complex and very highly interconnected with many other complex systems.
by tptacek | 2025-11-06 22:11:00+00:00
One thing that radicalized me was building an agent that tested network connectivity for our fleet. Early on, in like 2021, I deployed a little mini-fleet of off-network DNS probes on, like, Vultr to check on our DNS routing, and actually devising metrics for them and making the data that stuff generated legible/operationalizable was annoying and error prone. But you can give basic Unix network tools --- ping, dig, traceroute --- to an agent and ask it for a clean, usable signal, and they'll do a reasonable job! They know all the flags and are generally better at interpreting tool output than I am.

I'm not saying that the agent would do a better job than a good "hardcoded" human telemetry system, and we don't use agents for this stuff right now. But I do know that getting an agent across the 90% threshold of utility for a problem like this is much, much easier than building the good telemetry system is.
by jones1618 | 2025-11-06 22:11:07+00:00
Your only operative complaint is "confused." What are you confused about? The high-level goals and requirements? Your own approach and criteria for success? Structuring your time/effort?

Without knowing what you are asking exactly, there are a ton of ways to structure a large project.

One of my favorites is: Pick some challenging (but not too challenging) use-case that intersects an interesting subset of the core requirements. Decide on ONE design principle you want to follow (highly testable, clear separation of concerns, pluggable sources/endpoints, whatever) and then build the crappiest/minimal version that does those two things (handles the main use-case and strictly adheres to your design principle) while being totally crappy in every other way (i.e. bad UI, brute-force algorithms, whatever). As you design/build this "slice"/MVP of functionality, keep notes about out-of-scope parts you can't/won't touch according to the rules above. Those will become seeds for the rest later.

This method yields a lot of advantages: 1) It provides a way to get started without analysis-paralysis, 2) it results in proof-of-concept, perhaps a demo for what you are going to eventually build, 2) You think through a lot but don't build so much or get lost in details you won't build, 3) If you hate the MVP, you can throw it away and build it again the right way (which will be better, as a result).

For a really big project, just iterate on the above by picking more slices/use-cases. You might have to refactor/redesign as you go but pretty quickly you'll have built up enough scaffolding that the rest of the project will flow easily or be delegated easily.
by palmotea | 2025-11-06 22:11:07+00:00
> The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary....

> It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.

It's kind of like in genetics: if a gene gets duplicated, it creates the opportunity for one copy to evolve to do something else. Likewise with language: having two words for the same thing allows their meanings to diverge without loss to cover more shades of meaning.
by wingerlang | 2025-11-06 22:11:21+00:00
I don't think the business events is realistic. It would have to be huge, generic, and have a huge amount of people be very specific with their wants-and-needs, on top of the technical issues I brought up earlier.

Speed dating is called speed dating for a reason, you're supposed to be forced to meet everyone. Probably takes more time to setup yet another dating profile than it takes to simply go through the process.

From what I read on 222, their entire purpose is to get away from algorithms, apps, and whatnot.

Timeleft has, according to their landing page, six people per activity.

I don't mean to discourage, by the way. It's neat tech, I personally just don't see where it could best be used.

EDIT: I could see speed dating have some sort of "prompt" build on top of this. Say the app is rebranded to "SpeedDater" and the organizers said to download it. Then while in the event itself, the apps could give prompts or fun stuff to talk about in realtime, and then later you could eg. say yes/no after the fact, at which point the matches are unlocked. Not sure this requires the local-thing though.
by kragen | 2025-11-06 22:11:57+00:00
The .ipynb format mixes source code with nondeterministic program output in the same file and regularly has backwards-incompatible format "upgrades". Those two make version control a nightmare. The files are also huge because they typically contain humongous base64-encoded PNGs.

The execution model also keeps invisible state in the running kernel, so fairly often if you restart the kernel and re-execute all cells, you'll get a traceback or, worse, subtly different results (and, alarmingly for something called a "notebook", your old results have been erased with no confirmation and no undo). This can happen for a variety of reasons, like deleting the definition of an object you are still using, or defining a new object in the last cell, using it in some subsequent cells, and then going back and changing some earlier cells to use it too.

If you get an .ipynb file from a coworker, you need to read it carefully before hitting "Execute all below" in case there's a cell saying something like "execute this cell to do an emergency shutdown of the production server", because that is a thing people do with entirely good intentions.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-06 22:12:12+00:00
Given that the thing we want to support can be supported via server-side translation, client-side translation in JavaScript, or automatic detection and translation via a third-party plugin in JavaScript... What bearing on the open web does it have to preserve this functionality as a JavaScript-accessible API built into the browser?

I don't see how removing this API harms the open web. I do see how it imposes some nonzero cost on website maintainers to adapt to the removal of the API, and I respect that cost is nonzero.

... but I also watched OpenGL evolve into OpenGL ES and the end result was a far better API than we started with.

I don't think XSLTProcessor joining document.defaultCharset in the history books is damage to the open web.

ETA: And not that it matters over-much, but the "overpaid Mba" is an electrical engineering Ph.D who came to software via sensor manufacturing, so if you're going to attempt to insult someone's training, maybe get it right? Not that he'd be wrong if he were an Mba either, mind.