MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gambiting | 2025-11-25 15:11:54+00:00
>>They were thinking about the "clean and limitless" energy that was supposed to have come from this new technology.

There is plenty of articles, books and every other media from that period of time with people expressing horror at the sheer power of these weapons, not to mention the pervasive belief that a nuclear war is just a matter of time, with kids in schools being taught how to hide under their desks and face away from a nuclear blast should one happen. There definitely was a "morbid" fascination in the sense that people wanted to see the blasts that could obliterate their cities without a warning. There was hope and belief that we'll have nuclear powered everything within couple decades at most, but people weren't building and buying nuclear shelters out of hope for the better nuclear future.

>>Stop trying to foist your "modern" ideals on people many years ago.

I think that's an unnecessary remark, especially given that you are also attributing a certain belief to everyone of that era when it very clearly wasn't universal.
by tanya-donska | 2025-11-25 15:12:11+00:00
You’re hedging. Which is understandable – hiring is expensive, commitment is scary, you’re not sure if investing in product design will actually move the needle.

So you post for a “freelance UX designer” because it feels lower-risk than full-time. Temporary. Reversible. Like renting furniture.

Problem is, that hedging doesn’t stay contained in the job description. It shows up in budget discussions. In timeline negotiations. In how decisions get made. In whether anything actually gets built.
by fwip | 2025-11-25 15:13:15+00:00
I haven't read this paper, but for the "25" paper, it was a longitudinal study that stopped observing people at 25. The result "brain continues to develop up to at least age 25" was misinterpreted as "stops developing at age 25" by media & social media.

I have similar concerns about reporting on this paper - feels ripe for pop-sci misunderstandings.
by vessenes | 2025-11-25 15:13:24+00:00
She talks for a while about how the Circus Maximus was really where the fun was (250k spectators, chariot races, betting, mixed seating). That sounds super fun. However, she also pitches that the Coliseum was like going to the opera - formal seating rules, formal dress, segregated seating.

On the one hand, okay - it was fancier. However, I do not believe that any public air ceremony with fighting, dying, and live animals in it will be sedate. I’ve been to open air events in many continents, and people just aren’t naturally all quiet like when life and death things are happening. I just cannot imagine this behavior outside of a religious ceremony.

Even at the opera or live theater, both of which darken lights, light a stage, architect for acoustic carry, there is often shushing, resettling, multiple cues for the audience to sort of ‘settle down’ and pay attention. The idea that 50k people are going to watch some captured Christians face down a lion and make no noise while they were their Tuxedo equivalents seems to me to be in its own way a weird and just off Anglicism. I guess I might be straw manning her pitch a little, but I think she just over pitches this idea — I truly think a society that did that would be very, very unusual, to the point of being extremely creepy.
by tim333 | 2025-11-25 15:13:24+00:00
I've heard of it but I'm not sure I buy it. I mean you can get examples of most grammatical constructs in a language in a few pages of text or few hours of speech. It takes a long time to go from "mama" to "I feel if I were in Chomsky's position I might have examined LLMs more" say, during which kids would be exposed to a lot of language.
by mcqueenjordan | 2025-11-25 15:13:32+00:00
The jankiness of the original had a lot of charm, almost selling the dystopian absurdity of trying to deploy a service via the janky voice and slightly desync'd audio and animation. I don't think it's just nostalgia, because I felt the same way watching it the first time all those years ago.

I think AI slop is decidedly different, because it just doesn't have the charm. I don't know if I can yet decompose exactly why that is.
by analog8374 | 2025-11-25 15:14:16+00:00
The association between story and reality is completely arbitrary.

(Science? Science is a craft for creating stories closely coupled to reality. It's a special case and not as popular as you might think.)

To get popular a story needs to be simple, satisfying, logically consistent with the other stories... I think that covers it.

Reality? LOL. We are bronze-age mud-worshippers.
by lazide | 2025-11-25 15:14:17+00:00
Yes, and? HDD controllers dying and head crashes are a thing too.

At least in the ‘bricked’ case it’s a trivial RMA - corrupt blocks tend to be a harder fight. And since ‘bricked’ is such a trivial RMA, manufacturers have more of an incentive to fix it or go broke, or avoid it in the first place.

This is why backups are important now; and always have been.
by dangus | 2025-11-25 15:14:27+00:00
Does the end user care that the system is made with React? What is the tangible negative impact?

My start menu doesn’t have ads, it really isn’t hard to manage that sort of thing.

OneDrive is fully uninstalled, Copilot is fully uninstalled, I find my system to be quite clean.

And if you don’t like the start menu, there are ways to replace the start menu entirely with something else. Good luck replacing entire major elements of the macOS UI.

In contrast, Apple puts advertisements at the same urgency level as critical system updates in the settings. There’s no setting to disable them and they sometimes come back with a new version release, you just have to know the magic actions to get them dismissed.

Haters dog on Windows 11 for various things but it really is the best version of the OS since 7. It has some of the best updates to traditional Windows tooling in years: tabs in notepad, git preinstalled, finally the settings pane is in a good place, brand new command line interface, and Microsoft has had a great habit of putting new features in separate apps that can be installed optionally. (E.g., you can’t uninstall Apple News on a Mac, but you can uninstall ClipChamp on Windows)
by ghaff | 2025-11-25 15:14:30+00:00
I did have interviews with a government agency many years ago that, among other things, involved a battery of tests including what I assume were foreign civil service exams. I got an offer though I didn't take it.

But assuming in-person day long batteries of tests for universities and companies is probably not very practical.

You can argue whether university is a very efficient use of time or money but it presumably does involve some learning and offers potential employers some level of a filter that roughly aligns with what they're looking for.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-11-25 15:14:50+00:00
> For example, I assume a fab runs for about 20-30 years.

If only.

20 years ago, fabs were being built to use 90nm class technology. Chips made on such an old node are so cheap today it can't pay even fraction of a percent of the capital costs of the plant per year. So all of it's capital has to have been depreciated a long time ago.

The oldest process node in high-volume production for memory is currently 1α, which started production in January 2021. It is no longer capable of making high-end products and is definitely legacy, and also has to have essentially depreciated all of the capital costs. The time a high-end fab stays high-end and can command premium prices, and during which it has to depreciate all the capital is ~3-5 years. After that either you push the plant to produce legacy/low price and low margin items, or you rebuild it with new tools with costs >$10B.

Also, even if fabs did last 20-30 years, the capital costs would dominate.

> And wouldn't "wildly variable borrowing costs" also affect oil and gas who need to finance the research phase and construction of the plant?

I don't understand? Nothing else costs anywhere near as much capital to produce than silicon chips. Thanks to the inexorable force of Moore's second law, fabs are machines that turn capital investment into salable product, nothing like it has ever existed before.
by waerhert | 2025-11-25 15:15:08+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! Rainbow tables probably won't work here since the epoch (rounded to 5 minutes) salts everything, so precomputed tables would expire constantly. You would use use BSSIDs + SSID in real implementations. The MinHash part creates 128 hash values from the entire observed set, not a subset of 3, then LSH divides these into bands where similar sets collide probabilistically based on Jaccard similarity. I've tested with two phones where one saw 3-4 networks and the other saw ~10. They still found each other, and you can try it in the interactive demo yourself. You're right it's not entirely privacy preserving, really depends on your threat model as I discuss in the security section. Your idea about combining area hints with time-based salts is interesting though, feels like it could bridge geospatial indexing with this approach! The whole geospatial indexing thing was something I became aware of late in the project and didn't go into further. It's probably a much simpler approach if geolocation is important. In the current approach, geolocation doesn't matter at all, only 'the environment', whatever that may be.
by Marazan | 2025-11-25 15:15:16+00:00
The Mornington Crescent Players Association (MCPA - often lovingly renlffered to as The Scottish Father) unanimously voted through the Flodden amendments last year. The Mornington Crescent Rules Committee (not to be confused with the Rules Committee of Mornington Crescent) will be voting on the topic on December 25th. Whereupon it will be passed to the International Board for ratification.

The only controversial point is it will be applied retroactively over the last decade, changing the results of no less than 3 world championship matches
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-11-25 15:15:19+00:00
> Looking over this PR, the vast majority of the code is a DWARF library by itself. This should really not live in the compiler, nor should it become a maintenance burden for the core devs.

I think this is a good point, that publishing a library (when possible, not sure if it's possible in this case) or module both reduces/removes the maintenance burden and makes it feel like more of an opt-in.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-25 15:15:33+00:00
In my personal case, it was cost of energy due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggering a stop on buying cheap gas from them. Infrastructure upgrades are also being done, costing tens of millions per year because the grid can't handle the sudden increase in renewable energy generation and electrification (to ironically move away from dependency on gas).

I mean part of me thinks it's a necessary evil because we relied too much on Russian gas in the first place. But that's because we extracted most of our own gas already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field), which that article lists as one of the factors in the Dutch welfare state being a thing - it and smaller fields out at sea contributed over 400 billion to the Dutch economy since the 1950's.
by jmclnx | 2025-11-25 15:15:48+00:00
> It is your device that is not compatible with Linux

No truer words, and it is very hard to get people to understand that phrase. Like the author I tried to get people on-board with Linux in the 90's, but it was a very hard time. No one switched, and considering I worked on a large programming group, to my surprise the people who heard of it was very small.

After IBM did its thing in 2000, a couple of years later these same people would ask me questions about it, but no one switched. My manager even had me do a demo on it at work.

But the direction of Linux is worrying me. But I have a second older Laptop with a BSD on it, and that will give me an out if necessary. Sadly that may happen sooner then later :(
by woodruffw | 2025-11-25 15:15:53+00:00
To be clear, the "you" and "my" in your sentence refer to the same person. Julian appears to be the APT maintainer, so there's no compulsion except what he applies to himself.

(Maybe you mean this in some general sense, but the actual situation at hand doesn't remotely resemble a hostile unaffiliated demand against a project.)
by philipwhiuk | 2025-11-25 15:16:33+00:00
I'm more bothered by the geriatric politicians in various democracies than I am that you're missing out on some amazing politician in their twenties.

The UK has a practical minimum of 18 for Prime Minister (technically there is no minimum but practically there is) but realistically never elects a PM under 40.

For British Sovereign there is also no limit, any particularly young Sovereign has effectively delegated to a council of regents historically. In practice this is also unlikely - although in theory of course we are two untimely deaths from a 12 year old taking the throne.
Show HN: Tree Dangler
by jasonthorsness | 2025-11-25 15:16:41+00:00
I wrote an SVG editor and physics simulation to determine how pieces connected by rigid rings will dangle when hung. I was surprised at how well the simulation actually predicted reality!

This was done with a lot of help from Gemini over last week (so half with the upgrade).

Main link is an explanatory article.

Here's the live app: https://jasonthorsness.github.io/tree-dangler/

And source: https://github.com/jasonthorsness/tree-dangler
by Aurornis | 2025-11-25 15:16:44+00:00
> a good computer from 10 years ago can still do 99.9% of what people need, even things like high end gaming are perfectly viable with well dated cards.

HN is strange. I have an old gaming build from 7-8 years ago and while it can do high end games on low settings and resolution, it doesn’t hold a candle to even a mid-range modern build.

“viable” is doing a lot of work in that claim. You can tolerate it at low res and settings and if you’re okay with a lot of frame rate dips, but nobody is going to mistake it for a modern build.

You’re also exaggerating how fast video cards became obsolete in the past. Many of us gamed just fine on systems that weren’t upgraded for 5-6 years at a time.
Show HN: Product Loop – Automated AI customer interviews
by satssehgal | 2025-11-25 15:16:45+00:00
Hi HN — I built Product Loop because I found customer interviews slow, inconsistent, and hard to keep up with. Scheduling calls, chasing users, and taking notes was eating hours every week.

Product Loop runs automated voice interviews with your users, asks follow-up questions, and summarizes the insights so you know what to build next.

Here’s how it works technically:

Uses an AI voice agent for natural conversation

Runs in the browser (no app install)

Extracts themes, pain points, and feature requests

Generates a structured interview summary

You can trigger interviews via link or email

Would love feedback from this community — especially on:

What’s unclear in the UX

What feels unnecessary

Whether the AI interviewer feels natural enough

Any technical improvements you'd recommend

Check it out: https://productloop.io

Happy to answer anything.
by anthk | 2025-11-25 15:16:51+00:00
Reading up Reissanance everyday-drama novellas from Spain/Italy in the 1600s/1700s but being placed into the Roman Empire would actually yield a similar society and behaviour than anything made from Hollywood.

Romance and picaresque dramas weren't that dissimilar to love epics from the Classical times. And ofc treasonry, backstabbings, and the like would be the same today, 300 years ago and millenia ago.

The townsfolk shouting and laughing against a poor dude being burned down between logs wouldn't be that different to similar peasants reacting in the same way to slaves fighting at the Circus.
by dv35z | 2025-11-25 15:16:56+00:00
Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...?

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. Similarly, I appreciate what Kotlin has done with Java. Is there a "Kotlin for Rust"? or another high quality system language we ought to be investing in? I genuinely believe that languages ought to start with "newbie friendliness", and would love to hear challenges to that idea.
by mamcx | 2025-11-25 15:16:58+00:00
A good counterpoint is that a lot of information about this is dense, cryptic, weird, confusing and hard to get.

The major problem is not to find the sophisticated things, but understand how do it in simple-ish ways.

Do otherwise is a major waste of time!

P.D: And yes, only when you get the basic and learn the jargon still is a problem to find the neat tricks, but is likely that you already get that there is nothing like read the source... (sadly that source is in C or worse C++, but lately with Rust that is gaining traction at least it make more sense!)
by rao-v | 2025-11-25 15:17:02+00:00
I was pretty excited for Onyx as a way to stand up a useful open source RAG + LLM at small scale but as of two weeks ago it was clearly full of features ticked off a list that nobody has actually tried to use. For example, you can scrape sites and upload docs but you can’t really keep track of what’s been processed within the UI or map back to the documents cleanly.

It’s nice to see an attempt at an end to end stack (for all that it seems this is “obvious” … there are not that many functional options) but wow we’ve forgotten the basis of making useful products. I’m hoping it gets enough time to bake.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-25 15:17:24+00:00
"Everything before 40 is research" I once heard, and every day, I find it to be more true.

I'm a great parent because it is what is necessary and my children had no choice or consent in existing, but I also tell anyone younger that unless they are absolutely sure they want kids and are ready for decades of suck, don't do it [1] [2] [3]. Live your best life, be true to yourself, find your passion and joy exploring and being curious; one can do this without children. If one needs kids to mature or become a better human, find a therapist first. Also, maturity is optional. You have to grow old, you don't have to grow up (take on responsibility unnecessary to take care of yourself, broadly speaking). Religious beliefs aside (potential reincarnation and whatnot), enjoy life, you only get one run through your part of the timeline. Don't waste it on the expectations or belief systems of others.

[1] (lack of support systems, both social and familial, ~$380k in 2025 dollars to raise a child 0-18 in the US not including daycare and college, etc; n=1, ymmv)

[2] Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024

[3] The American dream will cost you $5 million, report finds - https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cos... - September 22nd, 2025
by ranger_danger | 2025-11-25 15:17:34+00:00
I don't think people would be concerned about that explanation either... I think they need to hear real-world consequences, of which the only one I can remotely think of would be identity theft, and the chances of that happening I think are still slim among all the people whose info has even already been exposed publicly.

How does privacy enable one to "not know your deepest thoughts" if you're aren't giving that information out in the first place?
by mrob | 2025-11-25 15:17:46+00:00
The announcement says:

>In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing.

I can understand the importance of safe signature verification, but how is .deb parsing a problem? If you're installing a malicious package you've already lost. There's no need to exploit the parser when the user has already given you permission to modify arbitrary files.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-11-25 15:18:02+00:00
I understand both that this is valuable AND how many (most?) education environments are (supposed) to work, but 2 interesting things can happen with the best & brightest:

1. they skip what are to them the obvious steps (we all do as we achieve mastery) and then get penalized for not showing their work.

2. they inherently know and understand the task abut not the mechanized minutia. Think of learning a new language. A diligent student can work through the problem and complete an a->b translation, then go the other way, and repeat. Someone with mastery doesn't do this; they think within one language and then only pass the contextual meaning back and forth when explicitly required.

"showing your work" is really the same thing as "explain how you think" and may be great for basics in learning, but also faces levels of abstraction as you ascend towards mastery.
by mopierotti | 2025-11-25 15:18:17+00:00
I might be misunderstanding your point, but quantization can have a dramatic impact on the quality of the model's output.

For example, in diffusion, there are some models where a Q8 quant dramatically changes what you can achieve compared to fp16. (I'm thinking of the Wan video models.) The point I'm trying to make is that it's a noticeable model change, and can be make-or-break.
by zmgsabst | 2025-11-25 15:18:18+00:00
Using a timeline from LA to NYC, since you made me curious:

- life formed 3.7B of 4.5B years ago, which is 700km towards NYC from LA; or about Colorado

- proto-humans formed 2M of 4500M years ago, which is about 1.7km “from” NYC; a distance hard to compare with the whole way

- human lifespans are about 70 of 4.5B years, which is about 6cm “from” NYC; a distance hard to compare with either 1.7km, 700km for life to form, or the whole 3966km.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-25 15:18:23+00:00
> Anybody working for a living

> (but saving money)

These two are already difficult or impossible for many people. Especially a big chunk of USAmericans have been living paycheck to paycheck for a long time now, often taking multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

And then to gamble it on a speculative market, whose value does not correlate with its performance (see e.g. Tesla, compare its sales / market share with its market value compared to other car manufacturers). That's bad advice. And for an individual, you'd only benefit a fraction from what the big shareholders etc earn. Investing is a secondary market.
by linsomniac | 2025-11-25 15:18:25+00:00
I've had good luck with having Claude write little CLI tools that interact with Jira: "cases" prints out a list of my in-progress cases (including immediately printing a cached list of cases, then querying Jira and showing any stragglers), "other_changes" shows me tickets in this release that are marked with "Other changes" label, "new_release" creates a new release in Jira, our deployment database, and a script to run the release, etc...

I could imagine a subagent that builds a tool on demand when it's needed.

Claude is really good at building small tools like these.
by tomasphan | 2025-11-25 15:18:43+00:00
This is great, the value is there. I work for a F100 company that is trying (and failing) to build this in house because every product manager fundamentally misunderstands that users just want a chat window for AI, not to make their own complicated agents. Your biggest competition in the enterprise space, Copilot, has terrible UI and we only put up with it because it has access to email, SharePoint and Teams.