MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reify | 2025-11-29 20:33:00+00:00
sneaky sneaky

The sales pitch and marketting on Reddit doesnt even mention ai once!!

you just know, dont you, when they use the word "powerful", they still use it when selling the old i5 Lenovo T450, dead give away.

https://reddit.nerdvpn.de/r/indiehackers/comments/1p9up7x/i_...

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by starchild3001 | 2025-11-29 20:33:30+00:00
AI-text detection software is BS. Let me explain why.

Many of us use AI to not write text, but re-write text. My favorite prompt: "Write this better." In other words, AI is often used to fix awkward phrasing, poor flow, bad english, bad grammar etc.

It's very unlikely that an author or reviewer purely relies on AI written text, with none of their original ideas incorporated.

As AI detectors cannot tell rewrites from AI-incepted writing, it's fair to call them BS.

Ignore...
by woodruffw | 2025-11-29 20:33:46+00:00
> ... I suppose the interesting question is: if some of my dependencies are ported, and some are not, is there any way a normal compiler can call into a Fil-C-compiled library for just a few functions?

To my understanding, there's no way to do this: Fil-C is basically a managed runtime for native code, so the FFI implications are similar to those for Go or any other intrusive managed runtime. Which is to say that Fil-C could offer an FFI, but not without losing the blanket exit-instead-of-memory-unsafety guarantees it aims to offer.
by bastawhiz | 2025-11-29 20:33:51+00:00
I own three electric motorcycles and respectfully disagree. You can't make tube and canvas that let a passenger survive getting t-boned by a Yukon Denali or an F-250. One high-profile accident with a mother and her child getting peeled off the road with a coal shovel are all it'll take to kill such a form factor forever.

The problem isn't the form factor you're describing, it's that you can't put those on the road with 1000+ horsepower machines that are 50 times heavier. And on top of that, a lot of people just don't want to give up their heated massage seats and connected infotainment and removable third row or whatever crap they pack in minivans these days.
by SteveJS | 2025-11-29 20:34:02+00:00
My grandmother loved clippy.

Melinda French Gates back when she was Melinda French had a part in Clippy.

“Melinda French (then the fiancée of Bill Gates) was the project manager of Microsoft Bob”

Microsoft Bob is where Clippy was born.

Reference: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
by throaway54 | 2025-11-29 20:34:19+00:00
Peanuts is also a product of Jazz-era America (50's & early 60's). Joe Cool is a beatnik, not a hippie or a rocker. So a lot of that context & content gets lost as the decades go by.

Case in point being the name Peanuts itself, which even to me as an elder Millenial was obscure. No one actually said Peanuts, always Charlie Brown.
by atmosx | 2025-11-29 20:34:22+00:00
This study tested whether an unexpected event, such as the presence of a person dressed as Batman, could increase prosocial behavior by disrupting routine and enhancing attention to the present moment. We conducted a quasi-experimental field study on the Milan metro, observing 138 rides. In the control condition, a female experimenter, appearing pregnant, boarded the train with an observer. In the experimental condition, an additional experimenter dressed as Batman entered from another door. Passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seat when Batman was present (67.21% vs. 37.66%, OR = 3.393, p < 0.001). Notably, 44% of those who offered their seat in the experimental condition reported not seeing Batman. These findings suggest that unexpected events can promote prosociality, even without conscious awareness, with implications for encouraging kindness in public settings.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-29 20:34:50+00:00
You can put tens of thousands of files in a single file lots of ways that are expressly designed for that. You don't need SQLite for that.

So why would you want to use SQLite for that is my question? Mounting a database or a table as a filesystem doesn't make much sense to me. There's a very poor fit between the two paradigms. What does a subdirectory mean in a database? What does a foreign key or set of columns mean in a filesystem?
by darth_avocado | 2025-11-29 20:35:15+00:00
Ford is a bad example because they’ve pretty much abandoned all their non truck and transit van segments for years. Even if EVs weren’t a thing, they do not compete in any of the segments and haven’t for almost a decade. First it was Japanese and German companies eating their lunch, now it’s the Chinese.

Also, F150 lightening is such a failure. There was a recent video of it trying to haul very minimal load and it pretty much drained the battery in less than 100 miles.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-29 20:35:44+00:00
I think #1 will probably play out to a certain extent. Perhaps as an oscillation between low and high as each wave knocks more gas stations out of business and refinery capacity offline. But I have to say, even low prices on gas won't make me go back -- I prefer my EVs in all regards to the ICE equivalents, with the sole exception of marathon (>450 miles per day) road trips, which is not my use case.

I hope #2 won't be the future. It's not as easy to just jack up electric prices because EVs are charging, because they are regulated, and electricity is used for way more than cars (if my napkin math is right, on average people will use around 30% more electricity if they go full electric).

I expect that as a practical matter #3 is here now, it just hasn't filtered down to retail car sales in the US yet.
by misnome | 2025-11-29 20:36:04+00:00
Right, but, this is just a single data point anecdote, right? Let’s say for same of argument that there is a 5% chance of overheating in five years - and another sub-percentage where this causes a fire, depending on where it is plugged in.

95%+ of people would report “zero problems here, all concern is overblown”.

Safety doesn’t work that way?
by mcv | 2025-11-29 20:36:22+00:00
Not western Europe, no. Not yet at least. But Russia does threaten eastern Europe. The Baltics in particular are high on Putin's wish list. And if he invades there, and the EU and NATO is slow to respond, that could easily be the end of NATO.

Of course Russia can't attack western Europe right away, but he can weaken it by taking a bit at a time from eastern Europe. And Ukraine is part of that. Europe should really be stepping up there, but they keep telling themselves that Russia can't invade western Europe, so it's not that urgent.
by godelski | 2025-11-29 20:37:04+00:00
Again, you need to reasonably interpret what I'm saying. Picking out an edge case and acting as if it is some mic drop is disingenuous. We can't communicate if you hyper fixate on one tree when our discussion is about the forest. Language isn't precise enough to do that without getting extremely verbose. So either I can write a novel in response (I'm not going to) to explain what I said above or you can work with me here. If you're really not getting it I'm sure an LLM could help you out if you also fed it the responses.

> As a senior I've been tasked with impossible tasks

Sure. Even juniors get this. But an impossible task is an impossible task.

> Sure, saying NO is an option

Saying no is always an option. When given an impossible task it's the only option. There's many ways to say no. Not delivering is one of them

> being the NO guy is surefire way to getting fired.

You do not get fired for saying no, you get fired for how you say no. You get fired because the project fails. You get fired because you push back against an egotistical manager who doesn't understand the problem and none of the other engineers back you up.

It's all about how you say no. You don't have to use the word to do so. Instead lead them down the right path and make them understand. You don't lecture them. Managers are like cats, you have to make them think it's their idea. So you have to ask clarifying questions and when doing so you can introduce explanations that let them know that it's not possible. The goal is to put all the puzzle pieces on the table, put the right ones next to each other and let them put the final pieces together. If they don't then they don't feel like they did anything.

You are not a mindless automata directed by your manager. That's not the role of a senior. Your job is to get things done. A senior knows that "the customer" (in this case your manner) doesn't know what they want and doesn't know how to say what they do. The job is to figure that out as best as possible
by jstanley | 2025-11-29 20:37:11+00:00
> A zero knowledge proof (ZKP) answers a question without revealing anything more than answer. For example, a digital signature proves your possession of a private key without revealing that key.

I don't think a digital signature is a Zero-Knowledge Proof because someone else could copy and paste the signature and then it would look like they know the key, and because other third parties could check whether the signature was valid or not.

To be a true Zero-Knowledge Proof it needs to:

* show that you know the thing without revealing the thing

* not allow other people to copy your answer

* not allow anyone other than your intended counterparty to even verify the answer
by michelpp | 2025-11-29 20:37:50+00:00
Automerge is an excellent library, with a great API, not just in Rust, but also Javascript and C.

> All you need for the backend is key-value storage with range/prefix queries;

This is true, I was able to quickly put together a Redis automerge library that supports the full API, including pub/sub of changes to subscribers for a full persistent sync server [0]. I was surprised how quickly it came together. Using some LLM assistance (I'm not a frontend specialist) I was able to quickly put together a usable web demo of synchronized documents across multiple browsers using the Webdis [1] websocket support over pub/sub channels.

[0] https://github.com/michelp/redis-automerge

[1] https://webd.is/
by kakacik | 2025-11-29 20:38:16+00:00
Given recent results of democratic elections across most western world, decency seems to be overrated. Maybe you were voting against such change, but look where we are. Its not just US or just parts of Europe.

I don't have a solution, but to change people one has to start where masses are and how they thing and especially how they feel. Facts seem to be overrated too.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-29 20:38:18+00:00
I've got a Lightning and I think I like the 'converted to electric' aspect. Everything that fits on a regular ICE F-150 fits on my truck. The interior is the same (okay, some trims have a big screen, but not all do). It would be nice if it had a bit more range, but when I look at the efficiency of an R1T or a CT, I don't see that being purpose-built would automatically be a win for Ford. Pickups are not ever going to be competitive with sedans and CUVs for efficiency.
by ewoodrich | 2025-11-29 20:38:41+00:00
I also wouldn't underestimate Google's ability to nudge regular users towards whichever AI surface they want to promote. My highly non-technical mom recently told me she started using Google's "AI Mode" or whatever it's called for most of her searches (she says she likes how it can search/compare multiple sites for browsing house listings and stuff).

She doesn't really install apps and never felt a need to learn a new tool like "ChatGPT" but the transition from regular Google search to "AI Search" felt really natural and also made it easy to switch back to regular search if it wasn't useful for specific types of searches.

It definitely reduces cognitive load for an average user not needing to switch between multiple apps/websites to lookup hours/reviews via Google Maps, search for "facebook.com" to navigate to a site and now run AI searches all in the same familiar places on her phone. So I think Google is still pretty "sticky" despite ChatGPT being a buzzword everyone hears now that they caught up to OpenAI in terms of model capability/features.
by venturecruelty | 2025-11-29 20:39:23+00:00
>I suspect there is a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome that causes people to write hyper-confident blog posts about why they are better without AI...

I mean, it's better than the hyper-confident blog posts about how AI made them an ubermensch superdooper 100000000x developer but "no you can't see the code because it's for WORK". Nice subtle dig, though.
by reify | 2025-11-29 20:39:40+00:00
Because ai does not have consciousness

educate yourself and read this paper

Anthropomorphism in AI: hype and fallacy

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-024-00419-4

Abstract

This essay focuses on anthropomorphism as both a form of hype and fallacy. As a form of hype, anthropomorphism is shown to exaggerate AI capabilities and performance by attributing human-like traits to systems that do not possess them.

As a fallacy, anthropomorphism is shown to distort moral judgments about AI, such as those concerning its moral character and status, as well as judgments of responsibility and trust. By focusing on these two dimensions of anthropomorphism in AI, the essay highlights negative ethical consequences of the phenomenon in this field.
by darth_avocado | 2025-11-29 20:40:41+00:00
I think it’s less “pivoting is hard” and more “we know what’s right and we’re not going to pivot”.

It’s not hard to have smaller R&D teams work on these problems to keep the innovation going, but most executives are out there prioritizing cost cuttings so that the shareholders get the quarterly dopamine boosts on the earnings calls.
by dzaima | 2025-11-29 20:41:21+00:00
Actually, even finding a larger function that would by itself have a meaningful disassembly is posing problematic; basically every function deals with in-memory data structures non-trivially, and a bunch do indirect jumps (function pointers, but also lookup-table-based switches, which require table data from memory in addition to assembly to disassemble).

Like, here's a ~2.7x larger function: https://dzaima.github.io/paste/#0jVdNjxs3DL3nVwzQo30gRY00ChY... (is https://github.com/dzaima/CBQN/blob/90c1dc09e88c5324373281f6... with a bunch of inlining)

(I'm keeping the other symbol names there even though they'd likely not be there for real closed-source things, under the assumption that for a full thing you'd have something doing a quick naming pass beforehand)

This is still very much on the trivial end, but it's already dealing with in-memory structures, three inlined memory allocation calls (two half-deduplicated into one by the compiler, and the compiler initializing a bunch of the objects' fields in one store), and a bunch of inlined tagged object manipulations; should definitely be possible to get some disassembly from that, but figuring out the useful abstractions that make it readable without pain would probably take aggregating over multiple functions.

(unrelated notes of your previous results - claude indeed guessed correctly that it's BQN! though CBQN is presumably wholesale in its training data anyway; it did miss that the function has an unused 0th arg (a "this" pointer), which'd cause problems as the function is stored & used as a generic function pointer (this'd probably be easily resolved when attempting to integrate it in a wider disassembly though); neither claude nor cgpt unified the `x>>48==0xfff7` and `(x&0xffff000000000000)==0xfff7000000000000` which do the exact same thing but clang is stupid [https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/62145] and generates different things; and of course a big question is how many such intricacies could be automatically reduced down with a full codebases worth of context, cause understandably the single-function disassemblies are way way more verbose than the original)
by keeda | 2025-11-29 20:41:25+00:00
I dunno... Consider:

1. Token prices keep plummeting even as models are getting stronger.

2. Most models are being offered for free at a significant loss, so reducing costs would be critical to maintain some path to sustainability.

3. Every hyperscaler has been consistently saying for the past several quarters that they are severely constrained on capacity and in fact have billions in booked backlogs. That is, if they had more capacity they would actually be making even more billions.

I can totally imagine the smaller players renting these cloud resources for their private model uses to be rather inefficient (which is where the 50% utilization number comes from), probably because they are prioritizing time-to-market over other aspects. But I would wager that resource efficiency, at least for inference, is absolutely a top priority for all the big players.
by venturecruelty | 2025-11-29 20:41:46+00:00
I thought this was going to be, like: "here's why my manager sucks", and not "I wish I wrote more Ruby". Also, I'm sorry, but broad statements like "remote work sucks" are not confessions, they're statements of a preference specific to the author. I love remote work, personally. I love being able to do laundry during the day, or run an errand. I love not breathing in the same COVID air as other people, or having to listen to them have no social grace while they scream into a microphone in a room with no walls.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-29 20:42:40+00:00
> Zig is definitely not as safe as either Rust or Fil-C, since Zig doesn't have a great story for use after free.

Have you considered making... Fil-Zig? Would it be easier to do because Zig is already fairly far ahead of C in terms of safety?

> Rust is less safe than Fil-C in practice, because Rust code uses `unsafe` a lot (>100 uses of `unsafe` in uutils and sudo-rs, for example), and Rust code ends up depending on an unsafe stack (like calling into libc, but also lots of other dependent libraries that are written in C).

To be fair `sudo-rs`'s usage of unsafe is all there just to interface with C code (e.g. PAM) so it isn't really sudo-rs that is "less safe", it's just that PAM isn't any safer (because it's unmodified C). Also you can use Rust without libc - https://github.com/sunfishcode/mustang - unfortunately it doesn't seem to have gained much traction which I think is a shame because glibc is a curse.

Most Rust programs actually have very few C dependencies. The big exceptions are libc and OpenSSL, but I think they'll be excised eventually.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-29 20:43:44+00:00
> with the sole exception of marathon (>450 miles per day) road trips

I've done 4 3000km road trips and intentionally took the EV leaving the ICE vehicle at home. It's a better car, and we need to stop to bathroom anyways, so charging isn't inconvenient. Saving a few hundred dollars in fuel is nice, too.
by saghm | 2025-11-29 20:44:07+00:00
> I think it could be solved by the author using an "I" framing as they did in every other section

Yeah, this is probably what really confused me most about it. The tone felt remarkably different in that section than the others, and when it's also the topic that at least to me seems the most controversial, I can't help but wonder if it's representative in some way. It's not at all uncommon for people to dig in their heels more when presented with disagreement, so it's hard for me not to be concerned that the only reason this section is phrased differently is that this is the topic where they've received the most pushback on, which would be exactly what I'd expect even before accounting for the actual phrasing of their opinion.
by thr0waway001 | 2025-11-29 20:44:13+00:00
Seems like a common theme of every veteran to dress the way used to in their prime for the rest of their lives, listen to the same music, watch the same movies, etc. and to use the same belief systems as well. On the one hand, if it worked for them, why not? There's no incentive to change. Heck, it is very much the definition of conservatism. Old men who don't change is so common that it borders on proverbial.

Very rarely, however, do you see a brilliant mind like Richard Feynman, a man who was so open to new ideas and out of the box thinking. Even in old age. Seeing someone, in good faith, question what they believe in light of new knowledge is very rare. Now that is a special thing.
Show HN: Nano PDF – A CLI Tool to Edit PDFs with Gemini's Nano Banana
by GavCo | 2025-11-29 20:44:24+00:00
The new Gemini 3 Pro Image model (aka Nano Banana) is incredible at generating slides, so I thought it would be fun to build a CLI tool that lets you edit PDF presentations using plain English. The tool converts the page you want to edit into an image, sends it to the model API together with your prompt to generate an edited image, then converts the updated image back and stitches into the original document.

Examples:

- `nano-pdf edit deck.pdf 5 "Update the revenue chart to show Q3 at $2.5M"`

- `nano-pdf add deck.pdf 15 "Create an executive summary slide with 5 bullet points"`

Features:

- Edit multiple pages in parallel

- Add entirely new slides that match your deck's style

- Google Search enabled by default so the model can look up current data

- Preserves text layer for copy/paste and search

It can work with any kind of PDF but I expect it would be most useful for a quick edit to a deck or something similar.

GitHub: https://github.com/gavrielc/Nano-PDF
by what_for | 2025-11-29 20:45:25+00:00
Regarding other comments; It’s not about how successful Clippy was, it was the intention behind it. A facility to serve, to enable users to better use their computers. A highlight of the pivot to a world where you serve the computers, through the use of stripped back functionality, a lack of right to repair, the dissolution of the power user and a landscape of constant and deep data harvesting.
by Reason077 | 2025-11-29 20:45:41+00:00
While I’ve seen plenty of swollen and deformed phone batteries, I’ve never personally seen one that has burned. Obviously it’s happened in the past with certain phone/battery models, but I’d imagine that it’s actually very rare now days?

On the other hand, I have seen cheap 18650s spontaneously start smoking even when they weren’t plugged in to anything…
by klipklop | 2025-11-29 20:46:23+00:00
As a casual observer of Canada it would seem that the average Canadian only has the right to lie down and let their rights get stripped away one at a time…as long as they pay taxes or don’t protest/tweet too hard/mean.

Otherwise they will watch their rights get stripped away from inside a prison cell with their bank accounts promptly closed.

Canada has nothing like the free speech laws the US has. What they have is a cruel illusion of free speech.
by Marsymars | 2025-11-29 20:46:31+00:00
> Also, F150 lightening is such a failure. There was a recent video of it trying to haul very minimal load and it pretty much drained the battery in less than 100 miles.

Was that due to something specific with the Lightning, or was it just due to the intrinsic energy requirements of hauling loads? (Or in other words, does an EV even exist that's notably better at hauling loads?)
by phkahler | 2025-11-29 20:46:45+00:00
>> I don't think a digital signature is a Zero-Knowledge Proof because someone else could copy and paste the signature and then it would look like they know the key, and because other third parties could check whether the signature was valid or not.

One of us is confused. You can't copy a digital signature in a useful way. Without the message it doesnt mean anything. With the message its proof that the message was signed by someone with the private key.

To meet your second two (arbitrary) requirements, have the signer encrypt the signed message with your public key before sending it to you.