MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by haspok | 2025-11-18 16:39:42+00:00
> You are supposed to see beside the road by light reflected from your beams.

I don't think so.

If you are driving at normal speed (100 kmh in most of Europe) on an unlit country road, with a low beam, maybe with oncoming traffic, you have 0 (zero) chance of spotting a deer by the road jumping out from the dark in front of you. Zero. Nada. Null. LED or halogen lights, doesn't matter.

But regardless, I still remember driving with a halogen low-beam, it wasn't any better in that regard than with LED. At least with the LED I can see the road properly now, unlike with the halogen.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 16:39:45+00:00
That's not what any psychologist would say. This isn't my opinion on frustration, this is just the standard interpretation under emotional appraisal theory.

Also, it is absolutely not the case that more frustration leads to higher payoff. There are tons of cases where frustration leads to zero payoff, and where you get complete payoff with zero frustration.

Frustration is not the same as hard work. If something takes a lot of hard work but progress is constant and clear, there's no frustration involved.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-11-18 16:39:48+00:00
It still astounds me that the big dogs still do not phase config rollouts. Code is data, configs are data, they are one and the same. It was the same issue with the giant crowdstrike outage last year, they were rawdogging configs globally and a bad config made it out there and everything went kaboom.

You NEED to phase config rollouts like you phase code rollouts.
by nis0s | 2025-11-18 16:39:53+00:00
It’s not a bad thing per se, but democratic action can produce cultural shift to something that was previously considered outside of the scope of your country’s way of life. What matters is what you want to achieve as a country, a society, a community and so on. This is something groups of people have to decide for themselves, and the worst form of disagreement is violence.

I am of the view that more than 10 countries in the world should be built on enlightenment ideals, have a rule of law, have systems and processes for providing a good quality of life, and have centers of education and productivity.

I don’t think it’s reasonable that we should shift billions of people to live in a handful of nations via immigration. If that’s the overall plan, then nations where those people are immigrating from should just become vassal states.
Show HN: Waitinglist.to Create Waitlists in Seconds
by ivanramos | 2025-11-18 16:40:08+00:00
I’ve seen so many founders sharing waitlists lately.

A simple one. Nothing more.

So I built a tool that gives you exactly that.

A basic waitlist. Fast to create. Easy to share.

https://waitinglist.to

Just name → URL → share.

A quick waitlist so you can focus on your product.

Would love feedback from the HN community.
by collingreen | 2025-11-18 16:40:28+00:00
They'll have to compete with these other pending funded companies:

- ai therapist for your ai agents

- genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives

- prompt engineering as a service

- social media post generator so you can post "what if ai fundamentally changes everything about how people interact with software" think pieces even faster

- vector db but actually json for some reason

(Edit: formatting)
by zamadatix | 2025-11-18 16:40:32+00:00
Without a public moderation log (i.e. even user flags being part of the log) claims like this will always come up but to me it always seems more likely just the early commenting users tired of being told they are part of some astroturf campaign and if they don't flock to agree with the OPs views it must just be more proof.

I'm sure both reasons happen to some degree, just as a matter of how often is actual astroturfing vs "a small percentage of active people can't possibly just have different thoughts than me".
by NullCascade | 2025-11-18 16:40:48+00:00
I'm not a mathematician but I think we underestimate how useful pure mathematics can be to tell whether we are approaching AGI.

Can the mathematicians here try ask it to invent new novel math related to [Insert your field of specialization] and see if it comes up with something new and useful?

Try lowering the temperature, use SymPy etc.
by stevesimmons | 2025-11-18 16:40:53+00:00
A nice Easter egg in the Gemini 3 docs [1]:

If you are transferring a conversation trace from another model, ... to bypass strict validation in these specific scenarios, populate the field with this specific dummy string: "thoughtSignature": "context_engineering_is_the_way_to_go"

[1] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3?thinking=high...
by amatecha | 2025-11-18 16:41:16+00:00
Adding Cloudflare to my site would actually cause more denial of service to legitimate users than it would if I never added CF. As someone using OpenBSD + Firefox with strict privacy settings and "resist fingerprinting", I am frequently blocked from sites because CF erroneously identifies my browser as suspicious (with no way for me to resolve this except use a different browser or computer). I'm not interested in blocking visitors because they use a different browser. Case in point: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...
by manoDev | 2025-11-18 16:41:43+00:00
> That should make arr[1] possible but arr[1] = 9 impossible.

I believe you want `=`, `push`, etc. to return a new object rather than just disallow it. Then you can make it efficient by using functional data structures.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf
by hashstring | 2025-11-18 16:42:06+00:00
Comparing burning a zero day to flexing DDoS capabilities is absolutely insane.

I dislike CloudFlare for their extremely hostile stance against VPNs and for collecting a near autocratic control of a large part of the “world wide” web. I think that there are very valid concerns regarding that. And yes, that power is given to them by service providers, however also essential services use it and as a user I can not choose to not use your service without CF, so it’s still very much asymmetric.
by sigbottle | 2025-11-18 16:42:15+00:00
I don't think knuth does modern TCS stuff, the "old guard" (80s-ish) was focused on either classical algorithms / combinatorics, or the start of systems programming (db, network, os). Yes, Knuth did quite a bit of math in TAOCP, but they're very much "old" techniques.

Modern TCS is about unifying a lot of the ad-hoc approaches of old, as well as analyzing different models of computation that better model reality (EMM, streaming, distributed, etc).

I like both.
Show HN: One Time Payment Text Speech in the Browser
by OfflineSergio | 2025-11-18 16:42:16+00:00
I loved speechify but had 2 problems : - its monthly price - its character limitations.

So I built WithAudio (https://with.audio). I've been working on this for the past 8 months. A one time payment desktop app that lets you listen or listen while following the text highlighting.

Soon I realised me and many users prefer to have the option to do this in their browser. So I built the browser extension. The extension is free but works only if you have the WithAudio app (which is a paid product).

Youtube demo: https://youtu.be/Vn3VwCLuPQU Chrome Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/the-withaudio-web-c... Extension's source code: https://github.com/withaudio/withaudio-web-companion
by torginus | 2025-11-18 16:42:32+00:00
I don't want to hate on this but I remember last week, when as a backend developer doing frontend, I spent about 20 minutes prompting Claude Sonnet in a loop trying to build a landing page for a new feature.

The task was to put create a header, putting the company logo in the corner and the text in the middle.

The resulting CSS was an abomination - I threw it all away and rewrote it from scratch (using my somewhat anemic CSS knowledge), ending up with like 3 selectors with like 20 lines of styles in total.

This made me think that 1: CSS and the way we do UI sucks, I still don't get why don't we have a graphical editor that can at least do the simple stuff well. 2: when these model's don't wanna do what you want them to the way you want them, they really don't wanna.

I think AI has shown us there's a need for a new generation of simple to write software and libraries, where translating your intent into actual code is much simpler and the tools actually help you work instead of barely allowing to fight be all the accidental complexity.

We were much closer to this reality back in the 90s when you opened up a drag and drop UI editor (like VB6, Borland Delphi, Flash), wrote some glue code and out came an .exe that you could just give to people.

Somewhere along the way, the cool kids came up with the idea that GUIs are bad, and everything needs to go through the command line.

Nowadays I need a shell script that configures my typescript CDK template (with its own NPM repo), that deploys the backend infra (which is bundled via node), the database schema, compiles the frontend, and puts the code into the right places, and hope to god that I don't run into all sorts of weird security errors because I didn't configure the security the way the browser/AWS/security middleware wanted to.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-18 16:43:12+00:00
> It is done purely altruistically

I agree, but there are some advantages to donating blood regularly. It's a free blood-iron check, they also screen for various diseases and it's probably the most effective way of reducing microplastics in your blood. Also, there's the chance that you might need a blood transfusion yourself, so while you won't be getting your donation back, it means that there's more chance that your blood type will be available if you donate.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-18 16:43:33+00:00
Yeah I dug into this, and the hive does show some characteristics of communism, and the regulating force of their behavior is their identical genes.

So this is an interesting contrast, in this example in nature a pattern that resembles communism seems optimal when each bee/agent has identical function to all other bees/agents. I'm dramatically oversimplifying here, but it seems like a distinction that matters.
by dalenw | 2025-11-18 16:43:43+00:00
I used to be a big ruby/rails fan but I have to agree with you. I now write c-sharp and it's a lot less stressful than Ruby. If a Ruby/Rails codebases get to a large enough point it's really difficult to keep track of what types a method you wrote accepts. You end up just constantly double checking your own code. Or you end up with a few type checks and/or type conversions at the top of every method. And maybe I was doing it wrong because it was early on in my career. But when a method can accept literally anything and return literally anything, not even a strong IDE like RubyMine can save you.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-11-18 16:43:49+00:00
They've poisoned the internet with their monopoly on advertising, the air pollution of the online world, which is an transgression that far outweighs any good they might have done. Much of the negative social effects of being online come from the need to drive more screen time, more engagement, more clicks, and more ad impressions firehosed into the faces of users for sweet, sweet, advertiser money. When Google finally defeats ad-blocking, yt-dlp, etc., remember this.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-18 16:43:54+00:00
You absolutely can, but the problem is that you can’t know if those metrics are really caused by “ADHD” or one of many other possible causes.

The whole idea here is that current evidence suggests that we are almost certainly currently filing a variety of disparate conditions under “ADHD” because we have no good way to determine what “ADHD” actually is.
by mpeg | 2025-11-18 16:43:55+00:00
Well, it just found a bug in one shot that Gemini 2.5 and GPT5 failed to find in relatively long sessions. Claude 4.5 had found it but not one shot.

Very subjective benchmark, but it feels like the new SOTA for hard tasks (at least for the next 5 minutes until someone else releases a new model)
by JohnMakin | 2025-11-18 16:44:10+00:00
In a company I am no longer with I argued much the same when we rolled out "global CI/CD" on IAC. You made one change, committed and pushed, wham it's on 40+ server clusters globally. I hated it. The principal was enamored with it, "cattle not pets" and all that, but the result was things slowed down considerably because anyone working with it became so terrified of making big changes.
by neop1x | 2025-11-18 16:44:17+00:00
It's not only centralization in the sense your website will be down if they are down but it is also a centralized MITM proxy. If you transfer sensitive data like chats over cloudflare-"protected" endpoints, you also allow CF to transparently read and analyze it in plain-text. It must be very easy for state agencies to spy on the internet nowadays, they woukd just ask CF to redirect traffic to them.
by singhrac | 2025-11-18 16:44:34+00:00
They're a bit less bad than they used to be. I'm not exactly happy about what this means to incentives (and rewards) for doing research and writing good content, but sometimes I ask a dumb question out of curiosity and Google overview will give it to me (e.g. "what's in flower food?"). I don't need GPT 5.1 Thinking for that.
by dottedmag | 2025-11-18 16:44:44+00:00
Better never stray from code.

My faviourite configuration pattern for SaaS code: all the configuration for all targets, from local development setup, to unit tests, to CI throwaway deployments, to production is in a single Go package. The current environment is selected by a single environment variable.

Need something else configured beyond your code? Write Go code to emit configs for the current environment, in "gen-config some-tool && some-tool" stanza.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-18 16:44:47+00:00
I'm new/uninformed in this world, but I have an idea for an eval that I think has not been tried yet.

Can anyone direct me towards how to ... make one? At the most fundamental level, is it about having test questions with known, golden (verified, valid) answers, and asking different LLM models to find the answer, and comparing scores (how many were found to be correct)?

What are "obvious" things that are important to get right - temperature set to 0? At least ~10 or 20 attempts at the same problem for each llm? What are non-obvious gotchas?

Finally, any known/commonly used frameworks to do this, or any tooling that can call different LLMs would be enough?

Thanks!
by lalitmaganti | 2025-11-18 16:44:55+00:00
> Gemini app surpasses 650 million users per month

Unless these numbers are just lies, I'm not sure how this is "pushing their AI into everything they can". Especially on iOS where every user is someone who went to App Store and downloaded it. Admittedly on Android, Gemini is preinstalled these days but it's still a choice that users are making to go there rather than being an existing product they happen to user otherwise.

Now OTOH "AI overviews now have two billion users" can definitely be criticised in the way you suggest.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-18 16:45:28+00:00
Generally if you are paying full price (paying per token), then it's not used for training.

If you are not paying, or paying a consumer level price ($20/mo) you will be trained on.

ETA: In the terms they say they use your data because "free" is the only option available in preview. However it does say you can disable sharing in your settings...
by iLoveOncall | 2025-11-18 16:46:01+00:00
I don't give a penny to CloudFlare to be clear, and I would definitely not pay for those services for my blog.

It's not because it's not a criticism that it's a sponsored post.

I happen to have multiple sites that use the same technology (WordPress, with the same few plugins and the same theme) running on the same server, with one behind CloudFlare and one not. Left value is with CloudFlare, right is without:

- First Contentful Paint: 0.4s - 0.7s

- Largest Contentful Paint: 0.8s - 0.9s

- Total Blocking Time: 0 ms - 0 ms

- Cumulative Layout Shift: 0 - 0

- Speed Index: 0.4s - 8.9s

The difference is quite staggering, and I'm located pretty close to my server (a Hetzner VPS), I can't imagine the difference for someone that lives across the world.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-18 16:46:14+00:00
I used to think it was a lot of people doing it. I drive an older car with what I call "normal" brightness headlights, and the warm color too instead of the annoying blue/white.

But then I had to rent a newer car, and it came stock with super bright blue/white headlights. They were so bright to what I was used to I had to double check the high beams weren't on. The standard lights were as bright as my old car's high beams.

Lights in newer cars are literally just that bright, and I think it's a result of car safety culture being a matter of "I only care of the car protects me" instead of "the car should also be safe for others on the road as well"
by underlipton | 2025-11-18 16:46:15+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_gland

Skunks use their anal scent glands as a defensive weapon, yes, and it's thought that this is their primary use. However, until recently, it was also thought that skunks didn't scent mark at all. It turns out that they do, through body-rubbing, like cats. It stands to reason then that we might also be wrong about the functions of their anal glands, and that (as with most carnivores) they serve some sort of less-extreme communication function in addition to the last-resort defense. But threat displays are also part of a human's communication system, yes.

In any case, there are differing accounts as to whether removal affects the animal, and also whether it's even necessary to prevent spray incidents.

https://publish.illinois.edu/maxallen/files/2021/04/Jackson-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Skunks/comments/fyxdsk/hello_i_have...
by recitedropper | 2025-11-18 16:46:22+00:00
"Since then, it’s been incredible to see how much people love it. AI Overviews now have 2 billion users every month."

Cringe. To get to 2 billion a month they must be counting anyone who sees an AI overview as a user. They should just go ahead and claim the "most quickly adopted product in history" as well.
by ranprieur | 2025-11-18 16:46:42+00:00
This article fails to mention why the currency circulated so fast. It was depreciating: it was defined as gradually losing value, so hoarding didn't work, and the people with money had a strong incentive to spend it. The article makes it sound like these currencies worked because they were local. They worked because they depreciated, and it's possible to do this on a national level.

Other writings about this: A book chapter, The Currency of Cooperation: https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-7-02/

And a short piece about Brakteaten money: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Brakteaten_Money
Show HN: Turn OpenAPI specs into interactive API playgrounds
by SamTinnerholm | 2025-11-18 16:46:53+00:00
Converts your API spec into a polished playground with live code examples. Developers can test endpoints directly in the browser with Python/JS/cURL snippets.

DEMO: https://coingecko-y.vercel.app/ GITHUB: https://github.com/Playground-Y/Playground-Y
by silisili | 2025-11-18 16:47:11+00:00
Well, and the fact they're just way brighter than ever. When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded. We even used to park several cars around a basketball court behind the goals with headlights on at times to play at night.

Maybe I just got old or my eyes are peculiar, but that's no longer the case. I cannot stare directly into the new white/blue/whatever lights cars use at all without an immediate reaction of being blinded.

In my opinion, we just don't need this level of lighting at night. My vehicle lights up giant swaths of the fields next to the road and I can see for a hundred+ feet in either direction. I just don't need this level of HD quality night vision, only just enough to see down the road a ways and immediate side of it to check for objects/deer/people.

So now we have these retina scorching lights that are generally fine if the road is 100% flat and the car brand new. Any other situation ends up feeling like everyone is pointing lasers into your eyes.
by toast0 | 2025-11-18 16:47:28+00:00
Even if you're here without permission, you can be tried in our courts, and are subject to our jurisdiction. I'm willing to be swayed, but it has to be compelling. Diplomatic immunity or maybe recognized tribal member on recognized reservation when they were being disenfranchised are the only times I'm aware of where people are physically within the States and DC and not subject to the jurrisdiction thereof. Perhaps if a child is born in an internation vessel at port, or in a duty free shop or a customs free trade zone. Territories and such get squishy, it's usually not clearly stated when the term United States is meant to include those portions of the country that are not a State; but the 14th ammendment is understood not to apply to territories. Citizenship at birth is granted in some territories (at least Puerto Rico) by federal legislation.

That said, upthread you claimed:

> this is only true if your parents were citizens

And now you claim something about illegal aliens. There's a whole range of circumstances, some of which would have been uncontemplatable at the time of the 14th ammendment. If you are born in the US. You claim citizenship only if parentS are citizens. But if only one parent is a citizen, or both parents are permanent residents, or the parents are authorized visitors. For the historically impossible situation, what if the child is carried by a surrogate with authorized presence and the parents are non-citizens not present at birth ... that child is a US citizen by birth, and not included in your statement above.
by EGreg | 2025-11-18 16:47:30+00:00
I remember back in the day using DJGPP (DJ Delorie) with the Allegro library (Shawn Hargreaves), building little games that compiled and ran on Windows and other OSes, and being part of the community.

You can still play the little game I made in under 10K for the Allegro SizeHack competition in 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20250118231553/https://www.oocit...

Back then I was also writing a bunch of articles on game development: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Theory_Practice-Issue_00_I...

Anyone on HN was active around that time? :) Fun time to be hacking!
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 16:47:41+00:00
The difference is whether it's a goal that is important to you.

If you encounter an obstacle and just stop without feeling frustrated, then you just didn't care much in the first place. That's fine. It's not laziness, it's just not valuing that particular outcome much.

Frustration is generally a very easy emotion to identify because you tense up, get irritated, have a feeling of wanting to shout or swear, growl, etc. Even if you're in a professional environment where you can't do those things, you feel the impulse to. There's no confusing that feeling with laziness.

"Laziness" is generally a value judgment imposed by a third party, that you're not doing the thing they value as important. An employer might think an employee is "lazy", when the employee thinks they're underpaid and chooses not to do anything above the bare minimum.