MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pscanf | 2025-11-16 21:22:41+00:00
> Imagine a world where your data isn’t trapped in distant data centers. Instead, it’s close to home—in a secure data wallet or pod, under your control. Now imagine pairing that with a loyal personal AI assistant, a private, local tool that lives with you, learns from you (with your permission), and acts on your behalf. Your AI. Not theirs.

This is almost exactly what I say on the landing page¹ of the product I'm building (an open-source personal database, with an AI assistant on top).

I want to believe this can be a reality, and I'm trying to make it become one, but there are two significant challenges:

1. AI = cloud. Taking my app as an example, it'll be at least 2 years before consumer hardware will be able to run the smallest model that performs somewhat decently (gpt-oss-20b). And of course in 2 years that model will be beyond obsolete. Would a regular user pay the price of a subpar experience in order to get data ownership and privacy? It's a very hard sell.

2. Apps/services are very jealous of their users' data. As a user I have to jump through incredible hoops just to get a point-in-time copy of my data. If I can get that at all. There is no incentive for apps to allow their users to own their data. On the contrary, it's better if they don't, so they remain locked in the app. Also, regular Joe and Jane users are not really asking to have access to their data, because there's no benefit for them either.

That is, I think, the key to overcome challenge #2: giving regular Joes and Janes an immediate and obvious benefit. If they see that only by owning their data they can do $INCREDIBLY_VALUABLE_THING, then they will themselves start demanding companies access to it, or they will jump through the hoops to get it. (That's the way I'm going about it. I'm nowhere near the end goal, of course, but I see promising results.²)

I have no idea how to overcome challenge #1 yet. Mainly because currently there aren't really any big downsides to using cloud models. Or, at least, we haven't seen them yet. Maybe if OpenAI starts injecting ads in GPT-8 responses, people will reconsider using a "stupider" but local, ad-free model.

¹ https://superego.dev/

² https://pscanf.com/s/350/
Ask HN: How do you choose your next programming language to learn?
by lopz | 2025-11-16 21:23:15+00:00
I’m feeling a bit blocked deciding which programming language to learn next year. When you’re faced with this choice, what drives your decision?

- Market demand and job opportunities?

- Exploring a different paradigm (functional, logic, etc.)?

- Pure curiosity and fun with something that interests you?

I’m trying to figure out my own approach and would love to hear how others make this choice.
by deadbabe | 2025-11-16 21:23:23+00:00
Any game with any in-app purchase at all already feels unhealthy, even if its just a trial unlock.

The healthiest games are consistently ones where you pay one large amount upfront, and then are never bothered about money again, because there is nothing else to buy. The developers are so confident you will enjoy it they don't bother with free trial offers. If you really don't like it, you just return for a full refund. Feels good.
by iLemming | 2025-11-16 21:24:32+00:00
> requires an enormous amount of hacking to make a usable IDE.

When you're using it for one, specific purpose, like an IDE for specific language(s), then yes, sure, it may feel like that.

Yet Emacs is so much more. It's not an IDE (but it could be); it's not [the best] source control tool; it's not [greatest] note taking app; it's not an [amazing] mail client; it's not [most beautiful] pdf reader; nor a [feature rich] terminal app; etc. Emacs is not even an editor, to be brutally honest. It's not the greatest concrete implementation of any of these things.

What Emacs actually is - it's a concrete implementation of an abstract idea - a Lisp REPL with a baked-in text editor into it. That, for a second, is an absolutely fascinating commodity. Once you grok the essence of that idea, it's really difficult not to see the extreme value of it.

I'm sorry, I just have hard time to believe anyone who says: "used it for many years... yet abandoned it anyway".

It typically means that they've been using it from a narrow, small focused point of view, without ever exploring the possibilities that "true" Lisp REPL can grant them. I just don't see myself ever escaping Emacs, because there's simply no practical, comparable alternatives to it. Comparing VSCode to Emacs is like comparing it to Thunderbird - you didn't like how Emacs handled your emails and now using something else? Congrats, and that's just fine, only it's not fair and proper comparison by any means.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-11-16 21:24:55+00:00
No, the article says those who have the right to work.

Those who have the right to work are those who have requested it successfully after 12 months, and those who were lawfully in the UK on a visa that allowed them to work when they applied for asylum. I.e. all the "small boats" asylum seekers don't have the right to work by default and they are perfectly allowed not to request it.

The announcement is therefore a little disingenuous (or more than a little) but that's politicians for you.
by A1kmm | 2025-11-16 21:25:16+00:00
It might be easier to block by ASN rather than hard-coding IP ranges. Something as simple as this in cron every 24 hours will help (adjust the ASNs in the bzgrep to your taste - and couple with occasional persistence so you don't get hit every reboot):

TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)

trap 'rm -r "$TEMPDIR"' EXIT

curl https://archive.routeviews.org/oix-route-views/oix-full-snap... -Lo "$TEMPDIR/snapshot.bz2"

bzgrep -e " (15828|213035|400377|399471|210654|46573|211252|62904|135542|132372|36352|209641|7552|36352|12876|53667|138608|150393|60781|138607) i" $TEMPDIR/snapshot.bz2 | cut -d" " -f 3 | sort | uniq > $TEMPDIR/badranges

iptables -N BAD_AS || true

iptables -D INPUT -j BAD_AS || true

iptables -A INPUT -j BAD_AS

iptables -F BAD_AS

for ROUTE in $(cat "$TEMPDIR/badranges"); do

iptables -A BAD_AS -s $ROUTE -j DROP;

done
by jeremy_flox | 2025-11-16 21:26:31+00:00
Correction: we don't eval when you create environments.

Our catalog continuously pre-evaluates nixpkgs in the background. 'flox install' just selects from pre-evaluated packages -- no eval needed, ever. The k8s node fetches the manifest and mounts the packages.

Eval is done once, centrally, continuously. So... even more pre-val'd, so to speak.
by lxgr | 2025-11-16 21:27:42+00:00
LLMs are definitely capable of helping with writing, connecting the dots, and sometimes now of genuine insight. They're also still very capable of producing time-wasting slop.

It's the task of anybody presenting their output to third parties to read (at least without a disclaimer about a given text being unvetted LLM output) to make damn sure it's the former and not the latter.
by joering2 | 2025-11-16 21:28:49+00:00
Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-16 21:28:53+00:00
Programming languages don't have to be for the purpose of industrial software construction to be considered useful. In fact, many ideas that industrial languages use come from academia. If we want new ideas and new languages to flourish, it cannot be the case that large corporations get a free pass to just smash researchers' academic efforts when they feel like it, especially when their motto at the time was "Do no evil".
by yuvadam | 2025-11-16 21:29:02+00:00
This blog post isn't human speech, it's typical AI slop. (heh, sorry.)

Way too verbose to get the point across, excessive usage of un/ordered bullets, em dashes, "what i reported / what coinbase got wrong", it all reeks of slop.

Once you notice these micro-patterns, you can't unsee them.

Would you like me to create a cheat sheet for you with these tell tale signs so you have it for future reference?
by deadbabe | 2025-11-16 21:29:11+00:00
I'm just surprised there is still only one web after all this time.

Why isn't there a multiverse of "webs", each with different cultures or rules for whatever their niche is?

There could be a web where its only personal websites, and using different protocols besides TCP, HTML markup and even DNS.

Or have we forgotten how to simply even build a web from scratch? Didn't CERN do this in a lab like 40 years ago?
by tredre3 | 2025-11-16 21:29:21+00:00
I've had the same experience as you with Zig. I quite love the idea of it Zig but the undocumented churn is a bit much. I wish they had auto generated docs that reflect the current state of the stdlib, at least. Even if it just listed the signatures with no commentary.

I was trying to solve a simple problem but Google, the official docs, and LLMs were all out of date. I eventually found what I needed in Zig's commit history, where they casually renamed something without updating the docs. It's been renamed once more apparently, still not reflected in the docs :shrugs:.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-16 21:29:22+00:00
There is -fno-rtti, -fno-exceptions, -Wmultiple-inheritance, -Wvirtual-inheritance, -Wnamespaces, -Wsuggest-final-types, -Wsuggest-final-methods, -Wsuggest-override, -Wtemplates, -Woverloaded-virtual, -Weffc++, -fpermissive, -fno-operator-names and probably many more. The warnings can be turned into errors, e.g. -Werror=namespaces.
by projektfu | 2025-11-16 21:29:26+00:00
Here was the CEO back in 2017:

"Alexro, there are clear and large signs about the cameras at the entrance to our neighborhoods.

"Our neighborhoods are not large public roads, they are typically 100-400 home communities. You would never have to enter the community."

Now, it's clear that the cameras are not always obviously marked, they are not always in small communities, and they are often now on public thoroughfares. i go past at least one every day and it is not within a subdivision, rather it's on a main thoroughfare. It is marked, but a sign that is readable at 5 MPH is not necessarily readable at 35 MPH. It doesn't help to mark it "Flock" because I don't know who it is for.

Presumably, someone who has permission to the data can use it for legitimate investigations. Or they can use it for illicit investigations. Or share it with others for their own investigations. Or exchange it for other data they care about. And since we're not the "customer", what can we do about it? We're the target.
by ebiester | 2025-11-16 21:29:37+00:00
> Can "AI" in its current form deliver value? Sure, and it absolutely does but it's more in the form of "several hours saved per FTE per week" than "several FTEs saved per week".

Yes but...

First, what we're seeing with coding is that it is just exposing the next bottleneck quickly. The bottlenecks are always things that don't lend themselves to LLMs yet.

Second, that still can mean 4 hours a week for 20-50 bucks. At US white collar wages, that might mean 8 people are needed rather than 9. In profit centers that's more budget for advancing goals. At cost centers, though, that's a reduction in headcount.
by smj-edison | 2025-11-16 21:29:50+00:00
It's pretty incredible how much ground this covers! However, the ordering feels a little confusing to me.

One example is in chapter 1. It talks about symbol exporting based on platform type, without explaining ELF. This is before talking about while loops.

It's had some interesting nuggets so far, and I've followed along since I'm familiar with some of the broad strokes, but I can see it being confusing to someone new to systems programming.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-16 21:31:07+00:00
> It would be a very different story if someone discovered a new type of WMD that anyone could make in a few days from commonly available materials, if only they knew the secret recipe.

It would need even more to be public. Suppose it was easy to make a biological weapon. You wouldn't be able to effectively censor it anyway and trying to would leave you sitting on an apocalypse bomb waiting for it to leak to someone nefarious or get independently rediscovered before anyone else is allowed to discuss it. What you need is for knowledge of how it works to be public so that everyone can join in the effort to quickly devise countermeasures before some nutcase destroys the world.

Moreover, if something is already public enough to be in the AI training data then it's already public.
by nolanl | 2025-11-16 21:31:13+00:00
Right, but you do avoid worries like "will I have to update this dependency every week and deal with breaking changes?" or "will the author be compromised in a supply-chain attack, or do a deliberate protestware attack?" etc. As for performance, a lot of npm packages don't have proper tree-shaking, so you might be taking on extra bloat (or installation cost). Your point is well-taken, though.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-16 21:31:19+00:00
Thankfully, the 8 millionth post whining about LLMs with zero additional value added to the conversation is far less time-wasting than a detailed blog post about a real-world security incident in a major corporation that isn't being widely covered by other outlets.

The article isn't paywalled. Nobody was forced to read it. Nobody was prohibited from asking an LLM to summarize the article.

Whining about LLM written text is whining about one's own deliberate choice to read an article. There is no implied contract or duty between the author and the people who freely choose to read or not read the author's (free) publication.

It's like walking into a (free) soup kitchen, consuming an entire bowl of free soup, and then whining loudly to everyone else in the room about the soup being too salty.
Show HN: A cleaner, safer, plug-and-play NanoGPT
by SergiuNistor | 2025-11-16 21:31:28+00:00
Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on NanoGPTForge, a modified version of Andrej Karpathy's nanoGPT that emphasizes simplicity, clean code, and type safety, while building directly on PyTorch primitives. It’s designed to be plug-and-play, so you can start experimenting quickly with minimal setup and focus on training or testing models right away.

Contributions of any kind are welcome, whether it is refactoring code, adding new features, or expanding examples. I’d be glad to connect with others interested in collaborating!

Check it out here: https://github.com/SergiuDeveloper/NanoGPTForge
by kaihanga | 2025-11-16 21:31:33+00:00
I've found tech-debt to be a false dichotomy with product work. They're all decisions made in the context of the moment with accompanying weakness in understanding and time. Convincing business partners of the value in addressing tech-debt - let alone defining it - is rarely worth the herculean effort vs business outcomes. It always comes down to faith: trust us to get it right... this time; whatever "right" or even better is - if that's a more preferable word. It's no more possible for Product to get it right the first time than it is engineering. Embrace the journey and make the best decisions one can - though engineering leadership should be alert for obvious counter-productive calls - and focus on iteration speed, as that's the only quantifiable, accountable process that I've found to becoming more right.
by api | 2025-11-16 21:31:41+00:00
I see the energy issue as kind of fake too. Either we get our power from polluting sources or we don’t. Highlighting one specific use of energy detracts from that. Now it’s about that specific use and not where we get all energy for all uses.

The net is full of loud anti-AI people who will scream about power use and carbon emissions and then order tacos through DoorDash and crank up their heat or A/C. It’s all energy use.
by p1necone | 2025-11-16 21:32:23+00:00
Yeah I think this clarifies the core issue with this kind of thinking (imo).

The venn diagram between 'mechanics that make games fun' and 'dark patterns' (as described by this site) is basically a circle. The important thing isn't the patterns themselves, it's that they're used to make you spend money on microtransactions.

Looking at just the mechanics divorced of any context of the surrounding business/marketing/monetization is missing the point.
by conradev | 2025-11-16 21:32:32+00:00
Should've included a bit more but the title does a good job:

The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare

It's pretty consistent across camera tracking companies. Facial recognition more broadly, like Clearview AI as well. I don't have a unifying theory other than it's a very obvious business model that naturally accrues power as well. Not unlike... selling drugs.

The model is not entirely unhelpful: selling better drugs might be one of the few practical solutions here. If cameras have undeniably visible benefits for private companies and public safety (I think they ultimately will), then the question is how to build them in a way that avoids accrual of centralized power while providing the benefits. You can attack that problem from a lot of angles, but at the moment it is undeniably hard to build video sensing in a way that doesn't rely on centralized (computing) power.
by maxbond | 2025-11-16 21:32:46+00:00
I understand being okay with a book being generated (some of the text I published in this manual [1] is generated), I can imagine not caring that the author lied about their use of AI, but I really don't understand the suggestion I write a book about a subject I just told you I'm clueless about. I feel like there's some kind of epistemic nihilism here that I can't fathom. Or maybe you meant it as a barb and it's not that deep? You tell me I guess.

[1] https://maxbondabe.github.io/attempt/intro.html
by johnfn | 2025-11-16 21:33:30+00:00
The book claims it’s not written with the help of AI, but the content seems so blatantly AI-generated that I’m not sure what to conclude, unless the author is the guy OpenAI trained GPT-5 on:

> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.

“Not just X - Y” constructions.

> By Chapter 61, you will not just know Zig; you will understand it deeply enough to teach others, contribute to the ecosystem, and build systems that reflect your complete mastery.

More not just X - Y constructions with parallelism.

Even the “not made with AI” banner seems AI generated! Note the 3 item parallelism.

> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.

I don’t have anything against AI generated content. I’m just confused what’s going on here!

EDIT: after scanning the contents of the book itself I don’t believe it’s AI generated - perhaps it’s just the intro?

EDIT again: no, I’ve swung back to the camp of mostly AI generated. I would believe it if you told me the author wrote it by hand and then used AI to trim the style, but “no AI” seems hard to believe. The flow charts in particular stand out like a sore thumb - they just don’t have the kind of content a human would put in flow charts.
by jesprenj | 2025-11-16 21:33:36+00:00
That's probably some sort of gate on your headphones that silences audio (by killing power to the amplifier circuitry) if it's below a threshold loudness level, to prevent users from hearing a hissing sound the cheap circuitry produces that is otherwise masked by other louder sounds. When gate opens again, it takes 1-2 seconds for the amplifier to power up completely.
Show HN: Skillz – Use Claude Skills Anywhere
by kevinslin | 2025-11-16 21:33:55+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a big fan of skills and wanted to use them across different models and tools. So I made skillz - a CLI which gives any model/agent/tool the ability to make use of skills

Two commands: - `skills init` to inject into AGENTS.md (or other files) a prompt to make them aware of skills. - `skills sync` will crawl all skill directories and append the name/description frontmatter into the system prompt

This has allowed me to unify common capabilities across all the coding agents I use.

Even if you only use claude, you should find value with skillz like the ability to list and edit any of your existing skills. Have plans to expand this - including a public skills registry of popular skills as well as a feedback loop to track skills usage and auto-improve skills over time.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think!
by lxgr | 2025-11-16 21:34:11+00:00
I think the feedback that LLMs were used not very successfully in the making of TFA is valid criticism and might even help other/future authors.

We're probably reading LLM-assisted or even generated texts many times per day at this point, and as long as I don't notice that my time is being wasted by bad writing or hallucinated falsehoods, I'm perfectly fine with it.
by jchw | 2025-11-16 21:34:31+00:00
For tunnels many of the features basically have to work this way, so I'd be surprised if you could avoid it. It's also impossible to avoid if you use normal Cloudflare "protected" DNS entries. You can use Cloudflare as just a DNS server but it's not the default, by default it will proxy everything through Cloudflare, since that's kind of the point. You can't cache HTTP requests you can't see.
by Razengan | 2025-11-16 21:34:49+00:00
> Most people are not like that.

Not that most people like games, but everyone has their own goal, even if they haven't discovered them yet, even if it's just to chill in a nice place and do nothing all day, they can still find better ways to be lazy! (build better furniture, explore the search for the ideal climate etc.)

What is with all this defeatist give-up-by-default attitude? There's NO fucking way that the current common system of human education, which has been pretty much the same for hundreds of years, is perfect.
by jrm4 | 2025-11-16 21:34:51+00:00
Yeah, "MCP" felt like BS from jump. Basically it's the problem that will always be a problem, namely "AI stuff is non-deterministic."

If there was some certainty MCP could add to this equation that would perhaps be theoretically nice, but otherwise it's just .. parsing, a perhaps not "solved" problem, but one for which there's already ample solutions.
by jclarkcom | 2025-11-16 21:35:22+00:00
Author here - yes, this was written using guided AI. I consider this different than giving a vague prompt and telling it to write an article. My process was to provide all the information, for example I used AI to: 1. transcribe the phone call into text using whisper model 2. review all the email correspondence 3. research industry news about the breach 4. brainstorm different topics and blog structures to target based on the information, pick one 5. Review the style of my other blog articles 6. write the article and redact any personal info 7. review the article and suggest iterate on changes multiple times. To me this is more akin to having a writer on staff who can save you a lot of time. I can do all the above in less than 30mins, where it could take a full day to do it manually. I had a blog 20 years ago but since then I never had time to write content again (too time consuming and no ROI) - so the alternative would be nothing.

There are some still some signs you can tell content is AI written based on verbosity, use of bold, specific HTML styling, etc. I see no issues with the approach. I noticed some people have an allergic reaction to any hint of AI, and when the content produced is "fluff" with no real content I get annoyed too - however that isn't the case for all content.