MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yudduy | 2025-11-26 01:18:11+00:00
built this after watching sql agents silently return wrong data. queries run fine, no errors - but the results are just wrong. syntax checkers don't catch it.

turns out db engine devs have the same problem testing query planners. they use metamorphic testing - generate equivalent queries that must return the same results, then check if they do. sqlancer found 400+ bugs in postgres/mysql/sqlite this way.

so i applied the same techniques (TLP, NoREC) to verify llm-generated sql at runtime. also analyzes EXPLAIN plans for perf issues.

trying to give sql agents a real feedback loop instead of just generating and hoping. curious if anyone else is working on this or tried different approaches.
by bpt3 | 2025-11-26 01:18:25+00:00
Those are not "tech jobs" for the most part, they are business support jobs.

Data scientist is an exception based on title, but in my experience there are a large number of people with that title who have never heard of the scientific method, let alone could apply it with any rigor.

I'm sure LLMs are taking some of these jobs, but a lot of the decrease is probably due to general cutbacks on overhead and a realization that they produce limited value.
by insin | 2025-11-26 01:18:51+00:00
Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions.

On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature).

With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden.

It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc.

[^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
by UniverseHacker | 2025-11-26 01:19:01+00:00
Doing computational biology for several decades in about a dozen languages, I do think R is a much better language for data science, but in practice I end up using Python almost every time because it has more libraries, and it’s easier to find software engineers and collaborators to work on Python. However, R makes for much simpler cleaner code, less silent errors, and the 1 indexing makes dealing with biological sequences much less hassle.
by dkbrk | 2025-11-26 01:20:47+00:00
Have you seen the presentation from GDC 2017 on the architecture of Overwatch [0]? If you watch the video in detail -- stepping through frame-by-frame at some points -- it provides a nearly complete schematic of the game's architecture. That's probably why the video has since been made unlisted.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3aieHjyNvw
by buzer | 2025-11-26 01:21:44+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980117

Some more details:

https://noyb.eu/en/eu-commission-about-wreck-core-principles... Textual analysis of the changes from the original leaked draft (especially "Overview Table of the Draft & Comments by noyb")

https://noyb.eu/en/digital-omnibus-first-legal-analysis Video about the proposed changes (there are some changes compared to the leaked draft)
by tzs | 2025-11-26 01:22:37+00:00
I don't know about the UK, but in the US lawyers can be jurors.

The main point of a jury from the "arrive at the legally correct solution to the issue before the court" point of view is to settle questions that are questions of fact rather than questions of law.

Generally in a legal dispute you have two parties who disagree over the underlying facts. For example I say your drone broke my window and I want you to pay for a new window. You say your drone was not flying at the time my window broke. Whether or not your drone broke my windows is a question of fact, not a question of law.

Once it is decided whether or not your drone broke me window, then applying the law is straightforward. The difficulty is determining whether or not your drone broke my window.

Once the jury has decided on all the questions of fact they have to apply the law tp them, but for that the court will have given them instructions. Generally that is in the form of a form they can fill out that's basically a decision tree. They just have to fill in what they decided are the facts, follow the branches, and they end up with the correct legal result for those facts.
by k310 | 2025-11-26 01:23:23+00:00
May be a bad time, but universities and related labs certainly do offer challenges with a better chance of making a positive difference.

I did computer support for one of them. The projects were great and I almost moved "up the hill" to a national lab.

I have zero knowledge of openings, but there is a giant need of support to organizations fighting the destruction of such labs and of democracy itself. If I knew a suitable opening, I'd work there for free (I'm retired and looking out only for younger people at this point.)
by mynameisash | 2025-11-26 01:23:42+00:00
I don't spend a lot of time building services, but the last few I've done, I actually went straight to Rust. The downside is that it's quite slow to develop -- I probably don't have the knowledge that others do, but it seems that frameworks could really use some work. That said, I love that I can find and fix most my problems during development. Building a service in Python means I'm constantly fixing issues in production.

.NET is certainly better than Python, but I'm not very happy with the type system and the code organization versus my Rust projects.
by number1voteguy | 2025-11-26 01:23:50+00:00
We just aquired our first major client and hopefully onboarding another, two very different industries, yet they both host election's with 10s of thousands of members. We can undercut the closest competition by 40+%... and still make a 90% margin. Can Blockchain-backed elections be the future? Am I missing something disturbingly important?

Thanks - Concerned, Curious, and a little bit excited.
by bugglebeetle | 2025-11-26 01:23:54+00:00
No, he’s an overblown hack who is pandering to the elements of his audience that would share those views about Nazism and China. Should many someday see through the veil of his bullshit or simply grow tired of his pablum, he can then pivot to being a far right influencer and continue raking in the dough, having previously demonstrated the proper bona fides.
by amarant | 2025-11-26 01:24:07+00:00
I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually.

I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it.

We're at the point we need to coin a law for it. With tongue firmly in cheek, we could call it Turing's Law perhaps?

"Any person who publishes any text on the internet will be mistaken for a robot"
by _aavaa_ | 2025-11-26 01:24:24+00:00
> You’re putting a lot of words in my mouth here.

I'm not putting them in your mouth, I am stating what the most popular strains of the lab leak approach are.

> The specific origins of the virus have not, to my knowledge, been confirmed.

They have not, and realistically never will be. What would even constitute confirmation? If it leaked out of a lab, the lab and or CCP could own up to it. But zoonotic origin? You'd basically need a time machine to confirm it. The discussion by scientists is about the balance of evidence.

> nor did I assert anything about a coverup by any party.

I am not saying, or implying, you did. I'm sorry if you got that impression. The assertion of a coverup however is intrinsic to any version of the theory that it leaked from a lab. If someone believes that it originated in a lab then the only explanation for why it hasn't been proven yet is that the lab, the scientists, and/or the CCP is actively covering it up. Which is a textbook definition of a conspiracy.

> It should absolutely not be discouraged to consider less-likely explanations when the most likely has not been conclusively proven.

Who is discouraging considering the explanation? Take a look even at the wikipedia page [0]. Both scientists and varying government agencies have looked into the theory, and they have found no credible evidence to back it up, while finding plenty of evidence in support of zoonotic origin.

This discussion is not happening in early 2020, or even early 2021, when there is very little evidence to go on, it is happening in 2025 when there is plenty of evidence in support of zoonotic origin, and a of lack of evidence in favour of the lab leak theory.

Discussion on the topic isn't being suppressed, it's that those supporting the lab leak theory are supporting it despite the evidence to the contrary. They are using it to attack scientists and science broadly because they believe scientists are in on it (a conspiracy theory) [1][2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory#Gover...

[1]: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-wi...

[2]: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/lab-leak-fev...
by stevenhuang | 2025-11-26 01:24:41+00:00
It is not arrogance.

It's awareness of the physical church turing thesis.

If it turns out everything is fundamentally informational, then the exact complexity (of emotion or consciousness even, which I'm sure is very complex) is irrelevant; it would still mean it's turing representable and thus computable.

It may very well turn out not to be the case, which on it's own will be interesting as that suggests we live in a dualist reality.
by rssoconnor | 2025-11-26 01:25:21+00:00
I've use archforms in my custom markup before: https://r6.ca/HtmlAsSgml.html

For example added an <nbsp> attribute to turn all spaces into non-breaking spaces, and used archforms to remove the attribute afterwards.

But yeah, maybe for Makrdown you don't need archforms. On the other hand, perhaps there is some super clever way to use archforms to get your reference links working.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-26 01:25:37+00:00
We were told that "everyone needs to learn how to code", to the thunderous applause of all corporate stooges.

It is hard to tell what is really going on. No company will admit that they are firing, e.g., DEI hires from 2023. I have seen some open source CoC loudmouths being fired, but that is not enough to establish a large trend.
by shkkmo | 2025-11-26 01:26:16+00:00
> 3% decline in satisfaction was indeed a lot

That is 3% if you double ad spend. You've failed to demonstrate that the internet increased ad spend at all, let alone came anywhere near doubling it.

> Or now if you learn that economies, especially European, grow dramatically slower

I just was telling you what your own source claimed, not endorsing those claims...

> behaving like somebody on the defensive desperately trying to argue against something but having no foundation beyond the dislike of a seemingly inescapable conclusion.

Perhaps you should re-read the comment you just left...
by wolfejam | 2025-11-26 01:26:46+00:00
The Moment Claude Code did something I'd never seen before:

Read(FAF/faf-dev-tools/project.faf) ⎿ Read 124 lines ⎿ FAF/CLAUDE.md ⎿ FAF/faf-dev-tools/CLAUDE.md Look at that order.

project.faf first. Then CLAUDE.md. Then the nested CLAUDE.md.

The AI read MY format before Anthropic's own convention.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-26 01:26:55+00:00
If Franz isn't good enough we can do Caesar.

You can call things inevitable and on some level they likely are but +/-5yr makes a huge difference in the exact turns of events and the form that history takes because at the very least it determines who the parties involved are and/or affects the circumstances they are balancing. Do we still get Hitler if WW1 starts later or goes slightly differently? You don't get the modern world without Hitler.

Us typing this here and now with the world as it is is necessarily predicated on a ton of things who's details came down in large part to chance. And it goes back way, way, way further than that.
Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads across 200k websites
by antiochIst | 2025-11-26 01:27:16+00:00
I built a system that monitors ~200,000 news RSS feeds in near real-time and clusters related articles to show how stories spread across the web.

It uses Snowflake’s Arctic model for embeddings and HNSW for fast similarity search. Each “story cluster” shows who published first, how fast it propagated, and how the narrative evolved as more outlets picked it up.

Would love feedback on the architecture, scaling approach, and any ways to make the clusters more accurate or useful.

Live demo: https://yandori.io/news-flow/
by llbeansandrice | 2025-11-26 01:27:36+00:00
I've seen plenty of incredible engineers let go because of "performance issues" that were just poor project management and goal posts that moved so fast waymo should study them to improve their self-driving capabilities.

Shit rolls downhill and there's a lot more fuss when an engineer calls out risks, piss-poor planning, etc. than any actual introspection on why the risks weren't caught sooner or why the planning was piss-poor.
by Glyptodon | 2025-11-26 01:27:42+00:00
I also use cheap Mint Mobile plan with a 5 gig plan. Most months I don't hit the cap. But the months that I do all have two things in common: either traveling, often with the implicit assumption that I can use my phone for work, or tethering to use for work when there's a power or internet outage. Those primary causes aside, the current online universe does an awful lot of video and I've wasted an awful lot of data watching tutorial videos and how-to type stuff.

That said, the point is that if you can't watch a tutorial because it'd run over your data cap, it's problematic. So is having too trash of a phone - it's the kind of thing employers will see as a negative signal at a certain point.

Which is to say, sure, maybe you can spend under $200/mo on phones and Internet for one or two people, but realistically you're not spending under $100 without major and problematic sacrifices. And whether it's a $100 or $200, compared to housing, food, other stuff, it's not a wild expense.
by scoodah | 2025-11-26 01:28:04+00:00
Yeah this whole section of the article threw me all the way off. What even is this code? There’s so many things wrong with it, it blows my mind.

About the only code example I saw in here and thought “yeah it sucks when that happens” is the accidental closure example. Accidentally shadowing something you’re trying to assign to in a branch because you need to handle an error or accidentally reassigning something can be subtle. But it’s pretty 101 go.

The rest is… questionable at best.
by Aloisius | 2025-11-26 01:31:27+00:00
Yeah, hyperrealistic beans. They don't look real at all. The inside of an actual burrito is messy after you bite into it (and usually before). That burrito has a couple of nearly dry, yet for some reason speckled, beans that look more like they're floating on top of the burrito rather than actually in it.

And yeah, the focal plane is wonky. If you try to draw a box around what's in focus, you end up with something that does not make sense given where the "camera" is - like the focal plane runs at a diagonal - so you have the salsa all in perfect focus, but for some reason one of the beans which appears to be the exact same distance away, is subtly out of focus.

I mean, it's not bad, but it doesn't actually look like a real burrito either. That said, I'm not sure how much I'd notice at a casual glance.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-11-26 01:31:36+00:00
It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber?

I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipment in the garage is lookin' mighty appealing.
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-26 01:32:14+00:00
That’s a devilish engineering question. If you are truly framework agnostic you limit how much work you can do for your users, because a lot of the work happens inside of the framework. We decided we’d commit to doing the work so our customers didn’t have to.

E.g. most web apps have some endpoint that the client calls to initiate a checkout session by calling their payment processor’s server SDK.

How many times has the following code been implemented because no payment processor ships a route handler and a React hook (pardon my React-brainedness)?

Someone has to do the work to get that checkout request from your frontend to your payment provider and then back so you can redirect. In a just world, that your processor’s SDK would handle that work. Otherwise it falls on your plate.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-26 01:32:28+00:00
Name checks out. There's some kind of weird non-sequitur going around almost verbatim: "Roblox keeps kids paying for cosmetics, therefore it's at fault if creeps creep on kids there" (as though it would be somehow better if Roblox were just accidentally popular with kids, and creeps crept on them there? Wat?)
by el_jay | 2025-11-26 01:32:35+00:00
ML and physics share a belief in the power of their universal abstractions - all is dynamics in spaces at scales, all is models and data.

The belief is justified because the abstractions work for a big array of problems, to a number of decimal places. Get good enough at solving problems with those universal abstractions, everything starts to look like a solvable problem and it gets easy to lose epistemic humility.

You can combine physics and ML to make large reusable orbital rockets that land themselves. Why shouldn’t be able to solve any of the sometimes much tamer-looking problems they fail to? Even today there was an IEEE article about high failure rates in IT projects…
by dylan604 | 2025-11-26 01:33:40+00:00
You say fear. I say unnecessary for task at hand. My mom doesn't need to learn how to code to make a website for her florist. She just needs a site that can host some basic information like contact info, gallery of example images, and maybe some cheesy "about" page that people feel like is oh so important.

We're obviously reading a developer centric forum where people seem to have a hard time seeing things from anything other than a developer's point of view. Have hammer, everything is a nail situation. People just not wanting to become a coder isn't because they are scared of it. They just don't want to do it. I don't want to be a florist. I don't go bitching to florists that there's not an easy way to make floral arrangements without learning basics nor does it make me scared of it. Whatever "fear" you want to imply really makes you sound out of touch with non-developers.
by masterphai | 2025-11-26 01:34:03+00:00
Interesting project - it’s rare to see news-flow tracking done in real time at this scale. One thing you may want to stress-test is how stable the clustering remains when stories evolve semantically over a few hours. Embeddings tend to drift as outlets rewrite or localize a piece, and HNSW can sometimes over-merge when the centroid shifts.

A trick that helped in a similar system I built was doing a second-pass “temporal coherence” check: if two articles are close in embedding space but far apart in publish time or share no common entities, keep them in adjacent clusters rather than forcing a merge. It reduced false positives significantly.

Also curious how you handle deduping syndicated content - AP/Reuters can dominate the embedding space unless you weight publisher identity or canonical URLs.

Overall, really nice work. The propagation timeline is especially useful.
by kaz-inc | 2025-11-26 01:34:08+00:00
I'll take the bait.

Do you distinguish between writing a compiler and writing an optimizing compiler, and if so, how is writing an optimizing compiler an extinct art?

Equality saturation, domination graphs, chordal register allocation, hardware-software codesign, etc there are many new avenues of research for compilers, and these are just the ones on the top of my head that are relevant to my work. Most optimization work is R&D and much of it is left unimplemented at scale, and things like the phase-ordering problem and IR validation are hard to do in practice, even given ample resources and time.
by chrneu | 2025-11-26 01:34:18+00:00
For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.

So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.

I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.

I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
by yieldcrv | 2025-11-26 01:34:22+00:00
beanie babies were rational, there was a supply constriction that seemed permanent, the founder resolved it and flooded the market, leaving bagholders and decades of mockery

but I would content it was not an example of irrational exuberance

labubu’s are part of a flooded market as well, but there was never anything to suggest it wouldnt be flooded only an expectation for demand to keep up longer than just half of this year
by nickelpro | 2025-11-26 01:34:31+00:00
Ya OP is shadow boxing. There is absolutely no need for any of these things.

Tons of open source exists as only source code and a license, nothing else. No docs, no issue tracker, nothing. People who need it use it, learn from it, remix it, whatever, but there need not be any engagement at all from the given repo's maintainer.
by mickael-kerjean | 2025-11-26 01:35:04+00:00
This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities.

[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash