MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Y_Y | 2025-11-18 16:12:42+00:00
Add to that rental bikes that have always-on flashing lights. My neurospice is relatively mild, but flashing lights and animations in my field of view really fuck up my ability to focus on other things. I can't be the only one with this issue, but it doesn't seem to garner much sympathy.

I still drive when I have to, but I had to give up watching soccer on tv when they added animated ads to all the pitches. I'm honestly considering some kind of AR filtering at this point.

Also shoutouts to the places in South America (esp. Guayaquil) where people modify cars and buses to have constantly flashing lights, animated screens etc. It's like having a little Times Square in every traffic jam!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LOdfcJpvps
by sonofzork | 2025-11-18 16:13:28+00:00
The transition from oral tradition, to hand-written manuscripts, to the printed word, has had many forks in the road, resulting in countless paths not taken. Exploring the forgotten options, such as the letterforms of the Benevetan script, gives us new perspectives on our present. While this article is strictly within a typographic context, it takes on additional meaning reading it from the perspective of someone familiar with the AI revolution. We are at a point in human history where we may be undergoing another transition, from the writing and printing/display of human-written words, to the those generated by a computer. There are many choices being made right now creating a fractal landscape of "paths not taken" for the future.
by ramesh31 | 2025-11-18 16:13:29+00:00
>What prepares one to read Finnegan's wake?

Listening to Joyce read it aloud: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M8kFqiv8Vww&pp=ygUcam95Y2UgcmV....

I had so much trouble trying to read him before understanding the intended pacing. It's more poetry than prose.
by meetpateltech | 2025-11-18 16:13:38+00:00
DeepMind page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/

Gemini 3 Pro DeepMind Page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/pro/

Developer blog: https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-3-developer...

Gemini 3 Docs: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3

Google Antigravity: https://antigravity.google/
by andai | 2025-11-18 16:13:50+00:00
I had a funny experience with Claude (Web) the other day.

Uploaded a Prolog interpreter in Python and asked for a JS version. It surprised my by not just giving me a code block, but actually running a bunch of commands in its little VM, setting up a npm project, it even wrote a test suite and ran it to make sure all the tests pass!

I was very impressed, then I opened the tests script and saw like 15 lines of code, which ran some random functions, did nothing to test their correctness, and just printed "Test passed!" regardless of the result.
by Meekro | 2025-11-18 16:13:51+00:00
I looked at the article that prompted this[1]. If I had to respond to the author of the piece, I'd say this:

The fact that you wrote this introspective essay is good-- it means you've spent some time reflecting on the kind of person you could be, and you've concluded that you're falling short of your own moral compass. It's good that you're thinking through this, and I hope that someday you'll choose to act.

You mentioned that you have a good career and some upward mobility; that tells me you are probably intelligent, well-educated, and you possess skills that are in high demand. It also sounds like you have some surplus income. All that's lacking is some courage, but that can change. Take an example from your leaders, the ones who "donate directly to bigoted causes." I'm guessing they don't limit themselves to donating 1% of their salary, but rather that they're contributing substantial amounts of time and money to things that they believe in. Now there's something you could do, too.

Or you could go further. You could figure out what kind of work would be a positive good (or at least not actively evil) in your own eyes, and then figure out what kind of path would get you there. Scary, yes, but people do this every day. Why not you?

Personally, I don't like your ethical framework; not at all. Your critique of your leadership's donations reminds me of Brendan Eich, a man who was punished and humiliated by his coworkers for donating his own money to a cause his coworkers disliked. But that doesn't matter-- this isn't about me, and I hope you'll complement your no-doubt considerable skillset with some courage and start making good changes.

Also, to tell you the truth, I understand why lobste.rs didn't want to run your essay. Pieces like this don't bring out the best in us nerds; all we do is repeat the same flamewar for the umpteenth time, producing output so predictable that those AI data centers you helped grow could probably re-create the whole conversation with a simple prompt.

Good luck!

[1] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-compa...
by dymk | 2025-11-18 16:13:55+00:00
Ignoring DHH's politics (which are enough to make me look for alternatives), he makes breaking technical decisions to tooling with little to no community involvement. E.g., https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971

He makes it difficult to trust that, were he in charge of Ruby, he wouldn't just take the reigns and stubbornly do whatever he thinks is technically right for "aesthetics" at the cost of all else.
by aavshr | 2025-11-18 16:14:12+00:00
> In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.

From the CTO, Source: https://x.com/dok2001/status/1990791419653484646
by darrenf | 2025-11-18 16:14:28+00:00
> Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads. I have never even seen roadkill large enough to be unsafe to drive over.

I moved from London out to the sticks ~4.5 years ago and since then have seen deer, pigs, and cows multiple times each year on the larger roads around where I now live. Animals roam. People leave gates open or damage fences. It happens. Plus the named storms frequently bring trees down onto or even across roads.
by EmptyCoffeeCup | 2025-11-18 16:14:46+00:00
The lights aren't too bright, they're just poorly aligned.

Go for a walk of an evening along a footpath into traffic. I guarantee it'll be Teslas and Minis that are the routinely the culprits of dazzling.

I'd guess it's cheap, lazily aligned hardware in the Tesla, and the ridiculous design of the Mini that cause the problems.

Yes, sporadically you'll be blinded by another model- one that needs an alignment - but it'll consistently be Tesla's and Minis.
by yesb | 2025-11-18 16:14:58+00:00
Those are some of the most offensive lights but I wouldn't say it's the biggest problem. SUVs and trucks often have their headlights at the absolute highest point allowed and it's not uncommon for drivers to install lift kits which raise the lights even higher. If you're in a standard sedan, headlights pointing into your eyes is pretty unavoidable. Even a small vehicle that's oncoming and on a steeper incline than you may shine their bright headlights into your eyes.

There are no government agents going around inspecting all the vehicles coming off the factory line. Anecdotally, my friends Tesla has completely horizontal headlights from new. I could see oncoming drivers faces illuminate and wince in pain. A quick adjustment in the settings fixed that, however the majority of drivers are ignorant of the fact that headlights are usually adjustable.

Not sure there is any real solution other than going back to halogen lights or requiring sophisticated anti-dazzle systems.
by octoberfranklin | 2025-11-18 16:15:45+00:00
Yes, there are several, and the good one (linked below) lets you use the "humanness" token across different websites without them being able to use it as a tracking signal / supercookie. It's very clever.

https://github.com/ietf-wg-privacypass/base-drafts

https://privacypass.github.io/
by iLemming | 2025-11-18 16:15:55+00:00
Immutability is really valuable for most application logic, especially:

- State management

- Concurrency

- Testing

- Reasoning about code flow

Not a panacea, but calling it "overrated" usually means "I haven't felt its benefits yet" or "I'm optimizing for the wrong thing"

Also, experiencing immutability benefits in a mutable-first language can feel like 'meh'. In immutable-first languages - Clojure, Haskell, Elixir immutability feels like a superpower. In Javascript, it feels like a chore.
by benterix | 2025-11-18 16:16:07+00:00
> This is a reminder that benchmarks are meaningless – you should always curate your own out-of-sample benchmarks.

Yeah I have my own set of tests and the results are a bit unsettling in the sense that sometimes older models outperform newer ones. Moreover, they change even if officially the model doesn't change. This is especially true of Gemini 2.5 pro that was performing much better on the same tests several months ago vs. now.
by basscomm | 2025-11-18 16:16:26+00:00
https://wyrm.org/index.xml

I migrated to an Org-mode-based workflow a couple of weeks ago because I can see the writing on the wall, but most of the XML and XSLT files are still in place because cool URIs don't change(1).

Who knows how many other XML and XSLT-based sites still exist on the internet because Google refuses to index that content

1. https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
by mikestew | 2025-11-18 16:17:10+00:00
In stationary queues of traffic, drivers should apply the parking brake and, once the following traffic has stopped, take their foot off the footbrake to deactivate the vehicle brake lights.

I’m sure that might have been fine 30 years ago when cars had actual handbrakes. I doubt most folks these days can even find the little switch that activates it. Now it comes off as a bunch of monkey business.
by Loughla | 2025-11-18 16:17:44+00:00
Genuinely I don't understand how people post under their own name or connect their accounts to their real identities at all. I learned early that my opinion can piss people off (even though I think I'm pretty milquetoast to be honest), and there are people with enough time and hate to make their disagreement with you impact you personally.

I started using a pseudonym about the time my consulting site got taken down by a DDoS attack because I voiced an opinion about a presidential candidate who's name rhymes with Meorge Mush Munior. People are awful.
by bArray | 2025-11-18 16:18:11+00:00
I think most vehicles are operating with their headlamps adjusted too high. I think the majority are now completely out of spec [1]. My normal lights are very respectably adjusted and are the older dimmer type, but my full beams are blinding - I rarely ever use them. A few times a driver comes towards me with full beams on, I flash mine and light up the entire night.

The quality of driver is also decreasing. One of our MPs computed the data and discovered "Since 2016, 1,367,942 foreign drivers have been issued a driving licence without taking a UK test". There are apparently 42.1 mn licenses [2], so ~1/30 never took a UK test. It's getting dangerous out there.

[1] https://mattersoftesting.blog.gov.uk/the-mot-headlamp-aim-te...

[2] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/know-how/population-of-th...
by singron | 2025-11-18 16:18:22+00:00
Having driven in the US and UK, this is a significant difference between the two. In the UK, you might sometimes drive 30 under on a road that is nominally 60 mph. In the US, that road would have a specific posted speed limit that is safe to drive. US roads are also more consistently designed for constant speed or have additional advisory speed limits for curves. You can nearly always drive as fast as the number on the sign unless there is some additional hazard.
by LMYahooTFY | 2025-11-18 16:18:22+00:00
You're missing the economies of scale part.

OP is saying it's cheaper overall for a 10 million customer company to add infrastructure for 1 million more than it is for a 10,000 customer company to add infrastructure for 1000 more people.

If you're looking at this as a "share of the pie", it's probably not going to make sense. The industry is not zero sum.
by kubanczyk | 2025-11-18 16:18:28+00:00
> to charm, manipulate, and game

There is surely nothing wrong with being charming.

The "manipulate, and game", just per dictionary, would mean in this context something close to "control or influence unscrupulously". What social norms exactly do you see broken/bent by the OP? Because I see none.

Are you trying to influence this comment section unscrupulously?
by macintux | 2025-11-18 16:18:44+00:00
I would wager that most modern cars that have a clutch (which is <2% of the market in the U.S.) have hill assist.

Certainly when I've been stopped on a hill with someone directly on my bumper I've used the hand brake, but that's vanishingly rare for me (probably because I live in a very flat part of the country).
by honeybadger1965 | 2025-11-18 16:19:04+00:00
a light-hearted satirical take on programming :)

and TodePond can surely explain the concept better than myself

I took the idea and just ran with it - my implementation adds many features and skips some of the original

and, made an attempt at adding a language creation tool set

suppose the data ends up in a recursive spiral somewhere in the omniverse!
by TIPSIO | 2025-11-18 16:19:07+00:00
I actually like the workflow they are suggesting. There's something there for sure:

- Nano Banana => Mockup

- Antigravity/IDE => Comments/note

- Gemini => Turn to code

- Antigravity/IDE => Adjust/code

All on the same platform so can maximum automate / "agentic"
by bawolff | 2025-11-18 16:19:11+00:00
> In a CDN, customers consume bandwidth; they do not contribute it

They contribute money which buys infrastructure.

> If Cloudflare adds 1 million free customers,

Is the free tier really customers? Regardless most of them are small that it doesn't cost cloudflare much anyways. The infrastructure is already there anyways. Its worth it to them for the good will it generates which leads to future paying customers. It probably also gives them visibility into what is good vs bad traffic.

1 million small sites could very well cost less to cloudflare than 1 big site.
by lillecarl | 2025-11-18 16:19:14+00:00
Where I've worked and we've been in the cloud I've always promoted just running in one AZ, I run my own things in one Hetzner DC (hel1). I've done hybrid cloud as well and in that case we only have one AZ for the on-premise stuff anyways (plus offsite backup)

That one time when an AZ goes down and your infra successfully fails over to the other two isn't worth it for a lot of my scale companies, ops consultants seem to be chasing high cloud spend to justify their own high cost. I also factor in that I live in Sweden where most infrastructure outages are exceptionally rare.

Ofc it depends on what kind of company you are and what you're providing.
by haspok | 2025-11-18 16:19:17+00:00
> huge amount of white light you get with modern cars

Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for.

Previously I had a rusty Toyota with a very pale orange display, it was always either too dim or too bright, terrible contrast, and changing brightness on it was a pain. I hated that with a passion.
by drob518 | 2025-11-18 16:19:25+00:00
The only benefit to mutability is efficiency. If you make immutability cheap, you almost never need mutability. When you do, it’s easy enough to expose mechanisms that bypass immutability. For instance in Clojure, all values are immutable by default. Sometimes, you really want more efficiency and Clojure provides its concept of “transients”[1] which allow for limited modification of structures where that’s helpful. But even then, Clojure enforces some discipline on the programmer and the expectation is that transient structures will be converted back to immutable (persistent) structures once the modifications are complete. In practice, there’s rarely a reason to use transients. I’ve written a lot of Clojure code for 15 years and only reached for it a couple of times.

[1] https://clojure.org/reference/transients
by anandchowdhary | 2025-11-18 16:19:43+00:00
Nah - as you'll see from my work from a pre-coding agents age, I like emoji :)

Here are receipts some from 2020: - https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/bsc-thesis - https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/slack-netlify-trigger - https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/analytics-icons
by RijilV | 2025-11-18 16:19:46+00:00
So the internet is a series of pipes, or tubes, whatever. This quintessential personal blog website is hosted somewhere in this inter connected mess of things. There’s a hierarchy of these pipes/tubes, and they all have some ever diminishing capacity as they head from a mythical center to the personal blog website.

When the bad guys want to DDoS the personal blog website they don’t go and figure out the correct amount they need to send to fill up that pipe/tube that directly connects the personal blog website, they just throw roughly one metric fton at it. This causes the pipes/tubes before the personal blog website to fill up too, and has the effect of disrupting all the other pipes/tubes downstream.

The result is your hosting provider is pissed because their infrastructure just got pummeled, or if you’re hosting that on your home/business ISP they also are pissed. In both cases they probably want to fire you now.
by giantrobot | 2025-11-18 16:20:11+00:00
You're using confusing terminology so you look very wrong. What you mean to say is direct modem-to-modem connections were not laggy because there was no packet switching. This is a true statement.

What the GP comment was talking about was dial-up Internet being most people's exposure to TCP/IP gaming in the 90s. That was most assuredly laggy. Even the best dial-up Internet connections had at least 100ms of latency just from buffering in the modems.

The QuakeWorld network stack was built to handle the high latency and jitter of dial-up Internet connections. The original Quake's network was fine on a LAN or fast Internet connection (e.g. a dorm ResNet) but was sub-par on dial-up.
by fluffet | 2025-11-18 16:20:22+00:00
Great! I worked a lot with parquet like 5 years ago. The frustration and tilt working with the tooling was immense. Thank you for building this, it feels like resolving some old knot in my soul.

Some kind soul made this repository then, and I found it on like the 13th page of Google while in the depths of despair. It is my most treasured GitHub star, a the shining beacon that saved me. I see it has saved 17 other people too.

https://github.com/casidiablo/parquet-tools-for-dumb-people-...
Show HN: InsForge – A Postgres BaaS built for prompt-driven development
by tonychang430 | 2025-11-18 16:20:52+00:00
We built InsForge because we wanted to use pure prompts to build a production-grade app faster. In practice, AI isn’t reliable enough when generating code or configuring backend pieces like schema, RLS, auth, or functions. Postgres MCP and Supabase MCP are a good starting point, but they felt more like API wrappers for agents than something designed to guide AI safely through backend tasks.

So we built our own MCP server on top of Postgres and added a set of context-engineering tools to make prompt-driven workflows more predictable. It gradually turned into a Postgres-based BaaS.

Key features:

1. Authentication with prebuilt UI components

2. Postgres database with typed SDK

3. Serverless functions with a secret manager

4. S3-compatible file storage

5. AI model integration with a unified inference API and simple GUI

6. MCP server with context-engineering endpoints (`fetch-docs`, `get-backend-metadata`, `get-table-schema`, etc.)

We're still early (4 months in). Some parts are rough, but we’re shipping daily and improving quickly :)

[1] Launch blog: https://insforge.dev/blog/insforge-launch

[2] Open-source repo (self-hosting): https://github.com/InsForge/InsForge

[3] Benchmark: https://github.com/InsForge/mcpmark

[4] Website (cloud hosting): https://insforge.dev/

[5] Our article on context engineering: https://insforge.dev/blog/why-context-is-everything-in-ai-co...

[6] Public roadmap: https://feedback.insforge.dev/roadmap
by WhitneyLand | 2025-11-18 16:21:04+00:00
>>benchmarks are meaningless

No they’re not. Maybe you mean to say they don’t tell the whole story or have their limitations, which has always been the case.

>>my fairly basic python benchmark

I suspect your definition of “basic” may not be consensus. Gpt-5 thinking is a strong model for basic coding and it’d be interesting to see a simple python task it reliably fails at.
by cube2222 | 2025-11-18 16:21:39+00:00
Yeah, they mention a benchmark I'm seeing the first time (Terminal-Bench 2.0) and are supposedly leading in, while for some reason SWE Bench is down from Sonnet 4.5.

Curious to see some third-party testing of this model. Currently it seems to primarily improve of "general non-coding and visual reasoning" primarily, based on the benchmarks.
by bnchrch | 2025-11-18 16:22:03+00:00
I've been so happy to see Google wake up.

Many can point to a long history of killed products and soured opinions but you can't deny theyve been the great balancing force (often for good) in the industry.

- Gmail vs Outlook

- Drive vs Word

- Android vs iOS

- Worklife balance and high pay vs the low salary grind of before.

Theyve done heaps for the industry. Im glad to see signs of life. Particularly in their P/E which was unjustly low for awhile.
Semantic Query Engines with Matthew Russo (MIT)
by CShorten | 2025-11-18 16:22:32+00:00
AI is transforming Database Systems. Perhaps the biggest impact so far has been natural language to query language translations, or Text-to-SQL. However, another massive innovation is brewing.

AI presents new Semantic Operators for our query languages. For example, we are all familiar with the WHERE filter. Now we have AI_WHERE, in which an LLM, or another AI model, computes the filter value without needing it to already be available in the database!

```sql SELECT * FROM podcasts AI_WHERE “Text-to-SQL” in topics ```

Semantic Filters are just the tip of iceberg, the roster of Semantic Operators further includes Semantic Joins, Map, Rank, Classify, Groupby, and Aggregation!

And it doesn’t stop there! One of the core ideas for Relational Algebra and how its influenced Database Systems is query planning and finding the optimal order to apply filters. For example, let’s say you have two filters, the car is red and the car is a BMW. Now let’s say the dataset only contains 100 BMWs, but 50,000 red cars!! Applying the BMW filter first will limit the size of the set for the next filter!

This foundational idea has all sorts of extensions now that LLMs are involved! This opportunity is giving rise to new query engines and declarative optimizers such as Palimpzest, LOTUS, and others!

I am SUPER EXCITED to publish the 131st episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Matthew Russo, a Ph.D. student at MIT!

So many interesting nuggets in this podcast, loved discussing these things with Matthew, and I hope you find it interesting!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/koPBr9W4qU0

Spotify: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/ddUhVMmLoYb

Medium: https://medium.com/@connorshorten300/semantic-query-engines-with-matthew-russo-weaviate-podcast-131-131a42bbc521
by phyzome | 2025-11-18 16:25:02+00:00
It's really kind of pathetic how we live in a future where "antigravity" is a text editor that lies to you, "hoverboards" are one-wheeled electric skateboards that burn your house down, and... well, can't think of a third thing at the moment, but you know the vibe.

Lotta people mining science fiction for cool names and then applying them to their crappy products, cheapening the source ideas.