MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ddxv | 2025-11-10 04:26:11+00:00
I've seen an interesting politically motivated one. It didn't appear to be a bot, just a user from China:

https://github.com/umami-software/umami/pull/3678

The goal is "Taiwan" -> "Taiwan, Province of China" but via the premise of updating to UN ISO standards, which of course does not allow Taiwan.

The comment after was interesting with how reasonable it sounds: "This is the technical specification of the ISO 3166-1 international standard, just like we follow other ISO standards. As an open-source project, it follows international technical standards to ensure data interoperability and professionalism."

The politics of the intent of the PR was masked. Luckily, it was still a bit hamfisted. The PR incorrectly changed many things and the user stated their political intention in the original PR (the above is from a later comment).
by stanleyv | 2025-11-10 04:26:16+00:00
I'm building a better language learning Chrome extension. I wanted it to offer not just tools, but also the best Comprehensible Input practices.

Here’s what I plan to add that other tools don’t have:

- Super smooth Anki integration — saves words/sentences with full video context, native audio, screenshots, etc.

- A structured way to improve step by step.

- Real dictionaries for each language (as long as I can afford them ), not just AI translations.

What I’ve built so far:

- Word meanings in real context

- Real-time subtitle translation

- Auto detection of common collocations

- Target languages: English/Spanish/French/German/Japanese/Korean/Chinese. Native languages: English and Chinese.

If you also like learning languages through videos or podcast/audiobook, I’d love your feedback and ideas!
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-10 04:26:19+00:00
Your experience exactly matches mine as well.

But some of these comments are just like from another planet. Like a comment I responded to saying "All the tools that existed for remote work had been there, largely in the same fashion and capability, for decades", and then when I responded with disbelief about how anyone could think that remote working tools have been static for decades I was chastised for not giving specific examples.

The level of cluelessness on display here is just baffling to me. There used to be tangible benefits for being located in the same city. If I'm just Zooming with my colleagues anyway, it makes zero difference if they are in the same city or thousands of miles away, as long as there is good timezones overlap.
by llsf | 2025-11-10 04:28:14+00:00
> I would challenge any retail business to beat the 2.5% rate on their cash transactions once the various transit, security and banking fees have been factored in. Those armored trucks don't work for free.

Lots of countries are fine with charge card, connecting directly to their bank account instead of going thru intermediaries. It does not offer the flexibility of the US credit card ecosystem, but lower fees for merchants (and so for end user). It might be a matter of culture and habits. But for some the Visa/MC/Amex fees seem too high, even if most is given back to the end user, it artificially increases the prices (that is why the US Gov. charges me more if I insist on paying my US property taxes with as credit card).
by nidnogg | 2025-11-10 04:30:02+00:00
I'm wrapping up a v0 of a personal website soon [1]. This has been kinda "coming soon" for almost 7 years now - every single time I attempted it in the past, I would stop it prematurely due to a lot of yak shaving and I could never finish it fully. Or more commonly, I would get bombarded with busy times as well.

I'm happy where it's landing so far but also appreciate any actionable feedback to make it better (!). Under the hood, it packs a Rust Axum API, plenty of ffmpeg, and some hobo infrastructure [2] here and there.

[1] - https://nid.nogg.dev

[2] - https://github.com/nidnogg/hobo-infra-manifesto
by sophrosyne42 | 2025-11-10 04:31:31+00:00
The proprietary restrictions are an extension of government, because the government grants private actors protection of their IP and enforces that IP. The only issue is that because we take IP protections for granted, we see it as an issue of the private actor rather than the state which has increasingly legislated against people's ability to execute code on computers they themselves own. But it should be simple. The government grants a monopoly in the form of IP to certain private actors - when that monopoly proves to be against the interests of the citizens, and I believe it is, then the government should no londer enforce that monopoly.
by lmm | 2025-11-10 04:31:59+00:00
> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result.

And yet Germany, the great success story of retaining manufacturing in a western developed country, had and has far stronger leftists and far stronger unions than the UK. So evidently this was not the reason at all, although I'm sure getting the public to think it was is very useful to certain monied interests.

> By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift.

Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-10 04:32:16+00:00
> I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it.

That's not the whole story, though. The Internet inherently changed the value prop for software work, where a small number of engineers could support a huge number of users. That leverage makes software work inherently waaaay more profitable than it was pre-Internet, which is why companies could afford to throw gobs of money at top engineering talent.
by sarchertech | 2025-11-10 04:33:48+00:00
1. I got the idea from the Tp-Link website. Zhao Jianjun is known in the US as Jeffery Chao. Him and his wife are the sole owners of the US company.

“in October 2024, established TP-Link Systems Inc., based in Irvine, CA, as its global headquarters and parent company with Jeffrey (Jianjun) Chao and his wife Hillary as sole owners. Jeffrey is CEO of the company.”

https://www.tp-link.com/us/landing/fact-sheet/

2. The sole owners are Chinese citizens, 95% of their employees are Chinese citizens living in China, most of the R&D happens in china, and the majority of the components of their products are manufactured in China.

They have an HQ building in the US, but 90% of it is leased to other companies.

This is a US based company in name only. It’s essentially a shell company designed to bypass a potential US ban.
by deaux | 2025-11-10 04:33:54+00:00
> If you personally believe markets are not efficient, and prices are not accurate, then perhaps you should take up day trading

What does it mean for a price to be accurate? Most think of it as representing future revenue and profit. Anything else quickly gets you into tautological territory of "an accurate price is what the market thinks it's worth".

I don't think the belief leads to your conclusion. It's beyond doubt that the price of TSLA does not accurately represent the value of the company in terms of future revenues and profits relative to how other stocks are priced. Does this mean I should take up day trading? Definitely not! We don't live in an era where prices are guaranteed to eventually return to being accurate, any more so than if they were a random walk.

And even under the presumption that they would return to this, there's always the 'Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent'.
by BSTRhino | 2025-11-10 04:35:12+00:00
Oh yes, handling interactions and dependencies and what is affected by what. I did a lot of React development (as in the frontend web framework) before making Easel and was quite inspired by how it hooks to change. The way you give it a little routine, it says what it depends on, and then it just fully re-executes that whole routine when the dependencies change. So in Easel when you say `with Health { ... }` it makes a behaviour that re-executes every time the Health changes. But, if it just reran the behaviour, then you'd end up with it adding a new sprite (for example) every time it re-executes, until you've got hundreds of them. So the other trick is the Easel compiler assigns an implicit ID to things like sprites so that it will replace rather than add the second time around. It's built into the programming language so you don't see it (most of the time). It actually took me 2 years to come up with that, which is both cool and depressing when I can explain it in one paragraph.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-10 04:35:19+00:00
Yep. I feel like Cassandra warning the Trojans.

All the comments here on this thread feel almost exactly like the same things I heard about Chinese manufacturing or Korean cars back in the 2000s.

At an individual level, it's difficult to make any changes, but at the very least one can start thinking of how to live in this new world.

Just having enough EQ as an Engineer to give an actual business justification about your initiatives or teams (NARR attach rate, developer velocity, actual tangible examples of generating pipeline) along with actually trying to train and mentor new grads and consistently upskilling would in most cases be enough to protect your job, but people here want to stick their head in the sand.
by nradov | 2025-11-10 04:35:32+00:00
The wages for skilled trades are enough to pay for housing outside of HCOL areas like New York City and the SF Bay Area. People may need to move to restart their careers. There is high demand for electricians in Plano, TX. I understand that making that kind of move is difficult and highly disruptive but at some point workers have to face reality. Regardless of whether the root cause is AI or offshoring or higher interest rates, a lot of the old tech industry jobs are gone forever.
by vee-kay | 2025-11-10 04:35:57+00:00
The only fee will be a subscription to AI LLM.

AI will do a cheap job of automatically filtering the potential candidates for a hire.

A suitable AI LLM can even be leveraged as automation that calls up the filtered candidates and evaluates them for the basics.

So that would filter the wheat from the chaff.

And then the humans can take the process further to interview and select the candidates for the hire.

So yeah, AI will replace the HR recruiters at least for the mundane tasks.
by owenwil | 2025-11-10 04:36:46+00:00
My experience (I’m a hiring manager) is that a LARGE number of big US-based tech companies are only hiring in Canada right now for pretty obvious reasons, and are competing aggressively for top talent here. Many companies are backfilling American roles with remote Canadians when someone in the US exits right now. It’s the best I’ve seen in the ten years I’ve been here.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-10 04:36:50+00:00
Stores weren't stocking video game consoles in Japan either. I really don't think people would equate all video game consoles as being the same. Technology was moving fast at this time, and when a kid gets a taste of a game like Super Mario Bros, they will want the console since there is software they want to play with. There was practically a guarantee of market demand, and the software demoed well with American kids. I don't believe the perception was that much of an actual roadblock to shipping the famicom. I feel like if you were to ask kids if they wanted a NES because it looked like a VCR they would look at you funny. They would want it for the games.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-10 04:37:30+00:00
That’s the standard story, yes.

What’s always been missing from it for me is whether it actually mattered.

The NES wasn’t cheap. It didn’t do anything but play video games. Did its looking kinda (but not really) like some other piece of AV equipment (but having no other actual capabilities) contribute meaningfully to its success? Were a lot of its buyers, who weren’t exactly making an impulse purchase, swayed by the appearance?

I kinda doubt it. Meanwhile, the redesign did make it less-reliable than its Japanese counterpart.
by bkallus | 2025-11-10 04:37:58+00:00
ABISan. Think of it like UBSan, but for assembly.

It's a custom assembler built on top of the LLVM assembler (llvm-mc) that emits instrumentation code to catch ABI violations at runtime. Stuff like clobbering nonvolatile registers, misaligning the stack pointer, misusing the redzone, assuming volatile registers don't change across a function call, etc.

Hoping to finish up basic x86_64 support within the next few days. I can now reliably assemble and run unoptimized gcc output without hitting false positives, but I still have to iron out some false positives triggered by OpenSSL's handwritten assembly routines.

TODO items for the near future include porting the runtime support library into a kernel module so I can instrument Linux, and beginning ports other architectures (ideally something semi-obscure like POWER or RISC-V). I also need to figure out how to support dynamic linking, because the tool currently needs static linking to access its thread-local variables.

https://github.com/kenballus/llvm-project/tree/abisan/llvm/t...
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-11-10 04:38:14+00:00
Human experts can reliably detect some kinds of long-form, AI-generated text using exactly the same sorts of cues I've outlined: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15654v1. You may take issue with the quality of the paper, but there have been very few studies like this and this one found an extremely strong effect.

I am making an even more limited claim than the article, which is only that it's possible for "experts" (i.e. people who frequently interact with LLMs as part of their day jobs) to identify AI generated text in long-form passages in a way that has very few false positives, not classify it perfectly. I've also introduced the caveat that this only applies to AI generated text that has received minimal or no prompting to "humanize" the writing style, not AI generated text in general.

If you would like to perform a higher-quality study with more recent models, feel free (it's only fair that I ask you to do an unreasonable amount of work here given that your argument appears to be that if I don't quit my lucrative programming job and go manually classify text for pennies on the dollar, it proves that it can't be done).

The reason this isn't offered as a service is because it makes no economic sense to do so using humans, not because it's impossible as you claim. This kind of "human" detection mechanism does not scale the way generation does. The cues that I rely on are also pretty easy to eliminate if you know someone is looking for them. This means that heuristics do not work reliably against someone actively trying to avoid human detection, or a human deliberately trying to sound like an LLM (I feel the need to reiterate this as many of the counterarguments to what I'm saying are to claims of this form).

> I’m not going to write another detailed explanation of why your “slop === AI” premise is flawed.

This isn't a claim that I made. I believe that text written with LLM assistance is not necessarily slop, and that slop is not necessarily AI generated. The only assertion I made regarding slop is that being written with LLM assistance with minimal prompting or editing is a strong predictor of slop, and that the heuristics I'm using (if present in large quantities) are a strong predictor of an article being written with LLM assistance with minimal prompting or editing. i.e. I, I am asserting that these kinds of heuristics work pretty well on articles generated by people who don't realize (or care) that there are LLM "tells" all over their work. The fact that many of the articles posted to HN are being accused of being LLM generated could certainly indicate that this is all just a massive witch hunt, but given the acknowledged popularity of ChatGPT among the general population and the fact that experts can pretty easily identify non-humanized articles, I think "a lot of people are using LLMs in the process of generating their blog posts, and some sizable fraction of those people didn't edit the output very much" is an equally compelling hypothesis.
by jaggederest | 2025-11-10 04:38:24+00:00
It is. The best I've seen make use of essentially bright overcast levels of lighting, so more like 2000 lux, and it's extremely pleasant.

This guy has a pretty compelling version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

If you look at his scatter pane, that's where I would go. There are companies that sell similar lights retail, but they're perhaps 3x as expensive.
by hajile | 2025-11-10 04:38:26+00:00
When you outsource all your jobs that actually produce goods instead of services, you have nothing left to offer. At the same time, we're proving that short-term consumerism is completely destructive (designed to break is just another variant of the broken window fallacy).

Either you lower US standard of living to match the countries it is currently outsourcing to or you establish protectionism and isolationist policies with a focus on total efficiency rather than short-term gains.
by PeaceTed | 2025-11-10 04:38:57+00:00
Copyright in the context of LLM's is kind of weird. It doesn't explicitly copy others code but it does lean heavily on the structure of it. Is it evidence of copying prior work or is it fair use? Alas, we don't really have any legal bearing that can handle this yet.

If it is copying prior work, then you are right that there would be a lot of cross licensing bleed through. The opposite is also true in that it could take proprietary code structure and liberate it into GPL 3 for instance. Again what is the legal standing on this?

Years back there was a source code leak of Microsoft Office. Immediately the Libre office team put up restrictions to ensure that contributors didn't even look at it for fear that it would end up into their project and become a leverage point against the whole project. Now with LLM's it can be difficult to know where anything comes from.
by z3ugma | 2025-11-10 04:39:30+00:00
Making the Nest 2nd gen thermostat the Google recently bricked compatible with local setups like Home Assistant.

I'm involved in 3 projects that are solving this problem from different angles:

https://sett.homes/

https://github.com/codykociemba/NoLongerEvil-Thermostat

https://github.com/cuckoo-nest
by chrismorgan | 2025-11-10 04:39:43+00:00
> it’s very common for services to have their verification mail blocked or sent to spam

So instead, there’s no verification mail and it’s the next message, the one that you actually wanted, that gets blocked or sent to spam.

The “privacy advantage” that the issuer can’t learn the identity of the application that wants to send mail seems to me to be a significant functional liability. If it instead produced a token that said to the email service provider “see, the message was invited”, now that would be useful. (It would raise concerns of its own, but it would at least be useful.)
by asaddhamani | 2025-11-10 04:41:05+00:00
I’ve been working on MemoryPlugin (https://www.memoryplugin.com), a tool that adds long term memory across AI tools

Lately I’ve worked on a chat history based memory feature that can recall information from every conversation you’ve ever had with ChatGPT and Claude. It’s been particularly useful and also technically fun to implement. Speed has been very important as I do just in time summarisation and a multi stage RAG pipeline, and most LLMs have unacceptable performance. I ended up going with GPT-OSS on Groq due to its ultra low latency often completing full generations before Gemini or ChatGPT APIs return even the first token.

The ability to recall details from conversations going back years makes tasks where I want personalised plans or feedback like 10x more useful, at times I get the AI to ingest tens of thousands of tokens of context to help me better.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-11-10 04:41:39+00:00
>Many of the truly rich people are quite anonymous

Are you trying to tell me that there are people out there worth more than Elon Musk who are not throwing money at political campaigns, funding mass projects or cultural pursuits? Because, yes, its possible for someone who is worth say, half a billion or even up to maybe 10 billion dollars or so to stay out of public life, but at a certain degree of wealth that wealth becomes institutional and closely tied to political power, so it becomes functionally impossible to remain fully anonymous. What state, what government would allow a private citizen worth so much money to go untaxed, without that person somehow being tied to the government? Or are you saying that the state, which commands use of force and violence, would not use that force to extract wealth from those who are not apart, directly, of its apparatus?
by jaggederest | 2025-11-10 04:42:35+00:00
Think operating room or photo studio. 100w grow light panel for every 2-3 square meters - so for a typical office, 4 100w lights, with a scatter panel in front.

I really like this video for an example of how to make proper scattering effect, but you can buy similar materials that are more durable and lighter, for in e.g. a drop ceiling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
Ask HN: How do you deal with eye strain as a developer?
by deterministic | 2025-11-10 04:42:51+00:00
I've been dealing with eye strain in my left eye lately, and it's really impacting my quality of life. I can barely get through my workday, and afterwards I have to avoid screens completely. No TV, no gaming, no reading. It's frustrating feeling so limited. Has anyone else experienced something similar? I'd love to hear what helped you.
by 0xfffafaCrash | 2025-11-10 04:43:15+00:00
> There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.

Even if you think the harms of AI/machine generated content outweigh the good, this is not a winning argument.

People don’t just consume arbitrary content for the sake of consuming any existing content. That’s rarely the point of it. People look for all kinds of things that don’t exist yet — quite a lot of it referring to things that are only now known or relevant in the given moment or to the given niche audience requesting it. Much of it could likely never exist if it weren’t possible to produce it on demand and which would not be valuable if you had to wait for a human to make it.
by rjmill | 2025-11-10 04:43:37+00:00
Not to dimish the achievement, but TFA is pretty clear about the limitations of the piece:

> I was able to get it working consistently, although it did lose 2-3 balls an hour and could only run for a few hours without the motor overheating.

IMO that's more impressive to hear than if he hadn't mentioned it at all. (I would have assumed more marbles getting lost.)
by coolThingsFirst | 2025-11-10 04:44:12+00:00
This is my conclusion as well, I'm building a few MVPs and the time spent building the MVP was orders of magnitude more productive than sending in 100s of job applications and preparing the STAR method and witnessing my mental health tank rejection after rejection.

Tech careers are no longer careers they are gigs. You get in you are lucky but Elon can tweet something and you can be out in a whim. Now it's for geniuses, turbo slaves willing to work 70 hours a week and that's unsustainable for more than 6 months.

Keep in mind this is in Europe as well, we don't make the crazy salaries Americans make with stocks. Basically 40-50K salary if you're lucky and that kind of money doesn't warrant the effort required for it.