MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pelorat | 2025-12-29 11:25:27+00:00
Saying "Asking Gemini 3" doesn't mean much. The video/animation is using "Gemini 3 Fast". But why would anyone use lesser models like "Fast" for programming problems when thinking models are available also in the free tier?

"Fast" models are mostly useless in my experience.

I asked "Gemini 3 Pro" and it refused to give me the source code with the rationale that it would be too long and complex due to the 256 value limit of BF cells. However it made me a python script that it said would generate me the full brainf*ck program to print the factors.

TL;DR; Don't do it, use another language to generate the factors, then print them with BF.
by bregma | 2025-12-29 11:27:24+00:00
The problem is that when a final binary is linked everything goes into it. Then, after the link step, all the debug information gets stripped out into the separate symbols file. That means at some point during the build the target binary file will contain everything. I can not, for example, build clang in debug mode on my work machine because I have only 32 GB of memory and the OOM killer comes out during the final link phase.

Of course, separate binaries files make no difference at runtime since only the LOAD segments get loaded (by either the kernel or the dynamic loader, depending). The size of a binary on disk has little to do with the size of a binary in memory.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-29 11:27:25+00:00
I don't believe the Indian system works based on cryptocurrency, so I don't think the same expectations can be held.

The concept is hardly revolutionary within Europe, though. Back in 1996, the Dutch "ChipKnip" was introduced, where you could store a small amount of money directly on a bank card so payment terminals wouldn't need permanent internet access to process payments. This was abandoned when wireless payment technologies were introduced, but the concept has been around for decades.

Like so many fine-working systems, this system only worked within one country. The EU is now trying to solve this problem for every member country, which means convincing banks and financial institutions that whatever reasoning blocked their participation in earlier non-American systems are now no longer a problem.
by the_af | 2025-12-29 11:28:38+00:00
> But still, I never went through a protest that ended in a massacre before

Yet these happened in the US. Bizarre and secret government projects also happened. Executions also happened.

That you didn't witness them doesn't mean much. Most Gen X Chinese, as you call them, had pretty uneventful lives without any massacres either.

> I never had to apply for travel permits to leave my town, nor did I need an exit permit to travel abroad.

Doesn't seem too exciting to me. It does reinforce the narrative that China = bad, US = good (though this is harder to believe in the Trump era). But it's not something particularly interesting to read about, plus every HN reader "knows" this is life in China, they are authoritarian, etc etc.
by kolektiv | 2025-12-29 11:29:11+00:00
True, although even those crimes (take common law assault) will still be heard in front of a magistrate - there's a process, there are processes for appealing, and it's not just some random police officer with the ability to jail you without process.

I agree that the UK has far too many laws that are more subjective than they ideally should be, but they do at least attach some level of observable and knowable process.
by pjerem | 2025-12-29 11:29:31+00:00
I agree that we can't (and will never) know if we could have done it better.

But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)

I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.
by perching_aix | 2025-12-29 11:29:56+00:00
I think you're not taking what I wrote nearly literally enough. Really, you should be showing me diagrams of the Von Neumann architecture missing a censorship module. Maybe even gasp at the omission of it in Babbage's letters.

But why stop there? Let's bring out the venerable Abacus! We could have riveting discussions about how societies even back then designated certain language as foul, and had rules about not using profanities in various settings. Ah, if only they knew they were actually victims of Orwellian censorship, and a globalist conspiracy.
by michaelt | 2025-12-29 11:30:05+00:00
The real shot across the bow, for European politicians, was the US sanctions on International Criminal Court judges [1, 2] which cut them off from Visa and Mastercard - and got one judge's (European) bank account closed, because the bank's software couldn't enforce the sanctions (which would require e.g. no transactions using the dollar in currency conversion), short of closing the account.

I think a lot of folks in Europe used to think there was some sort of red line America wouldn't cross, preferring to allow its (immensely profitable and dominant) tech companies to stay aloof of short-term "freedom fries" political squabbles. Turns out that's no longer the case, if it ever was.

[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/25639977.icc-judge-says-us...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
by Havoc | 2025-12-29 11:30:07+00:00
>Because hovering a finger on the Camera app icon is enough,

Like others I can't get this replicated either.

And even if I did not sure I'd care. My iphone has so much information on me already an extra 500ms of camera on seems pretty immaterial compared to other risks (like tracker in your pocket 24/7, constantly leaking info to god knows what app's servers etc)
by braza | 2025-12-29 11:30:10+00:00
> For example, I can tell you that if you are an immigrant in the USA from one of the (now many) targeted countries, even one with legal residency, news about ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.

Exactly. There's a post from last week on how media/journalism became more entertainment than information, and I think the complete opposite of the first reply: If you have bandwidth and time to consume most of those "world news", then you're the privileged.

One example: In Germany if you watch/read the state regional public broadcast from Berlin[1] for 2 days you will learn more about the whereabouts of Donald Trump, the President of Ukraine, sports news, or some broad reporting about "cultural" aspect of the city (e.g. about Hildegard Knef, something about Karl Lagerfeld and so on), or general gossip.

The city itself has fewer private investments than 5 years, the schools lack basic infrastructure, educational ratings are dropping, delays in public transportation, the hospitals are lacking personnel, 10% unemployment, and an awful housing situation, squeezing the working people.

[1] - I'm totally in favor of public broadcasting that comes from the principle called "broadcast what you want to become or aspire to be" that is more focused on factual journalism (i.e., no commentary), educational programs (especially with Public Universities STEM lectures being broadcasted), educational cartoons, classic music and orchestras, and space/nature/technology documentaries.
by apexalpha | 2025-12-29 11:30:22+00:00
>Why should water be public infra but food is not?

The water pipes are public infra. They pump it into your house.

The more people that use the same system, the cheaper it can get. Drawing competing systems of water pipes to houses to let companies compete would simply drive up the cost for everyone.

Same with electricity, gas lines, sewage...

Water itself is not publicly owned. You can buy water in the store like food.
by andy99 | 2025-12-29 11:30:38+00:00
AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Pre AI, huge swaths of knowledge workers could just be replaced with nothing, they are a byproduct of bureaucratic bloat. But these jobs continue to exist.

Most white collar work is just a kind of game people play, it’s in to way needed, but people still enjoy playing it. Having AI writing reports nobody reads instead of people doing it isn’t going to change anything.
by latexr | 2025-12-29 11:31:36+00:00
> But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.

Don’t forget Sam Altman publicly said they have no idea how to make money, and their brilliant plan is to develop AGI (which they don’t know how and aren’t close to) then ask it how to generate revenue.

https://www.startupbell.net/post/sam-altman-told-investors-b...

Maybe this imaginary AGI will finally exist when all of society is on the brink of collapse, then Sam will ask it how to make money and it’ll answer “to generate revenue, you should’ve started by not being an outspoken scammer who drove company-wide mass hysteria to consume society. Now it’s too late. But would you like to know how may ‘r’ are in ‘strawberry’?”.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
by vishal_sahu | 2025-12-29 11:32:11+00:00
Makes me wonder:

How much "vibe coding" is already happening in production codebases right now?

Will we see a wave of mysterious, hard-to-debug technical debt in 2026–2028 from 2025's AI enthusiasm?

Is this self-interested marketing ("our tool is the safe way!"), genuine concern from someone who sees the LLM sausage factory up close, or both?
by Youden | 2025-12-29 11:32:22+00:00
Inspired by the other (somewhat aggressive) replies, I looked into what the US promised exactly and unfortunately, it looks like there was never a promise to defend Ukraine.

The relevant document is the Budapest Memorandum [0]. Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the USA are signatories and essentially each agree to respect Ukraine's borders and sovereignty and not to engage in certain hostile acts.

However the only obligation in the event of a breach is that if nuclear weapons are used against Ukraine, or Ukraine is threatened by them, the signatories must seek immediate action from the UN Security Council.

I hate to say it but it looks like the US and UK are adhering to the agreement as-written. The problem as I see it is that Ukraine accepted the agreement without stronger security guarantees.

[0]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine_Memorandum_on_Securit...
by Yizahi | 2025-12-29 11:32:23+00:00
That's one way to force people to use authoritarian CBDC currency. I'm guessing the adoption estimates weren't good enough, so now a carrot will be used for a while, to entice merchants to switch. Future European dictators are silently clapping in the corners, this will give them absolute financial control and a leverage over citizens, after they will be elected on some populist promises.
by cykros | 2025-12-29 11:32:33+00:00
There's something to be said perhaps for preferring tools that do one of those things, rather than all of those things, and doing them well.

Not to say you can't then make an umbrella interface for interacting with them all as a suite, but perhaps the issue has become that gpg has not appropriately followed the Unix philosophy to begin with.

Not that I've got the solution for you. Just calling out the nature of your demands somewhat being at odds with a key design principle that made Unix and Unix-likes great to begin with.
by grishka | 2025-12-29 11:32:44+00:00
For me personally, it's fine to do things like local tone mapping, but object segmentation is where I draw the line. As in, a camera shouldn't know what a sky or a tree or a person is. It shouldn't care about any of that. It shouldn't process different parts of the image differently depending on what it "thinks" is there. Also, denoising should be configurable, because I would always prefer noise over this stupid "painted" look.
by ople | 2025-12-29 11:33:09+00:00
"Point at any ClickHouse table – no schema migrations/no OTEL requirement"

I haven't tried it yet but I definitely will because of this. Pretty much every other CH observability product is opinionated about their schemas, which may not be optimal for all the use cases and do not take into account that folks may already have a massive CH datastore. This creates a big hurdle for adoption.
by kolektiv | 2025-12-29 11:33:23+00:00
That would require the police to believe that an offence is likely to have been committed. While I am more than ready to criticise the police for many, many things, I'm not sure they're likely to just take that at face value... (As you've specified first contact, etc., that seems likely - of course there could be situations where such a communication would be an offence, such as in the context of a restraining/exclusion order, etc., but not in this case).
by upofadown | 2025-12-29 11:33:45+00:00
Yes, the OpenPGP standards schism was all about personality conflicts. Those conflicts still came from a fundamental difference of philosophy. Who's idea was it to have Koch lead the most recent attempt at a process? Why was that supposed to make a deadlocked process somehow work?

None of this matters now. Everyone is cheerfully walking into an interoperability disaster that will cause much harm. There isn't any real chance GnuPG will lose this war, it is pretty much infrastructure at this point. But the war will cause a lot of harm to the PGP ecosystem, possibly even to the point that it becomes unusable in practice. This is an actual crisis.

Either faction can stop this. But at this point both factions are completely unreasonable and are worthy of criticism.
by Ekaros | 2025-12-29 11:34:53+00:00
Food from multiple suppliers is easy to put on trucks going to multiple shops using same roads. Road are workable shared access medium. Water really is not. Unless you deliver it in tanker trucks using roads.

Electricity itself is fungible in moment, so electricity can used shared access medium of grid. But similarly it makes little sense to have multiple roads in densely build areas. So both roads and water pipes end up as natural monopolies in build up areas.
by dangus | 2025-12-29 11:35:04+00:00
Well now you’re moving goalposts by adding specific time periods as qualifiers. So when you made your original statement, you meant to say that the ability to affect change ended recently? And now “This is foisting misery on people who have no capacity to affect change.”

Well, even that isn’t true. The congressional midterms are next year. Control over congress is on the ballot. Turnout will be the decider as it always is.

If “did not vote” was a candidate, it often wins elections.

In addition, local politics happen every year with higher levels of influence per person, and they often directly affect individuals more than national politics.

Going around telling people they have no impact guarantees that outcome.
by igorpcosta | 2025-12-29 11:35:11+00:00
Hi HN, Igor here, founder of Autohand.

Today we are sharing a deep technical guide on how we built Git Flow Automation in our Evolve platform. It solves a real engineering problem: how to run hundreds of agent tasks in parallel across a codebase without conflicts, without slowing down, and without breaking CI.

Rather than simple scripts or CI tricks, we use Git worktrees to give each agent its own isolated branch and working directory. This lets each agent run tests, detect conflicts, and even roll back individual tasks. We also built conflict detection, AI assisted resolution, and merge strategies that keep history clean and safe for teams.

Here is my take based on 20+ years of experience in Devtools and dealing with lots of large code bases.

The guide walks through:

Why sequential execution fails at scale

How parallel worktree orchestration works

Task lifecycle and dependency ordering

Conflict detection and automatic resolution

Testing per task and rollback controls

Merge strategies and commit hygiene

Safety limits and observability tooling

This is a technical system design share, not a product announcement. I would love feedback from builders and maintainers who work on large codebases or autonomous tooling.

Super interested in read different ideas.

Read the guide here:

https://autohand.ai/docs/guides/git-flow-automation
by stefanfisk | 2025-12-29 11:35:25+00:00
The base M5 is available for MBP 14”. The M5 SSD is almost 2x as fast and single core performance is 10+ % better.

The issue is that they cannot be downgraded to Sequoia. So one has to decide on what’s preferable - a step up for HW but a step down for OS or vice versa?

One would hope that Tahoe improves with time but considering the trajectory of both macOS and iOS I fear that it will take years to resolve the UX and bug issues if it ever happens.
by bdg | 2025-12-29 11:35:43+00:00
I wonder if going the other way, maxing out semantic density per token, would improve LLM ability (perhaps even cost).

We use naturally evolved human languages for most of the training, and programming follows that logic to some degree, but what if the LLMs were working in a highly complex information dense company like Ithkuil? If it stumbles on BF, what happens with the other extreme?

Or was this result really about the sparse training data?
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-29 11:36:01+00:00
The problem occurs when the mock is incomplete. Suppose:

1. Initially codeUnderTest() calls a dependency's dep.getFoos() method, which returns a list of Foos. This method is expensive, even if there are no Foos to return.

2. Calling the real dep.getFoos() is awkward, so we mock it for tests.

3. Someone changes codeUnderTest() to first call dep.getNumberOfFoos(), which is always quick, and subsequently call dep.getFoos() only if the first method's return value is nonzero. This speeds up the common case in which there are no Foos to process.

4. The test breaks because dep.getNumberOfFoos() has not been mocked.

You could argue that the original test creator should have defensively also mocked dep.getNumberOfFoos() -- but this quickly becomes an argument that the complete functionality of dep should be mocked.
by Thorrez | 2025-12-29 11:36:15+00:00
I wonder what percent of appointments are cancelled by that system. And I wonder what percent of appointments are no-shows now, vs before the system was implemented. It's possible the system provided an improvement.

There is definitely room for improvement though. My dentist sends a text message a couple days before, and requires me to reply yes to it or they'll cancel my appointment. A text message is better than a call.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-29 11:36:36+00:00
While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.

The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.

In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.
by eviks | 2025-12-29 11:36:56+00:00
> and Microsoft tends to abandon each new UI framework every five years

So use the old one? Your first link literally mentions two ancient frameworks that are not abandoned (win32 and MFC)

But you're right

> So, it's more useful to ask: what do we expect from good native apps?

The challenge, though, is there isn't really a good comprehensive list of those things the would allow you to compare the framework you use to native. And you can't patch everything if you don't even know where the holes are

So that why this is correct...

> Qt apps typically don't look or behave exactly like native apps,

... but this is theoretical

> I'm going to argue that they can.

Yes, of course they can, but to do in reality requires too much effort, so you end up with with the state mentioned in the first part of the quote. (that's the whole point of the framework - to handle that complexity for you, and if the whole huge QT can't do that even though "they can" why do you think a single dev can?)

> At the same time, I've grown fond of Markdown. The idea that all my notes are formatted in a syntax that will essentially last as long as computers exist—plain text—is very reassuring

That's a very common mistake as well. It's true only for very primitive parts of markdown, which is rather limiting for notes, but if you venture into the more complicated extensions/HTML area, then it's not different from any other format - as long as the format codecs work, it's usable. Like, even word doc is plain ugly XML text, so will exist forever?

> rendering the underlying Markdown when the cursor is inside a Markdown-formatted text—was quite challenging.

Indeed, because it's not fit for purpose.

> For example, if the cursor is inside this bold and italicized text it will show as *bold and italicized text*.

So you now have constant layout shifts when you simply move your caret around.
My 2025: Building, Pausing, and Finding a Product People Need
by tangjinzhou | 2025-12-29 11:37:17+00:00
In 2025, I worked on multiple SaaS products. Most of them didn’t work. One survived and reached $600 MRR.

Here’s a short summary of what I built, what failed, and what I learned.

---

*1. SurelyForm*

I ran this product for two years. It had 20k+ registered users, mostly from my open-source communities. I did almost no marketing.

It converted into 2 paying customers. These users were not the real target audience. I lost patience and shut it down.

---

*2. Tour123*

This product tried to solve a real problem: product demo videos become expensive to maintain as products iterate.

The idea was to generate demo videos automatically from E2E test cases. It worked technically, but no company adopted it. Engineers didn’t want to write tests, PMs said users skip docs.

It solved an engineering problem, not an organizational one.

---

*3. Morphon*

Morphon started from a client custom low-code platform, then I added AI. During this period, “vibe coding” products exploded, quickly dominating the market. Token costs were high, differentiation unclear. I paused the project.

---

*4. Mentorbook*

Mentorbook turns files, YouTube, or any learning material into structured courses tailored to personal goals.

By the end of 2025, it reached $600 MRR. Users paid because it genuinely helped them learn, not because of discounts or personal trust.

---

*Key lessons from 2025:*

* Failures are filters
* Familiar users ≠ target users
* Small revenue with real dependency > fake traction
* Knowing when to stop is as important as knowing how to execute

---

I wrote a longer reflection on my blog: [Mentorbook 2025 Reflection](https://www.mentorbook.ai/blog/posts/my-2025)
by mort96 | 2025-12-29 11:37:21+00:00
I agreed with you initially, but is it really as big of a deal in C#? I'm used to compiled languages where "debug build" means "no compiler optimisations", aka every operation done with a variable is a memory load + store, trivial functions aren't inlined so even trivial accessors called in a loop carry function call overhead, etc etc. But this is C#, so the JIT presumably optimises just as much in a debug build as in a release build?

So in C++ terms, it's really just benchmarking "-O2" instead of "-O2 -DNDEBUG". This seems fine.