MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anthk | 2025-12-21 23:24:39+00:00
Not my problem. You wouldn't need an antivirus with a properly locked browser with UBlock Origin and OFC no damn HTML email. GPO's blocking anything not being under an executable whitelist.

If any, your email client should open any attachment under a sandbox, such as Sandboxie, under a libre license:

https://github.com/sandboxie-plus/Sandboxie

Of course no Office macros would be allowed, ever.
by smallnamespace | 2025-12-21 23:25:14+00:00
> According to the researchers, an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware, on average. That figure is down from around 40 minutes, the group's estimate in 2003.

This was from two decades ago, and cursory searching suggests the average lifetime of an unpatched system is even lower now.

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/study-unpatched-pcs-compro...
by bashkiddie | 2025-12-21 23:26:17+00:00
A hull requires at minimum one shape and returns a convex shape.

A minkowski sum, as far as I understand it, requires a surface and a volume and returns a volume.

Example 1: apply hull() to a star shape

Example 2: You want to fold a picture (SVG) around a cylinder and make its edges FDM printable by 45 degree overhang, apply a cone to the image
by Tempest1981 | 2025-12-21 23:27:00+00:00
Yep. Top search result was this, amusing: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install

But 2nd was this: https://www.linux.org/pages/download/

It shows 24 distributions, but no newbie guidance. Maybe a wizard UI would help, vs the open-ended "Explore different Linux distributions and find the one that fits your needs"
by exmadscientist | 2025-12-21 23:27:00+00:00
> In spite of some hoity-toity nitwits who consider cash to be gauche for gifts, at no point in my life have I ever be disappointed to be given cash.

If you are one of those people afraid to give cash, here's what you do: go to the bank and ask for fresh bills. (You can also iron them yourself, I think.) I know of absolutely no one who would turn their nose at a fresh, crisp $100 bill, and it's not like $20s or $50s are much worse even if the $100 is king. They're just really satisfying when they're brand new.

Trust me, no one will complain.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-21 23:27:05+00:00
I am very interested in Hylo! I think they're playing in similar spaces. I'd like to explore mutable value semantics for Rue.

One huge difference is that Hylo is using LLVM, whereas I'm implementing my own backends. Another is that Hylo seems to know what they want to do with concurrency, whereas I really do not at all right now.

I think Hylo takes a lot of inspiration from Swift, whereas I take more inspiration from Rust. Swift and Rust are already very similar. So maybe Hylo and Rue will end up like this: sister languages. Or maybe they'll end up differently. I'm not sure! I'm just playing around right now.
by pton_xd | 2025-12-21 23:27:09+00:00
> "Just Eat Less" is roughly the way to lose weight

Maybe the messaging should be "eat healthier"? How many obese people cook for themselves and eat exclusively from the outer aisles of the grocery (fruits, vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, dairy)?

I could be wrong but I have to imagine the average obese person has a terrible diet. Portion control won't work at that point, you're already doomed to fail.

To be fair, most people have a terrible diet, it's just that some lucky individuals have the metabolism to overcome it. It seems like those people are increasingly the exception and a bad benchmark for how humans should eat.
by Melonai | 2025-12-21 23:27:50+00:00
Defunctland is genuinely amazing and always a fun watch, and I never regret the time spent on their videos, they're kind of like a special occasion... though they're getting incredibly long... :)

There are a few older shorter videos in the half hour range, I highly recommend checking them out if you find some quiet time! (It's awfully hard for me too in recent times, I haven't gotten around to watch the Living Characters one myself, so I can't give the gist... I'm just glad I got the holidays off to finally catch up!)
by herdymerzbow | 2025-12-21 23:27:57+00:00
chatpgt has sent me wrong instructions on just as many occasions it has given the right instructions on how to fix things on linux. It's frustrating when it sends me a 'fix' on something that doesn't even need it (steps on installing a particular flavour of Proton to bypass Rockstar's launcher, when it was already done by default). And because I'm not terribly adept I only appreciate it's the wrong instructions after implementing it and it not working.
by gkoberger | 2025-12-21 23:28:00+00:00
The basic gist is that while the tech is cool, it just ends up being impractical for regular use in the parks. (But like the other poster mentioned, with Defunctland it's less about the tldr and more about the journey and fascinating segues he takes)

Totally get it's difficult to make time with kids, but depending on your kids ages... the video shows a LOT of Disney characters talking and doing things and the videos are colorful, so it could work as something you can listen to and they won't mind having play in the background!
by sueszli | 2025-12-21 23:28:01+00:00
woah, this got way more attention than i expected. thanks a lot.

if you are interested in the technical details, the design specs are here: https://github.com/sueszli/autograd.c/blob/main/docs/design....

if you are working on similar mlsys or compiler-style projects and think there could be overlap, please reach out: https://sueszli.github.io/
by asabla | 2025-12-21 23:29:45+00:00
From my point of view, you're either choosing between instruction following or more creative solutions.

Codex models tend to be extremely good at following instructions, to the point that it won't do any additional work unless you ask it to. GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 on the other hand is a little bit more creative.

Models from Anthropics on the other hand is a lot more loosy goosy on the instructions, and you need to keep an eye on it much more often.

I'm using models interchangeably from both providers all the time depending on the task at hand. No real preference if one is better then the other, they're just specialized on different things
by alwa | 2025-12-21 23:29:48+00:00
Then again, some governing actually does need to get done. That’s not much time to do anything that requires patient coordination and thorough consideration—especially anything of any complexity—even when people broadly agree that it needs to happen.

It’s also not much time to implement or reflect on anything: in the 2-3 month term, the new highway means construction noise and road closures, even if a year from now everyone might be glad to have a speedier commute.

It seems like, when the elected representatives are disposable like that, the power to mold policy devolves to the permanent political classes instead: lobbyists, policy shops, people whose paycheck comes from purses other than the public one…
by throwaway173738 | 2025-12-21 23:29:50+00:00
Not everyone has the means to call in a “professional” and pay the fully loaded price without trying to trim some fat. It sounds to me like they were taking the fat out of the foundation job by mining out a space for the repair. What he’s describing is probably between the mid five figures and the low six figures to get a professional to do. I don’t know many people who could come up with the down payment for a construction loan on that.

I also took on a remodel under similar conditions and I think that the decision they undertook was likely very reasonable at the time. The outcome, in retrospect, would be obvious as well. But sometimes you have to grit your teeth and finish something.
by tmoertel | 2025-12-21 23:29:52+00:00
No, it does not conform. As I wrote earlier, I have not seen that usage for less than 100%. So 600% conforms; 50% does not.

That is, expressions like "twice as slow/thin/short/..." or "2x as slow/thin/short/..." or "200% as slow/thin/short/..." have a well-established usage that is understood to mean "half as fast/thick/tall/..."

But "50% as slow/thin/short/..." or "half as slow/thin/short/..." have no such established usage.

For some evidence to support my claim, please see this 2008 discussion on Language Log:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=463#:~:text=A%20fur...

Since HN has a tendency to trim URLs and might prevent this link from taking you to the relevant portion of a rather lengthy article, I'll quote the salent bits:

"A further complexity: in addition to the N times more/larger than usage, there is also a N times less/lower than [to mean] '1/Nth as much as' usage"

"[About this usage, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage reports that] times has now been used in such constructions for about 300 years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has ever been misunderstood."
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-21 23:30:18+00:00
I don't think you'd want to write an operating system in Rue. I may not include an "unsafe" concept, and will probably require a runtime. So that's some areas where Rust will make more sense.

As for Go... I dunno. Go has a strong vision around concurrency, and I just don't have one yet. We'll see.
by Retric | 2025-12-21 23:31:11+00:00
No, I’m only saying a useless error code and a useless log are both possible. Either could be useful or they could both be useless because the creator was actively malicious etc. Thus, the possibility of a useless error code doesn’t inherently mean a log would improve things.

Really the only thing we can defiantly say is when both approaches are executed well it’s harder to use log entries in your code. If something returns an error that’s tied to a specific call to a specific bit of code, where a log entry could in theory be from anything etc.
by allenu | 2025-12-21 23:31:16+00:00
I find that I use it on isolated changes where Claude doesn’t really need to access a ton of files to figure out what to do and I can easily use it without hitting limits. The only time I hit the 4-5 hour limit is when I’m going nuts on a prototype idea and vibe coding absolutely everything, and usually when I hit the limit, I’m pretty mentally spent anyway so I use it as a sign to go do something else. I suppose everyone has different styles and different codebases, but for me I can pretty easily stay under the limit without that it’s hard to justify $100 or $200 a month.
by czteam | 2025-12-21 23:31:29+00:00
As someone from the Czech Republic, I’m honestly proud to see us at #18 on this ranking

What I find especially encouraging is that our score (487) is above the OECD average, despite the fact that Czechia is a relatively small country without massive education budgets compared to some top performers.

Historically, we’ve had a strong emphasis on math, engineering, and technical problem-solving, which still shows today - especially in STEM fields and technical universities. At the same time, this result feels like a reminder that maintaining (and improving) math education matters if we want to stay competitive in an increasingly data- and tech-driven world.

Curious to see how countries like ours will evolve in the next PISA cycle, especially with AI tools becoming more common in education.
by gpm | 2025-12-21 23:32:00+00:00
I wonder if it's useful to think of this as go is low type-system-complexity and rust is high type-system-complexity. Where type system complexity entails a tradeoff between the complexity of the language and how powerful the language is in allowing you to define abstractions.

As an independent axis from close to the underlying machine/far away from the underlying machine (whether virtual like wasm or real like a systemv x86_64 abi), which describes how closely the language lets you interact with the environment it runs in/how much it abstracts that environment away in order to provide abstractions.

Rust lives in high type system complexity and close to the underlying machine environment. Go is low type system complexity and (relative to rust) far from the underlying machine.
by isodev | 2025-12-21 23:33:09+00:00
It’s a trend and it’s slowing down not plummeting. And even if it is, there are already more of us than we know how to sustain.

The problem at hand is not growth rate slowing down, it’s humans divided in tiny pockets of countries burning through what little we have left of natural resources.

People who have kids today, do so knowing that their children will most certainly be displaced by natural disasters.
by citizenpaul | 2025-12-21 23:33:29+00:00
Gift cards are one of the dumbest most brain-dead pieces of scam ever invented. With all kinds of restrictions that resemble "scrip" type payment systems. They only exist to increase a larger entities control over you.

Why take perfectly good cash and change it to something worse in every way? I cannot understand why so many people enthusiastically go out of their way to buy gift cards. Can you take my cash and convert it to something with the same function but with all kinds of restrictions and gotcha's? Sure no problem....
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-21 23:33:37+00:00
Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) and Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs). I’ve also noticed (perhaps this is not recent though) the max cash limit at some ATMs reduced from $500 to $400. If you purchase $1000 or more in USPS money orders, the rep will take a copy of your government identification.

https://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/supervision-and-examination...

https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/shared/CTRPamphlet.pdf
by krackers | 2025-12-21 23:34:32+00:00
Even before AI, I think I've seen it used before in self-help books or therapy type stuff. It has always felt like an intellectually lazy attempt at reframing, painting things as black and white in the form of a thought-terminating cliche. "It's not X, it's Y" discounts X entirely, when usually the relationship between X & Y is more nuanced: "X and also Y", "X because Y", etc.

Also if you do want to use "it's not X, it's Y" as a clincher, you better make sure that Y in fact builds on X in some way (which implies that X and Y actually have to be similar enough to be plausibly associated with each other) and Y isn't just some orthogonal concept.
by nubg | 2025-12-21 23:35:40+00:00
It's an interesting approach.

To try to come up with an example, let's say we set as our goal to completely automate a process X, which consists of 10 subprocesses. Let's say we fairly quickly automated steps 1-9, but the 10th is tricky.

But we now realize the 10th step was only really necessary for certain edge cases, which we now realize we are fine not handling. So we "if" them away and now have a process that is 100% automated, even though it is different from what we originally wanted to achieve.
by vasac | 2025-12-21 23:35:52+00:00
I remember installing plain Windows XP at a time when Service Pack 3 had already been released. Since I had only recently gotten cable internet, it didn’t cross my mind to disconnect the network cable, and my PC got owned almost immediately. IIRC, some dialog just popped up as an artifact of a successful penetration, right after the network connection was established - before I even managed to insert the SP3 CD. So it was pretty bad for a while.
by scoofy | 2025-12-21 23:35:54+00:00
I lived in the training zone for both Waymo and Cruise. They were there for literally years before they were offering rides to anyone. The idea that they could train them for emergency scenarios, especially ones that happen so infrequently like a power outage on a route they regularly drive, seems borderline nonsensical, but I honestly don't know if there is a plausible way to do it.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-21 23:36:54+00:00
> I remember the days of Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95. No upselling services. No automatic updates. No nagging. You turned your computer on, executed programs, and that was it.

I 'member the days of Win 98, Win ME and Win XP... made good money cleaning up malware - browser toolbars, dialers, god knows what - from computers. Some came from the hellholes that were Java, ActiveX or Flash, some came from browser drive-by exploits served from advertising networks, but others just came from computers that were attached directly to the Internet from their modems.

And I also 'member Windows being prone to crashes, particularly graphics drivers, until Windows 7 revamped the entire driver model.

Oh, and (unrelated) I also 'member websites you could use to root a fair amount of Android and Apple phones.

All of that is gone now, it has gotten so, so much better thanks to a variety of protection mechanisms.
by nanolith | 2025-12-21 23:36:59+00:00
We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest.

Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.

Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.

Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
by SamDc73 | 2025-12-21 23:37:13+00:00
If privacy is your top priority, then sure spend a few grand on hardware and run everything locally.

Personally, I run a few local models (around 30B params is the ceiling on my hardware at 8k context), and I still keep a $200 ChatGPT subscription cause I'm not spending $5-6k just to run models like K2 or GLM-4.6 (they’re usable, but clearly behind OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini for my workflow)

I was got excited about aescoder-4b (model that specialize in web design only) after its DesignArena benchmarks, but it falls apart on large codebases and is mediocre at Tailwind

That said, I think there’s real potential in small, highly specialized models like 4B model trained only for FastAPI, Tailwind or a single framework. Until that actually exists and works well, I’m sticking with remote services.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-21 23:38:03+00:00
Exactly. Do people want to live in desirable areas? Absolutely. The much bigger draw to expensive metros, however, are the vastly more robust job prospects that come with those areas.

In a city, you have both much better chances of finding employment suited to your skills specifically, better chances of being paid well for it, and better chances of upwards mobility. Plus, should it become necessary you're more likely to be able to find something to keep the bills paid with even if it's not what you'd like to be doing.

Low CoL areas by contrast come with scant employment that's generally poorly compensated and almost always has a low ceiling.

In some cases one can commute into the city for work and live in LCoL area, but then you're burning time — multiple hours each day, usually — that you'll never get back on your employer instead of yourself or with your family, plus the myriad expenses that come with driving that far and often.
Show HN: Create Scrapers for Any Site with AI
by jlauf | 2025-12-21 23:38:47+00:00
Hi! I'm Joe, and I'm working on Lection (https://www.lection.app). It's a Chrome extension that uses LLMs to build Python-based web scrapers.

Instead of similar AI-based web scraping tools which are slowed down by using headless browsers or limited to scraping static sites, having the scraping live within your existing browser session simplifies all of this.

You can take any of these scripts and run them on browsers in the cloud, and then retrieve the data via a webhook to get data on regular intervals.

I found that AI agents are uniquely suited to web scraping as a task: retrieving information from the page, testing it, and iterating.

I'd love to get your feedback and what you think the main limitations are!
by jerlam | 2025-12-21 23:38:55+00:00
The Waymos still have all their normal driver controls. There is a process where law enforcement can enter the vehicle, call Waymo and verify their law enforcement status, and then switch the vehicle into manual mode and drive it as normal.

Here is their instructions for law enforcement in the Waymo Emergency Response Guide:

https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/first%20r...
by layer8 | 2025-12-21 23:39:13+00:00
From TFA: ‘One more time for those in the back: the main known applications of quantum computers remain (1) the simulation of quantum physics and chemistry themselves, (2) breaking a lot of currently deployed cryptography, and (3) eventually, achieving some modest benefits for optimization, machine learning, and other areas (but it will probably be a while before those modest benefits win out in practice). To be sure, the detailed list of quantum speedups expands over time (as new quantum algorithms get discovered) and also contracts over time (as some of the quantum algorithms get dequantized). But the list of known applications “from 30,000 feet” remains fairly close to what it was a quarter century ago, after you hack away the dense thickets of obfuscation and hype.’
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-12-21 23:39:38+00:00
> very likely made it impossible for anyone at BigCo to reconstruct what happened to a particular gift card between checkout and most recent use.

Could I improve my own privacy posture by just buying myself gift cards, if I can't use cash? Or that's just pushing all the data that the store would get onto the gift card company?
by gpm | 2025-12-21 23:40:46+00:00
> For example I expect recycling costs to be significantly worse for the Li-Ion.

I think there's a good argument for the opposite.

Recycling costs for Li-Ion once we are doing it at scale should be significantly negative. There are valuable materials you get to extract, they aren't in that complex a blend to extract them from, and there's a lot of basically the same blend. The biggest risk in this claim is, I think, the implicit claim that we won't figure out how to extract the same materials from the earth much cheaper in the meantime cratering the end of life value of batteries - but in that event the CO2 battery technology is underwater anyways and the chemical batteries win on not wasting R&D costs.

By contrast while there's some value in the steel that goes into building tanks and pumps and so on, the material cost if a much lower fraction of the cost of the device. Most of the cost went into shaping it into those complex shapes. I don't know for sure what the cost breakdown of the CO2 plant looks like but if a lot of the cost is something else it's probably something like concrete or white paint that actually costs money to dispose of.
by otterley | 2025-12-21 23:41:20+00:00
It depends. Some cases like auditing require full fidelity. Others don’t. Plus, if you’re offering a logging service to a customer, the customer’s expectation is that once successfully ingested, your service doesn’t drop logs. If you’re violating that expectation, this needs to be clearly communicated to and assented by the customer.

The right way to think about logs, IMO, is less like diagnostic information and more like business records. If you change the framing of the problem, you might solve it in different way.