MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ge96 | 2025-12-24 08:22:59+00:00
It seems so silly to say but I too have a dream of not wanting to work. Then I can just exist. I came across this YT video about enjoying boredom. It slows down time and you do things you really want to do. I'm currently the type of person that is always plugged into noise (music, podcast, YT). It is rare that I sit in silence. But yeah I'm hoping I can save, exit working, I'll still be making stuff that I enjoy at a good pace. I have this problem where I want to share things that aren't done yet, it's early ego reward. That's the problem with YT too and attention span, things take time to do and it's about the immediate reward. I get it too, attention is a currency and people spend it where they want/deem important.

But I feel it though, the urge to grind. When I have free time I think, shouldn't I be doing/achieving something. If you quantify value by money then yeah there are dumb ways to make money like me driving Uber Eats and donating plasma (an extra 17 hrs of my life per week). I can instead spend less money and enjoy life more.

I almost think social media is the worst thing that I ran into, the points/likes aspect. Going back to sharing things that aren't real yet for the kudos. Anyway ranting. I'm thankful I became self-aware as when Facebook was new I was posting like everything about my life like "omg look at me...". Which is a double-edged sword you know, something like Instagram is how women scope you out and if you don't have a good one...

Tangent, there is also this fetishizing of productivity where you see this clean desk and a little notepad. Or some kind of setup like a minimalist laptop. The whole video is about that but not actually working ha.
by anthk | 2025-12-24 08:23:31+00:00
IDK about C11; but C99 doesn't change a lot compared to ANSI C. You can read The C Programming Language 2nd edition and pick up C99 in a week. It adds boleans, some float/complex math ops, an optional floating point definition and a few more goodies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99

C++ by comparison it's a behemoth. If C++ died and, for instance, the FLTK guys rebased their libraries into C (and Boost for instance) it would be a big loss at first but Chromium and the like rewritten in C would slim down a bit, the complexity would plummet down and similar projects would use far less CPU and RAM.

It's not just about the binary size; C++ today makes even the Common Lisp standard (even with UIOP and some de facto standard libraries from QuickLisp) pretty much human-manageable, and CL always has been a one-thousand pages thick standard with tons of bloat compared to Scheme or it's sibling Emacs Lisp. Go figure.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-24 08:24:26+00:00
> This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with.

No, this is an example of someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful outcomes.

"Smart" people like to believe that knowing enough minutiae is enough to result in a successful outcome.

Actual smart people know that the process is more important than the minutiae, and proceed accordingly.
by gitaarik | 2025-12-24 08:25:43+00:00
Tailwind is not a bad CSS framework, because it doesn't try to change CSS at all, it's just a collection of (configurable) aliases / shortcuts for common used CSS statements.

Something that will usually happen in any big project to some extend. But when using Tailwind you don't have to think about it and you have a consistent way across many projects.
by Alex2037 | 2025-12-24 08:25:58+00:00
depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.

also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.
by wiseowise | 2025-12-24 08:27:20+00:00
It’s only useful if you consider a single anecdote useful. For every OP’s example I can come up with at least 2 where you follow their advice and it goes south, most likely there are thousands engineers who can do the same.

It’s a typical pat on the back/confirmation bias article so whoever identifies with this specific opinion can feel good and close the tab with “yeah, I’m a real senior”.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-24 08:27:32+00:00
Of course you can. And you don't need any consent from the user for doing so.

The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data.

What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).
by Hoshang07 | 2025-12-24 08:27:33+00:00
The 5 layers of safely connecting agents to your databases:

Most AI agents need access to structured data (CRMs, databases, warehouses), but giving them database access is a security nightmare. Here's a layered architecture that addresses this:

Layer 1: Data Sources
Your raw data repositories (Salesforce, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, etc.). Traditional ETL/ELT approaches to clean and transform it needs to be done here.

Layer 2: Agent Views (The Critical Boundary)
Materialized SQL views that are sandboxed from the source acting as controlled windows for LLMs to access your data. You know what data the agent needs to perform it's task. You can define exactly the columns agents can access (for example, removing PII columns, financial data or conflicting fields that may confuse the LLM)

These views:
• Join data across multiple sources
• Filter columns and rows
• Apply rules/logic

Agents can ONLY access data through these views. They can be tightly scoped at first and you can always optimize it's scope to help the agent get what's necessary to do it's job.

Layer 3: MCP Tool Interface
Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools built on top of agent data views. Each tool includes:
• Function name and description (helps LLM select correctly)
• Parameter validation i.e required inputs (e.g customer_id is required)
• Policy checks (e.g user A should never be able to query user B's data)

Layer 4: AI Agent Layer
Your LLM-powered agent (LangGraph, Cursor, n8n, etc.) that:
• Interprets user queries
• Selects appropriate MCP tools
• Synthesizes natural language responses

Layer 5: User Interface
End users asking questions and receiving answers (e.g via AI chatbots)

The Flow:
User query → Agent selects MCP tool → Policy validation → Query executes against sandboxed view → Data flows back → Agent responds

Agents must never touch raw databases - the agent view layer is the single point of control, with every query logged for complete observability into what data was accessed, by whom, and when.

This architecture enables AI agents to work with your data while maintaining:
• Complete security and access control
• Reduces LLMs from hallucinating
• Agent views acts as the single control and command plane for agent-data interaction
• Compliance-ready audit trails

If you're building agents that touch sensitive customer information stored across your data stack, Pylar can help!
by fakedang | 2025-12-24 08:28:44+00:00
You underestimate Musk too much.

This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.

I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
by anthk | 2025-12-24 08:29:18+00:00
And FFMPEG, the standard codec suite for Unix today. And Qemu, the core of KVM. Plus TCC, a great small compiler compared to C/Clang altough cparser has better C99 coverage. Oh, and some DVB transmitter reusing the MHZ radiation from a computer screen by tweaking the Vidtune values from X. It's similar to what Tempest for Eliza does.
by setopt | 2025-12-24 08:31:00+00:00
I suppose it gets a bit more complex again if you enable stuff like microtype, but even then you can probably measure how much inter-letter and inter-word spacing has been adjusted by just scanning other text in the same line.

I think the conclusion is honestly that PDF is an outdated format for keeping records that might have to be redacted in the future, like court documents. Something reflowable like epub could have the text replaced with constant-space black squares instead no hints leaked as someone mentioned in a parallel comment.
by konradb | 2025-12-24 08:31:02+00:00
I don't think you need to pay $6 a month to try it out.

Install it on all the machines you want. When you are running it on the machine, it is networked to the other machines that are running it. Now make an 'exit node' on one of those machines by selecting it in the UI, and all your gear can access the internet via that exit node. Your phone can run it. Your apple tv can run it. You can have multiple exit nodes. So you can have a worldwide network and not once did you have to open ports in firewalls etc.
by giorgioz | 2025-12-24 08:32:07+00:00
Often there is a bell shaped curve where productivity peeks at a point and bigger efforts after that make you actually less productive overall.
In my personal experience most projects are a marathon not a sprint.
Always sleep the 8-9 hours necessary to feel full-rested.
I'm most productive in the morning so I try to work every day during mornings but since in the afternoon I'm a lot less productive I've decided I can allocate that time to entertainment and social activities.
My entertainment and social activity tend also to be along learning new things.
by thisislife2 | 2025-12-24 08:32:13+00:00
In my opinion, you only need this if you don't like connecting to unknown (insecure or suspect) network to get access to the internet. Ideally, you would configure this kind of router to connect to a VPN so that as soon as it connects to the internet, it immediately logins to the VPN and reroutes all your network traffic through it. This makes it more difficult for someone to hijack your connection or crack it. From the comments it also appears that some people use it to connect to their home network, either to access their home server or to use as VPN (this can help you get around geo-fence and unnecessary additional authentications that some services require for fraud prevention). Some travel routers can also combine 2 or more internet connections (public WiFi + mobile data) to provide you a more stable internet connection, which is often desirable.
by dansmith1919 | 2025-12-24 08:32:34+00:00
The very basic (but incorrect) assumption that the “grind never stops” people rely on is

more hours == more productivity

It’s not. If you’re sleep deprived you’ll produce shit, which you’ll probably have to redo later. Sleep properly, produce more in less hours.

But hey, at least your colleagues think you’re busy because you’re last to leave redoing your shitty work!

Edit: read The Brain at Rest by Jebelli, don’t work yourself to death
by snvzz | 2025-12-24 08:33:22+00:00
I recapped a C64C I bought second hand recently, using premium Japanese 105C capacitors off the shelf on akihabara, minus the huge axial one I ordered a modern, extremely durable replacement for.

I tested every cap I removed, all of them nichicons from the mid 80s. They all measured to spec.

So it was kinda pointless at the end. Sure, it is going to be good for a few more decades, alongside the 1571 Ultimate II-L.

(yes, I replaced the original PSU. I bought separate modern, safe 9vac and 5vdc PSUs and an adapter to join them into the C64 power connector)
by zvr | 2025-12-24 08:34:04+00:00
The format is standardized, to the highest level possible: ISO/IEC 5962:2021 defines SPDX v2.2.1. The actual standard text is available for free at the ISO website (and other places, like spdx.org).

The newer version, SPDX v3.0, will become ISO/IEC 5962:2026, and work is already underway for further versions.

What is not standardized at all are the integration of processes for producing/consuming/maintaining SBOMs in the software development world.
by immibis | 2025-12-24 08:34:50+00:00
Slavery has never been illegal in the US. The 13th amendment leaves slavery legal as punishment for a crime. The US has the highest rate of crime punishment in the world (higher than places like North Korea), an industry that profits by selling slave labour of those punished criminals, and known ties between those who profit from selling slave labour and those who decide how many things should be crimes.
by ActorNightly | 2025-12-24 08:34:51+00:00
The whole reason for the first "AI Winter" was because people were trying to solve problems with smaller neural nets, and of course you run into problems during training, where you can't get things to converge.

Once compute became more available, and you had more neural nets, and thus more dimensionality (in the sense of layer sizes), during training, you had more directions for gradient descent, so things started happening with ML.

And all the architectures that you see today are basically simplifications of the fully connected layers with max dimensionality. Any operation like attention, self attention, or convolution can be unrolled into matrix multiples.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google TPUs basically do this. It seems to reason that they are the most efficient because they don't move memory around, which means that the matrix multiply circuitry is hard wired, which means that the compiler basically has to lay out the locations of the data in the spaces that are meant to be matrix multiplied together, so the compiler probably does that unrolling under the hood.
by GistNoesis | 2025-12-24 08:35:22+00:00
And that's just in the non-adversarial simple case.

If you don't know the provenance of images you are putting black box on (for example because of a rogue employee intentionally wanting to leak them, or if the image sensor of your target had been compromised to leak some info by another team), your redaction can be rendered ineffective, as some images can be made uncroppable by construction .

(Self-plug : https://github.com/unrealwill/uncroppable )

And also be aware that compression is hiding everywhere : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing
by roenxi | 2025-12-24 08:35:50+00:00
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).

The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.

Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
by mikeayles | 2025-12-24 08:36:12+00:00
Well thanks for that rabbit hole. I was hoping the dingus was the actual term, but sadly not.

For anyone needing some pub quiz trivia, a lower case g has the top half which is called the bowl, the bit top right is called the ear, then the bottom is called a loop tail when it's closed, or just a tail when it's open, and is joined by a link.
by tetha | 2025-12-24 08:37:49+00:00
This is something that hit me during my master thesis the first time: I was entirely free to choose my work time, work mode. Since the prof was very hands-off too, only the result after 6 months mattered. That was quite the weird time. But it taught me some pieces about work-life balance and choosing what is 'enough work', as well as giving your brain time off, or time on something else to work through more complex topics and to recharge.

This is also why I honestly enjoy being a salaried employee. My employer buys 40 hours a week from me. Right, some weeks it's 50 and the next week only 30. Some weeks need a machine just executing, some weeks need more careful thought.

I could optimize it for more monetary output, but at the moment it is a predictable, usually not-painful thing with decent monetary output for personally more interesting subjects. I've found appreciation of this.
by zeristor | 2025-12-24 08:38:14+00:00
Having had to wait a few months to work on a project I realised I had been thinking it through in much depth for so long.

Once I was able to get some time in Windsurf I churned through my ideas in 2 hours.

It’s a bit weird, normally at the end I would regret having procrastinated for several days in total, it’s quite dizzying.

As a spike I had free range, but I am starting to wonder just how much decisions and approval for clearance to use tech can strangle the exhilaration of doing things.
by rurban | 2025-12-24 08:38:28+00:00
I'm reving _why's syck right now. Turns out my fork from 2013 was still the most advanced. It doesn't implement the latest YAML specs, and all of it's new insecurities, which is a good thing. And it's much, much faster than the sax-like libyaml.

But since syck uses the ruby hashtable internally, I got stuck in the gem for a while. It fell out of their stdlib, and is not really maintained neither. PHP had the latest updates for it. And perl (me) extended it to be more recursion safe, and added more policies (what to do on duplicate keys: skip or overwrite).

So the ruby bindings are troublesome because of its GC, which with threading requires now7 a global vm instance. And using the ruby alloc/free pairs.

PHP, perl, python, Lua, IO, cocoa, all no problem. Just ruby, because of its too tight coupling. Looks I have to decouple it finally from ruby.
by gertrunde | 2025-12-24 08:38:34+00:00
Basic version is it's a sort of developer focused zero trust network service.

Encrypted overlay network based on wireguard tunnels, with network ACLs based around identity, and with lots of nice quality-of-life features, like DNS that just works and a bunch of other stuff.

(Other stuff = internet egress from your tailscale network ('tailnet') through any chosen node, or feeding inbound traffic from a public IP to a chosen node, SSH tied into the network authentication.

There is also https://github.com/juanfont/headscale - which is a open source implementation of some of tailscale's server side stuff, compatible with the normal tailscale clients.

(And there are clients for a very wide range of stuff).
by pdpi | 2025-12-24 08:38:37+00:00
Somebody walking around on site without high-vis gear is a blatantly obvious violation. Somebody operating heavy machinery while talking on the phone is another blatantly obvious violation. They’re mistakes you don’t get without a pervasive culture of laxness towards safety. The fact there was a whole network of subcontractors on-site means that responsibility for on-site safety was too spread out for any real accountability to exist. Sounds like that site was a disaster waiting to happen, really.

People getting killed is never something to celebrate, but there is a certain degree of poetic justice in a company’s CEO dying to that company’s safety violations.
by kristofferR | 2025-12-24 08:38:49+00:00
No, it's the opposite, it's fairly damaging. Previously they could claim, dubiously but plausible, that all redactions were about protecting victims (the only redactions allowed under the act). A lot of the "undone redactions" are solely about protecting the abusers, illegal under the law.

Whether breaking a law actually matters anymore is another question though, as crime is legal now.
by vanviegen | 2025-12-24 08:39:07+00:00
I do not think your compiler argument in support of TCO is very convincing.

Do you really need to write compilers with limitless nesting? Or is nesting, say, 100.000 deep enough, perhaps?

Also, you'll usually want to allocate some data structure to create an AST for each level. So that means you'll have some finite limit anyway. And that limit is a lot easier to hit in the real world, as it applies not just to nesting depth, but to the entire size of your compilation unit.
by pan69 | 2025-12-24 08:39:23+00:00
> The combination of coincidences is striking

Why?

Someone decided to walk across the road, was wearing dark clothing, had an eyepatch on so he couldn't see one side of the road well, and was struck by a forklift while the operator was on the phone.

What combination of coincidences is striking? People are careless all the time.
by consumer451 | 2025-12-24 08:39:40+00:00
That entire thread is really interesting reading.

I feel the vibe. Two days ago my co-founder mentioned a more focused product, and a clear distribution pipeline. I created the frontend MVP using our old backend in a few hours.

I then tried to sleep. I woke up after 2-3hrs mid dream about chasing some active electronic device with a long cable tail. When I tried to grab it, it started to bleed.

DID NOT GO BACK TO SLEEP.

Instead, discovered and implemented Kontsa UI, then took a 3 hour nap, then base of all that, we appear to have secured runway for the next year.

Dreams aside, life is great.

I am very heavily product-pilled.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-24 08:40:06+00:00
Most things aren't absolutes. This is no exception. The vehicles can operate on their own the majority of the time. That is a form of autonomy, albeit incomplete.

You are subject to road signs, traffic, police directions, etc while driving. In the event of a natural disaster it seems feasible that you could end up in a situation where you don't know how you ought to proceed. So neither are you "free of external influence or control" in an absolute sense.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-24 08:40:11+00:00
>> I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers

> My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (...) since at least 2019. All her devices connect to it (...) Cost me 15€ in 2016.

I think this answers GP's question as (yet another) solid reason why manufacturers "can't understand" prosumer needs - it's because targeting prosumers, or making products that "just works", is very bad for sales down the line.
by user_7832 | 2025-12-24 08:40:35+00:00
> Beyond that you're clearly just trolling at this point

I think this is the greatest proof of the simultaneous validity of two different arguments. Disclaimer, I'm assuming (I think fairly) that you're in good faith.

The funny thing is, to me, the other commenter's arguments are quite clear/obvious to me and make sense. Not that your points are wrong - but... I'm 99% sure the other person isn't trolling in the slightest. Y'all are just talking across each other.
by renegade-otter | 2025-12-24 08:41:35+00:00
In the age of LLMs, "rewrite these actions to use XYZ instead" also makes this easier than ever. Not a one-shot solution, probably, but most likely not as challenging.

Microsoft thinks it has a moat by locking people in, but they ticked me off hard enough (finally) for me to switch my gaming Alienware rig to Mint. It starts faster, too.