MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by x0x0 | 2025-12-18 20:28:10+00:00
> There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation

Believe it or not, google is even more stunningly incompetent than that.

If you have someone in your contacts there literally is no way to (1) retain him/her, and (2) ensure they are never, ever, for any reason, suggested in any product. eg in google docs, I do not want "@" autocompletions to suggest the person. No sharing, no drive sharing, no email cc/bcc, etc.

In my case, there was a breakup with a cofounder / exit from a company and ongoing collaboration with a friend who shared the same first name. I actually had to delete the former cofounder's contact, which made me miss some calls from an unknown number.

Having someone that you need to occasionally maintain contact with that should never be prompted in any way (exes of all types, divorced, stalker) is a basic need in real-world systems.
by NavinF | 2025-12-18 20:28:21+00:00
> You can't get healthcare

Kinda thing only sheltered people say. When I was unemployed and on free gov't health insurance (medi-cal), I got all my healthcare for free and most of my appointments like MRIs were next-day. Not as good as tech company insurance, but "can't get healthcare" is not a thing in the US.

> you have to work three jobs

Plot the number of people working multiple jobs vs time and you'll see a flat line that has no correlation with the stuff mentioned in the article: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
by immibis | 2025-12-18 20:28:43+00:00
They say The Looker is made for two kinds of people: if you loved The Witness, you'll love The Looker, and if you hated The Witness, you'll love The Looker.

It's a pretty short game - a couple of hours, if you don't spend hours and hours stuck on one of the puzzles. (just look up a walkthrough at that point - the game's not so awesome to be worth spending hours stuck)
by hyghjiyhu | 2025-12-18 20:28:44+00:00
The "problem" is that a rent controlled apartment is some weird chimera of ownership and renting.

You could take the difference between the market rent and contract rent to calculate a subsidy. Then you could calculate the net present value of the future subsidy payments. This is often a very significant amount of money that you just lose if you move.

Another way of looking at it. Let's say you need 40sqm of space. You rent an apartment of 100sqm. These square meters don't bring you any joy of quality of life at all. If you owned you would move. If you rented at market rate you would move. But if you rent it at a controlled rent you must hold onto it for dear life because maybe you will need it when you start a family in the far future. Getting another contract this good could be very uncertain.
by hnlmorg | 2025-12-18 20:28:45+00:00
MCP, as a concept, is a great idea.

The problem isn’t having a standard way for agents to branch out. The problem is that AI is the new Javascript web framework: there’s nothing wrong with frameworks, but when everyone and their son are writing a new framework and half those frameworks barely work, you end up with a buggy, fragmented ecosystem.

I get why this happens. Startups want VC money, established companies then want to appear relevant, and then software engineers and students feel pressured to prove they’re hireable. And you end up with one giant pissing contest where half the players likely see the ridiculousness of the situation but have little choice other than to join party.
by tptacek | 2025-12-18 20:29:28+00:00
This comes up on every story about bug bounties. There is in general no market at all for XSS vulnerabilities. That might be different for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, because of the possibility of monetizing a single strike across a whole huge social network, and there's maybe a bank-shot argument for Discord, but you really have to do a lot of work to generate the monetization story for any of those.

The vulnerabilities that command real dollars all have half-lives, and can't be fixed with a single cluster of prod deploys by the victims.
by sershe | 2025-12-18 20:29:33+00:00
How is it different in terms of breach of professional ethics than practice interviews many in tech do, never intending to take the offer? I personally have never done them (part laziness, part ethics, part lucky to have little experience of job insecurity), but have been told a few times by people that do that is stupid that I should stay sharp (and waste 5 people's time to help me for free :))
by cthalupa | 2025-12-18 20:30:52+00:00
I would argue that his general stance on COVID is HIGHLY relevant and not poisoning the well, as is his general stance on other science-related topics, which climate change definitely is. If someone claims that COVID doesn't even exist then I think it is quite fair to immediately discard anything they have to say on this topic.

Mentioning his racism is perhaps poisoning the well, but the other stuff I think is relevant.
by bena | 2025-12-18 20:31:11+00:00
The tax code (at least in the US, YMMV in other countries) is already progressive. Making more will never have you taking home less.

However, most welfare systems have hard cutoffs. If you get $500 in SNAP a month and make $500 a month, you have $1000 to last a month. And if the cutoff is $501, making that one extra dollar is going to cost you $499.

What would be more difficult, also gameable, but better all around is to have benefits adjusted to get people to a baseline.

Say the poverty level is $1000 a month. You get $1000 - X, where X is how much you made in that month.
by som | 2025-12-18 20:31:18+00:00
Yep no doubt FF users cut from a slightly different cloth than those who choose GAMS browsers.

But as an old-school Firefox user, with a slieu of mobile extensions installed and a healthy cynicism about our swan dive into the dark sea of AI ... I have no problem at all with the statements from Mozilla. Outsiders can argue all day about intent, it's the actions that count.
by vessenes | 2025-12-18 20:31:24+00:00
I've built a number of MCP servers, including an MCP wrapper. I'd generally recommend you skip it unless you know you need it. Conversely, I'd generally recommend you write up a couple skills ASAP to get a feel for them. It will take you 20 minutes to write and test some.

MCP does three things conceptually: it lets you build a bridge between an agent and <something else>, it specifies a UI+API layer between the bridge and the LLM, and it formalizes the description of that bridge in a tool-calling format.

It's that UI+API layer that's the biggest pain in the ass, in my opinion. Sometimes you need it; for instance, if you wanted an agent to access your emails, a high quality MCP server that can't destroy your life through enthusiastic tool calling makes sense.

If, however, you have, say a CLI tool or simple API that's reasonably self documenting and you're willing to have it run, and/or if you need specific behavior with a different context setting, then a skill can just be a markdown file that explains what, how, why.
by CupricTea | 2025-12-18 20:31:49+00:00
That community has no oversight for what gets posted. It's a free-for-all for anyone to gather (read: cherrypick) low quality information and present it in an overtly sensationalist way and intentionally misrepresent what they quote.

They have no standards, no oversight, no formal methodology, so naturally it attracts gossip-oriented people who want to stir up drama for fun.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-18 20:31:51+00:00
I can't see these "societies" as anything more than toys for rich people. They simply aren't real. Creating a real society with so few people just doesn't work. You have to rely on a lot of input to make the society work which means you are defacto relying on the external structures to make your utopia function.

These are nothing more than going to weird conferences for an extended time at best, and the setup of a cult compound at worst.

Consider basic things like "How do we get food, water, sewage, trash taken care of". No way these little societies aren't simply fudging when it comes to those problems.
by mindslight | 2025-12-18 20:32:15+00:00
No, that seems like a lazy technologist approach of reflexively hanging your hat on database queries. Police do actual police work like physically collecting evidence, seeing if they indicate any particular kind of gun or known ballistics, reconstructing the encounter, etc.

Also FWIW in MA firearms aren't licensed, rather their owners are. And ownership isn't registered, rather many types of transfers are supposed to be recorded.
by SunlitCat | 2025-12-18 20:32:58+00:00
The problem with DX12/Vulkan isn’t just that “low-level control is hard”, it’s that a lot of performance-critical decisions are now exposed at a level where they’re extremely GPU- and generation-specific. The same synchronization strategy, command ordering, or memory usage can work great on one GPU and badly on another.

A GPU ISA wouldn’t fix that, it would push even more of those decisions onto the developer.

An ISA only really helps if the underlying execution and memory model is reasonably stable and uniform. That’s true for CPUs, which is why x86 works. GPUs are the opposite: different wave sizes, scheduling models, cache behavior, tiling, memory hierarchies, and those things change all the time. If a GPU ISA is abstract enough to survive that, it’s no longer a useful performance target. If it’s concrete enough to matter for performance, it becomes brittle and quickly outdated.

DX12 already moved the abstraction line downward. A GPU ISA would move it even further down. The issues being discussed here are largely a consequence of that shift, not something solved by continuing it.

What the blog post is really arguing for is the opposite direction: higher-level, more declarative APIs, where you describe what you want rendered and let the driver/hardware decide how to execute it efficiently on a given GPU. That’s exactly what drivers are good at, and it’s what made older APIs more robust across vendors in the first place.

So while a GPU ISA is an interesting idea in general, it doesn’t really address the problem being discussed here.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-18 20:33:29+00:00
I'm surprised Google Docs doesn't support all the features lawyers need by now. Seems like a market they'd want to go after, and their .docx conversion seems decent enough for basic formatting, tables, etc.

Curious what the top 3 features are that are missing. The article only mentions multi-level decimal clause numbering (e.g. 9.1.2). Seems like it would be a very easy feature to add. I've heard that line numbering is also a big legal thing, but Docs already has that.
by monegator | 2025-12-18 20:33:36+00:00
Not ones from Jetbrains.

I've use eclipse many times in the past, and hated every second of it. Stupid defaults, very stupid defaults.

I also don't like visual studio, the way it forces me to work with "solutions", like i can't have two different projects open at the same time.

Netbeans instead, that always felt so natural to me. And MPLABX is of course the one i use most of the time (like 60%, then 10% VSCode and 20% Qt)

I also really like Qt Creator, for generic C++ development too. And i would probably feel at home with KDevelop
by shlip | 2025-12-18 20:33:37+00:00
It's not clear if the app was removed AND their account terminated, or if the account was terminated, and the app disappeared from the store as a consequence ?

Looks like LocalDevVPN is next then... ?

For those wondering, StikDebug is "An on-device debugger/JIT enabler for iOS versions 17.4+, powered by idevice."
by stephen_cagle | 2025-12-18 20:33:47+00:00
You know, this is kind of a funny take at some level. Like, for any surgery, you want the doctor who has done the same operation 10 times, not the one who has 10 years of "many hat doctoring" experience.

I'm not really arguing anything here, but it is interesting that we value breadth over (hopefully) depth/mastery of a specific thing in regards to what we view as "Senior" in software.
by itchyouch | 2025-12-18 20:34:13+00:00
While I can't speak to whether there are enzymes for the proper copy/paste I do have a set of random cancer related bits I've picked up over the years.

There are some basic, well-known nutritional interventions that are generally important/critical for DNA repair processes. The 2 main ones are Vitamin D and Magnesium. Ensuring adequate amount of these tend to be helpful (most folks aren't getting enough sun and greens).

Other than that, a steady and adequate source of the substrates seems to be important: ie protein (nitrogen), and phosphates.

One of the interesting bits about some cancer cells is that while they simply haven't gone through apoptosis, physical sheer stress incurred from physical activity (exercise) can cause cancer cells that travel beyond the tumor point (before it becomes metastatic) to finally self destruct.

It seems important to me that the best strategy for cancer is the compounding of many different strategies that optimize the body's innate defenses to run optimally.

It does seem that ketogenic diets may have adjuvant properties, but there is yet to be a clinical trial that demonstrates it, so it's basically stuck in paper and R&D stages as to whether being in a ketogenic state can be one of the last areas that may help cancer patients extend lifetime from say 1 year to 2 years.
by firefax | 2025-12-18 20:35:02+00:00
I've been doing all my personal notes etc that I want a rich text format in .ODT for decades now and don't regret it one bit.

I do regret being overly paranoid in my 20s and not writing down my master passphrase to my personal documents -- I lost a huge chunk of diaries and writings due to that.

Fun fact: ODT uses Blowfish encryptio. Remember when we made Bruce Schnierer a meme like Chuck Norris? He wrote it -- apparently it's faster than AES?

Anyways, if you save with password in a .ODT file, if you pick a strong password you've got a nice little self contained encrypted volume that doesn't require "suspicious" software to open.

ANYWAYS, a bit of a tangent but... looking forward to death of Word.
by valleyer | 2025-12-18 20:35:02+00:00
POSIX does not specify the init/rc script system, so it's not a factor here at all. A POSIX-compliant system could use Python scripts. macOS (which is UNIX 03 certified) uses launchd. A POSIX system has to ship the shell, not use it.

And FreeBSD isn't actually POSIX-certified anyway!

The real consideration here is simply that there are tons of existing rc scripts for BSDs, and switching them all would be a large task.
by tomhow | 2025-12-18 20:35:03+00:00
Thanks you.

For the record, I replied "Fine!" as a friendly acknowledgement of the community winning the argument. I collapsed some of the subthreads, because, at the time, these meta subthreads were taking up most of the main thread. However I deliberately left some uncollapsed – even though we would normally have collapsed all of them – so as not to hide the fact that there was debate about the title. I also turned off default penalties (flamewar detector, flags) and restored the submission to the front page to give it more exposure.
by asdfsfds | 2025-12-18 20:35:12+00:00
The Airbnbs mentioned rented throughout the year in monthly periods, so they fill a different niche. The new law kills not only short term stays but everything that goes through an online provider (except multi-year contracts).

When I first arrived here I relied on these long stay airbnbs until I could find a way through the byzantine Spanish rental process. Now this option will no longer exist.

Again, you are not familiar with Spanish politics if you think this is by accident. I have myself given up on any attempts of doing business here after I spent 1 year waiting for a certain business license and could only obtain it (in a week) after a chance friendship with a local notary. :)
by dbdr | 2025-12-18 20:35:23+00:00
> this will never work because governments will never allow for disintermediation of their currency because it’s one of, if not THE, primary sources of control over a population

Isn't this similar to saying "democracy will never work because kings will never allow it"?

I'm not saying it's exactly the same, just the fact that some existing power structures do not like the change does not guarantee they will manage to stop it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
by hbn | 2025-12-18 20:35:37+00:00
It's not trying to be Portal. It's a Sokoban game. If you like playing Sokoban games, here's a package of ~1400 hand-crafted puzzles, probably with a handful of interesting gimmicks/rule alterations to spice things up.

> At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay.

Unfortunately we're not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it'll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-12-18 20:35:52+00:00
> Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever

This is so fascinating to me, because when I really get a piece of creative art, like I thought I did with both Braid and The Witness, I usually feel like I get some insight and empathy with the person who created it. Yet every time I read or hear from Jonathan Blow ... I do not feel that. So, I guess I've been challenged by art again, hooray!
by mkagenius | 2025-12-18 20:36:16+00:00
I doubt that. MCPs are broader. You can serve a Skill via a MCP but the reverse may not be always true.

For example, you can't have a directory named "Stripe-Skills" which will give you a breakdown of last week's revenue (unless you write in the skills how to connect to stripe and get that information). So, most of the remote, existing services are better used as MCPs (essentially APIs).
Show HN: Eval based agent builder (pls roast us)
by akshay326 | 2025-12-18 20:36:43+00:00
Hi HN! We're fellow devs tinkering with agents like everyone.

We believe sometimes its worth spending more time aligning on agent goals & evals before coding for e.g. spec alignment, generating evals, provisioning sandboxes, etc.

Right now our package only works for langchain agents & supports a few MCPs. Roasts are welcome.
by decafninja | 2025-12-18 20:36:58+00:00
Controversial and possibly politically incorrect take, but the People's Republic of China sends many, many, of its citizens to study at top universities and work at top companies all over the world. I'm sure even at sensitive defense related orgs too.

While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.

Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.

And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.
by kh_hk | 2025-12-18 20:37:28+00:00
A side-effect of running rootless and daemonless is that containers stop on user log out, and I can't believe how all this is to be expected for a newcomer to parse. Because I thought the whole point of containers in production was for them to keep running when you log out.

Of course, when you think about it, nobody expects a command to just survive logging out, but coming from docker, you still have that expectation. And I wonder, am I supposed to be running this on a tmux like the old days? No, you need to do a bunch of systemd/linger/stuff. So being that we are already in systemd land, you keep searching and end up in quadlets, which are a new-ish thing with (last I checked) bad docs, replacing whatever was used before (which has good docs). Docs, being said, that give k8s ptsd. Quadlet, podlet and pods.

It seems that when podman deviates from docker, it does in the least ergonomic way possible. Or maybe I have been lobotomized by years and years of using docker, or maybe my patience threshold is very low nowadays. But this has been my experience. I felt very stupid when I deployed something and it stopped after 5 minutes. I was ready to use podman, because it worked locally. And then it failed in production. Thanks no.
Ask HN: Why are some innovations from previous AI cycles forgotten about?
by dch82 | 2025-12-18 20:37:36+00:00
Take for example Expert Systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system) which are AI systems designed to make logical inferences. They had systems that could do accurate logical inferences in the 1970s, and even designed a VAX chip (SID) and made medical diagnosises (MYCIN) [apparently] to a level at or above many physicians.

Why are innovations like these (another example being genetic algorithms) ignored and forgotten about even though they work better in logical problems which LLMs suck at?
by fsflover | 2025-12-18 20:37:50+00:00
> A bog-standard ARM or x86_64 cell phone that loads all its kernel modules from a bog standard Linux installation any distro, standard LTS kernel

This sounds almost like Librem 5, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem-5, which can run different GNU/Linux distros, has open schematics. Not everything is mainstreamed for it yet, but it's progressing: https://puri.sm/posts/how-to-be-upstream-first/

> Extra extra bonus if most of the parts are user serviceable, especially the battery and modem so that phone can evolve with the LTE and Wifi standards.

Imdeed, it has removable modem, WiFi card, battery. People were able to get 5G working on it, https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem5-5g-is-here-modem-sim8202g-t...
by arjie | 2025-12-18 20:38:34+00:00
I like many of these attempts at creating new communities. One thing I have noticed with many of them is that none of them have progressed to the point where there is a first follower - someone who isn't part of the originating culture but is induced by something to join. As an example of one that I find interesting is the Esmeralda project, led by Devon Zuegel. These things select for the kind of people who will attend a talk on crypto, rationalism, urbanism and so on every evening. I imagine that this is intentional to start with. You need some critical mass of true believers to get things off the ground.

But is that really the property of every successful community? I imagine that, like a tree, the majority of us are the trunk, the phloem that conducts the resources through, so that there are leaves and fruit and so on. I have no problem being the trunk of such a community, but I don't think I can be the fruit.

I don't mean in a non-participatory sense. I mean that if the leaders are the High Priests, then the rest of these people are the rest of the clergymen, but they have no laymen at the sermon yet.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-18 20:38:39+00:00
Agreed. The $20 plans can go very far when you're using the coding agent as an additional tool in your development flow, not just trying to hammer it with prompts until you get output that works.

Managing context goes a long way, too. I clear context for every new task and keep the local context files up to date with key info to get the LLM on target quickly