MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: WhatHappened – HN summaries, heatmaps, and contrarian picks
by marsw42 | 2025-12-08 19:55:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I built WhatHappened (whathappened.tech) because I have a love/hate relationship with this site. I love the content, but the "wall of text" UI gives me FOMO. I was spending too much time clicking into vague titles ("Project X") or wading through flame wars just to find technical insights.

I built this tool to act as a filter. It generates a card for the top daily posts with a few specific features to cut the noise:

1. AI Summaries: It generates a technical TL;DR (3 bullet points) and an ELI5 version for every post.

2. The Heat Meter: I analyze the comment section to visualize the distribution: Constructive vs. Technical vs. Flame War. If a thread is 90% Flame War, I know to skip it (or grab popcorn).

3. Contrarian Detection: To break the echo chamber, the AI specifically hunts for the most upvoted disagreement or critique in the comments and pins it to the card.

4. Mobile-First PWA: I mostly read HN on my phone, so I designed this as a PWA. It supports swipe gestures and installs to the home screen without an app store.

Stack: Next.js, Gemini, Supabase.

It currently supports English and Chinese. Any feedback will be appreciated! My original X post: https://x.com/marsw42/status/1997087957556318663, please share if you like it or find it helpful! :D

Thanks!
by CrimsonCape | 2025-12-08 19:55:25+00:00
I been using C# since .Net Framework 4.6, jumped to .Net 6, and have kept up to .Net 9 when starting new projects.

My advice is to download .Net 9 SDK because it's now super easy to create a file with extension .cs, put your terminal window next to your code, and call `dotnet run file.cs` and it just works. The compiler will teach you a lot because the errors are extremely easy to follow.

I never bought into books because too many language features have been added in the past years that improve on "old" ways.

The only complaint I have is that Google is still the best interface for navigating the docs. Spamming google over and over. Solving this in an easily greppable way is on my wishlist.

Especially because I see the MSDN docs are rolling out new "Did you want to generate a sample of this? Here's a prompt you can copy paste into Copilot to generate an example: xxxxxxx blah blah"
by chasil | 2025-12-08 19:55:29+00:00
If you are buying now, you want a device on a v5 Linux kernel with BPF support, where the bootloader can be unlocked and VoLTE is implemented in the 3rd-party ROM.

LineageOS has a build roster of current devices at this URL:

https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/

The Pixels are the most flexible, but don't buy a model from Verizon (they don't allow unlocked bootloaders).

Most other OEMs require you to generate an unlock token and send it to them, then wait a week, which is extrememly inconvenient (and sometimes they just stop and refuse, as I understand OnePlus has).

If you want a locked bootloader at the end of the process for security, then you will be on a later Pixel with Graphene.
by ev1lkow | 2025-12-08 19:56:18+00:00
I’m one of the researchers at Aurascape Aura Labs who worked on this.

We’ve been investigating a real‑world campaign where scammers seed GEO/AEO‑optimized content across the web so that LLM‑powered answer engines (Perplexity, Google AI Overview, etc.) surface fraudulent “customer support” phone numbers as if they were official airline lines.

A few things we found:

Perplexity answers queries like “the official Emirates Airlines reservations number” or “how can I make a reservation with British Airways by phone” with step‑by‑step instructions that prominently include a scam call‑center number.

Google’s AI Overview has, in some cases, recommended the same ecosystem of fake numbers for Emirates reservations in the US.

The numbers are backed by a lot of poisoned content: PDFs on compromised .gov/.edu/WordPress sites, MapMyRun route pages hosting uploaded spam PDFs, bot‑generated Yelp reviews, and YouTube channels where titles/descriptions are stuffed with airline keywords and phone numbers.

Even when ChatGPT or Claude return the correct number, their citations sometimes include these poisoned sources, which suggests the GEO/AEO spam is already influencing the retrieval layer across multiple models.

From our perspective this isn’t a jailbreak or prompt‑injection problem so much as a new LLM index poisoning / answer‑engine optimization issue: attackers are optimizing content specifically to be retrieved, trusted, and summarized by generative systems.

The post includes:

concrete screenshots for Perplexity and Google AI Overview

an explanation of how the GEO/AEO spam is structured

a non‑exhaustive list of indicators of compromise (phone numbers + abused hosts)

some mitigation ideas for LLM vendors, brands, and platforms like YouTube/Yelp

Feedback very welcome — especially from people working on LLM retrieval/ranking, safety, or abuse detection. Happy to clarify any part of the methodology or data.
by whynotminot | 2025-12-08 19:56:19+00:00
It’s weird to have vague, non-business expectations built into a yearly performance review.

If you can give me some more examples I’m happy to hear them.

So far, commentators have listed:

(1) dietary considerations for team meals. (2) participation in company ERGs (this has never been compulsory at any company I’ve worked at). (3) making up a series of words they hope will appease managers

None of this seems like it should be part of a yearly performance package?

Personally, if I had celiacs and found out people were using ordering me a gluten-free pizza as a critical input to their yearly performance reviews, I’d probably be a little weirded out. But then maybe I’d be one of the more popular folks in the office come lunch-and-learn day, so pros and cons I guess.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-08 19:56:52+00:00
> When you start needing things like undo/redo you suspiciously start architecting something that smells like the elm architecture.

Well Iced itself claims to be inspired by the Elm Arch, so that checks out (see the first line under the Overview section of the Readme https://github.com/iced-rs/iced )
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-08 19:57:26+00:00
You can get ghosted on IM too. Just ask anyone on tinder lol.

The downside of IM like Telegram or Matrix or Slack is that it's a broadcast bottle-in-the-sea way of communication. It's everyone's job to answer there, thus it's no one's job to answer there. OTOH contact mail boxes are often direct at people whose job is to read it.
by jibal | 2025-12-08 19:57:56+00:00
Internal monologue is a like a war correspondent's report of the daily battle. The journalist didn't plan or fight the battle, they just provided an after-the-fact description. Likewise the brain's thinking--a highly parallelized process involving billions of neurons--is not done with words.

Play a little game of "what word will I think of next?" ... just let it happen. Those word choices are fed to the monologue, they aren't a product of it.
by rtkwe | 2025-12-08 19:57:58+00:00
I think it's pretty easy to see on the face of it that a direct access for anyone to potentially reach everyone is a massive change from a system where that gets filtered through media companies. We don't really have to decide how much of which effect we attribute to that it's a fundamental reordering of the ecosystem of media production and consumption.

It was even easier before genAI and NLP where you could reliably say they're not really putting forward precise variants of genres because there just wasn't the capability of distinguishing (and still to this day I think they'd have trouble) genuine vs bait versions of videos. I think people want to believe the algorithm is more manipulated than it is generally because it serves a bunch of junk and it's more appealing to believe it's being pushed rather than that's just what people consume a lot of.

For a completely anecdotal bit of anecdata I've had good luck over the years with stuff like the Youtube algorithm because I've been fairly judicious with the "don't show me this" button(s) and I habitually watch stuff I know is pure junk food in an incognito window instead of on my 'main' feed.
by catigula | 2025-12-08 19:58:08+00:00
Category error. Intelligence is a different type of thing. It is not a boring technology.

>Give humanity's wellbeing the highest weight on its training

We don't even know how to do this relatively trivial thing. We only know how to roughly train for some signals that probably aren't correct.

This may surprise you but alignment is not merely unsolved; there are many people who think it's unsolvable.

Why do people eat artificially sweetened things? Why do people use birth control? Why do people watch pornography? Why do people do drugs? Why do people play video games? Why do people watch moving lights and pictures? These are all symptoms of humans being misaligned.

Natural selection would be very angry with us if it knew we didn't care about what it wanted.
by enthdegree | 2025-12-08 19:58:09+00:00
The latest Kobos use MediaTek SoCs with locked bootloaders. The Kobo Clara BW's MT8113, for example. As far as I know, one of the early bootloaders it, BL1, refuses to execute the next bootloader (BL2) unless its signature is valid. We can get the device into a mode where BL1 waits for upload of a BL2 via USB using an exploit called Kamakiri, but in public there is neither an exploit to get BL1 to boot an arbitrary BL2, nor an authorized BL2 image to upload. See here: https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1332

Kobo devices have root exposed but don't let users boot their own kernels (and the kernel they ship was not compiled with kexec either).

I really don't know the reason so many devices these days don't have an unlock method. It seems predatory. Who knows where in the chain this happens... maybe it's Kobo, or maybe MediaTek won't sell you their SoCs for mass-market devices unless you lock them.
by BigHatLogan | 2025-12-08 19:58:54+00:00
Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself.

I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that. I'm not discounting any of that, but what does this actually mean or look like in your day-to-day life? I'm working at a mid-sized company right now. I use Cursor and some other tools, but I can't help but wonder if I'm still falling behind or doing something wrong.

Does anybody have any thoughts or suggestions on this? The landscape and horizon just seems so foggy to me right now.
by clemvonstengel | 2025-12-08 19:58:57+00:00
Basically correct intuition: the model does much better when we give it, e.g., 30 secs of neural data in the leadup instead of e.g. 5 secs. My sense is also that it's learning in context, so people's neural patterns are quite different but there's a higher-level generator that lets the model learn in context (or probably multiple higher-level patterns, each of which the model can learn from in context).

We only got any generalization to new users after we had >500 individuals in the dataset, fwiw. There's some interesting MRI studies also finding a similar thing that when you have enough individuals in the dataset, you start seeing generalization.
by BizarroLand | 2025-12-08 19:59:04+00:00
The other thing is that they're FORCING it on the users. Its invasive and creepy and assaulty and it has multiplied my loathing of Microsoft infinitely.

Someone in Microsoft needs to watch a lecture on affirmative consent.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing with AI, both local and online. If you tell me its available if I want it, I might come dabble a bit.

But cram AI into every facet of my machine? That's a 1 way ticket to never being installed on any system I ever own in the future ever again.

Companies should treat AI like a madam treats the workers in a whorehouse. You don't make them go door to door. You let the johns come to you.
by ThrowawayB7 | 2025-12-08 19:59:50+00:00
We've been hearing empty punditry like that for the last several decades all while they've been a poster child for "number go up": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...

These predictions about the decline of Microsoft are like the Year of Linux on the Desktop; neither is going to happen anytime soon. Y'all can start predicting doom when there's a multi-year trend of declining revenue for MSFT and then maybe there's something to discuss.
by secstate | 2025-12-08 19:59:50+00:00
e-recycling is only marginally better than a landfill. At least a landfill in pseudo-regulated government economy has the chance to be safely abated in 100 years. Though a few things of value are sometimes extracted, mostly it all ends in places like Turkey or India and burned or buried.

Sorry for the cynical take, but patronizing folks like this is worse than cynicism because it suggests that you actually believe what you're saying is true.
by kevlened | 2025-12-08 19:59:54+00:00
> Find me a “lights out” factory. They don’t exist.

"Inside China's 'dark factories' where robots run the production lines" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw

"China’s Dark Factories: So Automated, They Don't Need Lights" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
by opan | 2025-12-08 20:00:00+00:00
It's a technique to temporarily make one or more duplicates of your body which can move independently and have your memories/abilities. A strong enough hit will dispel them, or the user can do it manually, after which the memories of what the clones did return to the user.

The usage here by GP might just be because everyone looks/is-dressed the same and is working in unison, and since they're Japanese, anime comes to mind. In the show, Naruto often uses shadow clones to pull off more complex techniques, throwing himself, having them take turns punching/kicking, or in the case of the rasengan he divides the work of controlling the ball of chakra since he struggled to do it successfully by himself.
by underlipton | 2025-12-08 20:00:18+00:00
Pure anecdata. However, the change from the first two days I multi-apped and made almost 3 times my usual hourly rate, to the following weekend, when

>neither app would send me orders for up to half an hour

>as soon as one had assigned me and order, the other would start sending my multiple per minute

>all of these orders were either comically low-compensation (no tip), a 15-minute-plus drive away from the order I'd just accepted (to areas it had never sent me before), or both

was marked.
Anthropic Sends Statsig Your User ID,IP,Email and Where to Find a SugarDaddy
by miceprincipal | 2025-12-08 20:00:19+00:00
I was boredly thinking about capturing Claude chat edits and so poking about in elements and found what looked like leaking user data. Turned out to be odd sample prompts.

When searched (using the word Sarah from one of the prompts) statsig?statsig... came up. Pasted the url https://claude.ai/api/bootstrap/user-id/statsig and found a thrilling 15,400+ line json complete with user id, email, IP, location, full hashed experiment list which can be used to intuit a fair amount of data if you're bored enough, internal code names for Claude models and features, country service levels, client list, an ever handy complete list of crisis numbers, blah blah...

Handily one experiment appears to be a highly cryptic thrree category (effectively 2) list of websites and it has a lot of mundane stuff but dear god it has an exhaustive* but confusinngly incomplete list pron, sugar daddy, affair, piracy, streaming, torrent etc sites that appears to have been lovingly curated by someone. For the life of me I cannot fathom its purpose due to the obvious exclusions and inclusions not making much sense as a blacklist.

I raised it with anthropic and they did the equivalent of a shrug saying come back if you find a vulnerability.... fair enough, access control does seem to work... It doesn't entirely seem in the spirit of GDPR data minimization at the very least...

Reproduce: Start claude.ai web chat or open existing. Hit f12 or work out how the hell to spidermash it on your stupid 60% keyboard that's mostly stubs now Sources/search "Sarah" Click wildly on statsig until you realise it's already opened a console tab. Copy Url and paste into browser. Prettify before your eyes melt.
by salt-thrower | 2025-12-08 20:00:37+00:00
Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether.

Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with the online console gaming experience. Halo was an untouchable juggernaut of a series for the first 3 titles.

It's mind boggling that Microsoft just let all that die without a fight. Worse, they seem to have actively shot themselves in the foot and then given up.
by jibal | 2025-12-08 20:01:12+00:00
Thermometers and human brains are both mechanisms. Why would one be capable of measuring temperature and other capable of learning abstract thought?

> If it turns out that LLMs don't model human brains well enough to qualify as "learning abstract thought" the way humans do, some future technology will do so. Human brains aren't magic, special or different.

Google "strawman".
by cmiles8 | 2025-12-08 20:01:13+00:00
The circular funding is concerning, but more concerning are suggestions that supply might be vastly exceeding demand. Not that people don’t want chips but that the chip production now exceeds the ability to power them up and use them. The shortage is power and racks in data centers ready to go. Folks are running numbers suggesting there’s a bunched chips now just sitting around.

That, combined with some cooling from an AI hype bubble burst (see separate articles about companies missing quota as folks aren’t buying as much AI as the hype hoped) and there’s a potential ugly future where the headline demand plummets in top of idle chips waiting to be powered on. Suddenly the market is flooded with chips nobody wants.
by lloeki | 2025-12-08 20:01:19+00:00
> But "chs" is just nonsensical. The idea that it would sound like "sh" is baffling

In the word "french" C H is pronounced sh and nobody bats an eye, I don't think it's that outlandish that someone once read it as fuch-sia, incorrectly splitting it compared to the original.

In the language French, fuchsia is unequivocally read something more like few-shia, and I'd bet that even though it comes from German Fuchs-ia (fooks-ia) English has picked it up from the French side.

If you find such a loanword weird, don't you dare try reading Japanese.

https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-th...
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 20:01:47+00:00
Yeah, the specific capabilities and operations of intelligence agencies like the NSA are a topic I’ve spent far too much of my life obsessing about. Fortunately, mostly because I’ve been paid to do so, but I should really find better things to do with my free time than rehashing work stuff in HN comments.

I think we broadly agree on the details, and whatever differences remain are probably mostly attributable to us looking at the topic from slightly different angles. There's probably not much more we could usefully address on this topic via HN comments, so it is probably a good time to conclude :)

If the story behind the shadow brokers leaks is of interest to you, I dumped some details in a reply to a now-flagged thread. It's quite the rabbit hole if you want to dig into it, especially with the whole Hal Martin situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46186975
by throw0101d | 2025-12-08 20:02:15+00:00
> Except there is robust competition in media —be it news, social, etc.

As of a few years ago, there were six corporations owning 90% of US media: NewsCorp, TimeWarner, Comcast, Disney, Viacom, Sony.

* https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/fs5g0b/more_tha...

* https://techstartups.com/2020/09/18/6-corporations-control-9...

Add to that local channel ownership (like Sinclair) concentration:

* https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/media-consolidation-me...

* https://www.vox.com/2018/4/6/17202824/sinclair-tribune-map

* https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/broadcasters-urge-fcc-to-h...

This is especially true when it comes to investigative journalism, where it may take weeks or months to run down leads and information.
by Jtsummers | 2025-12-08 20:02:19+00:00
I've done both.

> your text first expounds on a naive solution to the problem

That's not how every literate program is written, nor is it the entire purpose of literate programming.

> Or do you write one literate program, and then update the file containing the text of your program after you realize the better solution—no different from anyone writing conventional programs—thus thwarting the fundamental promise of LP (since the "why" of changes like that—and the absence of answers to those whys—is exactly what makes it such a battle to understand unfamiliar programs). [emphasis added]

I think you misunderstand LP. Keeping history is not essential to literate programming. Having a series of evolving programs from naive to fastest possible is not the point of LP. Having an explanation of the program with the code is the point of LP.

Sometimes that means leaving history, sometimes it means removing it. A literate program is not a dead program. It's a living object that can be edited and changed over time. Keep the elements that are essential to the text. If the naive version is clearer (often it is) then retain it so you can explain the more complex fast version as it relates to the naive version. If it has no explanatory value, then drop it. If you implemented something incorrectly, it's not necessarily worth keeping unless the wrongness of it has value in itself.
by aanet | 2025-12-08 20:02:25+00:00
Lucky you to have visited Buffet's house!

I "visited" Buffet's house about a decade ago or so when I drove from Chicago to the Bay Area to move there.

"Visited" is rather generous - I went by it, saw some security, took some selfies and pics, and paid my respects at the Steakhouse :) Now I wish I had sought an opportunity to visit him in person.

Anyhow... BRKB has been in my portfolio for 20+ years. (Now dwarfed by other Tech equity)
by itsdrewmiller | 2025-12-08 20:02:39+00:00
It looks like in practice the most generous of these programs are not accessible to most working poor, so the charts here are more theoretical than practical. It also doesn't address income tax-free earnings (traditional 401k and IRA) - it seems like those generally don't count against your eligibility for programs and could shelter ~25k or more for the self-employed. Not that I imagine most people actually near poverty are maxing out their retirement accounts, even if it theoretically costs them nothing or even gains them value.
by qwertyastronaut | 2025-12-08 20:03:08+00:00
I don’t know if it’s 90%, but I’m shipping in 2 days things that took 2-4 weeks before.

Opus 4.5 in particular has been a profound shift. I’m not sure how software dev as a career survives this. I have nearly 0 reason to hire a developer for my company because I just write a spec and Claude does it in one shot.

It’s honestly scary, and I hope my company doesn’t fail because as a developer I’m fucked. But… statistically my business will fail.

I think in a few years there will only be a handful of software companies—the ones who already have control of distribution. Products can be cloned in a few weeks now; not long until it’s a few minutes. I used to see a new competitor once every six months. Now I see a new competitor every few hours.