MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by janeway | 2025-12-15 16:55:02+00:00
A sign says: "Dogs must be carried on the escalator."

At first glance it seems clear. On a second read, it becomes obvious that what matters is not the dogs, but whether they are being carried.

Grandma calls out: "The chicken is ready to eat."

Many system outputs have the same problem. They look definitive, but they silently hide whether the required conditions were ever met.

When systems consume outputs from black-box algorithms, the usual options are to trust the conclusion or ignore it entirely.

In clinical genomics, the latter is traditional. For example, the British Society for Genetic Medicine advises clinicians not to act on results from external genomic services https://bsgm.org.uk/media/12844/direct-to-consumer-genomic-t...

This post describes a third approach, grounded in computer science. Before any interpretation, systems should record whether verifiable evidence is actually available.

The standard adds a small but strict step. Each rule first reports whether it could be checked at all: yes, no, or not evaluable. Then the evidence is used in reverse, not to confirm the result, but to try to rule it out. If removing or negating that evidence would change the outcome, it counts as real evidence. If not, it does not.

Crucially, this forces a simple question: could the same result have appeared even if the evidence were absent or different? Only when the answer is no does the result actually count as evidence.

The idea comes from genomics, where hospitals, companies, and research groups need to share results without exposing proprietary methods, but it applies anywhere systems reason over incomplete or black-box data.
by fsniper | 2025-12-15 16:55:24+00:00
A music player for my 2 years old son. There are premade toys like Yoto player. But what is the fun in buying ready made?

esp32+sdcard reader+gc9a01 lcd and a pcm5102a+xh-a232 (overkill 30W! solution! Will replace in time)

Add some 3d printed enclosure and you are done. I am currently vibe coding a UI into it. I am planning to cram in adsp Bluetooth speaker support and some web config, maybe ota updates..
by unbelievably | 2025-12-15 16:55:52+00:00
$50 bucks gets you an EIGHTH of a vCPU, 1GB RAM, and 10GB SSD??? This is quite frankly highway robbery. Not to mention the laughable bandwidth. Hetzner will give you 16 vCPU, 32GB RAM, and 640GB SSD for less than that. We're talking over an order of magnitude difference in value here.
by gpderetta | 2025-12-15 16:56:41+00:00
Interesting use case.

> It sounds totally fixable, but then you either have two types of function types, one where all parameter names are qualified and one where they aren't and only could use the former for function definitions

Making the names part of the type would be a bit weird, although we have seen stranger things. The biggest problem is that it would be a breaking change at least in C++.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-15 16:57:11+00:00
That’s not the questions people will ask though. They’ll go “what body temperature is too high?” Baby temperatures are not the same as ours. The threshold for fevers and such are different.

They will ask “how much water should my newborn drink?” That’s a dangerous thing to get wrong (outside of certain circumstances, the answer is “none.” Milk/formula provides necessary hydration).

They will ask about healthy food alternatives - what if it tells them to feed their baby fresh honey on some homemade concoction (botulism risk)?

People googled this stuff before, but a basic search doesn’t respond with you about how it’s right and consistently feed you emotionally bad info in the same fashion.
by Delphiza | 2025-12-15 16:57:16+00:00
In my experience, marketers wanted quick and catchy copy to post on linked-in and copywriters obliged. It reached a point where the content was irrelevant. You just had to get something posted on linked-in and get engagement. It was all slop long before AI came along. Nothing useful is posted (to linked-in) because the quality of the posts has been so low for so long that you don't even notice that it is turned into AI slop. All corporate 'news' and 'blog' pages are the same. Copywriters left us a long time ago.
by neutronicus | 2025-12-15 16:57:22+00:00
Hmm.

I learned Hebrew in Duolingo and I've in fact spoken many sentences to natives. All the Israeli women we know are always negatively comparing their American Jewish husbands to me, the goy who learned Hebrew from Duolingo.

Granted, those natives are either married to me or related to someone who is. So maybe that component is essential.
by gethly | 2025-12-15 16:57:29+00:00
Something trivial as matching people based on interest. We have social networks and various marketplaces but we are still unable to pair/match people based on desired activities, items for sale, services, relationships(online dating), even jobs.

Imagine you have some ancient toaster you are about to throw in the bin because it is old and you have no use for it and it has no value on the market. Yet, on the other side of the planet, there is a guy who is desperately looking for exactly this toaster because of #reasons. Yet, these people will never be able to find each other to trade.

Yes, there is ebay and whatnot, just like there is tinder for dating, facebook for socialising, various platforms for job hunting, but all these platforms are extremely inefficient in actually delivering on the promise of matching people based on the supply and demand.

The search engines all these platforms use are all very primitive and completely unable to provide the desired service. They are essentially all the same, they just cater to different markets. But there is little technical distinction among them.

The toaster example is a completely trivial one. You can easily expand it to a job where you need a person with specific skills and experience. But you will simply never be able to find that person via any of the existing pathways. Except sheer luck and word of mouth.

This can be likely solved via something like brain implants where we can be connected to the internet and immediately provide necessary context or answer some questions to build a better profile as a "supplier" or "buyer" that could allow a better match. But we're infinitely far away from it.

And this is just one of millions of such small problems that are really hard to solve.

The advertising companies all use tracking to try and mitigate this as much as possible so they can offer you the most likely product or a service that you actually might be interested in buying. But again, these are very primitive solutions.
by crote | 2025-12-15 16:57:32+00:00
The thing is, what's the market for them?

If you care even remotely about speed, you'll get an NVMe drive. If you're a data hoarder who wants to connect 50 drives, you'll go for spinning rust. Enterprise will go for U.3.

So what's left? An upgrade for grandma's 15-year-old desktop? A borderline-scammy pre-built machine where the listed spec is "1TB SSD" and they used the absolute cheapest drive they can find? Maybe a boot drive for some VM host?
Show HN: Wirier – Browser-based URL cleaner for tracking parameters
by renbuilds | 2025-12-15 16:57:48+00:00
I kept manually deleting UTM parameters and click IDs from URLs before sharing them. Eventually I built a small tool to do it automatically.

wirier.com

It's a single-page app that strips 210+ tracking parameters from URLs. Everything runs client-side in JavaScript. URLs never leave your browser.

What it removes: - Platform trackers (fbclid, gclid, ttclid, msclkid, twclid, etc.)

- UTM parameters

- Analytics junk (_ga, _gl, _hsenc, mkt_tok)

- Recruiter/ATS tracking (Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed, Glassdoor, and others)

- Affiliate parameters

Also unwraps redirect URLs from Facebook, Twitter, Google AMP, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

The recruiter tracking stuff was a recent addition after some job seekers requested it. Turns out there are 60+ parameters across 18 different ATS systems that track candidate activity.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation.
by anon84873628 | 2025-12-15 16:58:06+00:00
Well you can say there is a difference between "computer science" and "software engineering", plus many "universities" are particularly research focused.

A chemistry, physics, or even MechE BS is coming out only at the very beginning of their training, and will require lots of specific on-the-job training if they go into industry. School is about the principles of the field and how to think critically / experimentally. E.g. software debugging requires an understanding of hypothesis testing and isolation before the details of specific tech ever come into play. This is easy to take for granted because many people have that skill naturally, others need to be trained and still never quite get it.

Edit: of course if only 5% of grads are going on to research then maybe the department is confused. A lot of prestigious schools market themselves as research institutions and advertise the undergrad research opportunities etc. If you choose to go there then you know what you're getting into.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-15 16:58:15+00:00
FTFA:

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by wrs | 2025-12-15 16:58:19+00:00
I had the same latency concerns when I heard about this PaaS DB trend, but you’ll note that this runs in the AWS (soon GCP) region of your choice, so if you’re hosted there, it should be about the same latency as using their managed DB service.

If you aren’t hosting the app in the same AWS/GCP region then I still have the same question.
by voidnap | 2025-12-15 16:58:25+00:00
> There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared.

In 2020 there was a global pandemic called COVID-19 that had a pronounced affect on the world economy. Stimulus cheques were given to companies to keep them afloat through this time. Tech companies spent that new capital on hiring and them layed off a lot of workers when they weren't able to sustain them.

A big reason you saw layoffs is because we had massive hiring sprees from short term capital through stimulus cheques.

These days, when a company tells you they are laying off good workers and replacing them, with software that cannot fact check its output, because their audience cannot tell the difference, you should believe them and consider if that is really what you want the world to become.
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-15 16:58:37+00:00
>it's just victim blaming

Victim-blaming is when a girl gets raped and you tell her that it's her fault for dressing like a skank and getting drunk at a college fraternity party. Telling the bank they should have put the money in a vault instead of leaving it in an unlocked drawer next to the cash register is not victim-blaming. Telling the CIA that they shouldn't have given Osama Bin-Laden guns and money to fight the soviets in afghanistan is not victim-blaming. Telling president Roosevelt it was a poor decision to park the entire Pacific fleet in a poorly-defended naval base adjacent to an expansionist empire which is already at war with most of America's allies is not victim-blaming. *Telling a well-funded corporation to not download and execute third-party code with privileges is not victim blaming, especially as their customers are often the ones who are actually being targeted.*

>I bet the commenter also has installed pip or npm packages without reading its full code

I think i did use pip at some point about a decade ago but i can't remember what for. In general though you lose that bet because I don't use either of these programs.

> it just feels cool to tell other people they are dumb

it does, yes.

>and it's their own fault for not reading all the code beforehand or for using a package manager, when every single person does the same.

I don't suppose you've ever played an old video game called "Lemmings"?

>Some just are unlucky.

Lol.

>The whole ecosystem is broken, the expectations of trust are not compatible with the current amount of attacks.

that's kind of my point, except it doesn't mitigate responsibility for participating in that ecosystem.
by pfdietz | 2025-12-15 16:58:45+00:00
Landfills are engineered at some cost to retain nasty liquids and gases that are produced. Glass doesn't need any of that.

Or, if you're going to put glass in a landfill, it could be cheaper to put it into a glass-only landfill that wouldn't need those protections.

If you're going to burn the waste them removing glass first makes that easier.
by orliesaurus | 2025-12-15 16:59:02+00:00
Nice to see someone tackling debugging in TypeScript head on... the discussion about templates and in‑house compilers is interesting... I always appreciate when authors share their process...

ALSO when it comes to debugging TypeScript I lean heavily on a mix of tools and best practices... Visual Studio Code’s built‑in debugger and Jest integration make stepping through code a breeze... I combine that with custom type guards and strategic logging to catch errors early and make the stack traces meaningful...

I’m curious if you dive into production debugging and error tracking... things like source maps and disciplined logging can save hours when chasing bugs in the wild... thanks for sharing your experience and good luck polishing the final version...
by Clamchop | 2025-12-15 16:59:03+00:00
The general term for plants that set seed once is monocarp. Most famously agave and bamboo, among plants with cycles longer than two years.

For plants like bamboos, they're interesting because the periods can be quite long, over a hundred years in some cases, so it's simply rare to see them in flower, and due to how they're propagated and how they keep time, you sometimes see a mass worldwide flowering and die off followed by a shortage of that plant.

It's a much rarer reproductive strategy than annual, biennial, or perennial.
by mothballed | 2025-12-15 16:59:10+00:00
Mr. Lai is the real deal. He started out as a child laborer and worked his way up from nothing to owning a clothing brand and then Apple Daily pro-democracy publisher. He had the option to leave Hong Kong, but stayed and kept up the fight.

He's facing life in prison right now, so this conviction puts everything on the line.

Glad to see this hitting the front page. I posted an article earlier with not much movement which was really worrying for the HK free thought movement; happy that this turned out to not be the case.
by rcrowley | 2025-12-15 16:59:25+00:00
We've engineered in protections from noisy neighbors in both CPU and I/O usage and we do not over-commit resources.

If your or another customer's workload grows and needs to size up we launch three whole new database servers of the appropriate size (whether that's more CPU+RAM, more storage, or both), restore the most recent backups there, catch up on replication, and then orchestrate changing the primary.

Downtime when you resize typically amounts to needing to reconnect i.e. it's negligible.
by btilly | 2025-12-15 16:59:46+00:00
Yes. Just as we can build an ACL on a capability system, we can build a capability system on an ACL.

But this approach is more natural in a capability system. You have to write software differently for dealing with "I got permission through an ACL" versus "I got information through a capability". So when the default expectation is, "I get a capability," the right abstraction is already there for "...and this capability has something more behind it."
Show HN: ModelGuessr: Can you tell which AI you're chatting with?
by mdahardy | 2025-12-15 16:59:50+00:00
Hey HN - I built ModelGuessr, a game where you chat with a random AI model and try to guess which one it is.

A big open question in AI is whether there's enough brand differentiation for AI companies to capture real profits. Will models end up commoditized like cloud compute, or differentiated like smartphones?

I built ModelGuessr to test this. I think that people will struggle more than they expect. And the more model mix-ups there are, the more commodity-like these models probably are.

If enough people play, I'll publish some follow-up analyses on confusion patterns (which models get mistaken for each other, what gives them away, etc.). Would love any feedback!
by ryandrake | 2025-12-15 16:59:57+00:00
It sucks that we need rely on a big company to make a big, scaled-up change like that in order to move the needle. This looks like a pretty fatal flaw in the design of TCP/IP. IPs should be randomized periodically and they should all be equal. You shouldn't be able to tell someone's country from them, let alone their city, ISP, whether it's coming from a business or somewhere residential, whether they are a bot or a human. The Internet shouldn't have boundaries like this, and the fact that it still does shows there's still work to do.
by yawnxyz | 2025-12-15 16:59:58+00:00
for back office software, I'm actually getting more interest in building weird back office stuff than before, because people know what's possible now.

I'm not a consultant anymore but my friend who owns a dental clinic asked me if I could build them a personalized system that checks in with the staff every week; a thing that helps analyze how they feel week to week and helps my friend update her management strategy and coaches her on how to talk with her staff / helps her figure out her staff's communication strategies and what work they prefer to do; and she'd like me to run and host it so she can't see the raw data from her staff so they'll trust it more as it's run by a third party.

She could probably figure out how to do this but she'd still rather pay me like $5k to do this than spend 100+ hours figuring this out herself. Even with AI it'd probably take me at least a couple of weeks to get it working 100% as intended, and I don't have a dentist business to run.

I think we'll see more back office SaaS, becuase the problems to solve are near infinite, and no one has time to build all these themselves.
by bitexploder | 2025-12-15 17:00:27+00:00
You can probably maintain your Prusa forever. The Bambu... not so much. It is a philosophy choice here and the 3D printer space is vastly more complex and nuanced for many users than an appliance that has one simple job. Yes if you /just/ want to print stuff and treat it like an appliance as a curious consumer dabbling in the space the Bambu is great. That was never Prusa's target. I don't think the comparison is very strong.
by paddleon | 2025-12-15 17:00:30+00:00
um. My uncle died of polio, and I was a medical researcher (phd) for a while.

Polio can cause paralysis just fine on its own, it doesn't need DDT or paraquat to help it.

And you are also right that widespread spraying of DDT lead to all kind of problems (killed all the birds, for one, leading to "Silent Spring"), which one reason it was banned.

another reason is the mosquitos developed resistance.
by jjcc | 2025-12-15 17:00:48+00:00
>But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.

This is very insightful. But it's more profound than what's observed on surface. There was a chain of reactions along with many coincident events.

If we consider a collection of human bounded by different glues, i.e. tribes, culture, religions, ethnicities , political beliefs, cooperate, LLCs, etc., as a new form of creature superior to nature animals, then Chinese as a new creature is very special one. Maybe next to Jews.

The failure of Opium war and consequential changes caused a humiliation that created a special stress on this creature, resulted in a strong response which also drove many revolves inside China. Chinese elites seeking different solutions as reaction to those changes.

One big revolt lead by revolutionaries , the predecessor of the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan in 1949, overthrew the last dynasty of China. However it didn't address the issue of humiliation. The elites continue to seeking solutions while tried to reunite China. CPP was one of them.

After WWII, only 2 contesters survived. Another 4 years of civil war later, the Nationalist lost and Republic of China migrated to Taiwan. In 1971, ROC lost the seat in UN, CPP took over as the representative of China.

Both CPP and the Nationalists are nationalists , among others who lost in the history. The majority of early members of CPP, even strongly believe in the Marxist ideology, deep in their heart they are the same as the other nationalists even they hate and kill each other.

Marxism is a tool which is very effective proved by history, used by the unique creature called China to restore its honor and dignity, without the user of the tool even realizing it. Today it is called "Socialism with Chinese character", a heavily modified and unrecognizable version of Marxist ideology.

That's a little long version of

>that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949

I wish I have time to write a book about it as real long version after some time, maybe 10 years.
by Tobani | 2025-12-15 17:00:53+00:00
I used https://learn.mangolanguages.com/ to get to something like ~b1/b2 in French after a year. I did a lesson or two every day, and did all of the review, pretty much much every day.

I spent 8 years in jr high - college studying German without having any real competency in German, it did however teach me something about learning another language.

Mango isn't gamified. Its basically a curated set of flashcards, and the lessons are essentially flashcards themed together. There are some extra explainers throw in that are helpful. I really enjoyed it.

On top of Mango as the primary lessons, I've been listening to podcasts, watching series in french, reading books, etc.

I didn't pay anything for mango, it was entirely funded by my local library so that was great.
by mkleczek | 2025-12-15 17:00:55+00:00
> Using a random UUID as primary key does not mean users have to memorize that UUID. In fact in most cases I don't think there's much reason for it to even be exposed to the user at all.

So what is such an identifier for? Is it only for some technical purposes (like replication etc.)?

Why bother with UUID at all then for internal identifiers? Sequence number should be enough.
by georgeecollins | 2025-12-15 17:01:15+00:00
I agree with this completely. I feel like my phone is leaking so much sensitive information about me in so many ways. And it has access to my location, my communications, my finances. And it is hard to turn off. I can turn off my vacuum cleaner for months if I want. I can't turn off my phone or the computer in my car.

I guess that's why the vacuum doesn't worry me. The phone really does.
by coldpie | 2025-12-15 17:01:19+00:00
I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China."

I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
by agwa | 2025-12-15 17:01:43+00:00
There's an extension to static-ct-api, currently implemented by Sunlight logs, that provides a feed of just SANs and CNs: https://github.com/FiloSottile/sunlight/blob/main/names-tile...

For example:

curl https://tuscolo2026h1.skylight.geomys.org/tile/names/000 | gunzip

(It doesn't deduplicate if the same domain name appears in multiple certificates, but it's still a substantial reduction in bandwidth compared to serving the entire (pre)certificate.)