MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by memen | 2025-12-28 09:35:06+00:00
0% productivity improvement.

Rephrasing the question: By what percentage has AI changed your input quality?

Answer would be around -50%. This is attributed mostly to the vast amount of search results that are AI generated and provide very low density information and miss conveying actual key learning points. This means you have to scan through 100% more text to finally get the information you need to solve the issue. I think this is a low estimate actually.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-28 09:36:40+00:00
I wouldn’t be surprised if it performs adequately in this context —- isn’t the manufacturer a VOIP device maker?

The reality is that they spam the market with a large number of products with little consistency, poor (if labyrinthine) documentation, random google drive links for firmware etc., and there are the same issues with hardware support.

I dunno, maybe the situation there is better than it was. But the broad picture is the same: better hardware but you are basically on your own.
Show HN: An offline-first semantic search library with no DB or APIs
by aavashbaral | 2025-12-28 09:39:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built simile-search after struggling with semantic search for small projects and product catalogs where running a vector DB or calling APIs felt like overkill.

simile-search is an offline-first semantic search library:
- No database
- No external APIs
- Local embeddings + fuzzy matching
- Works well with messy human input (names, typos, partial queries)

It’s designed for cases like local apps, small catalogs, demos, and environments with limited infra.

GitHub: https://github.com/iaavas/simile-search
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/simile-search

I’d really appreciate feedback on the approach, performance tradeoffs, and where this might break down.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-28 09:41:05+00:00
Yes shared trips of course waste time. For 50 people you dont want 50 stops. But 1 or 2 stops pickups on the way is fine. The algorithm across all this can optimize cost and travel time for each rider. There may be transfers for cheaper prices.

E.g. $5 for a 30 min trip and a change or $20 for a 15 min trip direct taxi experience.

If the road is a bottleneck optimising for usage it may let buses have a fast lane and the difference is less.
by latexr | 2025-12-28 09:41:12+00:00
> they started to refuse to show anything on the home page with watch history off since a couple years ago.

I remember when that happened. It was hilarious to me because the way they phrased it felt like they think of it as a punishment or incentive, but not having anything on the homepage is incredibly refreshing, exactly what I wanted. YouTube’s homepage (at least in my country) is just garbage videos no one should be watching.
by Lucius-AI | 2025-12-28 09:41:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a student developer from Bosnia. I noticed bid managers in the construction industry were losing weekends manually reading 500+ page government contracts (JBCC, GCC, etc.) just to find "disqualification clauses."

I built Lucius AI to automate the boring part. It digests the PDF, runs a forensic analysis to find hidden penalties/compliance risks, and outputs a Red/Green compliance matrix.

The Stack:

Node.js / Express backend

MongoDB Atlas

React frontend (deployed on Render)

Google Vertex AI for the context window handling

It’s currently in MVP/Beta. I’d love feedback on the approach or the architecture.
by ozim | 2025-12-28 09:41:19+00:00
That’s a bit of evergreen topic. “stop bloating web with js” comes up fairly often and there are those people who think they found a solution and everyone should start using whatever they imagine is “best for everyone”.

In my opinion most of those people struggle with whatever they encountered in ecosystem and just want to find a way that fits them - while also trying to make others do the same.

*“You didn’t want to make things perfect. You just hated things the way they are.”*
by miki123211 | 2025-12-28 09:41:34+00:00
Did the AOL protocol (whatever the AOL app itself used for chat etc.) go over TCP/IP, or was that its own network, parallel to the internet?

Was the limitation that you couldn't use AOL from a different ISP artificial (whitelisted IP ranges, no routing to relevant addresses from the outside), or did it actually use an "internetless" protocol that you just couldn't emulate if all you had was the internet?

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that internet access was a late addition to AOL, hence the question.
by pxoe | 2025-12-28 09:41:44+00:00
Perhaps it would be preferable at least to not mix civilian health data or regular business data, with mass surveillance data, and with military industrial complex and kill chain data. It would make sense to have an interest in keeping different kinds of personal data in separate places and not have it thrown around companies with quite different interests or collected together within some company that's involved in quite different industries. So why does it not make sense to apologists of this company?
by jval43 | 2025-12-28 09:43:16+00:00
Not only that but also the same short videos keep repeating. I have tons of great suggestions from Youtube on the main feed from creators I like, yet the Shorts feed is almost 90% garbage and AI slop.

It's deliberate, I'm sure. People say they want the vegetables, but then go on to watch hours of fast food / Shorts. Clearly the algorithm knows.
by reidrac | 2025-12-28 09:43:25+00:00
It has been years now that I only care about my subscriptions. I also installed an extension to remove anything else (especially shorts!), and that works great for me.

The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically.

Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding.

Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.
by lutusp | 2025-12-28 09:43:43+00:00
> The point is that people are drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this lay report on early stage research.

That is partly because no one seems willing to summarize this work, in concise form, for nonspecialists. Such a summary might be, "This is an important finding, but it doesn't mean Lysenko was right, and the term 'inheritance' doesn't have just one meaning."

I think the term "inheritance" for both DNA and epigenetic information transfers (as in the linked article) is innately confusing.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-28 09:44:27+00:00
I'm learning Python on the job, with decades of experience in other languages. Asking an LLM noob Python questions is probably 5-10x faster than googling around and reading docs or tutorials, and almost 100% accurate. I also ask it about git commands I seldom use (I tend to confuse reset and restore, though not revert for some reason).

Introductory questions about a widely used language with great documentation and tons of tutorials are made for LLMs.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-28 09:44:44+00:00
Here's you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352728

So apparently it is fine for you to call out low karma accounts but I can't have you shit on a member in excellent standing here?

The Rust community has - rightly, in my opinion - flagged a number of serious concerns about language safety. Outside of that Rust is just another programming language and languages are just one of the parts of the security picture. There is process, general hygiene and a lot of hard learned lessons about how you keep systems secure regardless of what language a particular piece of code is written in.

Given the amount of Rust evangelization on HN (which is one of the reasons this link got posted in the first place) and the fact that they can't let any opportunity go by to shit on other languages and those that use them for reasons that are unclear to me (and this goes quite far, up to and including questioning the sanity of anybody writing in a systems language other than Rust) you can expect that that higher standard is applied to the Rust advocates in the same way.

Action begets reaction.

Your response is telling: you make a personal attack on a member of HN and then hide behind pointing out the flaws in 'the community' when in fact it is you that is poisoning the community with these kind of comments.

I've made it a rule since a couple of weeks that I'm tossing accounts like that onto my blacklist because really, life's too short. If you don't see value in HN discussing languages and their communities (and I have to give the Rust community some credit here, as the language matures they've become more realistic about their abilities and there is less zealotry, especially Steve Klabik deserves a mention) then it may be that you are in the wrong place. For me your account will cease to exist after this comment.
by ksec | 2025-12-28 09:45:01+00:00
I just tried this and found having Enhanced Contrast with grayscale looks a little better. I dont do doom scrolling on social media, but if this increase my phone battery life by 50% I will be happy. Since most of my days is endless Whatsapp or Email.

I am also wondering if simply having the filter showing in between colour and grayscale would improve battery life as well?
by kdavis | 2025-12-28 09:45:23+00:00
10x when working on a code base I'm very familiar with.

Basically, it amounts to being able to give detailed instructions to a junior dev (who can type incredibly fast) and having them carry out your instructions.

If you don't know the code base, and thus can't provide detailed instructions, this junior dev can (using their incredible typing speed) quickly run off the rails. In this case, as you don't know the code base, you wouldn't know it's off the rails. So you're S.O.L.
by Tade0 | 2025-12-28 09:45:28+00:00
They're more like a compromise.

As an outsider, to me the framing that USA is "car-oriented" was always off the mark. Cars are just a tool, which people would rather use as little as possible (I mean, who actually enjoys sitting in traffic or having a long commute?).

The real issue is the notion that everyone needs crazy amounts of space inside and a yard. I've found this calculator[0] that says that for my family I would need 2280 sq ft to "live comfortably", which to me is an absurd amount, as I live on a third of that and was only ever considering apartments with at maximum half the mentioned square footage.

You can't reasonably organise public transport over such a sparsely populated area. Over here we have districts of detached houses and they're notoriously difficult to get in and out of.

[0] https://themortgagereports.com/117403/average-home-size-in-t...
by jen729w | 2025-12-28 09:45:41+00:00
It really helps where the code I'm writing fits the broad description of boilerplate.

Need to integrate Stripe with the Clerk API in my Astro project? Claude's all over that. 300% faster. I think of it like, if there was a package that did exactly what I wanted, I'd use that package. There just happens not to be; but Claude excels at package-like code.

But as soon as I need to write any unique code – the code that makes my app my app – I find it's perhaps a touch faster in the moment, but the long-term result isn't faster.

Because now I don't understand my code, right? How could I. I didn't write it. So as soon as something goes wrong, or I want to add a feature, either I exacerbate this problem by getting Claude to do it, or I have to finally put in the work that I should have put in the first time.

Or I have to spend about the same amount of time creating a CLAUDE.md that I would have if I'd just figured out the code myself. Except now the thing I learned is how to tell a machine how to do something that I actually enjoy doing myself. So I never learn; on the contrary, I feel dumber. Which seems a bit weird.

And if I choose the lazy option here and keep deferring my knowledge to Claude, now I'm charging customers for a thing that I 'vibe coded'. And frankly if you're doing that I don't know how you sleep at night.
by aragilar | 2025-12-28 09:46:09+00:00
Part of the challenge is unless you know what the "news reporter's" role is (are they just reporting what they see/have heard vs. analysis/opinion and what their relevant expertise is; I'd suggest good news providers have clear divides and provide this information (though with biases), those that don't likely have some agenda), you get a mix of voices/views without a clear understanding of the facts. A different challenge is constraints of the various content formats/audiences (which are really only obvious when the same journalist does the same story in different formats).
by donkeybeer | 2025-12-28 09:47:12+00:00
Its hard to imagine a non-neurological basis for the ardent believers, it takes a lot to stick to belief in obvious falsehoods. There have been hundreds of religions throughout history, all of them thought they were the true one. None of them even stand scrutiny to basic arguments, let alone the very high amount of rigor such a supposedly fundamental truth must demand.
by b4ckup | 2025-12-28 09:47:35+00:00
I'd say on average about 50% faster but it really depends on the task at hand. On problems that can be isolated pretty well like a new feature that is relatively isolated (for example building a file export in a specific format) it's easily a 10x speed up.
One thing that generally gets less talked about is exploration of the solution space during manual implementation. I work in a very small company and we build a custom ERP solution. Our development process is very stripped down (a good thing IMO). Often times when we get new requirements we brain storm and make a rough design. Then I try implement it and during that phase new questions and edge cases arise, and at any time this happens we adjust the design. In my opinion this is very productive as the details of the design are worked out when I already know the related code very well as I already got down to implementing. This leads to a better fitting design and implementation. Unfortunately this exploration workflow is incompatible with llms if you use them to do the implementation for you. Which means that you have put more effort in the design up front. From my experience that means the gain in speed in such task is nullified and also results in code that fits worse into the rest of the codebase.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-28 09:48:21+00:00
Obviously. The topic is about whether case sensitivity + capitalization matters not whether it exists. My claim is it doesn’t matter much. Whether you use I or i in your for loop as an index doesn’t matter.

And it’s completely irrelevant to logic or math. So whether or not you choose to make capitalization matter in your program is a completely arbitrary choice. It’s like snake case and cane case. You choose one style for consistency but in the end even if you use both styles in your program there is zero practical downside. The only downside is people with ocd get all worked up and don’t have the capacity to understand that it doesn’t matter.
by rhdunn | 2025-12-28 09:49:05+00:00
And start with simpler regular rules and get more complex over time as words are imported and reimported, pronunciations shift, grammatical rules morph and evolve (often to simplify grammatical genders and cases) while leaving their mark, and spelling changes.

For example, goose/geese is the result of the plural form and singular form undergoing different paths in the Great Vowel Shift resulting in the different vowels in the modern form.

There's also evidence that Proto-Indo-European had laryngeal consonants that have disappeared in all modern languages derived from it [1], but have left their mark on the descendant languages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory
by damezumari | 2025-12-28 09:49:13+00:00
While the multiplier is less for me ( perhaps 3x or 4x ) I think the assumption that productivity gain leads to directly to more money is bit optimistic. Unless you are self employed, or run your own company, and actually get paid by results, being more efficient is seldom paid much. ( with luck you get promotion every two years or so or pay raise every year )

I have worked for too long in the field, but this year and simply thanks to the LLMs I have actually managed to get 4 usable hobby projects done ( as far as I need them to go anyway - personal tools that I use and publish but do not actively maintain unless I need some new feature ), and I have been quite productive with stack I do not normally use at our startup. Most previous years I have finished 0-1 hobby projects.

The ramp up period for new stack was much less, and while I still write some code myself, most of it at least starts as LLM output which I review and adjust to what I really want. It is bit less intellectually satisfying but a lot more efficient way to work for me. And ultimately for work at least I care more about good enough results.
by japborst | 2025-12-28 09:49:24+00:00
I can see that. Pydantic is great but relatively slow (which matters on edge devices) and can be bloated.

The fact that all your projects use Pydantic makes it an easy starting point and created standardisation - of course.

Nevertheless, I can definitely see some use-cases for lightweight JSON-serialisation without bringing in Pydantic. Dataclasses are great, but lack proper json handling.
by pizza234 | 2025-12-28 09:50:05+00:00
Very hard to estimate, depending on the domain, I'd say 1.5-2x as much.

When it comes to programming in languages and frameworks I'm familiar with, there is virtually no increase in terms of speed (I may use it for double checks), however, it may still help me discover concepts I didn't know.

When it comes to areas I'm not familiar with:

- most of the time, the increase is substantial, for example when I need a targeted knowledge (e.g. finding few APIs in giant libraries), or when I need to understand an existing solution
- in some cases, I waste a lot of time, when the LLM hallucinates a solution that doesn't make sense
- in some other cases, I do jobs that otherwise I wouldn't have done at all

I stress two aspects:

1. it's crucial IMO to treat LLMs as a learning tool before a productivity one, that is, to still learn from its output, rather than just call it a day once "it works"

2. days of later fixing can save hours of upfront checking. or the reverse, whatever one prefers :)
by einpoklum | 2025-12-28 09:50:31+00:00
Closed-source, very-limited-API platforms like Tik Tok do not actually let you "play with the thing". What I imagine you would be interested in is a client which, say, gets the text version of a large number of short videos, filters those texts based on criteria you have defined and meta-data from TikTok (time, number of views, some proxies for a 'quality' measure) and serves you up with the results in a textual form, or perhaps a page with titles/summaries and links to the text and the video.

I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.
by jsiepkes | 2025-12-28 09:52:02+00:00
I wonder what the point of this blog is. It's kinda easy to rip on certificates without giving atleast one possible way of fixing this, even if it's an unrealistic one.

Sure, the low-level nitty gritty of managing keys and certificates for TLS is hard if you don't have the expertise. You don't know about the hundreds of ways you can get bitten. But all the pieces for a better solution are there. Someone just needs to fold it into a neater higher level solution. But apparently by the time someone gained the expertise to manage this complexity they also loose interest in making a simple solution (I know I have).

> You can’t set the SSL certificate expiration so it kicks in at different times for different cohorts of users.

Of course you can, if you really want to. You could get different certificates with different expiry times for your reverse (ingress) proxies.

A more straight forward solution is to have monitoring which retrieves the certificate on your HTTPS endpoints and alert when the expiry time is sooner than it ever should be (i.e. when it should already have been renewed). For example by using Prometheus and ssl_exporter [1].

> and the renewal failures didn’t send notifications for whatever reason.

That's why you need to have deadman switch [2] type of monitoring in your alerting. That's not specific to TLS BTW. Heck even your entire Prometheus infra can go down. A service like healthchecks.io [3] can help with "monitoring the monitors".

[1] https://github.com/ribbybibby/ssl_exporter
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
[3] https://healthchecks.io/
by tjohns | 2025-12-28 09:52:53+00:00
AOL was it's own network, completely parallel to the internet. It didn't use HTML, they had their own "browser" (not called that), where each page loaded in it's own window. URLs weren't a thing, you accessed pages by "keyword". It all used used a proprietary protocol that was heavily optimized for dial-up.

Later on, in 1993, they added support for Usenet (see: "Eternal September"). Then in 1994 they added support for Gopher and WWW. So you could dial into the AOL client, and then open a regular web browser. But for most home users, there was more content in the AOL walled garden, so the web was something of a curiosity at first.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-12-28 09:52:55+00:00
> But it is true that religious people give more time and money to them. Less religious people tend to give and volunteer less for such causes. I offer no judgement or theories about why, but the data is strong.
You may want to look at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38407059/, a large mets-data study. Religious people give more when this is public, and vice-versa. I offer no judgment on that either :)

> About the sex ed., the clinic I volunteer at offers pregnancy related information, including pamphlets that explain pros and cons of things like the ‘day after’ pill. Of course the preferred option is always ensuring good parenting for the newborn child. Clients can take video classes on parenting skills to earn reward points good for diapers, baby food and clothing. It’s really a good program, provided free to the people who need it.

I volounteered for a long time at an organization that provided the same services. We provided information about abortion, pills, medical facts. Everything was on the table, from an abortion to raising your child.

Do your pamphlets address abortion as one of the solutions, making it at par with giving birth? I unfortunately know about "help centers" for pregnant women who were in fact driving them away from some solutions (mostly abortion). They were fortunately made illegal in France because everyone should have a neutral, unbiased access to information and help (including abortion).

For reference, Total Fertility Rate in France is 1.66 vs 1.60 in the US.

Teen pregnancy is four times lower in France - because we do serious sex ed and people have sex knowing what to expect.
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-28 09:53:27+00:00
I know next to nothing about Palantir or the CEO or his mate Peter other than what I've read in this thread and some of the links.

From what I can tell the objections are all political in nature, and whether people like what the company has done previously.

In the context of the NHS contract I've seen little to suggest the software is going to make anything worse... How could it?
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-28 09:56:22+00:00
> It just happens through the bankruptcy process

And that is fundamentally different in messaging to owners and boards than a court order explicitly stating "the government has seized this company because too many laws were violated too egregiously, the entire board is banned for 5-10 years from holding any other board position, the owners/shareholders will not be compensated".

Bankruptcies and dissolutions happen all the time, they are a part of normal healthy capitalism. But explicit, no-nonsense, no-excuse seizures not.