MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mulr00ney | 2025-12-11 14:00:47+00:00
> The question is

I don't mean to be a dick, but no, the question was what is a reasonable cause to bash someone if it's not disliking what they do. I don't know if these weird Socratic replies are meant to be thoughtful but they read as dismissive and condescending.

But hey, I can also play stupid games!

> The question is, why do you feel the need to bash them?

Why do you feel the need to defend them? (I answer this question less flippantly below.)

> Do you feel the need to say ugly things to your grocery store because they don’t actively have the goods you want?

Is not stocking garbanzo beans censorship? Why do you think this is equivalent?

> Do you feel the need to bash the coders of YouTube because they have ads or censor content?

Depends what Youtube is advertising. Depends what they're censoring.

> Are they your enemy because they hire a certain type of person?

Who'd they hire?

...

There is a difference between my grocery store stocking or not stocking something and having problems with a multi-national trillion dollar company that has wedged itself itself into most people's daily lives and has a history of censoring content to curry favour with authoritarians.

I sympathize with the folks who are working there trying to change things for the better, and I sympathize with the people who are legitimately stuck for whatever reason (don't know a lot about visas to the US, but those are probably a good reason). I also think they're tough enough to take it when they dunked on, and have the reading comprehension to realize that when people are critical of Facebook employees, there's context where it absolutely makes sense. Being a Facebook employee is not an identity, it's just a job. Facebook has pivoted to censoring queer content at a time when queer people are being marginalized after years of gains. Most of my ire is directed at the executives and management, but yeah, if you work at Facebook knowing what they do, you're not getting a pass.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-11 14:01:00+00:00
Yeah, I gotta work on legibility, particularly so I can accomplish the goals I am working on. [1]

I have been having such a good time this week I think other people should be jealous. I was worried I might be a little manic, especially because I had a psychogenic fever the way I did before my "evil twin" came out, but my therapist doesn't seem concerned. My "evil twin" was empty and angry and now I feel overflowing [1] and know how to maintain that feeling so it's a very different thing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbZSe6N_BXs
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-11 14:01:08+00:00
Nobody was even thinking about CO2 when the policies that got Europe where they are were enacted.

Europe began embracing diesels 40yr ago when they were noisy and stinky and they did it because they taxed the crap out of fuel so people rightfully prioritized buying vehicles that got better fuel economy.

Giving a crap about CO2 is a recent thing.
by dom96 | 2025-12-11 14:01:11+00:00
It wasn't an intentional omission, we weren't aware of this feature in AWS Lambda. The blog post has been updated to reflect that the numbers are for Lambda without SnapStart enabled.

Python Workers use snapshots by default and unlike SnapStart we don't charge extra for it. For many use cases, you can run Python Workers completely for free on our platform and benefit from the faster cold starts.
Show HN: An endless scrolling word search game
by marcusdev | 2025-12-11 14:01:22+00:00
I built a procedurally generated word-search game where the puzzle never ends - as you scroll, the grid expands infinitely and new words appear. It’s designed to be quick to pick up, satisfying to play, and a little addictive.

The core game works without an account using the pre-defined games, but signing up allows you to generate games using any topic you can think of.

I’d love feedback on gameplay, performance, and whether the endless format feels engaging over time. If you try it, I’d really appreciate any bug reports or suggestions.

Thanks in advance!
by the_gastropod | 2025-12-11 14:02:01+00:00
Ohhhh please. Donald Trump, the most influential and significant member of the Republican Party (and tons of other v important folks downstream from him) were giddy with joy when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was nearly killed by a lunatic with a hammer. They joked about this repeatedly. Charlie Kirk, himself, also joked about this incident, and even suggested “some amazing patriot” bail the attacker out of prison. This is categorically different from random YouTube dipshits saying unkind things about a reprehensible bigot being killed.

You could also trivially compare the responses from Democratic politicians to, e.g., Trump’s assassination attempt, the Charlie Cook killing to Republican politicians’ responses to the Minnesota political assassin, the shooting of Gabby Gifford, and the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband. There is a shocking contrast that is well evident to anyone not stewing their brains in RW propaganda.

Trump literally pardoned every Jan 6th participant, including those who assaulted police officers. I struggle to think of a more obvious example of demonstrating support for political violence.

You also apparently missed the countless conservative influencers calling for outright civil war after Kirk’s killing. I cannot fathom how you’ve drawn this conclusion. Certainly not from observing reality.
by cdegroot | 2025-12-11 14:03:36+00:00
YMMV, of course. I switched to it half a year or so ago, when doing a close read of the ASDF docs, and for my purposes it works well. But I may be odd: I have a monorepo of Lisp code which I don't intend to distribute in the sense of turning them into Open Source packages. There's an `l` subdirectory for libraries, a `p` subdirectory for "projects", and if I need something I can just import `ca.berksoft.l/math/fft` and be done. I think that having a file-per-package is not a limitation, it makes packages probably a bit more like modules in my daytime language (Elixir/Erlang), and it does save a lot of typing telling ASDF what to find where.
by killersheep | 2025-12-11 14:03:39+00:00
Quick demo of how it works:

1. You rant about something annoying (e.g., "Traffic was hell today") 2. Pfff!!! gives you XP and levels you up 3. Instant AI reply in your chosen tone (here: cynical mode)

Tried it with my own daily frustration (HN karma system ) – got a pretty spot-on sarcastic reply.

Feedback very welcome – especially on the tones, gamification, or missing features!

https://pfff.me
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-11 14:03:45+00:00
Major pet peeve of mine is when people unironically spread literal advertisements, whether it's because they're "cute" or people are outraged at them or whatever it may be.

The ad is doing it on purpose. It is literally manipulating you and you are spreading the malicious influence to other people. It's not AI but it sure is 'slop'. Propaganda, even.

...slopagada
by functionmouse | 2025-12-11 14:03:48+00:00
A $1B bribe for bribery

> ZTE , which already paid some $2 billion in penalties to U.S. authorities over export violations during President Donald Trump's first term, has for years faced probes by authorities around the world, opens new tab into alleged bribes to secure telecom contracts

I suppose the true cost of open and visible bribery is that now everyone wants a piece of the pie.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-11 14:04:06+00:00
I don't think it's expert, I just don't think being expert is necessary to get some value out of it if you aren't an expert. The trap is letting the charade go on longer than it should though. I personally only see the main value in using it to create test projects or to get the gist of what a library can do. I do think that's pretty valuable, and I also think real expertise is more valuable.

Or you can do like some of the others suggest and eliminate pure vibecoding. Just use it as a back and forth where you understand along the way and make well-reasoned changes. That looks a lot more like real engineering, so it's not surprising the other commenters report better results.
by bschne | 2025-12-11 14:04:21+00:00
information density of online maps is, in general, quite low compared to old paper maps: https://x.com/patrickc/status/1738646361128792402

I guess there's various reasons, ranging from "it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to scrape/copy data"
by logicchains | 2025-12-11 14:05:19+00:00
>Anyone tried to move away from this model where there is two people of opposite gender, living together as a family, working, and raising child(ren) at the same time? Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?

People in general have a built-in biological incentive to treat their own biological children well. People child-rearing just as a job generally treat children worse than biological parents, and the empirical evidence supports this (e.g. the earlier children enter paid childcare, the worse their outcomes on average). Only a small minority of extremely moral people treat other people's kids as well as their own biological children.
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-11 14:05:28+00:00
Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home.

The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".
by zahlman | 2025-12-11 14:05:32+00:00
Interesting. The tests use Python 3.6, which on my system replicates the huge difference shown in startup time using and not using `-S`. From 3.7 onwards, it makes a much smaller percentage change. There's also a noticeable difference the first time; I guess because of Linux caching various things. (That effect is much bigger with Rust executables, such as uv, in my testing.)

Anyway, your analysis of causes reads like something AI generated and pasted in. It's awkward in the context of the rest of your post, and 2 of the 3 points are clearly irrelevant to a "hello world" benchmark.
by taeric | 2025-12-11 14:05:42+00:00
It is workable for far more people than will make it work. Particularly in tech jobs.

The underlying issue remains that it is seen as a poor person option. As soon as people can afford a car, they get one.

Back when I didn't have a car, my future wife and I saw a comedian that literally had a joke about being above the poverty line of "do you take the bus?"
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-11 14:06:02+00:00
Could you share, if only for reference and comparison, where you live? I'm assuming, because of the missing work/life balance, that you live in the US?

It always seemed crazy to me that there still are societies and countries out there not offering more support to new parents, and even existing parents. It's literally what makes the country survive long-term, and without new children, you'll obviously end up in stagnation. So why not make it really easy and worry-free?
by layer8 | 2025-12-11 14:06:23+00:00
Several comments can be made here: (1) You only control what the LMM generates to the extent that you specify precisely what it should generate. You cannot reasons about what it will generate for what you don't specify. (2) Even for what you specify precisely, you don't actually have full control, because the LLM is not reliable in a way you can reason about. (3) The more you (have to) specify precisely what it should generate, the less benefit using the LLM has. After all, regular coding is just specifying everything precisely.

The upshot is, you have to review everything the LLM generates, because you can't predict the qualities or failures of its output. (You cannot reason in advance about what qualities and failures it definitely will or will not exhibit.) This is different from, say, using a compiler, whose output you generally don't have to review, and whose input-to-output relation you can reason about with precision.

Note: I'm not saying that using an LLM for coding is not workable. I'm saying that it lacks what people generally like about regular coding, namely the ability to reason with absolute precision about the relation between the input and the behavior of the output.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-11 14:06:47+00:00
The collateral damage was obvious and predictable. If you know about the potential collateral damage and do it anyway, then it's not targeted, even if you say it's targeted.

For example: say I want to kill someone. I know they live in NYC. So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.

Is this a targeted attack? Obviously not. But I said it was targeted! Doesn't work that way.

If you want to target people, you try your best to kill just them. If you're planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public, you are not doing that.

I don't know why we feel the need to defend military operatives by essentially claiming they're the stupidest people on Earth and cannot put 2 and 2 together. No no, they can. Meaning, this was intentional.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-11 14:07:15+00:00
I don't think it's self-sufficiency that should be the goal for society here, but self-sufficiency is one of several means to achieve the goal.

I think the goal should be for everybody to have the ability to walk away from an abusive boss, landlord or spouse without jeopardizing their life essentials. Which is a stronger statement than just saying that everybody should be able to afford their life essentials.

Not having a boss or landlord is a great way of achieving this, but it's not the only way. (If you don't have a boss, you do need the freedom to turn away abusive clients or customers)

Another way is ensuring that the essentials are universally available. Universal health care, public housing and a SNAP program that's not itself abusive is another.

Another HN-popular mechanism is UBI.

Another mechanism that helps greatly is ensuring that the essentials are inexpensive. Clothing and food have become cheap, but healthcare and housing have more than absorbed the difference.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-11 14:07:43+00:00
> Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper?

This reads like what you’re accusing them of doing. The way you’re asking the questions communicates skepticism in favor of facebook’s official statement. Facebook’s track record on policing content is not exactly one that inspires confidence in their narrative.
by cdegroot | 2025-12-11 14:07:56+00:00
I considered that (author here), but how I test is way too odd to share lol.

I think that that's one of the strengths and one of the weaknesses of CL and its ecosystem. Rolling your own variation is just too easy and it almost seems to be encouraged. Which artificially steepens the learning curve. Anyway, I decided to focus on just "packaging", but I agree that testing needs attention, just like all the other topics people here touched on: secure distribution, versioning and pinning, and all these other modern comforts we're used to when doing our daytime non-Common-Lisp jobs :)
by duskdozer | 2025-12-11 14:08:34+00:00
I'd much rather read someone's actual errored, nonnative writing than whatever an LLM would produce from it. Not only because it's annoying reading the same fake style over and over, but also because the less fluent they are the less able they are to tell when the LLM output is changing things in ways that don't reflect what they're thinking.

And if the main complaint is just a few odd words or structures, it's really not that big of a deal to me.
by postalcoder | 2025-12-11 14:08:36+00:00
Very neat, but recently I've tried my best to reduce my extension usage across all apps (browsers/ide).

I do something similar locally by manually specifying all the things I want scrubbed/replaced and having keyboard maestro run a script on my system keyboard whenever doing a paste operation that's mapped to `hyperkey + v`. The plus side of this is that the paste is instant. The latency introduced by even the littlest of inference is enough friction to make you want to ditch the process entirely.

Another plus of the non-extension solution is that it's application agnostic.
by panick21_ | 2025-12-11 14:09:07+00:00
The thing is, people are not ideological. If the car is 5x faster and nicer, then people will use it. People use what is convenient, most people don't pick public transport when it is 'workable' they pick it when it is actually good.

And the reason it seen as 'for poor' people is because you only use it when you can't get a car.

So the underlying issue is the overall quality of the service (frequency, reliability, comfort and so on).
by usrusr | 2025-12-11 14:09:24+00:00
"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit."

That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.

And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.

(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
by matthewaveryusa | 2025-12-11 14:09:25+00:00
Let's take the beautiful state of Massachusetts where I live. For foreigners: it's a liberal mecca, a pocket of Americans with a yearning for european lifestyle. Let's look at the government from a systems perspective and say that we prioritize individuals based on dollars spent on them, shall we?

- How much does the state spend for a pre-k child? <10k/year/child

- An incarcerated inmate? >100k/year/inmate

- Drug-use rehab? >50k/year/user-seeking-rehab

- How much does that leave parents to pay? >30k/year/child (again average, any place where there's a job it's closer to 50k pre-tax)

We don't prioritize children and our societies are actively hostile towards them in terms of dollars spent. As simple as that.
by thesz | 2025-12-11 14:09:32+00:00
Here, page 31 on: https://wiki.haskell.org/wikiupload/4/46/Hiw2012-duncan-cout...

Erlang circa 2012 was even less reliable than TCP on which its interprocess communication was based.

Namely, TCP allows for any prefix of messages m1,m2,m3... to be received. But Erlang circa 2012 allowed for m1,m3... received, dropping m2.

It may be not case today, but it was case about ten years ago.
by lunar_mycroft | 2025-12-11 14:09:48+00:00
> My hypothesis (based on observations when personally involved) is that this is exactly what allowed offshoring to boom.

Offshoring did happen, but if you were correct that only the quality control process impacted final quality, the software industry would have looked something like e.g. garment industry, with basically zero people being paid to actually write software in the first world, and hires from the developing world not requiring much skill. What we actually see is that some offshoring occurred, but it was limited and when it did occur companies tried to hire highly trained professionals in the country they outsourced to, not the cheapest bootcamp dev they could find. That's because the quality of the code at generation does matter, so it becomes a tradeoff between cost and quality.

> I still don't think that can be assumed as a fact. The few studies I've seen find comparable outcomes, with LLMs actually having a slight edge in some cases, e.g.

Anthropic doesn't actually believe in their LLMs as strongly as you do. You know how I can tell? Because they just spent millions acquihiring the Bun team instead of asking Claude to write them a JS runtime (not to mention the many software engineering roles they're advertising on their website). They know that their SOTA LLMs still generate worse code than humans, that they can't completely make up for it in the quality control phase, and that they at the very least can't be confident of that changing in the immediate future.
by quantummagic | 2025-12-11 14:10:03+00:00
As long as you support social media companies censoring people you don't like, you're in a weaker position arguing against their censorship of people you do like. There should be a strong social objection to all such censorship, but I don't know how we get there from here. All the justifications for censorship during Covid were corrosive, "The 1st amendment only protects you from _government_ censorship, etc."

At this point, nobody trusts the other side to "play fair" and reciprocate, which makes standing on principle feel like a loss. If all sides stood up just a little bit for the principle of "I don't agree with that person, but I defend his right to voice himself", we'd all be better off.
by syrusakbary | 2025-12-11 14:10:14+00:00
Completely agree on this.

Regarding cold-starts, I strongly believe V8 snapshots are perhaps not the best way to achieve fast cold starts with Python (they may be if you are tied to using V8, though!), and will have wide side effects if you go out of the standards packages included on the Pyodide bundle.

To put some perspective: V8 snapshots are storing the whole state of an application (including it's compiled modules). This means that for a Python package that is using Python (one wasm module) + Pydantic-core (one wasm module) + FastAPI... all of those will be included in one snapshot (as well as the application state). This makes sense for browsers, where you want to be able to inspect/recover everything at once.

The issue about this design is that the compiled artifacts and the application state are bundled into one piece artifact (this is not great for AOT designed runtimes, but might be the optimal design for JITs though).

Ideally, you would separate each of the compiled modules from the state of the application. When you do this, you have some advantages: you can deserialize the compiled modules in parallel, and untie the "deserialization" from recovering the state of the application. This design doesn't adapt that well into the V8 architecture (and how it compiles stuff) when JavaScript is the main driver of the execution, however it's ideal when you just use WebAssembly.

This is what we have done at Wasmer, which allows for much faster cold starts than 1 second. Because we cache each of the compiled modules separately, and recover the state of the application later, we can achieve cold-starts that are a magnitude faster than Cloudflare's state of the art (when using pydantic, fastapi and httpx).

If anyone is curious, here is a blogpost where we presented fast-cold starts for the application state (note that the deserialization technique for Wasm modules is applied automatically in Wasmer, and we don't showcase it on the blogpost): https://wasmer.io/posts/announcing-instaboot-instant-cold-st...

Note aside: congrats to the Cloudflare team on their work on Python on Workers, it's inspiring to all providers on the space... keep it up and let's keep challenging the status quo!