MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-22 15:47:16+00:00
Except CRT televisions weren't like that at all.

The only time the electron gun was not involved in producing visible light was during overscan, horizontal retrace, and the vertical blanking interval. They spent the entire rest of their time (the very vast majority of their time) busily drawing rasterized images onto phosphors (with their own persistence!) for display.

This resulted in a behavior that was ridiculously dissimilar to a 30Hz strobe light.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 15:47:43+00:00
Fair enough on that... I had just upgraded earlier in the year, so I'm set for the next 3-5 years at least, that said, I'll probably defer my usual mid-cycle gpu upgrade and hold onto my 9070xt for a while as well, I don't see GPU/Ram prices going back to normal for another 3+ years given how many data center rollouts are planned and mostly paid for in that timeframe. My bigger concern is actually going to be electricity costs in the face of those data center rollouts.

Not to mention actual AI fears since I've started playing with the latest Anthropic models (Claude Code), it's impressive and the field is still evolving rapidly. The job market is going to get worse IMO.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-22 15:47:50+00:00
<< Source

Eh. Sure, lets start at Netflix as a the edge of streaming wars for a quick example:

https://nscreenmedia.com/netflix-ad-values-5-dollar-increase...
https://nypost.com/2025/12/12/entertainment/streamers-are-ri...
https://deadline.com/2024/10/netflix-price-hikes-executives-...

I would like then point to exec statement in last one:

“Our approach to pricing has been remarkably consistent over many, many years,” Co-CEO Greg Peters said. “Our core theory is, we’ve got to work really, really hard to make sure we are delivering more value to members every quarter. Then, we assess based on how that’s going, through metrics like engagement, acquisition and retention, did we do a good job there? How we actually deliver that promise of more value. If we do, then we occasionally ask members to pay a bit more, so we can invest that forward and keep that whole process going.”

I don't have use my corporate to human translator machine..
by mjr00 | 2025-12-22 15:47:56+00:00
It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human. It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. I've never had issues getting results I've wanted with much simpler prompts like (looking at my own history here) "python grpc oneof pick field", "mysql group by mmyy of datetime", "python isinstance literal". Basically the same way I would use Google; after all, you just type in "toledo forecast" instead of "What is the weather forecast for the next week in Toledo, Ohio?", don't you?

There's a lot of black magic and voodoo and assumptions that speaking in proper English with a lot of detailed language helps, and maybe it does with some models, but I suspect most of it is a result of (sub)consciously anthropomorphizing the LLM.
Poll: As we close 2025, what's your opinion on the SWE level of SOTA LLMs?
by k2xl | 2025-12-22 15:48:08+00:00
Mark Zuckerberg predicted early in the year by the end of the year we would have AI that is equivalent to "mid-level" engineer. Was he right in that prediction?

If you would "rate" the level of Claude Opus/Gemini 3/Codex 5.2... What level of SWE would you say we are at as we end the year? What's your prediction by end of 2026?

[Note: I believe HN randomizes the poll choices, meant to have it in order]
by concinds | 2025-12-22 15:48:35+00:00
I'm not "incensed" by the law at all, only by the companies gleefully violating it.

But Apple doesn't track you in the way ATT prevents, see my other comment; the narrative that they do was pushed by the adtech industry who wants ATT gone, and the courts (French, Italian) just never bothered checking if that was true. Check the decision yourself, they take it for granted and never look into how it works.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-22 15:49:24+00:00
Terminology sucks. There is an ML technique called "hallucinating", that can really improve results. It works, for example, on Alphafold, and allows you to reverse the function of Alphafold (instead of finding the fold that matches a given protein or protein complex, find a protein complex that has a specific shape, or fits on a specific shape).

It's called hallucination because it works by imagining you have the solution and then learning what the input needs to be to get that solution. Treat the input or the output as weights and learn an input that fits an output or vice-versa instead of the network. Fix what the network sees as the "real world" to match what "what you already knew", just like a hallucinating human does.

You can imagine how hard it is to find papers on this technique nowadays.
by yesbabyyes | 2025-12-22 15:49:31+00:00
As I heard it explained, the original manuscript had the humans kept alive because the Matrix was actually running on the humans' brains as the computing substrate. This both made much more sense than humans as a power source, was more horrific, and a better story.

Apparently this was deemed to hard for the unwashed masses to understand, and we were left with this battery analogy instead.
by data-ottawa | 2025-12-22 15:49:43+00:00
Maybe it's because I'm a data scientist and not a dedicated programmer/engineer, but setup+tooling gains this year have made 2025 a stellar year for me.

DS tooling feels like it hit much a needed 2.0 this year. Tools are faster, easier, more reliable, and more reproducible.

Polars+pyarrow+ibis have replaced most of my pandas usage. UDFs were the thing holding me back from these tools, this year polars hit the sweet spot there and it's been awesome to work with.

Marimo has made notebooks into apps. They're easier to deploy, and I can use anywidget+llms to build super interactive visualizations. I build a lot of internal tools on this stack now and it actually just works.

PyMC uses jax under the hood now, so my MCMC workflows are GPU accelerated.

All this tooling improvement means I can do more, faster, cheaper, and with higher quality.

I should probably write a blog post on this.
by TomasBM | 2025-12-22 15:50:03+00:00
While I agree that we need a word for this type of behavior, hallucinate is a wrong choice IMO.

Hallucinations are already associated with a type of behavior, which is (roughly defined) "subjectively seeing/hearing things which aren't there". This is an input-level error, not the right umbrella term for the majority of errors happening with LLMs, many if which are at output-level.

I don't know what would be a better term, but we should distinguish between different semantic errors, such as:

- confabulating, i.e., recalling distorted or misinterpreted memories;

- lying, i.e., intentionally misrepresenting an event or memory;

- bullshitting, i.e., presenting a version without regard for the truth or provenance; etc.

I'm sure someone already made a better taxonomy, and hallucination is OK for normal public discussions, but I'm not sure why the distinctions aren't made in supposedly more serious works.
by ivanr | 2025-12-22 15:51:31+00:00
Because "everybody uses RC4" (the sibling comment from dchest is correct). There was a lot of bad cryptography in that period and not a lot of desire to improve. The cleanup only really started in 2010 or thereabouts. For RC4 specifically, its was this research paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit... released in 2013.
by achenet | 2025-12-22 15:51:34+00:00
There's a video I once saw of Jim Carrey talking about his dad, who, if I recall correctly, was originally a jazz musician, but decided it was too risky and opted to become an accountant instead.

And then, having given up on his dreams to follow the risk-averse path, he got fired.

Jim's words on the subject were like "well, he gave up on his dreams and still failed, so that's why I decided to pursue acting".
by stared | 2025-12-22 15:51:50+00:00
I think it is precisely why Rust is gold - you can pick the abstraction level you work at. I used it a lot when simulating quantum physics - on one hand, needed to implement low-level numerical operations with custom data structures (to squeeze as much performance as possible), on the other - be able to write and debug it easily.

It is similar to PyTorch (which I also like), where you can add two tensors by hand, or have your whole network as a single nn.Module.
by 72deluxe | 2025-12-22 15:52:24+00:00
I have a 2016 VW Beetle (which is a pleasure to drive, the 150PS diesel), but it has buttons on the steering wheel that do absolutely nothing without me paying £200 for the privilege of VW unlocking them.

Want to press that phone button to make a call? Sorry please visit your VW dealership.

Want to have CarPlay or Android Auto? Sorry please visit your VW dealership.

Want to speak to your car to make a call? Sorry please visit your VW dealership.

I also have a 1972 VW Beetle which doesn't require any intervention from anyone else on Earth to use. Guess which is the classic between these 2 models?
by BoredPositron | 2025-12-22 15:52:32+00:00
To be clear, we are not discussing small toy models but to be fair I also don't use consumer cards. Benchmarks are out there (phoronix, runpod, hugginface or from Nvidias own presentation) and they say it's at least 2x on high and nearly 4x on low precision, which is comparable to the uplift I see on my 6000 cards, if you don't see the performance uplift everyone else sees there is something wrong with your setup and I don't have the time to debug it.
Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?
by fud101 | 2025-12-22 15:53:25+00:00
I was listening to an old postcast from 2021 which discusses the inexplicable rise of Python.

I remember much of the positive sentiment around Python in the early days being less about Python and more about how powerful Perl is but Perl is Perl. Python being the nice and clean version of Perl meant it got all all the praise of Perl while enjoying the reputation of having none of the failings of Perl. In hindsight I think Python needed to stand on its own right, not just as a better Perl, but yet here we are. I think hindsight will show we should have considered the defects of Python more deeply. I know the lispers saw them but no one listens to them. Today Python is most dominant language on the planet and Perl is all but forgotten.

If you survey the language landscape now, a language can be much better than Python but never get the chance Python did just because it happened to look a bit better than Perl. Which is absurd to me.
by xaviergonzalez | 2025-12-22 15:53:37+00:00
OP here. I built this because I hit the 'Wordle Plateau'—I wanted a game with a progression mechanic where you actually have to build the word (3->7 letters) rather than just guessing.

It's purely client-side (no server). The daily puzzle is generated locally using the date epoch and a 60k word dictionary. It includes a 'Strict Mode' (one try per day) and a 'Share' grid that visualizes your climb.

Tech stack: Vanilla JS, HTML, CSS. <10kb total.

Would love feedback on the difficulty curve of Level 5.
by wrxd | 2025-12-22 15:54:27+00:00
I don’t think it’s surprising. The ideal setup for many people here is an OS that gives them control over what they run and over their data.

An App Store that restrict us from running the application we want is bad. An App Store that prevents applications from tracking us is good. The former restricts our freedom, the latter restricts the freedom of developers who want to take advantage of our data.
by dahart | 2025-12-22 15:54:31+00:00
In this shared responsibility model, if the public is mostly responsible, then what can and should be done by the public to fix these issues? And how long will it take? And how would you propose getting the bipartisan support needed, or avoid it becoming a partisan political issue? Are more high school media literacy classes realistically going to fix this problem? Today it feels to me like agenda-driven manipulative reporting is fueling a decrease in media literacy, which appears to be precisely what some people want. What can the public realistically do to counteract this?
by antonvs | 2025-12-22 15:54:39+00:00
Smaller teams, yes, but also it seems as though the SaaS explosion has led to many enterprises significantly relaxing the "hardness" of their network boundaries, at least when it comes to integration with companies whose services they depend on. I've seen Tailscale and tools like ngrok being approved to get into large enterprises who you might think wouldn't allow it. Some of these enterprises will set up a bastion in a DMZ to control that, but I've been surprised by how many don't do that.

That relaxation tends to have ripple effects - once you allow tunneling tools in for one purpose - like SaaS integration - then it becomes more normalized and people start using it for other purposes.
by runkids | 2025-12-22 15:54:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I built PackageFlow to replace my terminal tab chaos when working on multiple frontend projects.

What it does:
- Visual interface for npm/pnpm/yarn scripts
- Git operations with AI-generated commit messages
- Security auditing (npm audit + supply chain validation)
- MCP server integration for AI coding tools

Tech stack:
- Tauri 2.x (Rust backend)
- React + TypeScript
- SQLite for local storage
- 100% local-first, no cloud

Why I built it:
Tired of cd project && npm run dev across 5 terminals. Wanted something visual that stays out of my way.

macOS only for now. Source: https://github.com/runkids/PackageFlow

Feedback welcome, especially on the Rust/Tauri architecture decisions.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 15:54:56+00:00
> If anyone's interested in trying to implement something similar, there's a regularly updated database of ASN <-> IP ranges announced here: https://github.com/ipverse/asn-ip

What exactly is the source of these mappings? Never heard about ipverse before, seems to be a semi-anonymous GitHub organization and their website has had a failing certificate for more than a year by now.
Show HN: Mcp.christmas – play while your agent is working
by wilhelmklopp | 2025-12-22 15:55:33+00:00
Claude (code) has been doing a lot of work for me lately and using it has been a ton of fun. But what do I do while it's researching, calling tools, writing code? Too often I end up scrolling feeds and getting distracted. So I decided to build mcp.christmas, which is a sort of mashup of the chrome dinosaur game and google santa tracker. You play it in the browser and get an in-game notification when claude (or your agent of choice) is ready for you to provide feedback.

When you go to the site, you're redirected to a URL like https://mcp.christmas/jolly-santa and anything you POST to that (e.g. curl https://mcp.christmas/jolly-santa -d "Hello World!") is delivered as an in-game notification (powered by cloudflare workers).

More detailed setup instruction at mcp.christmas, but the simple API makes this very easy to integrate with claude code stop hooks (which are deterministic), but you can also use MCP – though whether or not the notify_user tool is called depends on your model and harness and can be very unreliable (through no fault of the protocol).

Enjoy! Merry Christmas
by lorenzohess | 2025-12-22 15:55:49+00:00
A better comparison would be the same left column (causes of death, by %) and a similar right column: media coverage of these causes of death, by %, BUT only in media coverage which explicitly covers the cause of death as a cause of death, and not in another context.

Just because an article mentions terrorism doesn't mean that terrorism is being covered as a cause of death. Terrorism could be covered wrto. its economic impact.

Same with the flu. The article could be on vaccines.

All these causes of death have so many other newsworthy impacts, so a better comparison would exclude coverage of these causes in the context of their other impacts.

I don't think the general sentiment would necessarily be much different, though. You may very well find that "mass silent killers" get less airtime than other types of news.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 15:56:20+00:00
Given the time it's been since deprecated, I'm assuming most older versions of Windows since 2000 and Samba have long since supported more secure options... though from some comments even the more secure options are relatively weak by today's standards as well.

Aside: still hate working in orgs where you have a password reset multiple times a year... I tend to use some relatively long passphrases, if not the strongest possible... (ex: "ThisHasMyNewPassphrase%#23") I just need to be able to remember it through the first weekend each time I change without forgetting the phrase I used.
by observationist | 2025-12-22 15:56:38+00:00
Someone is making your IT team do extra work without a good understanding of their systems if they're banning tailscale or granting special network level access thinking that ip or mac address based profiling is secure.

Your network should be zero trust. That means you want to treat every host that connects as if it's on the public internet; the corollary to that is you should give your hosts access to the public internet, unrestricted, and treat your users like adults who don't need micromanaging or constant surveillance (do sane logging, ofc.)

If you need a host that's subject to continuous surveillance, design it as such and require remote access with MFA, and so on.

Give your end users as much freedom as possible, and only constrict it where necessary, or you're going to incentivize shadow IT, unintended consequences, and a whole lot of unnecessary make-work that doesn't contribute to security.

Unrestricted access forces change management, design choices, and policy to confront each user and device for the attack vector they are, and to behave accordingly.
by kylecazar | 2025-12-22 15:56:39+00:00
First off, I'm sorry. I went down this road with my godmother, $300k still unrecovered, despite lots of information documented.

How did the money actually leave her account once they had access? Was it wired?

Unfortunately the solution for you right now is to focus on rebuilding and acceptance. This is a massive problem, you aren't alone, and it's a reminder that there are shitty people in this world. There needs to be an alert and approval mechanism for outbound wires that older people can be strongly encouraged to set up. Sons and daughters can be notified if there's a massive outbound wire pending and intervene -- scammers are often posing as these people.
by thisislife2 | 2025-12-22 15:56:42+00:00
Yes, in general you find the best high quality source you can get your hands on and then compress that. For us lay people, that would currently be any 4k videos with a high bitrate. In such cases, it doesn't matter much that it is already compressed with AVC or HEVC. Sure, when you compress that again at a lower bitrate, there will some loss of data or quality. But honestly, it doesn't make a discernable difference (after all, you decide what is the video quality acceptable to you by choosing how much more to compress). Ideally, if DVD and Blu-Rays lasted long, we would all just be saving our videos on it. (Assuming there will be any Blu-Ray readers, 10+ years down the lane).
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-22 15:56:51+00:00
RSA was still selling RC4 into the mid-2000s as a product. While open source variants of RC4, often trying to avoid the RSA trademark by calling it things like ARCFOUR, started trading in the 1990s, there was still a sense that RC4 was backed by a security company.

Also, even though flaws were discovered as early as the open source variants had reverse engineered the RC4 algorithm, it was one of those "flaws exist but need things to exploit them that are out of our current threat models" problems, with it being a multi-stage, multi-year effort from the earliest flaw discoveries in the 90s to the most devastating exploits being developed around 2013-2015 taking advantage of those flaws in reproducible ways.

I also remember in the 90s it felt like the reverse engineered, open source efforts were once shining beacons of hope like PGP of releasing "enterprise grade" security algorithms from trade secret-protected corporate and governmental interests to "the common people". RC4 was simple to implement and easy to reason about, but gave "good enough" security for a lot of uses, certainly far better than "no security unless you pay a company like RSA and only if you don't plan to export your software outside of the US". That's why RC4 was the basis of a 90s idea called CipherSaber [1] about the idea of being able to implement your own security suite that you controlled and companies couldn't take from you.

Of course, things have shifted so much since the 90s when security suites were trade-protected and export-controlled. The security through obscurity of the algorithms involved behind trade secrets laws is no longer seen as an advantage and the algorithm being public knowledge has started to be a part of security suite threat models. Today's advice is never write your own security suite because there are several well regarded open source suites that have many eyes on them (and subsequently vulnerability plans/mitigations). Governments in the internet age have had to greatly relax their import/export controls on cryptography. We live in a very different world from the world RC4 was originally intended to secure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CipherSaber
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-22 15:57:00+00:00
I can’t say I’ve ever had “5 year plans” and even I did, facts on the ground change so fast, my plans would change.

I’ve been working since 1996. But without going into ancient history, in 2008, I had spent the last 9 years at my second job, became an expert beginner, been divorced for two years, and had 5 mortgages between my home and two rental properties that were underwater by about a $250K.

I was also teaching fitness classes part time to make up the gap - that was suppose just be a hobby.

Then my plan was to get out from under all of that mess. I didn’t know how or have a timeline. But it started with getting a job where I could get exposed to modern development practices (done after 3 months and a lot of prep work), stopped teaching so much (just kept my favorite classes where my friends were), and walked away from five mortgages and wrecked my credit (everyone was doing “strategic defaults” back then).

One thing I didn’t “plan” for was to meet and marry my future wife and become a father to pre-teens by 2013. I’m still married, boys are grown. That by itself changed my goals.

By 2013, I was still about 25% under paid even for an enterprise “senior” [sic] dev in Atlanta and still digging myself out of my financial mess while supporting a family.

My goal by then was to develop the soft skills and hard skills to be a team lead - again no timeline.

Then in 2016, my goal was for us to move and work for a much better paying tech company after 2020 when my youngest graduated from high school. Even that changed to I would rather just not move and get into customer facing cloud consulting (not staff aug) after 2020 when I thought I would have to travel a lot (who could have predicted a worldwide pandemic??).

Well both fell into my lap in mid 2020 - customer facing cloud consulting and BigTech and I didn’t have to move when I got a job at AWS working in Professional Services. I didn’t even know the department existed. Again not planned.

2020 my plan was to work for Amazon for four years, pay off debt, save some money and work for a smaller consulting firm. I knew three months after I got there that I definitely didn’t have the stomach for BigTech long term. This was the only 5 year plan that worked out more or less as I wanted (staff consultant for a reputable mid sized company).

Even then, I never thought in 5 years, we would decide to sell our house in the burbs, downsize and move to state tax free, much better weather Florida