MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brudgers | 2025-12-15 18:07:36+00:00
we're 1/3 the price

How will you provide high quality service and reliability while competing on price with the scale and financial might of AWS?

Because in B2B, those things tend to have a higher value than initial cost. Or to put it another way, your customers will be making long term investments by choosing you.

Successfully competing on price in a commodity market requires cheaper access to resources and because price is the easiest way to segment a market, low prices attract price sensitive customers...they are the least desirable customers. Good luck.
by jordigh | 2025-12-15 18:08:02+00:00
The information to properly land the plane is in the manual. The required air speed and altitude have never been a secret, if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).

The real difficulty, not explored in this disassembly, is that the game has semi-realistic physics! My older brother was in flight school at the time and was able to easily land the plane and taught me how to do it.

As the article states, "Altitude and speed are both controlled by throttle input and pitch angle". So you can't just hit the engines or air brakes button to change your speed. If you lower the nose of the plane, you'll speed up and vice versa! So you have to carefully juggle your speed and altitude by altering both your pitch and your engines/air brakes.

My brother taught me that my speed wouldn't reduce if I'm nosediving, so raise the nose a little while opening my air brakes for a quick reduction in speed and then level out to maintain altitude. The game actually models this somewhat accurately!
Show HN: A Wordle-style game for SHA-256 hashes
by stwsk | 2025-12-15 18:08:04+00:00
i built a small wordle-style game where the target is a daily sha-256 hash.

it’s intentionally not cryptographically realistic; the goal is to make avalanche effects and the meaninglessness of near-matches intuitive.

this was a quick front-end experiment; the code isn’t published yet.

everything runs client-side; no tracking; no accounts.
by prepend | 2025-12-15 18:08:40+00:00
People are just raging and want an outlet. They aren’t thinking logically.

It’s been going on forever (remember how companies were reading files off your computer aka cookies in 1999?)

This seems like a total non-issue and expect that any public files are scraped by OpenAI and tons others. If I don’t want something scraped, I don’t make it public.
by taylodl | 2025-12-15 18:08:52+00:00
Not only has the price of goods gone up because of tariffs, but utility bills are climbing fast, grocery costs continue to surge, and health care premiums are skyrocketing. People have less money left for Christmas, and each dollar they do have buys far less than last year. I expect retail to take a brutal hit this season - and things will likely worsen in Q1 2026.
by reaperducer | 2025-12-15 18:09:07+00:00
Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed.

It's not always that black and white. In spite of appearances, many many companies make hiring decisions based on things other than what's in a resume.

For example, a company may have $mm contracts with another company whose owners/operators/shareholders/etc. favor one particular view, political party, or social construct. That company will most certainly look down upon the other company hiring people of a particular background.

Or the pressure could be internal. A couple of times in my life I've worked for companies where certain departments were unionized. Even if you weren't in one of those departments, if the company hired you and you had a particular background, the union would object.

The real world is very complex.
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2025-12-15 18:09:36+00:00
That is a game thoery approach but it completely fails in the face of reality.

The reality is that the floor to become "useful" is relatively low, which means the few billioanires have a large pool of potentially useful people of which they only employ some, leading to no greater salaries due to labour competition.

The other potentially useful workers cannot pool together and compete as the barrier of entry in the sector is prohibitely high.

So a natural moat emerges over cost of setting up a company, workers beg for a job of which they will take for a small wage and a few billioanires control the market.

This is a much closer approximation to the market we currently see
by gargi_tinyfish | 2025-12-15 18:09:38+00:00
Hi HN,

We are the engineering team behind Mino. We are building the infrastructure layer to help developers scale web agents from demo to production.

Here's the problem: Building an agent is easy; scaling it is expensive. Relying purely on inference loops (screenshot → reason → click) creates a flat cost curve.

It never gets cheaper or faster, no matter how many times you run the same task.

What we did: Convergent Infrastructure Mino is a headless runtime designed to optimize agent execution over time.

Instead of executing every run as a blank slate, Mino treats navigation as a convergence problem. As your agent repeats tasks, our infrastructure analyzes the successful execution traces to optimize the path.

Early Runs: Prioritize adaptability and exploration (handling dynamic DOMs/UIs). Later Runs: Prioritize speed and determinism.

The result is an API that warms up like a JIT compiler, becoming faster, cheaper, and more robust the more traffic you push through it.

The Primitive: We expose this as a stateless, async API designed for composition.

Input: URL + Goal (Natural Language). Output: Structured JSON. Concurrency: Fully parallelized.

We’re opening the API to developers today. 50 completed runs on the house.

Please try it out and give us your feedback.

And we are curious to hear what primitives you feel are missing from the current agent stack (auth management, captcha handling, etc.).
by Jide_Lambo | 2025-12-15 18:11:11+00:00
Hey guys,

Jide here, and I'm building from Helsinki - where getting either capital or face time with notable people often takes the strong grace of God and your native background, not what you're really capable of. I'm building FirstDistro and my ultimate ideal customers are mid-sized companies, with a few CSMs serving high-value customers. High-value customers that bring in revenue your company solely depends on to make payroll or attract the right traction for funding.

Why am I mentioning this? These types of ideal customers I've been building for are mostly in the US. You see, living and working in the EU comes with its perks and also obvious challenges. To sell here, you need country-specific talent for sales, legal, marketing, and so on. For a lean team like mine that cares alot more about providing quality value, and less about bureaucracy bs, this can be utterly frustrating. A total BS situation to find oneself.

However, relationships with US businesses and customers tend to be less stressful and most times, exciting. Same English language for communication, shared understanding about getting the work done and providing value, pay and get paid via stripe. The zeal to be successful is a shared value for both parties. You can literally strike up a conversation with a stranger in a starbucks line, and that person might become your biggest champion customer. The opportunities in the US are enormous, so much that we see it from miles away.

This is why I'm sharing this short epistle for my huge appetite to move to the US, work with the best minds, and serve more businesses with FirstDistro.

About FirstDistro, we help SaaS businesses detect early churn signals across usage, engagement, and sentiment within your products, and alert your team before your customers quietly churn. The experience is tailored to non-technical folks like CSMs , PMs, and designers in your team. It’s designed for non-technical users, so this is not another dev tool with an intimidating dashboards.
by psc | 2025-12-15 18:11:25+00:00
I've been working on a citizen science version of this, we have 7 hydrophones deployed that anyone can listen to live:

https://live.orcasound.net/

These hydrophones are a bit more expensive (~$1k per deployment) but still very accessible compared to how much it usually costs. And the goal is to bring the cost down to the ~$100 range (so $5 is very impressive!):

https://experiment.com/projects/can-low-cost-diy-hydrophones...

All the data is being saved (used for scientific research & ML training), with some of the hydrophones going back to 2017, and yes it's quite difficult to listen to and review so much audio. Better tools like the hydrophone explorer UI are much needed (been working on something similar).

One of the things that's surprised me the most is how difficult to keep hydrophones up and running. I can sympathize with both the technical and social challenges—underwater is not a friendly environment for electronics, and it can be difficult to get permission to deploy hydrophones. But it's incredibly rewarding when it works and you capture some cool sounds.

For anyone interested, all the code is open source and acoustic data is freely available:

Code: https://github.com/orcasound/

Data: https://registry.opendata.aws/orcasound/

Community: https://orcasound.zulipchat.com/
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-15 18:11:25+00:00
I don't agree that Rust tools are more sophisticated and they definitely are not more abundant. You just have a language that is more anal up front. C++ has many different compilers, analyzers, debuggers, linting tools, leak detectors, profilers, etc. It turns out that 40 years of use leads to significant development that is hard to rebuild from scratch.

I seem to have struck a nerve with my post, which got 4 downvotes so far. Just for saying Rust is not actually better than C++ in this one regard lol.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-12-15 18:11:32+00:00
AI water usage is pretty bad on a local scale where a large water consumer(Data centers) start sucking up more water than the local table can bear at the expense of the people living there.

Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person. It's correct that these companies will push limits and avoid accountability. It's correct that they're generally a liability creating a massive bubble and speculation based on an immature tech designed to automate as many careers away as possible without a proposed solution to the newly unemployed besides "deliver fast food" or "die".

Despite legally treating corporations as people, there's no consistently enforced mechanism that can punish them like people. Monsanto can't be sent to jail for murder. Their C-Levels will never see a cell the way the average person can have the book thrown at them for comparably minor crimes.

Because companies cannot be held accountable legally and effectively, it's important to assume the worst, to generate the public blowback to hold them accountable via lost business.
by usrme | 2025-12-15 18:11:37+00:00
Like my guy 'diarrhea' already echoed: using CUE absolutely does not make sense at a small scale; just write your YAML and get on with your day. We were using it to generate dozens upon dozens of GitHub Actions workflows from what was essentially a single source of truth, and because CUE can export to JSON too then that single source of truth could then easily be leveraged to provide other input files to be used elsewhere.
by ezekg | 2025-12-15 18:11:52+00:00
I have tables that have billions of rows that use UUIDv4 primary keys and I haven't encountered any issues either. I do use UUIDv7 for write-heavy tables, but even then, I got a way bigger performance boost from batching inserts than switching from UUIDv4 to UUIDv7. Issue is way overblown.
by itintheory | 2025-12-15 18:12:01+00:00
>gypsy moths

The common name is "spongy moths" now, to avoid a racial epithet.

"In July 2021 the Entomological Society of America decided to remove the name "gypsy moth" from its Common Names of Insects and Related Organisms List as "hurtful to the Romani people", since gypsy is considered an ethnic slur by some Romani people." [1]

[1] https://www.entsoc.org/entomological-society-america-discont...
by Terr_ | 2025-12-15 18:12:18+00:00
Certainly a factor: IIRC Hong Kong's GDP versus the mainland has gone from 20-30% to 2-3% in the ~28 years since the handover, as the mainland has modernized.

While that still puts in the ballpark of "top 5 cities", it's not quite the same (relative) prize as before.
by mmooss | 2025-12-15 18:12:23+00:00
Nothing is pure. You are ignoring quite a lot, and quite a lot that distinguishes that society and its peers different from than the others, far less accomplished.

The question is not purity, but facing our own faults, personal and societal, do we give up and indulge them or do we keep our vision and confidence and keep improving?

So many push so hard against liberty and justice.
by jotux | 2025-12-15 18:13:29+00:00
>What is the expected compensation for participants? Compensation varies based on experience level and agency placement. Annual salaries are expected to be in the approximate range of $150,000 to $200,000. Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and eligibility for performance-based awards.

>Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists

So "early-career" but they're going to get paid GS-14/15 pay[1] in DC? New grad engineers in DC are going to be GS-7/9 at best. This is either a blatant lie, or created by someone who has no idea of how federal pay works (or both).

As an aside, I was a fed for >10 years and left last year for industry but stay in touch with friends still working federal jobs. Before this administration recruiting was extremely difficult and candidate quality was low. I've heard that it's nearly impossible now and in the last 18 months they've only been able to hire a single person. Federal jobs used to be considered stable, with good benefits, but low pay. Now they're unstable, the current administration is actively working to make benefits worse, and the pay is still really low.

[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
by meatmanek | 2025-12-15 18:13:44+00:00
> On 23 October 2005, Finnix 86.0 was released. Earlier unreleased versions (84, and 85.0 through 85.3) were "Knoppix remasters", with support for Linux LVM and dm-crypt being the main reason for creation. However, 86.0 was a departure from Knoppix, and was derived directly from the Debian "testing" tree.[7]

My reading of this is that early versions of Finnix were based on Knoppix. However, according to the wikipedia sidebars, the initial release of Knoppix was 30 September 2000, while the initial release of Finnix was March 22, 2000. Something something beta/pre-release versions?
by square_usual | 2025-12-15 18:13:52+00:00
> You are better off being in the market than betting on an idea that you don’t know will even happen or when.

This is true if you're willing to wait forever, but if you have near- and medium-term goals, you should not be investing money in the market if you believe there will be a crash. I have such goals and I'm putting my money into treasuries instead of putting more into what I believe is a very overvalued market.
by reify | 2025-12-15 18:13:53+00:00
good old cnet.com has a dog in the rich mans race

you can never keep a good salesman down.

cnet! owned by the increasingly rich owner Ziff Davis

who recently bought:

The Skimm Well+Good Livestrong

who currently owns

AskMen BlackFriday.com BestBlackFriday.com CNET Deals of America Downdetector Ekahau emedia eVoice Eurogamer[84] Everyday Health Group (includes Everyday Health, Diabetes Daily, Migraine Again, DailyOM, What to Expect, BabyCenter, and Emma's Diary) ExtremeTech GamesIndustry.biz HowLongToBeat.com HR Technologist Humble Bundle IGN IPVanish Lifehacker Line2 Livedrive Lose It! Mashable MarTech Advisor Moz.com Offers.com PCMag RetailMeNot Rock Paper Shotgun Salesify SMTP Speedtest.net by Ookla MapGenie[92] Spiceworks StrongVPN SugarSync TDS Gift Cards Techbargains.com The Skimm Toolbox.com VG247 VIPRE ZDNet
by Boxxed | 2025-12-15 18:14:14+00:00
> The information to properly land the plane is in the manual. The required air speed and altitude have never been a secret, if you read the manual (which I guess most kids didn't).

It's also on-screen. What's missing is the acceptable ranges -- +/- 100 for altitude, +/- 50 for speed, per the post. Knowing that the slop for altitude is much higher is definitely helpful information.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-15 18:14:17+00:00
We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Clearly, the current system is bad, but it's the best system possible! Let's take the corruption we know, over the unknown possibilities. Who knows, through hard work, one day you could be a billionaire too. Do you really want to sabotage your future like that? Sound a lot like communism, and you are not supposed the make a living off minimum wage anyway.
by JaumeGreen | 2025-12-15 18:14:37+00:00
I miss MSAccess, but for the modern age. It has been replaced by basic CRUD using your platform of choice, but it's not as easy.

That would be similar to your solution, so either one would work.

I think that there might be some similar alternatives (maybe Airtable? probably using Lovable or Firebase counts) but nothing that is available for me for now.
by dyingkneepad | 2025-12-15 18:14:52+00:00
I'm quite the opposite: the more light, the better I am (especially now in the northern hemisphere December!). After painting my office walls with a reflective white and putting additional lamps on it, my productivity increased significantly (because the depression I felt inside the office went mostly away!).

In fact, my whole house has this problem: lots of rooms don't have light at the ceiling so I have to keep using these floor lamps that never seem to solve the problem for real, but if I want to add lamps at the ceilings I'll have to break drywalls and repaint everything, so I'm on an never-ending quest to improve lighting at my home.
by rajivjain | 2025-12-15 18:15:03+00:00
https://charlastar.org/

My twins (in high school) and I are building an AI study buddy.The idea is simple. A peer-level “study friend” you can work alongside, ask questions, and stay on track with.

It’s not doing anything ChatGPT or Claude couldn’t do. The goal is packaging it into something that feels a high-schooler would actually want to use when they’re studying.

We are also using this as a weekly project to learn the abstract stuff. Product thinking, design, pricing, marketing, and how to turn a vague idea into something real. Each week the kids prioritize a feature, research it, write up the idea, and then we build (or cut) it together.

Our stack is Claude Code, TypeScript, React and it's hosted on Cloudflare Pages for frontend + Workers for API.

No login or credit card required to try this out. We welcome your feedback.

<3
by sentrysapper | 2025-12-15 18:15:27+00:00
My grandfather was a crop duster pilot in the 60s-70s. He died of Parkinson's almost 4 years ago today. He is the only one in my family to succumb to this disease. For a brief moment I was relieved to know there was some explanation for his suffering.

Then I read the HN comments. It is beyond infuriating to read a well researched paper with 1300 open cases legal with overwhelming evidence only to be met with "zero chance this is real."
by 0x3f | 2025-12-15 18:15:31+00:00
It's possible for a meat grinder process to still be good at convicting, say, all murderers, at the cost of a few false positives. In a utilitarian sense that could be considered reasonable. And it might well be repeatable in a way. Even default-guilty is repeatable, and 'just' on those terms, as long as your pre-charging pipeline isn't kicking up too many false positives.

Really it's just about the definition of fairness or justness though. I'm not really disagreeing because I'm not putting forward definitions of my own either, but a lot of the comments here throw out the terms with some assumed meaning. For example, I'm pretty sure if you polled Chinese people, they wouldn't have a problem with the OP story's outcome. So does that make it democratic? Or good as a point of public policy? It's all a bit hand-wavey without specifying.

> what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?

Well we (I'm assuming) both live in the West and so we encounter the exceptionalist narrative of this place. Certainly HN is a Western forum. Most views of China held by people in the West are based on partial truths and thought-terminating cliches.

But that's kind of just how _people_ are the world over, no? Chinese people in Chinese forums have a parallel experience to this, just mirrored.
by HatchedLake721 | 2025-12-15 18:15:43+00:00
Same. Love PlanetScale, love their previous website design. I struggle reading white text on black backgrounds, so I don't even try to read their product pages or blog posts since there's no light mode :( yes I know about reader mode

It feels it went from "professional Stripe level design that you admire and it inspires you" to just "hard to read black website", not sure what for.

(not fully functional) https://web.archive.org/web/20240811142248/https://planetsca...
by IanCal | 2025-12-15 18:15:50+00:00
> If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?

Tax the thing you care about? You don't need to care really about the definition of AI or what an AI is or anything like that, you care that some people got trillions.

Tax "making an absolute shitton of money" or "being worth an insane amount". Taxing AI specifically means you're absolutely fucked if Altman turns out to not earn that much but someone who makes a specific connector to data centres is the richest person in the world. Is Nvidia an AI company? What is AI? *Who cares?* The point is to figure out some way as a society of continuing.
by wtallis | 2025-12-15 18:16:08+00:00
Lots of consumer SATA SSDs don't have any thermal pads between the PCB and the case, and plastic cases are common. Heat just isn't a problem for a drive that's only drawing 2-3W under load.

And most consumer NVMe SSDs don't need any extra cooling for normal use cases, because consumer workloads only generate bursts of high-speed IO and don't sustain high power draw long enough for cooling to be a serious concern.

In the datacenter space where it is actually reasonable to expect drives to be busy around the clock, nobody's been trying to get away with passive cooling even for SATA SSDs.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-15 18:16:28+00:00
I dunno--of all the AI based products coming out, the whole "AI girlfriend / AI boyfriend" thing bothers me the least. If someone can afford it and they want a play relationship with a computer, then I don't see the harm. It's probably safer, better and healthier than many real-human relationships are. If they're getting what they need out of the computer, who are we to judge?

I would change my opinion if it could be shown to have the negative physical harm that your cocaine example implies.
by dlubarov | 2025-12-15 18:17:02+00:00
While there isn't one standard definition of terrorism, Hezbollah's untargeted bombardment of Israeli towns qualifies under pretty much any definition.

You seemed happy to use the term against Israel [1], claiming an operation which specifically targeted Hezbollah operatives was somehow terrorism. Why do you suddenly have a blanket objection to a term that you were just using yourself?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46243118