MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by foldr | 2025-12-25 13:36:58+00:00
Merry Christmas!

I am not arguing that people should be paid public money to do Chomskyan linguistics. That is an entirely separate question from the question of whether or not Chomsky's key claims are true and whether his research program has made progress. Again, you will have to throw out the majority of science if you hold to the criterion that only work with practical applications has any value.

I also think that you continue to underestimate Chomsky's overall influence on cognitive science. If you think that post-cognitive-revolution cognitive science has achieved anything of note, then you ought to give Chomsky partial credit for that.

>I don't see how that small number of examples is supposed to scale to an entire natural language

Wide coverage generative grammars certainly exist, though they were never something that Chomsky himself was interested in. Here is one in a Chomskyan idiom: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1238.pdf

I'm still puzzled by your point about falsifiability. I haven't seen anything close to a falsifiable claim from people who are excited about the cognitive implications of LLMs. The argument is little more than "look at the cool stuff these things can do – surely brains must work a bit like this too!" Read almost anything by Chomsky and you'll find it's full of quite specific claims that can be empirically tested. I guess people get excited about the fact that the architecture of LLMs is superficially brain-like, but it's doubtful that this gets us any closer to an understanding of the relevant computations at the neural level.
Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas
by jack_ruru | 2025-12-25 13:38:38+00:00
I built a visual editor that represents Excel formulas as blocks,
making it easier to inspect, refactor, and reason about complex formulas structurally.
Frockly is not an Excel replacement.
It focuses on understanding and refactoring formulas before bringing them back to Excel.
Demo: https://ryuu12358.github.io/Frockly/
GitHub: https://github.com/ryuu12358/Frockly
Write-up: https://note.com/ryuu12358/n/naa65d9d5facd （Japanese）
by Chgdz | 2025-12-25 13:39:53+00:00
Hey HN! Author here.
Quick summary: SENTINEL is an AI security platform I've been building. Today I'm releasing everything – 97 detection engines, from regex to topological data analysis.
What makes it different:
- Strange Math engines (TDA, Sheaf Theory, Hyperbolic Geometry)
- 39K+ attack payloads for red teaming
- <10ms latency, production-ready
Why now? It's Christmas. Wanted to give back.
Happy to answer any questions!
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-25 13:40:21+00:00
Very impressive video! What you can clearly see:

If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D

This is just the very very early beginning, like the first seconds after big bang, we haven really started this whole thing: If you put just more ressources here, we will have giant parking houses for just self-driving-cars, like "coming home over night and recharge"

And this technology will come on a mass scale, Im pretty sure - there is nothing that can stop this?

How will this affect transportation jobs?

If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.

Lets come back in 10 years! :-)
by amluto | 2025-12-25 13:40:35+00:00
I find the backward version slightly more intuitive. Here’s why:

Suppose I want to uniformly randomly shuffle a deck of cards in a single pass. I stick the deck on the table and call it the non-shuffled pile. My goal is to move the deck, one card at a time, into the shuffled pile. First I need to select a card, uniformly at random, to be the bottom card of the new pile, and I move it over. Then I select another card, uniformly at random from the still non-shuffled cards, and put it on top of the bottom shuffled card. I repeat this until I’ve moved all the cards, so that each card in the shuffled pile is a uniform random selection from all of the cards it could have been. And that’s it.

One can think of this as random selection, whereas the “forward” version is like random insertion of a not-random card into a shuffled pile. And for whatever reason I tend to think of the selection version first.
by miroljub | 2025-12-25 13:40:41+00:00
With Röhm you are close to Goodwin. The difference is Röhm was hiding his sexual preferences, while Weidel is pretty open about it. Röhm was killed because of it by his party members. Weidels sexual preference is a non issue for AfD members.

Your comparison with Röhm just shows once more that AfD policies are quite opposite to those of the NSDAP.
by andix | 2025-12-25 13:41:03+00:00
Array also implements IReadOnlyList if I'm not mistaken.

I think C# doesn't really have immutable collections, they just can be typecasted to IReadonly* to hide the mutable operations. But they can always be typecasted back to their mutable base implementation.

The only real immutable collections I know of, are F#s linked lists.
by handoflixue | 2025-12-25 13:41:55+00:00
Most games use ranked match-making to resolve this. If you're in Bronze, compete trying to get into Silver, etc.. My experience is that you have to be extremely bad to get stuck at the bottom of Bronze in most modern games.

Yeah, you'll lose a few matches as the ranking system figures out where to place you, but the cost of competition is unfortunately the mortifying ordeal of learning that you are not in fact the best in the world.
by ajb | 2025-12-25 13:43:41+00:00
Non-neurotypicals can receive bad treatment from neurotypicals. But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant.
The corollary of not knowing when they're offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance - which is actually a lot; although it's understandable that this is not obvious.
by jack_ruru | 2025-12-25 13:44:28+00:00
Yeah, that’s usually what I do as well.
Breaking formulas down into smaller pieces with clear intent helps a lot.

What I’ve been thinking about lately are cases where large formulas already exist,
and changing the sheet structure (adding helper columns or moving things around)
isn’t always practical.

In those situations, it feels useful to first understand
what the existing formula is doing structurally,
before deciding whether and how to refactor it.

I’m not convinced this is a better approach yet —
just exploring the space.
by torginus | 2025-12-25 13:45:01+00:00
I used to think so too, but I do have to complain about Microsoft doing the Microsoft thing - they have a brilliant idea (and execution), but they bury it in so much boilerplate that 99% of people who would use it are put off by it.

The amount of stuff you have to wade through here compared to something like comptime in Zig (Roslyn API, setting up the project, having VS recognize it and inject it in the compiler, debugging etc) makes usage of these an absolute pain.
by latexr | 2025-12-25 13:46:31+00:00
> I feel ashamed that my selfish life feels pale in comparison.

You’re still alive, thus you still have the chance to live a more selfless life you feel proud of.

> It's amazing these people did not worry about the extra expense and inconvenience of taking care of another person

Seems to me they did worry, but decided to do it anyway.

> with children of their own to take care of.

The children came later, and Ronnie helped to take care of them.
by lexicality | 2025-12-25 13:46:43+00:00
> an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay?

A user that was following the letter of the license and has suddenly had their access to the software restricted without warning.

Open source software means people are entirely within their rights to sell it to others, perhaps creating value by providing the warranty that all licenses expressly disclaim.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-25 13:46:54+00:00
Enjoy the journey, make the most of as much of it as possible. The present can feel as if it moves very slowly, but the future arrives incredibly quickly. My two are 18 and 16 and it feels like only five minutes has passed (I'm sure this is how you feel about the last 3 years). I miss their unrestricted toddler personalities, but I'm also incredibly happy and proud of who they've both become as, essentially, adults now.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-25 13:47:42+00:00
I don't think traffic light outages (e.g. flashing yellow) or police directing traffic at intersections is that rare, but regardless these cars do need to handle it in a safe and legal manner, which either means recognizing police gestures in a reliable way, or phoning home.

We know that Waymos phone home when needed, but not sure how Tesla handles these situations. I'm not sure how you conclude anything about Tesla based on their current temporary "safety monitor" humans in the cars - this is just a temporary measure until they get approval to go autonomous.
by 101008 | 2025-12-25 13:48:36+00:00
I am thinking from a piracy perspective. If I share a link that contains a book, what can be done from DCMA or legal regulators? They can't ask the server (textarea.my) to remove the link because it doesn't exist.

They can't track every website with the link and ask to be removed, either.

Could they ask textarea.my to not parse the link and thus, not display the content? Could textarea.my refuse?
by amluto | 2025-12-25 13:48:59+00:00
I don’t really expect fancier codes to cause a huge jump in the number of logical qubits. At the end of the day, there’s some code rate (logical bits / physical bits) that makes a quantum computer work. The “FOOM” is the transition from that code rate changing from zero (lifetime of a logical bit is short) to something that is distinctly different from zero (the state lasts long enough to be useful when some credible code). Say the code rate is 0.001 when this happens. (I haven’t been in the field for a little while, but I’d expect higher because those huuuuge codes have huuuuge syndromes, which isn’t so fun. But if true topological QC ever works, it will be a different story.) The code rate is unlikely to ever be higher than 1/7 or so, and it will definitely not exceed 1. So there’s at most a factor of 1000, and probably less, to be gained by improving the code rate. This isn’t an exponential or super-exponential FOOM.

A factor of 1000 may well be the difference between destroying Shor’s-algorithm-prone cryptography and destroying it later, though.
by fn-mote | 2025-12-25 13:50:21+00:00
> Of course the open source bait and switch done by companies is a shitty behavior worth calling out,

Yes, that’s what we are doing here.

> but the companies exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected.

Expected != ethical. Also not a necessary, logical outcome.

What is legitimately expected is a pro version that has more corporate features. We’re not talking about $Xx/user/mo to enable SSO here, though.
by buddyhollyclone | 2025-12-25 13:50:59+00:00
I'm in much the same boat - however my SWE pivot was when I attempted to commercialize my PhD research along with my advisor. We had a startup for a few years and then got acquired by a global company. I now manage a team of SWEs and coordinate with SMEs in technical fields to make sure that our scientific software products are great in both areas. These roles exist, but probably not commonly as a straight hybrid - may have to lean into one and use the other as a differentiator/value-add. For me, I think I got here by caring about the customer experience first - which takes "whatever it takes" - software and science both. I have to be an evangelist for both of these things but only as a means to a common end, which is to help the end users expand their understanding and abilities with applied knowledge.
by Pepp38 | 2025-12-25 13:52:26+00:00
Interesting read. What stood out to me is that this feels less like a detection problem and more like a cost-shaping one.

Sec-Fetch and Client Hints aren’t decisive on their own, but they’re hard to fake consistently across layers and over time, which is where the real value seems to be.

Curious whether you see these headers as a durable signal, or more as something that will need regular rotation as automation frameworks adapt.
by cletus | 2025-12-25 13:52:30+00:00
Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I want to tell a story.

I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you couldn't block certain people but the one that was most public was Mark Zuckerberg. It would just say it failed or something like that. And people would assign malice or just intent to it. But the truth was much funnier.

Most data on Facebook is stored in a custom graph database that basically only has 2 tables that are sharded across thousands of MySQL instances but most almost always accessed via an in-memory write-through cache, also custom. It's not quite a cache because it has functionality built on top of the database that accessing directly wouldn't have.

So a person is an object and following them is an edge. Importantly, many such edges were one-way so it was easy to query if person A followed B but much more difficult to query all the followers of B. This was by design to avoid hot shards.

So I lied when I said there were 2 tables. There was a third that was an optimization that counted certain edges. So if you see "10.7M people follow X" or "136K people like this", it's reading a count, not doing a query.

Now there was another optimization here: only the last 10,000 of (object ID,edge type) were in memory. You generally wanted to avoid dealing with anything older than that because you'd start hitting the database and that was generally a huge problem on a large, live query or update. As an example, it was easy to query the last 10,000 people or pages you've followed.

You should be able to see where this is going. All that had happened was 10,000 people had blocked Mark Zuckerberg. Blocks were another kind of edge that was bidirectional (IIRC). The system just wasn't designed for a situation where more than 10,000 people wanted to block someone.

This got fixed many years ago because somebody came along and build a separate system to handle blocking that didn't have the 10,000 limit. I don't know the implementation details but I can guess. There was a separate piece of reverse-indexing infrastructure for doing queries on one-way edges. I suspect that was used.

Anyway, I love this story because it's funny how a series of technical decisions can lead to behavior and a perception nobody intended.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-25 13:52:38+00:00
I know how to get the audio stream names, the problem is the window titles. With X it's easy, just call xdotool. I'm sure it's probably easy enough on Windows and MacOS too. Wayland is the weird one for making focused window titles privileged information.

Anyway, I do think I've created what should be considered basic desktop functionality here, a simple hotkey that mutes or otherwise changes the volume only of the focused window. Every desktop should have it.

This is just one of the tools I've made for myself with X which I do not want to do without and this makes Wayland a non-option for me. If I can't use X and can't replicate things like this with Wayland, then maybe I should switch to MacOS at that point because the dream of controlling my own computer seems like it's dying anyway.
by andix | 2025-12-25 13:52:58+00:00
Modern C# and .NET are great. It still suffers from the bad reputation of the Windows-only .NET Framework. It's still a quite heavy platform with a lot of features, but the .NET team invested a lot of time to make it more approachable recently.

With top level Programs and file-based apps[1] it can be used as a scripting language now, just add a shebang (#!/usr/local/share/dotnet/dotnet run) to the first line and make it executable. It will still compile to a temporary file (slow on first run), but it doesn't require a build step anymore for smaller scripts.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-25 13:53:07+00:00
Ha I was being tongue in cheek for sure but not as a critique of the site just about Grok. I had a lot of fun with this tool last night. Very interesting watching the process play out and just a cool idea, already shared with a few buddies. Good to know about the @!

Congrats and have a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate :)
by Thorrez | 2025-12-25 13:54:21+00:00
>If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.

Why would insurance companies lobby for that? 90% reduction in accidents means 90% reduction in premiums, which means 90% reduction in profits.

Do insurance companies have a history of lobbying for safety regulations?
by oulipo2 | 2025-12-25 13:54:33+00:00
That wasn't the point of the answer. The point is "How well do you really know someone?". You really don't. Many people live with partners who end up killing them, although they thought they trusted them.

Besides, "Bayes law" is not on your side on this one, it's well-known that "regular people" are over-represented in homicide, and "autistic people" or even "schizophrenic people" are under-represented and are mostly harmless
by bilbo0s | 2025-12-25 13:54:47+00:00
Yeah but that's going nowhere in court right?

You can't have the government coming in telling a scientist who he has to work for. People are free to take jobs at whatever company they like.

This is just a clever mechanism of paying that intellectual capital an amount of money so far outside the bounds of a normal salary that it borders on obscenity.

All that said, I don't say anything when Jordan Love or Patrick Mahomes are paid hundreds of millions, so I need to learn to shut my mouth in this case as well. I just think it sucks for the regular employees. I guarantee they will lose their jobs over the next 24 months.
by justin66 | 2025-12-25 13:55:04+00:00
> the keyboard and trackpad are just as good

The keyboard on my framework 13 is fine but it’s got a very sketchy touchpad and that classic symptom of a modern, shitty laptop: the whole thing flexes if I pick it up by the corner, and oftentimes actuates the trackpad button. Other times if I’m sitting in an unfavorable position the machine flexes and the trackpad button no longer works. Compare that with the rigidity of a modern Macbook.
by krish678 | 2025-12-25 13:55:07+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing a research-focused ultra-low-latency trading system I’ve been working on to explore how far software and systems-level optimizations can push decision latency on commodity hardware.

What this is

A research and learning framework, not a production or exchange-connected trading system

Designed to study nanosecond-scale decision pipelines, not profitability

Key technical points

~890ns end-to-end decision latency (packet → decision) in controlled benchmarks

Custom NIC driver work (kernel bypass / zero-copy paths)

Lock-free, cache-aligned data structures

CPU pinning, NUMA-aware memory layout, huge pages

Deterministic fast path with branch-minimized logic

Written with an emphasis on measurability and reproducibility

What it does not do

No live exchange connectivity

No order routing, risk checks, or compliance layers

Not intended for real trading or commercial use

Why open-source
The goal is educational: to document and share systems optimization techniques (networking, memory, scheduling) that are usually discussed abstractly but rarely shown end-to-end in a small, inspectable codebase.

Hardware

Runs on standard x86 servers

Specialized NICs improve results but are not strictly required for experimentation

I’m posting this primarily for technical feedback and discussion:

Benchmarking methodology

Where latency numbers can be misleading

What optimizations matter vs. don’t at sub-microsecond scales
by m4ck_ | 2025-12-25 13:55:13+00:00
IDK about ya'll but the ~25-30% (or whatever) I pay in taxes/SS/medicare isn't going to be a significant enough bump to enable me to eliminate homelessness...

Where we can actually take the government out of the equation and actually help people: Zoning. In places without governments like Haiti you can raise a family in a relatively simple structure. It's not ideal but it's how humans have been not-homeless for the entirety of our existence. Currently in the US, this is basically only legal in extremely rural areas where there are no jobs, schools, stores, etc.

I can find lots near a major metro area on the east coast for 10-20k, less than I pay rent in year; but I'd have to spend half a million on some shitty twig built monstrosity that meets minimum sq footage, parking, and other arbitrary regulations that only exist to drive housing prices up, in order to live there. I can't just buy a $10k shed from Home Depot, add insulation and all the other niceties we enjoy and live there. (even the most staunch anti-government, anti-regulation types would agree this should not be legal: they want big government to use violence to keep to prevent anyone from building cheaper housing, because cheap housing hurts their net worth, on paper.)
by gwt123 | 2025-12-25 13:56:15+00:00
BaZi, also known as Four Pillars of Destiny, is a classical Chinese astrology system that reads life patterns based on your exact birth date and time. While the name “Eight Characters” refers to the eight symbols derived from the year, month, day, and hour of birth, most international users better understand the concept when framed as a structured birth-chart analysis system similar to Western astrology, but focused on timing, element balance, personality design, and long-term life cycles rather than daily horoscope predictions.

MingDecode delivers this tradition in a practical and transparent format. At https://www.mingdecode.com/
, users can generate their full Four Pillars chart instantly and explore insights on character traits, career momentum, relationships, wealth phases, and 10-year luck cycles. The platform avoids dramatic or absolute claims, offering guidance based on patterns—not fixed fate.

BaZi is a planning tool: it helps you prepare earlier, act at stronger moments, and make decisions with a long-term view. MingDecode turns an old system into a clear strategy for the road ahead.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-25 13:56:46+00:00
There are in fact multiple implementations of X and xdotool works with all of them. Typical Wayland advocate, doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about while telling people to just ignore the problems they have with Wayland, probaby because you don't even understand the problem in the first place. Why did you even respond to me? To insult me? To waste my time?
Ask HN: What happens to world economics when humanity reaches triade?
by IdontKnowRust | 2025-12-25 13:57:01+00:00
Hey folks, I'm intrigued by the consequences of what do you think it will happen to the global economy when humanity reaches these buzzword state-of-the-art technologies, like AGI, Quantum Computing and Robotics?

I mean when those things becomes so accessible and cheap that it will be considered a commodity

What do you think will happen to our society?