MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spicyjpeg | 2025-12-22 14:09:38+00:00
It is actually much worse than that. Much like banking, the push for digital government services in many countries has ended up more or less requiring every citizen to own an up-to-date, non-jailbroken iOS or Android device. If you blocked your phone from accessing Apple or Google servers (or if it's 6 years old, a dumb phone or runs GrapheneOS), the support staff will just tell you to walk to your closest Best Buy equivalent and grab the cheapest Android device you can find; in the name of "security" there often is no fallback option, and when there is one it's SMS 2FA which is (understandably) rate limited to three uses per year.

If your phone gets stolen, meanwhile, you may find yourself unable to log into the police's portal for reporting it.
by orwin | 2025-12-22 14:09:50+00:00
Any workshop can command WV screwdrivers, at least in the EU. I think the new regulation is that if you don't have the piece, or the tools necessary to replace the piece, you have to produce the plans on how to do it.

I know someone who had an issue with his old WV Kombi, and thought it would be the last drive (Around 2020-2021). He found an auto shop who could manufacture pieces and replaced every single malfunctioning pieces from plans they got directly from WV.
by DrScientist | 2025-12-22 14:10:34+00:00
A building that wasn't a pyramid, but had simple step sided walls is only significant in retrospect!

ie it only became of historic interest after the fact as people retrospectively thought it might have influenced later more significant buildings.

While I agree a page about Perl Monks isn't likely to be that significant - I was making a general philosophical point.

Eg how do you know that PerlMonks doesn't end up being one of the earliest examples for self-organising elearning - a movement that ends up replacing Universities in the future?

In terms of the details of this page leejo posts are more substantive.
by pmarreck | 2025-12-22 14:10:49+00:00
It's the bigotry of low expectations that the right often accuses the left of (arguably justifiably). Each side has their shibboleths and hypocrisies, and this is a very "left" one. Everything is the fault of the "other", in this case "all men", apparently.

As someone else said, the red flags of insufferability abound here, first and foremost with announcing something like this which is as personal and momentous as it is, on public social media.
Show HN: Shopie: Create Wishlists. Track Prices
by pfandrade | 2025-12-22 14:11:06+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Paulo. I’ve spent the last 6 months building Shopie, an iOS app that lets you save products you’re interested in and get notified when prices drop or items come back in stock. It runs entirely on-device using iOS background tasks, requires no account, and stores all data locally (or in iCloud if enabled). It’s been useful for finding real deals and avoiding impulse buys. Feedback welcome.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-22 14:11:14+00:00
This whole "clever code" has become a social thing.

It's one of the things people say when they don't like some piece of code, but they also can't justify it with a more in-depth explanation on why the cleverness is unecessary/counter-productive/etc.

Truth is, we need "clever code". Lots of it. Your OS and browser are full of it, and they would suck even more without that. We also need people willing to work on things that are only possible with "clever code".

From this point of view, the idea of the Lever makes sense. The quote also works for criticizing clever code, as long as we follow up with concrete justification (not being abstract about some general god-given rule). In a world where _some clever code is always required_, it makes sense that this quote should work for both scenarios.
by elzbardico | 2025-12-22 14:11:26+00:00
70's American cars were not very far from this. The competition from Japanese manufacturers really helped to improve this.

And ironically, the reason why Japan invested so heavily in high quality was to overcome their former image of low quality products that severely hampered their ability to sell to international markets.

I am not a libertarian that holds a religious belief on the infallibility of the market, but a lot of times, the market gave us better outcomes than any regulation.
by cardanome | 2025-12-22 14:12:27+00:00
> But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.

It nearly impossible to achieve substantial change alone. The key is to be organized with others, to find a community.

Now, I don't mean joining a political party, especially not at first. That can be important work but also very soul crushing

I am talking grassroots-level, local groups that work on a concrete topic, preferable something that concerns you personally. It is important to get into doing things as quickly as possible, be it organizing a small protest or maybe just a get together.

With this you will gain practically experience and you will find other people that share your goals and with whom you will struggle together.

Now, for the long term, you will also need to actually read political theory, you will have to get organized with people that have a more concrete strategy on how to create change but I generally would urge you to avoid analysis paralysis and focus on gaining practical experience first.

Building community is really the key.
by alecco | 2025-12-22 14:12:35+00:00
Most of those groups were co-opted by Big Tech. I can tell from personal experience 20 years ago. In my case Microsoft and Cisco put people dedicated to the standard and we actual coders lost just out of ballooning time required for meetings and pointless complexity.

You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-22 14:13:12+00:00
Personally, I see a kind of arc in programming style over time. It does begin naive, and more-experienced you will look back at your early code realizing you were essentially re-inventing the wheel in one place or you may see now that a look-up table would have been more efficient (as examples).

As you learn more techniques and more data structures the "cleverness" creeps into your code. To the degree that the cleverness might have a complexity cost, sometimes the cost may be worth it—perhaps not always though.

Naive-you would have struggled to understand some of the shortcuts and optimizations you are leveraging.

But then still more-experienced you revisits the more clever code with years now to have both written and attempted to debug such code. You may now begin to eschew the "clever" to the degree its cleverness makes the code harder to understand or debug. You might swear off recursive code for example—breaking it into two functions where the outer one runs a loop of some sort that is easier to set a break-point in and unwind a problem you were seeing. Or you might now lean more on services provided by the platform you are programing for so you don't have to have your own image cache, your own thread manager, etc.

I feel like in that last stage, most-experienced you may well be writing code that naive-you could have understood and learned from.
by reactordev | 2025-12-22 14:13:34+00:00
I know. NTSB is on it. It’s just sad. Smaller aircraft should have safety features in case of mechanical issues to be able to bring it down to land without catastrophic injuries.

Not sure why the downvotes when all I want is for someone to live. I understand it’s harder for larger aircraft but anything 8 passenger or less, this should be considered.

My wish is that one day aircraft will operate off batteries that are charged via the fuselage solar panels and that the airframe will be light enough to support “rapid deceleration pods” or other parachute like devices to bring the aircraft to the ground. Larger commercial aircraft can recharge at the gates.

Eliminating the combustible fuel in the wings is another huge win.
by squigz | 2025-12-22 14:14:20+00:00
> unless you go out of your way not to reveal too much about yourself, and even then, given enough time, there will be enough breadcrumbs eventually.

This is why it's not reasonable (for the vast, vast majority of people) to attempt this, and why we have to be realistic about our threat profiles.

Sure, anyone who knows what they're doing and is dedicated enough can find out information about me - that doesn't mean I'm going to advertise my name and location so that everyone can find that information about me with ease.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-22 14:14:40+00:00
Well this is true, but it is STL files that people send around everywhere and publish in the 3D printing world, especially.

People will reasonably choose not to publish their original designs but can only publish STL because of OpenSCAD, Blender and because of the free tier of commercial CAD.

And having the OpenSCAD source doesn't help that much; you can modify it but you are still stuck with STL. OK so FreeCAD can reinterpret some — not all — OpenSCAD operations in a bRep context. But it's not a great way to work; it doesn't really help much with interchange.

I absolutely have had to modify STL files for people because that is the only interchange format the designer made available to them, or even could make available because they used the wrong tool for the job (like Fusion's free tier). At this point there are many STL-folk-song designs out there, CC-NC, with bad geometry, non-centred exports, etc.

Thankfully there are ways, in core FreeCAD and in a third party workbench (MeshRemodel), to more easily extract and reconstruct some key geometry from a mesh, such that parametric modifications can be made. (Whereas with OpenSCAD you're basically stuck with cut-out-and-roughly-refill).
by wereHamster | 2025-12-22 14:14:51+00:00
I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.
by pron | 2025-12-22 14:15:20+00:00
> Where type system complexity entails a tradeoff between the complexity of the language and how powerful the language is in allowing you to define abstractions.

I don't think that's right. The level of abstraction is the number of implementations that are accepted for a particular interface (which includes not only the contract of the interface expressed in the type system, but also informally in the documentation). E.g. "round" is a higher abstraction than "red and round" because the set of round things is larger than the set of red and round things. It is often untyped languages that offer the highest level of abstraction, while a sophisticated type system narrows abstraction (it reduces the number of accepted implementations of an interface). That's not to say that higher abstraction is always better - although it does have practical consequences, explained in the next paragraph - but the word "abstraction" does mean something specific, certainly more specific than "describing things".

How the level of abstraction is felt is by considering how many changes to client code (the user of an interface) is required when making a change to the implementation. Languages that are "closer to the underlying machine" - especially as far as memory management goes - generally have lower abstraction than languages that are less explicit about memory management. A local change to how a subroutine manages memory typically requires more changes to the client - i.e. the language offers a lower abstraction - in a language that's "closer to the metal", whether the language has a rich type system like Rust or a simpler type system like C, than a language that is farther away.
by ninkendo | 2025-12-22 14:15:53+00:00
It doesn’t seem to me that it’s required for code that was hard to write, to be hard to debug. What if I spend my cleverness “budget” specifically on making the code easier to debug? Splitting out just the right pieces into generic bits so they can be replaced with debuggable mocks, for instance.

You could counter that the word “clever” only applies to hard-to-debug code, but that makes the whole statement rather vacuous, no?
Show HN: A site that models time (e.g. your lifespan) as a real-time percentage
by TheRefrigerator | 2025-12-22 14:15:56+00:00
I built a free, no login tool that calculates and shows the current year as a progress bar with continuously updating percentage, and 3 other visualization models.

It has a customization feature where you can track any time period up to 100 years as a progress bar, and a lifespan feature where you input your birthday and sex.

It handles leap years, time zones, and runs automated weekly snapshots via GitHub Actions + Puppeteer and posts on X.

Would love feedback on the model or edge cases I might have missed.
by HiPhish | 2025-12-22 14:15:58+00:00
It makes perfect sense if you include the two sentence before your quote:

> We already know that in a patriarchal society, women’s pain is dismissed, belittled, and ignored. This kind of AI-generated language also depoliticizes patriarchal power dynamics.

Man does something bad, it's the fault of patriarchy. Woman do something bad, it's also men's fault because patriarchy made her do it. Either way you cannot win with a person like that. I think I understand why the husband wanted a divorce.
by exceptione | 2025-12-22 14:16:37+00:00
> fn foo(n i32, m i32) (i32, i32) {}

But now consider returning a function with type¹

Foo<T<string, T2>> -> (bool -> IDictionary<string, T3> -> i32 -> T3) where T2 : T3

even if you leave out the latter type constraint, I think it is hard to avoid undecidable ambiguity.

fn foo(n i32, m T2) (????) {}

You quickly get ambiguity due to type parameters / generics, functions as arguments, and tuples if you don't syntactically separate them.

Even if you your context-depended parser can recognize it, does the user? I agree that a language designer should minimize the amount of muscle damage, but he shouldn't forget that readability is perhaps even more critical.

____

1. Note, even if the parser can recognize this, for humans the '>' is confusing unless syntax highlighting takes care of it. One time it delimits a generic type argument, the other time it is part of '->'. This is also an argument for rendering these things as ligatures.
by blahaj | 2025-12-22 14:16:38+00:00
People being allowed to part ways and not having to stick with their partner until death is one of the great achievements of feminism. It goes both ways.

You cannot control that you will love someone forever, so you cannot promise that. What you can promise someone is that you plan on spending the rest of your life with them and that you have so much love that you trust it will last forever. Sometimes that does not work out. That is no one's fault and no one owes to anyone to stay together with a person they no longer love.
by jvanderbot | 2025-12-22 14:17:05+00:00
After ~15 years, I've realized that no good things come to you without sustained focus / attentiveness, and gentle pressure in the direction of attention. What everyone here is saying is "be closed loop", vs the drunkards "open loop". Combined with a bit of progress every day, it's (so far, at least) magical what happens.

Another bit to consider:
It took a long time to realize that basically everyone wants basically everyone to succeed, as long as incentives align. It was very easy to imagine I was swimming upstream early in my career - especially my early mentors urging me to specialize to find success. My initial temptation was to "specialize" in hot/attractive topics in an effort to be the "indispensable X authority". But my PhD advisor urged me to "not swim in red water", where the incentives are inherently conflicting - everyone wants to be "the X person".

Much better to find a team working on a good problem somewhat like the ones you want to solve and just push along with them. You can save yourself a lot of energy by slotting yourself into a system that aligns with your preferred direction of travel, even if only a little bit. The current carries you.
by layer8 | 2025-12-22 14:17:15+00:00
Clearly we need left-associative and right-associative inverse parentheses.

a & )b $ c) @ d would mean ((a & b) $ c) @ d.

a & (b $ c( @ d would mean a & (b $ (c @ d)).

Combining both, a & )b $ c( @ d would mean (a & b) $ (c @ d).

;)
Show HN: Frndz – Privacy-first Web3 ads based on intent, not user data
by frndsprotocol | 2025-12-22 14:17:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Ahmad, founder of FRNDZ Protocol.

We're building a decentralized advertising protocol on BNB Chain where:
- Advertisers target user intent (from their apps) without tracking personal data
- Users earn real revenue share from ads they engage with
- No cookies, no profiles, no privacy invasion

Live MVP is ready on testnet: https://frndz-mvp.vercel.app
(Stake, create campaigns, see fast tx & clean UI)

We're currently running a whitelist for the first 300 testers with priority airdrop + rewards.

Would love your honest feedback from builders and early adopters!
- Try the MVP
- Reply here with thoughts, bugs, or ideas
- Or join the whitelist directly: https://x.com/FrndzProtocol/status/2002104237514502489

Happy to answer any questions or hop on a call.

Thanks!
Ahmad
@FrndzProtocol
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-22 14:18:41+00:00
I wonder about the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) of that one: she's already not too thrilled about my vintage arcade cab and its 21" CRT. Arcade cab which has already been to three different countries with us and, no, the movers typically ain't that happy when they have to move it (I already moved it by myself but that's quite the endeavour).
by spwa4 | 2025-12-22 14:18:45+00:00
Is that why the fact that getting essentially every LLM to produce sexualized stereotypes is trivially easy, yet getting zero attention from these guys?

Or, much more long-running than the LLM "loophole": there's entire "channels" on Social Media, like Tiktok and Facebook Instagram Reels and Signal and Whatsapp and Telegram and ... that post essentially nothing but that, and no reaction.

https://www.tiktok.com/@modelagencyai/video/7225020868131294...

But what I find most criminal about these systems is that they're all about catching. These people never touch what happens when they "catch" someone. What happens, of course, is that they usually can't do anything about people actually spreading these images, but they can arrest the minors involved and lock them up long term in a terrible system. Of course, that system is horrible and is getting further defunded every year, including 2025. But that is where these children they "help" end up. And they don't care at all.

You care about children and victims of child abuse? How about we start with improving the living conditions of the actual known victims? Instead we see regular scandals about the child services system itself abusing children. Rotherham, Romania, child services involvement in Ukraine, Hungary, "toeslagenaffaire", the Netherland's youth services approving foster parents who literally only wanted to torture a young girl (and ignoring her pleas for help), ...

Frankly, if that isn't done first, I refuse to believe there is any real intent to help these children.
by everdrive | 2025-12-22 14:18:54+00:00
I'm a little bit confused about what's going on here. Is this nothing more than an LLM-generated summary of her post? She shows the metadata but also shows it coming up in the post. I don't use any of these apps so I'm not really sure what a normal user would have seen. ie, would that text have been appended visibly to her post, making users think she wrote that, but also have been in tags which would have optimized for search engines?

Either way, I don't know what to tell people. Social media exists to take advantage of you. If you use it, your choices are "takes more advantage" vs. "takes less advantage," but that's as good as gets.
by tiazumdove | 2025-12-22 14:19:17+00:00
I really wish AI could help with learning open source FEM software so far having grok or gemini write elmer/fenics code has been a very bumpy ride my only saving grace is the fact that I can ask my colleagues for guidance and have them provide a working base to expand from. It would do wonders for the hobbyists scientists as well I can't count the times I had a idea for a product but it failed because I couldn't simulate the problem to see if it could work out.
by laladrik | 2025-12-22 14:19:43+00:00
That's a good introduction. There is a video which I'd say complements the article. It's called "Getting pixels on screen on Linux: introduction to Kernel Mode Setting" [1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haes4_Xnc5Q&list=PLz9LbZJP-T...
by pron | 2025-12-22 14:20:06+00:00
> because there are multiple valid ways of interpreting i

There are quantitative ways of describing it, at least on a relative level. "High abstraction" means that interfaces have more possible valid implementations (whether or not the constraints are formally described in the language, or informally in the documentation) than "low abstraction": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354267
by NeutralForest | 2025-12-22 14:20:49+00:00
I think we already have the tools but no the communication between those? Instead of having actions taken and failures as commit messages, you should have wide-events like logs with all the context, failures, tools used, steps taken... Those logs could be used as checkpoints to go back as well and you could refer back to the specific action ID you walked back to when encountering an error.

In turn, this could all be plain-text and be made accessible, through version control in a repo or in a central logging platform.
by lkramer | 2025-12-22 14:21:25+00:00
Interesting, I think for the older generation me included at the age of 45, it can be jarring to miss the visual marker of the capital letter in the beginning of a sentence. I have been online for 30 years and have certainly written my fair share of poor grammar, missing punctuation and probably missing capitalisation as well. I think the surprise comes from this being an article on the internet and seems like a design choice.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-12-22 14:21:55+00:00
About 20 years ago, my name showed up on a handful of websites that I could find. Was related to school activities I participated in. Used to surprise me then.

Even my damn personal website was in the top 5 Google results for my name, despite no attempt at SEO and no popularity.

Today those sites are all gone and it’s as if I no longer exist according to Google .

Instead a new breed of idiots with my name have their life chronicled. I even get a lot of their email because they can’t spell their name properly. One of them even claimed that they owned my domain name in a 3-way email squabble.

I almost no longer exist and it’s kinda nice.

Only PeopleFinder and such show otherwise.