MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aranw | 2025-12-24 16:10:39+00:00
The problem with mocks is that they test your assumptions, not reality...

When you mock a CRM client to return one account, you're assuming it always returns one account, that IDs have a particular format, that there's no pagination, that all fields are populated. Each assumption is a place where production could behave differently whilst your tests stay green

Your contract tests use cached JSON fixtures. Salesforce changes a field type, your contract test still passes (old fixture), your mocks return the wrong type, production breaks. You've now got three test layers (contract, mock scenarios, E2E) where two can lie to you. All your contract and mock tests won't save you. Production will still go down

I have zero confidence in these types of tests. Integration tests and E2E tests against real infrastructure give me actual confidence. They're slower, but they tell you the truth. Want to test rate limiting? Use real rate limits. Want to test missing data? Delete the data.

Slow tests that tell the truth beat fast tests that lie. That said, fast tests are valuable for developer productivity. The trade-off is whether you want speed or confidence
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-24 16:12:09+00:00
Such a beautiful technique for shoehorning straight out of the 1970s! See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

It seems so un-FORTRAN that DEC had a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-11. that was based on a stack machine and then later built an FP accelerator specialized to accelerate the stack machine. It was a straggler but I'm still trying to track down a circa 1992 article from Dr. Dobb's Journal where someone used virtual machine techniques to unbreak the broken i860 and make a good FORTRAN compiler.
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-24 16:12:48+00:00
At which time exactly was leisure "the default state"? The only way to have this is by having a slave-like class while the idle elite could enjoy "leisure", or live in very low density, caloric rich environment, which doesn't last long or ends up with wars (and being enslaved by the neighboring tribe, if you are from subsaharian Africa).
by Aurornis | 2025-12-24 16:13:12+00:00
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure

It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year.

What times in history had leisure as the default state? When was life so much easier than it is right now? Where were all the food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment materials coming from during this time and why was it so much more efficient than today?
by wbadart | 2025-12-24 16:13:24+00:00
Great write up!

Wanted to highlight MDN's HTTP caching guide[0] that OP links in the conclusion. It's written at a higher level than the underlying reference material and has been a great resource I've turned to several times in the last few years.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Cac...
Ask HN: Coding agents struggle to get the current OpenAI API Spec?
by dcreater | 2025-12-24 16:13:36+00:00
The OpenAI API spec is perhaps the most basic, central and widely used thing in building AI applications. It is thus so surprising and tell that it is so hard for a coding agent to get the actual API spec.

I asked Claude Code to validate my LLM call script against the official API spec. First, it used the Ref MCP which I had enabled which gathered over a dozen docs most of which were not from OpenAI and much of it was useless, outdated etc. I then disabled the MCP to see if basic web search would do better. It failed to do a direct fetch openAI's official doc page and then started googling - it asked to read 2 blog posts from Datacamp and medium.

This is a basic task that should not be this broken. I think there is clear need and opportunity for better tooling here or is it a skill issue?
by BlarfMcFlarf | 2025-12-24 16:13:40+00:00
Reality is short term thinking.

Idealism is long term thinking.

If you disregard reality, you will never understand the world around you to make change.

If you disregard idealism, you will only ever be able to react. You will end up dragged around by the nose, and pulled towards someone elses ideal that might not be so good for you.

Thinking that power is inviolable is an idealism that benefits existing power. They don’t want you to think of the countless times power has been overthrown, and a more just society has been built on the ruins of one with benefits for only those with power.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-24 16:14:09+00:00
AFAIK, most of event x86_64 patents are largely expired, or will be within the next 6 years. That said, efforts for a more open platform are probably more likely to be centered around risc or another arm alternative than x86... While I could see a standardization of x86 compatible shortcuts for use with emulation platforms on arm/risc processors. Transmeta was an idea too far ahead of its time.
by tgv | 2025-12-24 16:14:41+00:00
First off, the price: £36 was much more than "£1,600 in today’s money". A railway clerk made £2 12 0 in a week in 1917, (less than £10/month if I did the shillings and all that properly), which makes the scooter price the equivalent of 3.5 months, which is £7,000 at the lowest end of today's London North Eastern Railway salary range. The fact that the picture has Lady something in it, suggests it was more of an upper-class thingy.

Second, the scooter may not be new, the cluttering certainly is. Look at that empty street!
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-12-24 16:14:44+00:00
Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.

Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.

I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-24 16:15:00+00:00
No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.

Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.

Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.

It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.

You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.
by jetrink | 2025-12-24 16:15:20+00:00
> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it.

Recent anthropological and archaeological research is challenging the traditional view that ancient lives were "nasty, brutish, and short." Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day and frequently took time off for festivals or to travel long distances to visit friends and family. And unlike today, work usually had a more flexible rhythm where short periods of hard work were separated by long periods of light work and rest.
Webhook-based Git analytics across GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket
by akhnid | 2025-12-24 16:15:56+00:00
Hey HN, Most Git analytics tools only support GitHub.
I needed something that worked across all three major platforms, so I built Gitmore.

It uses webhooks (no polling) to ingest commits and PRs in real-time.

From there:

Query your repo history via AI ("who touched auth module last month?")

Schedule reports to Slack or email

Track contributor stats with a leaderboard

Privacy: metadata only, never reads source code.

https://gitmore.io Feedback welcome.

What analytics do you wish you had for your repos?
by albumen | 2025-12-24 16:16:00+00:00
I’m sorry but this article‘s headline/thesis is atrocious. The headline strongly implies there were e-scooters back then; there weren’t. Second, London’s pavements weren’t cluttered with autopeds; or if they were, there’s no evidence offered. Third, why expand the image with AI? The original is fine.

I do appreciate the dive back into history, but ianvisits.co.uk (which I usually like) can do much better.
by Arathorn | 2025-12-24 16:16:48+00:00
> State resolution is just a total mess.

Not since https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-stat...

> I spoke to a homeserver admin once who found that the DB storage space of just the member list can easily reach multiple gigabytes for larger rooms.

This is nothing to do with state resolution; it's due to Synapse's implementation deliberately cutting corners on storage efficiency while trading off for speed. I showed how it could be fixed a few months ago here: https://youtu.be/D5zAgVYBuGk?t=1853, but we prioritised fixing state resets instead.

> Also years later, we still don't have custom emojis, user statuses, user bios, invite links etc

There are MSCs for all of these now, and implementations are starting to filter through. The reality is that the project has been in a funding crunch since 2023 and we've had to focus on survival by prioritising stuff people pay for (i.e. big servers for govtech deployments) rather than custom emoji.
by cryptonector | 2025-12-24 16:17:03+00:00
> GC gives lets you have garbage cycles. RC does not.

This is the biggest difference, but if you disallow cycles then they come close. For example, the jq programming language disallows cycles, therefore you could implement it with RC or GC and there would be no observable difference except "eager destruction", but since you could schedule destruction to avoid long pauses when destroying large object piles, even that need not be a difference. But of course this is a trick: disallowing cycles is not a generic solution.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-24 16:17:31+00:00
> disappearing people on the streets without due process.

Undocumented immigrants can be detained and deported by the U.S. government but they are still legally entitled to due process.

What is happening is aggressive enforcement and detention that can feel like “disappearing,” but it is not the same thing as extrajudicial abduction in the legal sense.

When people use the word "disappeared" they usually mean families temporarily can't find someone after detention, detainees are transferred far aways, no lawyer automatically assigned, communication is difficult, deportation happens very quickly. While this is real harm, it is not the same phenomenon as disappearance under international law.

The U.S. is aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants under civil law, sometimes with minimal process and poor transparency — but not through secret, extrajudicial disappearances. Due process is thinner than for citizens, enforcement can be opaque and traumatic, but this is not the same as "vanished" outside the legal system.
by ggauravr | 2025-12-24 16:17:48+00:00
That is a fair distinction.

However, I don’t think using LLMs has to be an all-or-none proposition. You can still choose to build the parts you most care about yourself (where the learning happens) and delegate the other aspects to AI.

In the case of the text justifier, it was a small nuisance I wanted solved with very little effort. I didn't care about the browser APIs, just the visual outcome, so I let the LLM do it all.

If I were building something more complex, I would use LLMs much more mindfully. The value is in having the choice to delegate the chores so you can focus on the craft where it matters to you.

While we might value the process differently, the broader point remains that these tools enable people to build things they otherwise wouldn't have the time or specific resources to create, and still feel a sense of agency and ownership.
by nl | 2025-12-24 16:18:50+00:00
Of course!

But the operational costs are much lower than some people in this thread seem to think.

You can find a safe margin for the price by looking at aggregators.

https://gpus.io/gpus/h100 is showing $1.83/hour lowest price, around $2.85 average.

That easily pays running costs - a H100 server with cooling etc is around $0.10/hour to keep running

And a massive overbuild pushes prices down not up!
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-24 16:19:24+00:00
> There weren't meaningful restrictions.

I was forced to speak Ukranian at school. Is this not a meaningful restriction to you?

> Instead this sounds like "forcing" a number of people to speak to you in a particular language in order for you to not feel "restricted".

Unlike Ukranian government, I never forced anyone to speak any particular language. In fact, what happens when one person prefers to speak Ukrainian, and the other person prefers to speak Russian, is they just do, and they both understand each other just fine.
by cons0le | 2025-12-24 16:19:28+00:00
This seems like a pretty loosey goosey study. How do you realistically quantify someone's "overall happiness in life" and "burnout risk" into 1 number ?

I'm not sure how they did the control group, but I would be curious about the difference between 15 minutes playing Mario, and just getting a 15 minute break.

I think any significant time away from work/studying could reduce burnout risk
by kstrauser | 2025-12-24 16:20:16+00:00
We’re from the US but were recently in Germany. Sometimes we were completely exhausted after a long day and just wanted to rest in our room a little before going to sleep. Our motel had like 2 English speaking channels and both sucked. We watched a lot of German TV because it was interesting, even if we could barely understand what was going on. After some time doing that, it was a pleasure watching some Hulu, courtesy of connecting to WireGuard back at our house in California so that we had an American IP.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-24 16:20:19+00:00
not really sure what this means.

most people cannot detect differences in kerning, and must be extreme adjustments to get people to notice. even then, the words would need to be aligned above/below each other for people to see the differences. however, a computer program analyzing the size of a bounding box would notice single pixel differences. so randomly adjusting the kearning per word by pixels between each letter would go unnoticed by the vast majority of readers, but could play absolute havoc with algos trying to decipher possible word combos based on bounding box size.
by davnicwil | 2025-12-24 16:20:28+00:00
It's super interesting that you have this definition given your authorship of django (I mean, actually interesting, not 'interesting' :-)

In another comment I used the example of rails as a kind of canonical 'framework' that can potentially do everything for you full stack, and django is in the same category, juxtaposed against something like React that cannot.

To that, I think your last paragraph is the one I agree with most closely. It's true, but only for the view part of the app, right? I think that's where I get stuck on stretching to calling it a framework.

I guess I can see it if you're defining your view/client as a separate logical entity from the rest of the stack. Which is totally reasonable. But I guess just not how I think about it.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-24 16:21:04+00:00
> so many

To be exact, CNN reports that for the period Sep - Dec there have been ~30 boats destroyed in ~26 attacks, with at least ~105 deaths in these operations.

The US govt is of course claiming narcotics smugglers ("narcoterrorism") while others say they are not. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween, though who knows one which end of the spectrum.

What I think is maybe more interesting is the general pressure being applied to Venezuela by the US and the EU.
by horsawlarway | 2025-12-24 16:21:36+00:00
I don't actually find it a particularly strange interpretation.

Here's another lens:

I install cabinets in your kitchen. Your loved one trips, hits the cabinets, breaks their neck and dies.

Should I be liable in this case as well? I did a thing that was involved in harming your loved one... if the cabinet hadn't been there, they might not have died.

---

In both cases, it's pretty clear that there's no intent to harm your loved one. At best you're arguing that it was "foreseeable" that hitting a baseball might harm someone, and that it wasn't "foreseeable" that installing cabinets would harm someone.

But clearly that's ALSO wrong, because we know people have been hurt hitting cabinets before.

So clarify how you'd assign blame in this case, and why it's different from the baseball case?

Basically - your stance is that risk is always a decision someone has made, but I find disagrees with my intuition. Risk is an inherent part of life.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-12-24 16:21:36+00:00
When the russian military fired missiles and drones at my house, I should just accept it because some of my distant ancestors persecuted brown people. Is that your take?

Also, russia’s war against Ukraine enjoys popular support in russia today. Is your argument that the majority of UK and/or US citizens are eager for their respective countries to engage in war against former colonies today?

Fucking wild.
by hansvm | 2025-12-24 16:21:53+00:00
There's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead).

It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples:

- A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone.

- That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere.

- Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay.

- A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot).

I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations.

[0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.
by maqp | 2025-12-24 16:22:51+00:00
Not open source, you can't verify the end-to-end encryption or any other measures the client uses actually happen. This makes it trivial to hide backdoors.

The entire secure messaging app space is open source, why anyone would bother with writing a proprietary app and thus omit verifiability of the security claims is beyond me.

EDIT: Also, no proxy settings, meaning your IP address can't be masked with Tor/SOCKS5 proxy.

Do NOT use.
Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
by pedrodelfino | 2025-12-24 16:22:58+00:00
Thread for 2025:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408

Thread for 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782613

Thread for 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873800
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-24 16:25:17+00:00
If they weren't you'd be whining about a loss of sovereignty by EU states. It's an idiotic catch 22.

The EU systems balances national sovereignty with direct democracy but leans toward the former. It's a good system.

Anyway, EU states went to great lengths to join the EU and can leave at any time. Besides the self-destructive UK, none have.

> They must be proposed by the commission, which is not elected but appointed.

The commission is elected by elected representatives. Just like in many countries the leader isn't directly elected by voters but by their elected representatives.

Your comment is just ideological nonsense. You could argue in good faith about the pros and cons of various systems but you don't, it's just hate because you heard Trump or Musk or some right wing figure say it say it and you're garrotting it.

Prove me wrong by detailing whats wrong with it, and "muh democracy" doesn't count.
by Lostmon | 2025-12-24 16:25:38+00:00
After 15 years finding bugs in complex systems (400 documented vulns), I wrote this analysis of AI operational opacity.
Main thesis: The danger isn't "evil AI" - it's competent AI optimizing exactly what we ask for, at scales we can't supervise. When you've debugged enough edge cases, you start seeing them everywhere.
Document covers healthcare prediction systems, educational AI, autonomous city management, and financial systems - with realistic failure modes at 15-year horizon.
Not doom prophecy. Systems engineering problem.
Feedback welcome, especially from security researchers and AI safety folks.
by gosub100 | 2025-12-24 16:25:52+00:00
Suppose we got nuked or some calamity caused the interruption of all the fancy x-nanoneter processes. What would we actually miss out on? I don't know what the latest process nodes we have stateside are, but let's say we could produce 2005 era cpus here. What would we actually miss out on? I don't think it would affect anything important. You could do everything we do today, just slower. I think the real advancement is in software, programming languages, and libraries.