MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bee_rider | 2025-12-19 16:07:55+00:00
Against using Nomad a strong counterexample: they were almost certainly developing the device before the Nomad came out, so they might have been innovative in the sense that they were working on a device that they hadn’t seen before.

In my recollection, though, a bigger hard drive did not really feel like an innovation. It might have just been that I was a kid, but my music library was not so huge, and it was possible to reduce the file sizes anyway (especially given how crappy ear buds were at the time, and anyway, how good was the dac in a cheap mp3 player at the time?).

We were used to the idea that hard drive sizes might make a big jump anyway, it was still the era of dramatic leaps and bounds.

Finally, you probably had a binder full of CDs anyway (burned CDs if you were cool of course), so you could play them in a car. So, the concept of having much more “drive space” in some sense was not at all new. (And the UI of a binder full of CDs is much more intuitive than any MP3 player!).

Rather, the iPod didn’t really have any big new ideas. It’s just that nothing about it sucked. The hard drive was pretty big, the UI was good enough, the clickey wheel thing was fun, the audio quality was fine. No new ideas, B+ all around, and nothing to make you want to given up on it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-19 16:07:56+00:00
To answer my question myself I gave Microsoft copilot this prompt:

I want you to rewrite this headline "Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks" into something a little humorous and snarky that reveals the underlying truth that would bring a wry smile to tech-engaged but big tech-skeptical hacker news readers. This has to fit in the 80 character limit for Hacker News so keep it appropriately short. Also I want you to reply with exactly one headline and not anything else so I can use your output as part of a processing pipeline

and i get the response

Amazon Finally Remembers eBooks Aren’t Supposed to Be Prisoners

which I think is great. I started with the first paragraph and got something too long with some explanation. I added the second, and got three replies and more explanation. The three replies were all "good enough" in my mind but added the third paragraph to control the output.
by chao- | 2025-12-19 16:08:45+00:00
I have implemented (or managed a team that implemented) this concept four separate times as an internal library somewhere. Each one included slightly different affordances and addressed a few different concerns that stem from the domain that it was built for.

Props for extracting it and offering it up as a library. I'll be interested to compare it to the implementations I've seen, and see what you've added that I've not seen before.
by psyopsy | 2025-12-19 16:09:07+00:00
They did try to account for social conditioning: parents' education and jobs, local labor markets, school performance, the whole bit. The gap still didn't move much. If socialization were the main driver, you'd expect the most egalitarian countries to have the smallest gaps. They don't. In a lot of cases it's the opposite. Sweden, for example, shows bigger differences in occupational preferences than places like Pakistan.

So at that point you're not pointing to a specific confounder, you're basically saying "maybe there's something else." Sure, logically you can always say that. But if the evidence keeps stacking up in one direction and the only reply is "could be something," that's just refusing to update your view.
by vrosas | 2025-12-19 16:09:17+00:00
OTT = over the top = ads that aren't shown on cable ("linear") DSP = demand-side platform = real-time bidding on ad space on behalf of advertisers

What data is tracked? Don't think we can see what's plugged into the TV if it's not connected to the internet but besides that... all of it... If we have your TV we know where you live. We know what you're watching (hopefully our customers' ads!). We know all the devices that connect to your home network. We know where those devices go when you leave the house. We know you were driving down this stretch of road when you saw that ad on that billboard or on the side of that truck ("out-of-home" advertising). We know if you saw that ad and then bought something ("conversion" + "attribution"). We know what apps you have downloaded. Did you know Candy Crush is spying on you, too? Did you know Grindr sells your IP address? We likely know your age and your race and how much your home cost and where you went to college and how many kids you have ("segmentation"). Privacy laws have gotten in the way a little bit, but not much - it's less "we can't get this data anymore" and more "here's the hoop(s) we now have to jump through but we still get it".

I don't want to freak anyone out. In my time in adtech I never felt like anyone was using this data for anything besides "Please buy more coca-cola..." but you never know. Privacy _can_ exist it's just insanely hard because there's so much money hell-bent on tracking you down.
by vicentereig | 2025-12-19 16:09:24+00:00
Nice work. Thanks for sharing it! I've been thinking about using something like this for LLM agent workflows - the outbound action pattern would work well for tool calls that need to wait on external APIs.

I'm working on DSPy.rb [1] and this could pair nicely for multi-step reasoning chains.

Curious - any plans for async gem support?

[1] https://oss.vicente.services/dspy.rb/
by smallmancontrov | 2025-12-19 16:10:14+00:00
TSMC Arizona Gigafab, Intel's Chandler fabs, Micron's Boise megafab, these are all giant buildings full of equipment cranking out chips or credibly preparing to. I'd hazard a guess that more than lawyers were involved.

Oh, but trollbridge saw a lawyer once! That's it, phone it in, shut it all down, corruption proven, the gigantic buildings must be all be a mirage. Trollbridge saw a lawyer and that disproves everything!

Troll harder lol.
by gethly | 2025-12-19 16:12:12+00:00
Definitely not. Disclosing your code makes sense only if you are young and want to have something to show to recruiters in case you are looking for a job as a proof that you know what you are doing. But that is a young man's game. You will gain absolutely nothing by giving the code away. Especially now when bots are scraping the whole internet for data.
by rchaud | 2025-12-19 16:12:28+00:00
Mozilla has plenty of engineers. I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which the engineers themselves are pushing for AI features. After all, they are working at a nonprofit organization for below-market wages, and will at some point need to brush up their resume for the next gig. Browser development is cool, but FAANG doesn't hire for browser dev, they hire for AI.

By working on AI-whatever, the engineers have a reason to stay at Mozilla, and will have a "desirable" skillset when they eventually leave. That's something a CEO would need to take into account.
by why-o-why | 2025-12-19 16:13:21+00:00
I have read it. I spent my 20s guiltily reading all of the books I was supposed to have read in high school but used Cliff's Notes instead. From my 20's perspective I found Finn insipid and hokey but that's because pop culture had recycled it hundreds of times since its first publication, however when I consider it from the period perspective I can see the satire and the pointed allegories that made Twain so formidable. (Funny you mention Hemingway. I loved his writing in my 20's, then went back and read some again in my 40's and was like "huh, this irritating and immature, no wonder i loved it in my 20's.")
Ask HN: Is Stack Overflow Dead?
by raphar | 2025-12-19 16:13:27+00:00
With the explosion of AI tools in our workflows this year, I stopped using Stack Overflow and copilot.

Previously, SO was an unavoidable step of my programming effort for navigating or learning new frameworks, for exploring solutions, for debugging strange cases.... But now , it has been a long while since I visited the site.

Are you still using SO, reading, searching, contributing?
by dcreager | 2025-12-19 16:13:37+00:00
There was a hang/performance bug [1, 2] that was reported just after the beta release, which we've since fixed [3]. You might try seeing if we get through your entire project now?

(And as an aside, there _is_ a verbose mode: if you add `-vv` you'll get DEBUG-level log messages printing out the name of each file as we start to check it, and you can set TY_MAX_PARALLELISM=1 in your env to make it very clear which file is causing the hang. That's how we debug these kinds of issues when they're reported to us.)

[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/ty/issues/1968

[2] https://github.com/astral-sh/ty/issues/1993

[3] https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/pull/22030
by zeta0134 | 2025-12-19 16:13:42+00:00
Helpfully, neither is "I won't solve it nor help anyone with it" actually normal. That's what documentation, mentorship, peer review and coaching is for. Someone has to actually write all that stuff. If I solved it initially, that someone is me. Now it's got my name on it (right there in the docs, as the author) and anyone else can tap on my shoulder. I'm happy to clarify (and improve that documentation) if something is unclear.

Here, of course, is finally where AI can plausibly enter the picture. It's pretty good at search! So if someone has learned, and understood, and written it down, that documentation can be consumed, surfaced, and learned by a new hire. But if the new hire doesn't actually learn from that, then they can't improve it with their own understanding. That's the danger.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-19 16:13:48+00:00
It’s only a matter of time, but time matters, as they say.

You should know that what China is doing was tried in the past. It is an old story. When the microchip was brand new (invented in the USA) the Soviets realized they needed the tech for military purposes. So they built a closed city devoted to silicon research called Zelenograd. It was staffed with very bright physicists and engineers.

But Zelenograd didn't make the Soviets a computing superpower. In fact they were always behind and fell further and further as time went on. The reason is that the Zelenograd scientists were given copies of US chips and told to clone them. By the time they finished cloning one chip the US had already invented several that were much more advanced. Unable or unwilling to forge their own path, even though they were smart enough to do so, they could not truly develop the in-house expertise needed to match the ever accelerating pace of innovation.

The Soviets never did catch up. Americans tightened security and they just fell ever further behind. By the 1980s they did not even have any attempt to develop an internal internet.

That China is running secret projects to try and clone ASML's machines isn't surprising because for all it has changed, it's still a communist state and its leaders still think in communist ways. They don't understand or appreciate distributed wisdom, so are mentally unable to truly understand how innovation works. Government projects like that are destined to fail - they will clone yesterday's machines tomorrow, and just like the Soviets, will fall further and further behind.

The thing that saves China is that its private sector actually does exist and is much more developed, so the Chinese government projects aren't the only way it can make progress.
by ctippett | 2025-12-19 16:13:59+00:00
I got a good chuckle out of some of the titles. In Jeff Geerling's defence (the title on the site reads "Rich developer spends $15k to run a model slightly faster"), he was loaned the Mac Studios from Apple and so he didn't spend a dime.

Also his accompanying YouTube video mentions the kit retails for $40,000+, a far cry from $15k.
by zeech | 2025-12-19 16:14:06+00:00
I can't speak to it driving a monitor over USB-C as I don't use one, but I'm currently running 15.0-RELEASE on a refurbished Dell Latitude 7280 that has worked flawlessly out of the box so far.

Somebody else did a nice writeup [0] on their experience with FBSD on the same laptop.

[0] https://adventurist.me/posts/00352
Geometric derivation of the muon g-2 anomaly (63 ppm discrepancy)
by albert_roca | 2025-12-19 16:14:20+00:00
The Standard Model calculation of g-2 requires thousands of Feynman diagrams. This geometric model derives it from the topology of the lepton (icosahedron, 12 vertices). It posits the muon anomaly is the sum of the surface cost (Schwinger term) and the nodal friction against the 12 vertices:

α = 0.00729735256 N_v = 12 Schwinger_term = α / (2 · π) Nodal_term = α^2 / 12 a_mu = Schwinger_term + Nodal_term Schwinger_term = α / (2 · π) ≈ 0.001161409 Nodal_term = α^2 / 12 ≈ 0.000004438 Total ≈ 0.001165847 Experimental value: 0.001165920 Discrepancy: 63 ppm

Source: Geometric Unification of Physical Interactions, v10. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17847770
by justinc8687 | 2025-12-19 16:14:30+00:00
I personally have a Samsung TV, but this ACR and ad stuff is why ever since the moment I took it out of the box, it has never and will never, be plugged into the internet. I simply use an Google TV plugged into it for my actual streaming, and avoid all of this ACR nonsense (yes Google has their own tracking but I want Tailscale and SmartTube). I think this is the way to do it. Just use your smart TV as a dumb TV, and move on.
by HansardExpert | 2025-12-19 16:14:42+00:00
They are both equivalent. Scratch-built is perfectly cromulant.

My father used to talk about 'Scratch-building' his WWII dioramas and model vehicles/tanks. While you could use a phrase like 'Scratch-cooked' rather than cooking from scratch, I've never heard but someone would not think the former meant something different to the latter.
Show HN: Vanishfile – temporary and secure file sharing
by crosshairflaws | 2025-12-19 16:14:59+00:00
Hi HN,

It's my first post here, so hopefully this is allowed and correct (according to the rules it is). And of course I hope you find some value in it as well :)

I built Vanishfile because I often need to send files that shouldn’t live forever on a server. There wasn't any file sharing I found that could do this (beside secret sharing). I don't want to create an account, share unnecessary amount of details or something.

Vanishfile lets you:

- Share files that automatically delete after expiry (amount of downloads or after set time period)

- Doesn't need an account, I don't store anything besides the file

- Optionally enable client-side encryption, so even the server can’t read the file

- Optionally set a password, so only the user with a password can download the file

- Limit downloads (or make them unlimited)

Free usage is available, and there’s a small one-time unlock for larger files and encryption (currenly set at $3 for 7 days just to try things out). It generates an access code, which expires after a week. So no account required either (but the key should be stored by the user, of course)

This is a small, focused utility and not a startup pitch or something. It's mostly for personal use, but figured to put it out there as well.

I’d love feedback on:

- the UX

- whether the privacy model makes sense

- what more you would expect from a tool like this

- what would be a good free and paid distinction

- what would be a good price, if any

Link: https://vanishfile.com/

Thanks a lot!
by selectodude | 2025-12-19 16:15:20+00:00
Who knows? LLM providers losing money on every user and making it up on volume is a problem for them to deal with. I’m simply saying that the products are here to stay, even if (hopefully) the companies need to right-size their growth strategies. If Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 is the pinnacle of models and we never see a new one again, I think they’ll be useful and cash flow positive. OpenAI and Anthropic will, of course, go bankrupt. But the models themselves are absolutely valuable.
by publicdebates | 2025-12-19 16:15:50+00:00
"Show HN: I implemented generics in my programming language"

does not deserve the roast

"I built a language nobody will use just to learn generics"

It's not fair to assume the author didn't know how to implement generics before this project. It's also not fair to assume the project won't gain traction. Zig and Rust started out small too! This just goes a little too far for my tastes.
by fsloth | 2025-12-19 16:15:54+00:00
"since the economic market for artists is being destroyed"

I don't see it being destroyed. I mean the market for art. That's a market for tangible things made by specific humans, pieces that are unique.

Very hard to see how AI will affect that since the market is dominated to large extent by the need by the art salespeople, art institutions, and art collectors to sustain prestige and investment value.

If it just about volume, China would have destroyed it decades ago. Clearly adding even more volume will hardly put a dent to it.
by jedberg | 2025-12-19 16:16:00+00:00
> The problem with durable execution is that your entire workflow still needs to be idempotent.

Yes, but what that means depends on your durability framework. For example, the one that my company makes can use the same database for both durability and application data, so updates to application data can be wrapped in the same database transaction as the durability update. This means "the work" isn't done unless "recording the work" is also done. It also means they can be undone together.
by nmaleki | 2025-12-19 16:16:45+00:00
I am currently working on a desktop application for 3D spreadsheets.

The first version of the code looks like this, https://youtube.com/watch?v=rJuRTZOE99g

The new version is much more feature rich, catering towards the user. Unreal use in Python is now native and users can launch a dedicated server.

The development process can be slow, lots of waiting on compiling and cooking. The Python part of this project is great. Code is very simple and readable and I'm building out a renderer for the geometric algebra package I'm using, Kingdon. This lets users quickly visualize 3D elements, lines, points, planes, and shapes. Working on non-web stuff is great. I love building out UI and text in 3D, it feels like the final form of UI and is a lot more expressive than web UI. Controlling objects in 3D let's you do a lot more. Everything feels right.
by SomaticPirate | 2025-12-19 16:17:01+00:00
Seeing a ton of adoption of this after the Minio debacle

https://www.repoflow.io/blog/benchmarking-self-hosted-s3-com... was useful.

RustFS also looks interesting but for entirely non-technical reasons we had to exclude it.

Anyone have any advice for swapping this in for Minio?
by mindslight | 2025-12-19 16:17:31+00:00
So mid.

The lack of a capital L is because I'm not whole hog on the "Libertarian" party's kool-aid. In fact, I often argue against much of it as it runs contrary to individual liberty.

On this topic specifically, privacy is an integral part of individual liberty. So claiming to care about privacy, only to simplistically dunk on the more general subject is just odd.

Furthermore, elsewhere in this thread you've espoused the idea of examining arguments on their merits and not who is making them. So it's directly hypocritical to be dismissing my argument based on a quick self-description that I only threw out to mitigate the dynamic of destructionist/fascist cheerleaders writing off all dissent like it's only coming from progressive democrats with blue hair.
by n1xis10t | 2025-12-19 16:17:49+00:00
I do stuff with search engines, not AI agents. If this was based on your own index or if it was based on multiple sources and then re-ranked, I would have been more interested. Knowing that it’s just Google (+ web fetch) though I’m not interested in testing it.

Probably you need people to test it who actually do stuff with agents. This hacker news post didn’t get any traction, it looks like it was just me who noticed. I’m not sure what works well to get people’s attention on here, but maybe you could try adding a new post on HN for each interesting update, and focus on the interesting new thing in the title. If you don’t have a bunch of updates planned, maybe you could find the most interesting and distinctive things about this product and then make a different post about each, I think that would be okay. Maybe you should read the HN terms first though.

I think that may have been the problem, the title of the post doesn’t make it apparent what is new and interesting about the product, it just says what it is, which is part of a product category that already exists.
by tetha | 2025-12-19 16:17:51+00:00
I'm assuming you meant statically/dynamically type checked languages.

Generic functions to not ignore types. An `inThere::a list -> a -> bool` very much enforces that the list passed in, as well as the element have the same type. With a sufficiently powerful type system, this allows for statically checked code that's not much less flexible than dynamically checked code.

Observing current developments in Python, but also Rust gives me the impression that dynamically typed languages were more a reaction to the very weak type systems languages like C or Java provided back in the day. A lot of Python code has very concrete or rather simple generic types for example - Protocols, Unions, First-class functions and Type parameters handle a lot. The tools to express these types better existed in e.g. Caml or Haskell, but weren't mainstream yet.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-19 16:17:59+00:00
What is this fad on HN right now? All these people are coming out to criticize Firefox (Mozilla really, not Firefox itself) for their bumbling about the past few years, and now there's a backlash to it, like "these entitled users, oh my goodness" as though holding software companies to a standard is somehow a bad thing?
by neilv | 2025-12-19 16:18:38+00:00
It's a little bit n-gate.

Who unfortunately stopped posting HN critiques, a few years ago. But you can still read old posts on: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/2021/07/

(If you follow that link from HN, and the site sees an HN `Referer`, it will do a fake captcha load, so then click "HACKERNEWS" in the navbar on the right.)
by bondarchuk | 2025-12-19 16:18:40+00:00
You can guard against misrepresentations of your goals by stating your goals clearly, which you already do. Any further misrepresentation is going to be either malicious or idiotic, a university should simply be able to deal with that.

Edit: just thought of a practical step you can take: host it somewhere else than github. If there's ever going to be a backlash the microsoft moderators might not take too kindly to the stuff about e.g. homosexuality, no matter how academic.
by IX-103 | 2025-12-19 16:18:44+00:00
They're definitely doing screen level analysis.

I work for a company that does some work on Internet advertising and one of the main issues that came up when we discussed supporting smart TV platforms was how we could protect our proprietary advertising audience data while still showing ads on these devices. Knowing what ads we show the user tells them what the user is interested in, which is valuable information for our competitors.

Unfortunately, we were not able to solve that problem, and instead to just use lower fidelity user models for advertising on smart TVs. That makes smart TV ads less valuable, but allows us to keep our competitive advantage on desktop and mobile.
by kerkeslager | 2025-12-19 16:18:47+00:00
I'm concerned, and I am glad people keep writing about this.

But the final bit in this post is really where I'm at: I have no idea where to go from here.

Currently on mobile I use Orion--it's the only mobile browser I've found where setting up AdBlocking is reasonably easy. Maybe I'll try it on Desktop.

But this doesn't really address the issue of there being only one rendering engine out there because it uses WebKit.
by WolfeReader | 2025-12-19 16:18:58+00:00
Only some are. At the bottom of each book's store page, you can see if a book is DRM-free. And if it is DRM-free, you can download an ePub.

Example: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/gardens-of-the-moon

They've been doing this for YEARS before Amazon.