MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blibble | 2025-12-14 15:16:19+00:00
I am convinced he wants it because it looks huge on a flat map, almost all of which use the Mercator projection (which preserves shape, not area)

if you want to see the real size: Peter's projection preserves area, not shape

https://college.holycross.edu/faculty/cstone/span304/Mercato...

someone buy him a globe
by theturtlemoves | 2025-12-14 15:16:41+00:00
I'm struggling with this too. First, figure out if it's a true fear of success or really fear of failure in disguise. (I'm afraid of getting hired. So what? Then I have to perform. So what? But I might fail. Ahh, there we go.) Secondly, figure out what messages people around you gave you when you succeeded or failed. Especially any behaviors that gave you a feeling of fear, shame or disgust. Third, start placing your own judgment of what constitutes success or failure above what others think of as success or failure. Set your own goals and criteria for completion. Lastly, don't focus on the outcome, focus on your inputs. Work patiently, slow down until you reach the quality you want to reach.
by oulipo2 | 2025-12-14 15:16:46+00:00
I think it started as some kind of CI/CD tools, then they jumped on the AI hype and they started to use it to make it possible to run agents in containers easily... perhaps to do automated actions on CI/CD pipelines that use agents (eg try to solve some minor bugs automatically when you push on a branch, etc)

Although I'm not sure if that's so much a value-added? It's not so hard to just create a container and launch an agent in it.

The whole interesting thing was to use actual programming languages for Docker build, which I think was what they initially tried to do, but now it's a bit incomprehensible... I guess conceptually Dagger relates to Dockerfile a bit like Pulumi related to Terraform?
by brightball | 2025-12-14 15:17:39+00:00
Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.

It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.

- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.

- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.

- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.

- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.

It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.

He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.
by adwn | 2025-12-14 15:17:52+00:00
I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-(

> If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […]

There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable to TWh levels and economically feasible. Here on HN, there's always someone who'll post the knee-jerk response of "just build more panels", without doing the simple and very obvious calculation that 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there [1].

[1] Except for paying people to crank a generator by hand, although that might at least help with obesity rates.
by kakacik | 2025-12-14 15:18:20+00:00
I am having extremely hard time believing this, I don't mean that on paper chance exists but out there in real world, especially with current government. Checking for 2024 the number can be counted on all fingers and toes and all were special high profile cases.

US has a law that they will invade International court of justice if ever any US personnel is tried there (ie for war crimes, that one would be easy to pull on thousands of US citizens). That's the US mindset against other jurisdictions.

Israel would be an exception of course.
by adam_patarino | 2025-12-14 15:18:22+00:00
Yeah you’re right, that’s fair. I just think people don’t behave that rationally. I’m not moving away from my kid’s grandparents because my local costs have gone up, for example.

There exists greater friction with many of the items in red than the highly automated ones.

My question is how linked is this friction to the lack of automation?

With text books and meat packing there are few players due to consolidation. This means they can avoid investing in automation and keep prices high because they face less resistance from consumers and virtually none from competitors.

In short I’m asking if market forces are to blame for lower automation. And therefore automation is not the root cause of price increases.
Show HN: WillItFront.Page – Test your HN post before submitting
by tarasyarema | 2025-12-14 15:18:35+00:00
Hey HN!

I kept noticing great posts dying in /new while some mediocre ones hit front page at the right time. So I built a tool that analyzes your post and suggests optimal posting windows based on historical HN data. Also if provides general feedback based on data + similar posts.

From the tech side of it, both the fe and the HN API are open source here:

- Frontend: https://github.com/desplega-ai/ai-toolbox/tree/main/willitfr... - SQL API: https://github.com/desplega-ai/ai-toolbox/tree/main/hn-sql

The backend is done with a simple python script that fetches data into parquet files, and then queries them using duckdb, which work fine so far. The latencies go from ms to few seconds depending on the query.

PS: I haven't finished the full sync yet (~85% done).
by spookie | 2025-12-14 15:19:48+00:00
Look, I'm talking from the point of view that Russia will continue to invade others within Europe unless they're stopped. Which is, from what I gathered until now, your fearmongering scenario. I think my responses will make a lot more sense like that.

Maybe the difficulty in conveying thoughts into text struck again. I don't know. I haven't been trying to be malicious or distort your take, really. As I see it we have just been talking past each-other. Perhaps my fault.

Were you saying all this time they won't stop in Ukraine itself? Agreed, if that's the case.

> Obviously that's not the only thing that matters...

Of course it's not all that matters, I have just exaggerated it in an attempt to convey how much their past actions paint that picture. That they will continue doing the same even if absurd. Again, not that clear.
by muzani | 2025-12-14 15:19:50+00:00
Health data is usually the highest level protected data under most laws. It's not about just insurance. Part of the problem is once data is out there, it can be used by any shady person.

You can be discriminated against a job based on health records. Scary diseases like AIDS and TB make it hard for unskilled labor to land a job since it's so easy to discriminate. Pregnancy history may hurt women who are in countries with more generous maternity leave.

Mental health history will hurt just about everyone - who wants a worker who can claim ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc as reasons to be unproductive?

Then people will simply deny getting diagnosed for fear that they may uncover something that puts their jobs at risk. That hurts the medical system as a whole.

Combine with weird stuff like eugenics. What if we identify a possible rapist gene and neuter them in advance? Or bar people with a klepto gene from working in finance? You may live in happy, sane, democratic societies today, but it may not be the case 30 years from now.
by celticninja | 2025-12-14 15:19:53+00:00
HK is dead, it's just China now. No independence and so no reason to be there than mainland China.

The banking and shipping and other service industries will slowly migrate to Singapore and KL, possibly Bangkok and HK will be a non-entity in a decade or two. I know many HK expats who moved to the UK who had seen it's decline in just the last 5 years.
by mxey | 2025-12-14 15:20:28+00:00
> You can also argue that sd_journal (the C API) exists for this exact reason, rather than shelling out to journalctl.

Quoting from https://systemd.io/JOURNAL_FILE_FORMAT/

> If you need access to the raw journal data in serialized stream form without C API our recommendation is to make use of the Journal Export Format, which you can get via journalctl -o export or via systemd-journal-gatewayd.

Certainly sounds like running journalctl, or using the gateway, is a supported option.
by mrkeen | 2025-12-14 15:20:47+00:00
Why compilers are hard – the IR data structure

If you claim an IR makes things harder, just skip it.

Compilers do have an essential complexity that makes them "hard" [...waffle waffle waffle...] The primary data [...waffle...] represents the computation that the compiler needs to preserve all the way to the output program. This data structure is usually called an IR (intermediate representation). The primary way that compilers work is by taking an IR that represents the input program, and applying a series of small transformations all of which have been individually verified to not change the meaning of the program (i.e. not miscompile). In doing so, we decompose one large translation problem into many smaller ones, making it manageable.

There we go. The section header should be updated to:

Why compilers are manageable – the IR data structure
by rayiner | 2025-12-14 15:20:51+00:00
That reminds me of the Pharoh’s sorcerers in Prince of Egypt. Maybe we aren’t underestimating anything and these organizations are just dysfunctional because the federal government gives them a blank check with student loans?

WUSTL has 20,000 students and faculty. This is not a big organization. To manage that, they have over 17,000 administrators. Meanwhile, the Pentagon in 1941, at the start of US involvement in WWII, had only 24,000 civilian employees to manage over a million soldiers.
by oulipo2 | 2025-12-14 15:21:11+00:00
I generally agree. AI is far from being good enough to ship entire apps on its own. So for now it's more like a kind of "power templating assistant" for devs who already know what they're doing

that said, the article says "Why buy a CRM solution or a ERM system when “AI” can generate one for you in hours or even minutes"

and I'd say that it's also wrong to see it that way, because the issue with "rolling your own" is not so much shipping the initial version, than maintaining and developing and securing it over time. This is what takes a lot of manpower, and that's why you usually want to rely on an external vendor, who focuses exclusively on maintaining and updating that component, so you don't have to do it on your own
by everdrive | 2025-12-14 15:21:55+00:00
I can feel the skill atrophy creeping in. My very first instinct is go use the LLM. I think much like forcing yourself to exercise, eat right, and avoid social media / distractions, this will be a new modern skillset; do you have the discipline to avoid becoming useless without an LLM? A small few will be great at this, the middle of the bell curve will do "well enough," and you know the story for the rest.
by kijin | 2025-12-14 15:22:14+00:00
My dad used to have a crappy aftermarket GPS in his car that did the same thing. It would get lost dozens of miles away, and then hundreds of miles away.

The explanation I found online at the time was that a GPS receiver needs to download data about the exact orbits of all GPS satellites from time to time. Satellites slowly lose altitude and change their orbits. Up-to-date information is constantly broadcasted by every satellite, but it takes about 15 minutes for a device on the ground to download this dataset.

Most GPS devices do this automatically whenever they get the chance. But if your GPS is somehow unable to stay online for 15 consecutive minutes (bad firmware, faulty memory, tunnels, underground parking lots, etc), it will be relying on increasingly outdated info and drift far off its actual location.
by dorongrinstein | 2025-12-14 15:22:29+00:00
Control Plane is a virtual cloud platform. It lets you run workloads that scale up and down to save $ on AWS, GCP, Azure, on-prem or any provider. The Control Plane MCP service allows your AI tool to interface with the Control Plane API/CLI to deploy and manage your backend workloads, and persistent databases, queues, etc.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-14 15:22:44+00:00
Not to other people I've talked to.

I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.

[1] https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag
by throwaway613745 | 2025-12-14 15:22:57+00:00
It hasn't been an issue in my experience at $DAY_JOB, but for us all commits must pass CI and not just the tip of whatever branch was just pushed. So branches with partial commits that fail CI cannot be merged. So if you commit an incorrect partial commit, you either squash it into a commit that does pass CI (usually the next one forward) or you rebase and edit the failed commit and fix it and force push your branch and run CI on the whole changeset again.
by jmkni | 2025-12-14 15:23:21+00:00
I've been experimenting with "vibe coding" recently, and it's been interesting.

I was playing around with v0, and was able to very quickly get 'kinda sorta close-ish' to an application I've been wanting to build for a while, it was quite impressive.

But then the progress slowed right down, I experienced that familiar thing many others have where, once you get past a certain level of complexity, it's breaking things, removing features, re-introducing bugs all while burning through your credits.

It was at this point I remembered I'm actually a software engineer, so pushed the code it had written to github and pulled it down.

Total mess. Massive files, duplicated code all over the place, just a shitshow. I spent a day refactoring it so I could actually work with it, and am continuing to make progress on the base it built for me.

I think you can vibe code the basis of something really quickly, but the AI starts to get confused and trip over it's own shitty code. A human would take a step back and realise they need to do some refactoring, but AI just keeps adding to the pile.

It has saved me a good few months of work on this project, but to really get to a finished product it's going to be a few more months of my own work.

I think a lot of non-technical people are going to vibe-code themselves to ~60-70% of the way there and then hit a wall when the AI starts going around in circles, and they have no idea how to work with the generated code themselves.
by mxey | 2025-12-14 15:23:28+00:00
I recently wrote some Go code for running containers and chose to use the docker CLI instead of an API client. The CLI is more well known and better documented, and this is what replacements like Podman support. When there’s a problem, it’s easier to reproduce it by running the same CLI command. It also meant I wouldn’t need a whole lot of dependencies, and we needed the docker CLI anyway.

Obviously you shouldn’t try to parse human-readable output.
by squigz | 2025-12-14 15:23:31+00:00
Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.

More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting

Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
by idoubtit | 2025-12-14 15:23:41+00:00
Your mileage may vary, because the workflow you described does not suit me. I rarely want to put on hold my commit, work on a new one, then go back later to the former commit.

Most of the time, when working on a new commit I have a few changes related to recent commits. So _when I'm done with all that_, I commit selectively the new work, then dispatch the rest among the other commits:

git add -p ; git commit git add -u ; git absorb

Sometimes, I use `commit --fixup` instead of the automatic `absorb`. Anyway, I tried Jujutsu for a few weeks, some was good and some was bad; it didn't "shine" enough and I went back to pure Git.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-12-14 15:23:51+00:00
Books such as:

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

and

“Stand Out of Our Light”

might not change your mind, but you’re likely to end up realizing customer data hovering is more of a driver of modern business decisions than you realize. To say nothing of the assets such activities provide the intelligence communities.

This is happening. Please don’t dismiss it as conspiracy theory.
by probably_wrong | 2025-12-14 15:24:10+00:00
The problem with speaking fast predates 2x speed by decades. From what I've seen it's usually the result of not rehearsing beforehand - beginners tend to panic and speak fast as a result while experienced speakers overestimate how much information an audience can retain and/or how short a minute is. Experienced speakers can tune it in real time, though, and rehearsal time is expensive so they simply don't.
by mcsniff | 2025-12-14 15:24:18+00:00
It's a good thing personal choice exists and you don't make the rules for everyone.

> I don't see any reason someone would want to turn it on and off based on presence.

Maybe someone doesn't want the noise when they are present? Some people like white noise, some don't.

> The amount of electricity these take to run isn't worth even mentioning.

Not everyone lives where you do and pays the electricity rates you do. What about people who generate their own electricity, live off a grid, or just plain want to conserve energy for a myriad a reasons? Turning off specific loads based on XYZ is useful.

> So you can refill it remotely? You have to be present to fill it anyway - just look at the thing and you'll know its water level

Maybe the humidifier is in a low visible or less-trafficked area, and getting a reminder to fill it up would be useful.

What a terrible take you have on people's use case not exactly matching yours.
by Dumbledumb | 2025-12-14 15:26:11+00:00
While the situation in Europe is, of course, diverse, the culture in Germany (which is often looked to as a thought leader in the eu) is strictly to disallow and discredit any substantial criticism of the „only democracy in the Middle East“. Usually under a blanket accusation of antisemitism. Especially due to germanys history, this claim can be brought forward and be spread in a news cycle without substantive scrutiny. The fact that conflating the State of Israel with jewish people could be met with the same accusation is largely ignored.

If you are interested in the topic on a high level I suggest the following starting points

United Nations: „UN experts urge Germany to halt criminalisation and police violence against Palestinian solidarity activism“ as well as numerous statements by amnesty international or the Wikipedia Section „Restrictions on Pro-Palestinian expression“ of the article „Censorship in Germany“
by blitz_skull | 2025-12-14 15:27:16+00:00
I wish I could just ship 99% AI generated code and never have to check anything.

Where is everyone working where they can just ship broken code all the time?

I use LLMs for hours, every single day, yes sometimes they output trash. That’s why the bottleneck is checking the solutions and iterating on them.

All the best engineers I know, the ones managing 3-4 client projects at once, are using LLMs nonstop and outputting 3-4x their normal output. That doesn’t mean LLMs are one-shotting their problems.
by sethammons | 2025-12-14 15:27:35+00:00
Funny you mention Elixir. At one company, we passed around Ecto querysets. It started when the company was smaller. Then someone needed a little bit of analytics. And a few years of organic growth later and the system was bogged down. Queries where joining all over the place, and separating out the analytics from everything else was, again, a major undertaking.

I would love to see a counter example in real life at an org with over a dozen teams. A well working monolith and a well working monorepo are like unicorns; I don't believe they exist and everyone is talking about and trying to sell their mutant goat as one.
by bragr | 2025-12-14 15:27:52+00:00
In addition to sibling's comments about jamming and self driving safety, there are many driving situations where there is no or poor GPS reception: tunnels, double deck bridges, double deck freeways, underpasses, urban canyons, actual canyons, etc. Also regional problems. The GPS constellation is in a 55° inclination, so if you are north of ~55N, or south of ~55S, you need a clear view of the southern/northern sky, respectfully, for reception, since there will be no overhead satellites.
by lkjdsklf | 2025-12-14 15:27:55+00:00
The issue is LLMs are, by design, non-deterministic.

That means that, with the current technology, there can never be a deterministic agent.

Now obviously, humans aren't deterministic either, but the error bars are a lot closer together than they are with LLMs these days.

An easy to point at example is the coding agent that removed someones home directory that was circulating around. I'm not saying a human has never done that, but it's far less likely because it's so far out of the realm of normal operations.

So as of today, we need humans in the loop. And this is understood by the people making these products. That's why they have all these permissions and prompts for you to accept/run commands and all of that.