MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beloch | 2025-12-29 21:46:15+00:00
Bang on. It's advertising, so literally looking at where people are getting their info from is the way to go.

Google searches don't produce good results these days. The enshittification has become too extreme. Google openly admits as much (and further intensifies the enshittification) by placing a huge AI summary above those results.

The answer is self evident. If, before, you were relying on clicks resulting from google searches, today you need to be what an AI recommends when somebody uses an AI like they used to use google. (Users will eventually become more sophisticated though!) Lots of people are using AI like a search engine and getting better results than google gives simply because massive resources are currently being put into training AI, while mere neglect is insufficient to explain how fast Google search results are getting worse.

Is this how AI companies plan to cash in? Accept money from advertisers to promote their products in interactions with their LLM's? Were I an advertiser, I'd be trying to get Anthropic to take my money instead of giving it to Google. AI might be what finally makes it impossible to tell content and ads apart. That's great for advertisers... I guess. Not so great for the rest of us.
by trvz | 2025-12-29 21:46:16+00:00
I started building up my digital game library on Steam.

I then gradually switched to GOG, sometimes buying things again (it's not that bad with the identical deep discounts for most games on all platforms), because of the better DRM situation and because I like to be in relationships with public companies, so that I can buy their shares.

When GOG messed up their cloud saves functionality (reduced the granted storage to the point where I had to delete old saves – sure, I'll never need them, but I still want [someone else] to keep them), I switched back to Steam.

When I got tired of sitting at a desk to play I ended up switching to the Switch.

Switch 1 games running on the Switch 2 have bad resolution, the Steam Machine is interesting, and hopefully there'll be a lighter Steam Deck – I might end up at Steam again.
by pqtyw | 2025-12-29 21:46:24+00:00
That's kind of interesting, though considering that the German army (and presumably Prussian before that?) was know for giving a relatively huge amount of leeway and authority to more junior officers.

Supposedly while the French and British officers were frozen waiting for new orders to be telegraphed when something didn't go according to plan, Germans took the initiative based on what's happening on the ground. US and other countries adopted this doctrine after the war because of how unexpected successful the German army was (despite being outgunned by the French and the soviets who had better tanks and more trucks just couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently)
by guywithahat | 2025-12-29 21:46:29+00:00
I'm not OP but that seems like a pretty reasonable assumption. LLM dominance is basically a US thing (Europe is handicapped by the EU and China is handicapped by hardware), and there are only a few companies that are actually competitive in LLM's (OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, Meta, Anthropic). I think top 5 is a safer bet but top four isn't an unreasonable thing to say confidently
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-29 21:46:33+00:00
Hm good point but if one were to try to reach visibility via let's say contacting the creators themselves or making reddit showcases themselves?

I am not sure what might work better, sponsorships or Ads. Of course some are definitely icky sponsorships but if one were to align with small youtubers who develop their own things and you enjoy their content and there might be an overlap etc.

I personally have an ad blocker so I don't really know what might work for. I guess organic marketing? But how does one achieve it?

Any good books / ideas on more sustainable forms of marketing aside from paying the large corporations a sort of land tax basically?
Show HN: An automated tutor to help you understand chess
by MintyPyro | 2025-12-29 21:46:43+00:00
Built a quick demo for something that could help players understand the nuances of a position without needing to translate a bunch of complicated lines. Could be helpful for new players or maybe even moderately experienced players. Let me know what you guys think and if this is something worth working on. (Please excuse the mobile version, couldn't get around to making it look good)
by gwd | 2025-12-29 21:47:03+00:00
Not trying to be pedantic. When I hear "leave it to the compiler", I normally think, "let the compiler optimize it, rather than optimizing it yourself". The compiler is doing the initialization either way, but in one case you're relying on a correct understanding of minutiae of the language spec (both for you and all future readers and writers of the code), in another case you're explicitly instructing the compiler to initialize it to zero.
by amber_raza | 2025-12-29 21:47:03+00:00
Thanks for the feedback—this is helpful.

1. Re: Clerk/uBlock: You were spot on. The default Clerk domain often gets flagged by strict blocklists. I just updated the DNS records to serve auth from a first-party subdomain (clerk.getevidex.com) to resolve this. It should be working now.

2. Re: Freshness & 'Rubbish': You are absolutely right that standard of care doesn't (and shouldn't) change overnight based on one new paper.

However, the decision to ditch the Vector DB for Live Search wasn't about pushing 'experimental treatments'—it was about Safety and Engineering constraints:

Retractions & Safety Alerts: A stale vector index is a safety risk. If a major paper is retracted or a drug gets a black-box warning today, a live API call to PubMed/EuropePMC reflects that immediately. A vector store is only as good as its last re-index.

The 'Long Tail': Vectorizing the entire PubMed corpus (35M+ citations) is expensive and hard to keep in sync. By using the search APIs directly, we get the full breadth of the database (including older, obscure case reports for rare diseases) without maintaining a massive, potentially stale index.

The goal isn't to be 'bleeding edge'—it's to be 'currently accurate'.
by yesfitz | 2025-12-29 21:47:44+00:00
I'm not the person you asked, but I assume their basis is that the majority of the Adult US Population is overweight or obese.[1]

However, we're conflating the related problems of hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. Food insecurity at its most extreme will result in hunger (a lack of any food), but the affordable food that is available in food deserts (and at food banks) is often ultraprocessed and incompletely nutritious, which can lead to obesity.[2]

Largely, Americans don't seem to be affected by "hunger" as defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization[3], but are very affected by malnutrition and food insecurity (as defined by that same body).

1: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
2: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9790279/#jhn12994-s...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger#Definition_and_related_...
by silisili | 2025-12-29 21:47:50+00:00
Not OP but I also use ControlD. I admittedly like NextDNS interface better, but honestly, I rarely need to login anyways.

So why ControlD? Because I don't want to run my own piHole, basically. They maintain ad block lists that you can edit as you see fit to add things or relax things that may cause issues(which you can't do easily with public ad blocking dns servers).

Why ControlD then and not NextDNS? First, because their support was awesome when I had an issue. AFAICT it was the founder actually emailing me back and forth, and it ended up being my ISP's fault, but I only knew that based on research provided to me by support. Secondly, I got a good deal on a 5-year subscription at one point.

Happy to answer any questions, not affiliated but a fan of the service.
by benoau | 2025-12-29 21:48:00+00:00
It's all gaming history and a sadly-overlooked part of "Stop Killing Games".

The worst part is the licenses that do exist are non-transferrable, so by the end of this century there will be zero licenses left for these games. They'll just be expunged until they become public domain perhaps in the middle of the next century - if any copies survive.

And what's sad about that is we know for a fact games can survive and be enjoyed for decades, because we have seen this occur for the entire lineage of game-playing machines.
by Defletter | 2025-12-29 21:48:05+00:00
Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted under hate speech laws for stating facts in the 40-odd years since its passage? Why is this not just concern trolling?

As to the general question, no, a statement being true does not immunise it from an accusation of it being used to stir up or incite hatred, or at the very least such a defence is not defined within the Public Order Act 1986. We do have the Human Rights Act which protects Freedom of Expression, but whether you could use it or other defences is pure speculation on my part: I would need to see some actual caselaw.

I've attempted my own searches but have only encountered the usual suspects: holocaust deniers and their ilk. Please let me know if you find such a case because I genuinely think that would be interesting to debate, but debating over pure speculation and innuendo is very boring.
by muppetman | 2025-12-29 21:48:16+00:00
Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now?
We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back.
I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-12-29 21:48:33+00:00
Treemap is the densest/most accurate information source on a per px basis. Flamegraphs are pretty good but with a fixed Y and variable X your box area is inaccurate, and it wastes a fair amount of plot space with the non-flame area. The sunburst chart is really pretty but bad from an information communication perspective.
by pigpop | 2025-12-29 21:48:59+00:00
I can understand not enjoying an LLM taking over the fun problem solving aspect of programming, I've felt that before. Maybe the same is true for some people when it comes to acting as a manager for an LLM but for me it's the opposite. I truly dislike managing other people for lots of reasons but I really enjoy managing LLMs. Maybe that's because I'm not interested in mentoring but I do enjoy building the processes that guide LLM dev work.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-12-29 21:49:02+00:00
I'm working on building an AI agent that creates queries over a time-series database focused on financial data. For example, it can quantify Federal Reserve reports and generate a table showing how SPY reacted 30 minutes after, at EoD, at the next day’s open, and at the next day’s EoD. It will plan the database query and then query the data from a materialized view. It is magic!

How would biomedical researchers use tons of time-series data? A better question is: what questions are biomedical researchers asking with time-series data? I'm a lot more interested in generalized querying over time-series data than just financial data. What would be a great proof of concept?
by fao_ | 2025-12-29 21:49:38+00:00
> Best game in the world, but I'm not subjecting myself, or my kid, to Windows and the Epic store just to get at it.

Quite right! I really don't blame you, given the direction that Windows has taken in the last decade, and especially the last few years. The LLM integration is bad enough (Kids and LLMs should not mix, IMHO), but he adverts in the start menu could be anything. I've had some very explicit 18+ adverts on a social media platform twice this week, despite not engaging with that kind of thing at all, and the best I could do was report them.

> I'm quite surprised Epic hasn't done something to kill off the Steam version yet, but I expect the recent bot problem is going to give them the "justification" they need to put EAC in it. Even if it "works" on Linux after that, I'll be in constant fear that my account, with hundreds of dollars into the game, will get banned without recourse.

For what it's worth, Easy Anti-Cheat is supported and doesn't ban you for using Linux.
by samtp | 2025-12-29 21:50:03+00:00
Google Search Ads are usually the most expensive on a CPC basis out of the big platforms, but usually the CPA is much lower (even though Bing Ads can often be better value). This is usually because of 2 reasons:

1. You can target a specific part of the funnel (informational -> purchase intent) in search ads. Targeting on social networks is more about overall user profiles rather than their immediate state of mind.

2. People going to a search engine expect to leave that search engine to go to another website. Whereas people on a social network expect to stay in that portal. So clicking on an ad then doing something after is a more natural flow (and better value for advertisers).
by Rasbora | 2025-12-29 21:50:12+00:00
This is the core concept of how proxies are detected via services like https://layer3intel.com/tripwire or https://spur.us/monocle/

The difference in min TCP RTT and min RTT to respond to a websocket payload is a dead giveaway that there's a middlebox terminating TCP somewhere along the path. You can bypass this by sourcing your request within 30ms of wherever TCP is being terminated, anything under that threshold could be caused by regular noise and isn't a reliable fingerprint. Due to how many gateway's there are between you and a residential proxy exit node this makes fingerprinting them extremely easy.

I expect it won't be long until someone deploys the first proxy service that handles the initial CONNECT payload in the kernel before offloading packet forwarding to an eBPF script that will proxy packets between hosts at layer 3, making this fingerprinting technique obsolete. The cat and mouse game continues.
by hypeatei | 2025-12-29 21:50:12+00:00
In the wild, that's not true at all[0][1]. The corporate firewall at my employer actually wasn't able to block ECH until they updated it then it was able to block sites as usual.

0: https://community.fortinet.com/t5/FortiGate/Technical-Tip-Ho...

1: https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/symantec-ech-whitepaper (see page 8)
by ibrar74 | 2025-12-29 21:50:46+00:00
NeuronDB runs vector storage, similarity search, and RAG primitives directly inside PostgreSQL.
The goal focuses on keeping embeddings, metadata, and query planning in one system.
The repository includes a PostgreSQL extension, vector indexing logic, and SQL-first query patterns.
Feedback on design tradeoffs, performance behavior, and failure modes under load would help.
by flumpcakes | 2025-12-29 21:51:11+00:00
> There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and ...

This sounds unbearable. It doesn't sound like software development, it sounds like spending a thousand hours tinkering with your vim config. It reminds me of the insane patchwork of sprawl you often get in DevOps - but now brought to your local machine.

I honestly don't see the upside, or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better.
by observationist | 2025-12-29 21:51:24+00:00
The biggest problem is platform scale, imo - platforms grow so big as to make the network effects confer an invulnerability to regulation or moderation, and then get exploited to squash competition, either through legal action, acquisition, suppression, or sometimes simple inertia. Ubiquitous reach and total control over the platform made it irresistible to bad faith operators, politicians, activists, and rent-seekers. AI has a good shot at completely fragmenting those technologies at a fundamental level.

We should be resisting any ad injection into ChatGPT, Claude, etc maintaining a firewall between what's acceptable in a paid product and what's not, and as long as open source Chinese models roughly keep parity, the big US labs can't pivot hard into exploiting users for ad revenues. Private hosting and bots are almost as good as ChatGPT with UI and UX, within a few percentage points as good in capabilities, and the pressure to go elsewhere is minimal. If they drive off a whole lot of independence minded users, they risk creating a community of people who'll create a very slick, workable alternative, while paying only a tenth or less what the frontier labs charge. As long as that dynamic cripples the efforts of big labs to enshittify, there's a good shot that the entire ecosystem fundamentally evolves to something better. I hope, anyway - it could just explode into a grotesque mess of user exploitation and yet more of the same.

I think at some point you'll be able to have good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go, and it'll do all the ad filtering and opsec and digital hygiene for you - everyone will have a high quality competent tech nerd in their pocket looking out for their best interests, and it won't just be a niche rebel nerd thing anymore.
by memoriuaysj | 2025-12-29 21:51:27+00:00
before coding I just ask the model "what are the best practices in this industry to solve this problem? what tools/libraries/approaches people use?

after coding I ask it "review the code, do you see any for which there are common libraries implementing it? are there ways to make it more idiomatic?"

you can also ask it "this is an idea on how to solve it that somebody told me, what do you think about it, are there better ways?"
by Sakura-sx | 2025-12-29 21:51:30+00:00
Oh I haven't seen that before, it's really cool, thank you for showing me that!

I want to clarify that the approaches are a bit different, they use IP intelligence too and this approach doesn't use any kind of websockets, which is a really good idea, and I have to admit I didn't think of that, but sadly it's not really possible to do it with Fastly.

Another big difference is that this could work with any TCP application, not only HTTP, and if you do it with HTTP/S you can know if it's a proxy or not on a request basis and totally passively, without adding any delay or changing the code of the app.

But yeah, it's a really cool demo, thanks again!
by jki275 | 2025-12-29 21:52:17+00:00
Local models won't generally have as much context window, and the quantization process does make them "dumber" for lack of a better word.

If you try to get them to compose text, you'll end up seeing a lot less variety than you would with a chatgpt for instance. That said, ask them to analyze a csv file that you don't want to give to chatgpt, or ask them to write code and they're generally competent at it. the high end codex-gpt-5.2 type models are smarter, may find better solutions, may track down bugs more quickly -- but the local models are getting better all the time.
by thundergolfer | 2025-12-29 21:52:24+00:00
After his first #1 HN post on Nov 11, 2024, Sean Goedecke went on a ridiculous posting run in 2025. Over 130 published and 2nd only to Simon Willison.

1. http://simonwillison.net — 21,015 points

2. http://seangoedecke.com — 11,243 points

3. http://jeffgeerling.com — 11,106 points

4. http://neal.fun — 8,998 points (374.92 point per post!)
by nonameiguess | 2025-12-29 21:52:34+00:00
I'm glad as hell not to run a business and never plan to, but it's interesting to think as a consumer where I would try to get information like this. Guy's running a service that provides in-person entertainment for events and parties, seemingly things like clowns and magicians, maybe small-time bands or what-not.

Seemingly you don't want to target children directly. If they ask their parents for specific entertainment at a party, they're going to ask for entertainers they know, not companies acting as brokers and middlemen. They might want a particular clown (but probably not) but will never want a particular local vendor of clowns. You need to target the parents for that. If it were me doing the buying, I'd probably prioritize word of mouth recommendations if anyone had such, and otherwise for a large enough event like a wedding or graduation party, I'd look to professional planners. Assuming that's any kind of widespread pattern, you'd want to target strong relationships with planners rather than trying to advertise directly to consumers.

Did people really ever search Google to find party entertainment, and then ignore the search results and use the ads instead? Let alone Tik Tok videos? I guess I'm out of touch enough that the answer can be yes and I'm just that clueless about how small businesses work, but all the comments talking about LLM chatbot services are tripping me out. Y'all would ask ChatGPT who to hire for your kid's party?
by kibwen | 2025-12-29 21:52:35+00:00
> The JPL C rules are quite old, but avoiding dynamic allocation outside initialization is am considered best practice for spaceflight software regardless of language.

The rules are written with the historical context of C making it too easy to leak heap-allocated memory. In the safety-critical Rust code that I've worked on, we tend not to dynamically allocate due to the usual constraints, and we're well aware of the "thou shalt not allocate" rules in the scripture, but we've already gotten clearance from the relevant certification authorities that Rust is exempt from the restriction against dynamic allocation specifically because of its ownership system.
by em-bee | 2025-12-29 21:52:36+00:00
i was simplifying. the difference between dialect and language is fluid. plattdeutsch (low german) is also considered a language, as is luxembourgish. frisian btw i also spoken in nordfriesland (in schleswig-holstein) and there are a few speakers of saterfriesish which is the last remaining dialect of east frisian.
by Neywiny | 2025-12-29 21:53:00+00:00
This is what I keep hearing. "You just need something more agentic" "if you had the context length you could've fixed that" etc etc. yeah sure. I'll believe it when I see it. For me it's parsing 3000 page manuals for relevant data. I can do it fairly competently from experience, but I see a lot of people not familiar with them struggle to extract the info they need, and AIs just cannot hold all that context in my experience
by SirMaster | 2025-12-29 21:53:20+00:00
But it was so much simpler when you had the disc. Whoever had the disc had access to the copy and it could be sold and resold as many times as people wanted.

I don't think people are so against DRM, because a disc like that was essentially a form of DRM. They are against an online DRM scheme which could change in the future. I know there were sone disc DRM that could like revoke the disc license, but let's go back before that was a thing to like the Xbox/360 and PS1/2/3 era style.
by kees99 | 2025-12-29 21:53:27+00:00
> collecting RTT on [...] ping

Do you mean originating traffic back to the IP where HTTP request came from? That's way too risky for a reputable server/CDN. There is a reason why driftnet, shodan, paloalto, and the likes, only ever originate scans from separately-registered, separately-announced subnets. Those end up in lists like [1] in no time at all.

[1] https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/UninvitedActivity
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-12-29 21:53:42+00:00
Of course it works in reverse. Plenty of Democrats are not going to bother to waste their time in California when the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Similar with Republicans in Mississippi.

If the rules changed to a popular vote where even "safe" states were up for grabs, I think there would be lots of previously uncounted "dark matter" voters who would activate and would significantly impact the outcome.