MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-12-09 15:24:52+00:00
To support his notion that nuclear is cheap he cites Emblemsvag, here's a response from Fraunhofer calling the paper stupid.

https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/blog/2024/kritische-stellun...

> We can illustrate the fundamental nature of this error using a simple example: Let’s assume that a student buys a car and pays it off in monthly installments of € 300. The parents help to fund the student’s car purchase with € 200 per month. If we follow Emblemsvåg’s logic, the car costs € 500 per month.

The same author seems to have realised his error, but not as far as I'm aware admitted it, as he has a newer paper that argues that nuclear would have been cheaper if they used the waste heat from it for a radical desalination plan. Presumably he couldn't get the real numbers to support his pro-nuclear position without adding this strange element to tip the scales.

It's ironic and yet very on brand for someone who mentions IQ in his piece to be relying on some outlier crank for his scientific opinions.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-12-09 15:25:16+00:00
I remember pre 9/11 walking right up to the gate my mom was departing out of because she was nervous to go through it. I don't even remember going through security because we didn't have a ticket, they just let us through?

My first time flying myself was a school trip in January 2002, so a lot of the security theater hadn't started yet. There was more security, and I had to remove my jacket and belt, but it was still just a metal detector, and potentially a pat down (saw someone getting pat down).

By the time I was flying a lot for work (2006-2012), it was the full shebang (shoes off, using 3 different bins per person - and waiting for more bins, no jackets, no belts, no hats, no facial expressions as TSA looked at your ID).

Now when I fly it seems like the security takes no time anymore. When I last flew in October, I didn't even give the agent my ticket. Just my passport that they scanned and handed back to me without even looking at me. Same with Customs in the UK and US, scanned my OWN passport, and a gate opened for me to pass through, no border agent or anything.
by jjice | 2025-12-09 15:25:24+00:00
> or just a "can you quickly make this boring func here that does xyz" "also add this" or for bash scripts etc.

I still write most of the interesting code myself, but when it comes to boring, tedious work (that's usually fairly repetitive, but can't be well abstracted any more), that's when I've found gen AI to be a huge win.

It's not 10x, because a lot of the time, I'm still writing code normally. For very specific, boring things (that also are usually my least favorite parts of code to write), it's fantastic and it really is a 10x. If you amortize that 10x over all the time, it's more like a 1.5x to 3x in my experience, but it saves my sanity.

Things like implementing very boring CRUD endpoints that have enough custom logic that I can't use a good abstraction and writing the associated tests.

I would dread doing work like that because it was just so mind numbing. Now, I've written a bunch of Cursor rules (that was actually pretty fun) so I can now drop in a Linear ticket description and have it get somewhere around 95% done all at once.

Now, if I'm writing something that is interesting, I probably want to work on it myself purely because it's fun, but also because the LLM may suck at it (although they're getting pretty damn good).
by PKop | 2025-12-09 15:25:26+00:00
Disagree. It's a win win. As an example, Windows and Microsoft would benefit users if they focused less on injecting useless Copilot everywhere, and more on maintenance and improvement of the core functionality of the OS while not squandering the human resource of their development teams by forcing them to work on these things; bad opportunity cost.

Not to say Apple isn't also degrading their OS with bad design changes, but "more AI" is not something users are clamoring for.
Show HN: Milkie – Drop-In Stripe Paywall for Next.js
by akcho | 2025-12-09 15:25:53+00:00
I built Milkie to make it easy to add Stripe paywalls.

- Designed for Next.js + Tailwind + shadcn

- Works with any auth provider (NextAuth, Clerk, Supabase, etc.)

- Handles UI, checkout, webhooks, subscription status (the boring stuff)

There's still some setup involved, but the docs walk you through it.

Demo at milkie.dev

Happy to answer any questions!
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-09 15:26:05+00:00
I tried claude code to write very simple app for me. Basically Golang mock server which will dump request to console. I'd write this kind of app in an hour. I spent around 1.5 hours with claude code and in the end I had code which I liked, almost the same code I'd write myself. It's not vibe coding, I carefully instructed it to write code in a way I prefer, one small step after another.

So for me, it's pretty obvious that with better training, I'd be able to achieve speed ups with the same result in the end. Not 10x, but 2x is possible. The very first attempt to use AI ended up with almost the same time I'd write the same code, and I have a lot to improve.

That said, I have huge problem with this approach. It's not fun to work like that. I started to program 25 years ago, because it was fun for me. It still fun for me today. I love writing all these loops and ifs. I can accept minimal automation like static autocomplete, but that's about it.
by palmotea | 2025-12-09 15:26:14+00:00
> And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather from perspective of some kind of economic determinism? Have you ever thought that you would be compared to a gasoline engine and everyone would discuss this juxtaposition from purely economic perspective?

One of the many terrible things about software engineers their the tendency to think and speak as if they were some kind of aloof galaxy-brain, passively observing humanity from afar. I think that's at least partially the result of 1) identifying as an "intelligent person" and 2) computers and the internet allowing them to in-large-part become disconnected from the rest of humanity. I think they see that aloofness as being a "more intelligent" way to engage with the world, so they do it to act out their "intelligence."
by riskable | 2025-12-09 15:26:34+00:00
No: It's more like leaded gasoline. People of the future will be like, "why would you let a big corporation control the feed algorithm?" Social media is fine. It's the algorithm that seeks addiction/engagement that's the problem. Not social media in general.

"Social media" is far too ambiguous anyway. For example, under most definitions, Steam is a social media platform. Yet no one is addicted to sharing things via Steam. But you can! You absolutely can share and browse people's posts, screenshots, videos, and even chat (text and voice)!

The reason why no one complains about Steam's social media features is that they're not designed to be addicting. That's not the point of the platform (it's to sell more games).
by rvba | 2025-12-09 15:26:48+00:00
Best you can get is Aliens vs Predator vs Terminator comic book (if you are 10 years old you can like it, it is betterr than most AvP stuff but that is a low hanging bar)

I mean the franchise didnt get anything top tier apart from Aliens labirynth and the vP 2 game from.. 2001?
by csomar | 2025-12-09 15:26:50+00:00
I have been building a game (preview here: https://qpingpong.codeinput.com) as a practice to "vibe-coding". There is only one rule: I am not allowed to write a single line of code. But can prompt as much as I want.

So far I am hitting a "hard-block" on getting the AI to make changes once you have a large code base. One "unblocker" was to restructure all the elements as their own components. This makes it easier for the LLM (and you?) to reason about each component (React) in isolation.

Still, even as this "small/simple game" stage, it is not only hard for the LLM to get any change done but very easy for it to break things. The only way I can see my around it, is to structure very through tests (including E2E tests) so that any change by the LLM has to be thoroughly tested for regression.

I've been working on this for a month or so. I could have coded it faster by hand except for the design part.
by smig0 | 2025-12-09 15:27:01+00:00
Happy to see new pebble products ! I have few questions :

What do you mean by never need charging ? Is it a disposable product (or is there a disposable, removable battery) or does it have a way of recharging itself by energy harvesting ?

Isn't this feature of pushing a button, talking to the microphone and getting a transcription in the app already available on the pebble smartwatches ?

EDIT : I found this blog post : https://repebble.com/blog/meet-pebble-index-01-external-memo...
by Aurornis | 2025-12-09 15:27:28+00:00
There are some good kernels of wisdom in this article but it goes a little too LinkedIn-influencer style with the extreme proclamations.

> Swarms of others have been developing expertise with technologies that emerged last decade for… at least a decade. It’s already their superpower. It’s unlikely to become yours, too.

I agree that juniors should be open to experimenting with new technology, but they shouldn’t ignore the basics. It’s true that you’re probably not going to become the premier React expert and rise to the top of the field, but that’s not a good goal to start with anyway. Knowing some core technologies well is basically mandatory so you have something to build upon.

It’s also key to being able to get a job. Being the junior who doesn’t have much foundational knowledge but has a bunch of surface level frontier AI experiments they don’t really understand in their GitHub portfolio is not a good place to be, but I’m seeing more and more junior applicants like this. They follow articles like this and think that learning anything that isn’t extreme cutting edge is a waste of their time. The result is a junior who doesn’t really have a good foundation of the basics, but also doesn’t really have the skills necessary to understand the frontier AI work they’ve been trying to get on to their resume.

So exploring and experimenting is good, but don’t neglect the mature technologies. Those mature technologies are what’s going to get you the job. Don’t become the person with the “AI engineer” resume who can’t do simple interview questions to demonstrate basic understanding of the boring things.
by hnfong | 2025-12-09 15:27:34+00:00
Not seeing any horse heavens, do you have reason to believe humans (i.e. those not among the ruling class) are going to have a different fate from the horses?

I agree we can kinda make the argument that abundance is soon upon us, and humanity as a whole embraces the ideas of equality and harmony etc etc... but still there's a kinda uncanny dissociation if you're happily talking about horses disappearing and humans being next while you work on the product that directly causes your prediction to come true and happen earlier...
by notatallshaw | 2025-12-09 15:27:39+00:00
We're getting there https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/cli/pip_lock/ !

Pip has been a flag bearer for Python packaging standards for some time now, so that alternatives can implement standards rather than copy behavior. So first a lock file standard had to be agreed upon which finally happened this year: https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/

Now it's a matter of a maintainer, who are currently all volunteers donating their spare time, to fully implement support. Progress is happening but it is a little slow because of this.
Show HN: Foggo – CLI Tool for Auto Generation of Go's Functional Option Pattern
by rikeda71 | 2025-12-09 15:27:40+00:00
Hi Hacker News,

I've been relying on the Functional Option pattern to build clean, flexible constructors for my Go projects, but the constant need to write repetitive boilerplate for every struct became tedious and error-prone.

I built *foggo* to solve this pain point.

It's a simple, zero-dependency CLI tool that reads your configuration structs and automatically generates all the necessary, idiomatic Go code for the Functional Option pattern.

### Key Benefits: * *Massive Boilerplate Reduction:* Eliminates the manual work of writing option functions, making your code more focused on business logic. * *Consistency:* Ensures all your constructors adhere to the same, robust pattern across the entire project. * *Speed:* You define the struct, run `foggo`, and the pattern is instantly ready.

I primarily designed this for fellow Go library and package maintainers looking to standardize their configuration setup.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the utility and design of the tool, especially concerning its syntax or how it handles edge cases.

Thanks for checking it out!

*GitHub Repository:* https://github.com/rikeda71/foggo
by alephnerd | 2025-12-09 15:27:40+00:00
We are fine operating under highly regulated censorship laws, as American companies operating under India's IT Acts has show.

We are against the DSA because it is a de facto non-trade barrier to American services exports becuase of it's tax implications.

And it's doesn't matter that Trump is in office - a Harris administration would have played hardball against the EU as well, as was seen with the Biden admin perusing lawfare and lobbying to make an example out of Canada for their attempt at a digital services tax.

It's the same reason the Obama admin lobbied hard for the TPP to not include a digital services tax and harmonize with American IP law.
by layer8 | 2025-12-09 15:27:41+00:00
In monospace the dot is wider than in proportional fonts, thereby adding more space by itself. In addition, the space character itself is wider in monospace than in proportional fonts, relative to the average letter width. In combination, this balances out the difference from proportional typesetting, in my opinion. A dot plus two spaces is jarringly wide in monospace.

I do agree that monospace doesn’t make for readable prose either way.
by SecretDreams | 2025-12-09 15:27:42+00:00
> No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.

That's a pretty long life, TBF. I appreciate your concerns, though, and do wonder if there was a better middle ground (maybe a micro sterling engine leveraging the heat gradient from my finger to ambient, ha!).

People are buying Fitbit charge6 products today and those probably have an 18 shelf life and cost more.. so maybe it's not totally left field - although the charge6 isn't advertised to fail so soon lol.
by Lalabadie | 2025-12-09 15:28:09+00:00
They resisted (most of the) LLM boosterism and kept decent focus on SLMs that can run on-device.

I think the decision is first a self-serving one that's in line with how they want their devices and services to operate, but it also happens to be (in my opinion) the future-proof way of integrating consumer AI.
by rbanffy | 2025-12-09 15:28:34+00:00
> as the same goal for both corporations and people, which ultimately is a side effect of treating corporations like people

This is a huge problem the US needs a deal with - corporations are artificial beings that aren’t sentient and, therefore, cannot participate in politics. We might need to litigate that with an LLM to make language broad enough to set this precedent and further protect the rights of actual sentient beings.
by GentoroAI | 2025-12-09 15:28:59+00:00
We're super excited to launch the open-source prototype of Gentoro OneMCP, a knowledge-driven runtime for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that enables AI agents to interact with backend APIs accurately, consistently, and at lower cost. By generating and reusing structured execution plans, Gentoro OneMCP helps agents call complex services with predictable behavior, giving teams a practical foundation for production-grade agentic applications.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-09 15:28:59+00:00
One of my saved HN comments from @Retr0id:

---

Beware of having too-small fingerprint hashes though, or not checking enough of the digits. $ echo -n retr0id_662d970782071aa7a038dce6 | sha256sum 307e0e71a409d2bf67e76c676d81bd0ff87ee228cd8f991714589d0564e6ea9a - $ echo -n retr0id_430d19a6c51814d895666635 | sha256sum 307e0e71a4098e7fb7d72c86cd041a006181c6d8e29882b581d69d0564e6ea9a -

---

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38668893
by fetzu | 2025-12-09 15:29:20+00:00
More like buying a 99$ “12 to 15 hour recording” pack. Also created real tangible waste, I’m failing to see how recycling a bunch (what are they expecting to sell, hundreds-of-thousands order of magnitude?) of 99$ rings after two years will be worth it (how much material, and for what worth, can they really exctract?).
by matteason | 2025-12-09 15:29:25+00:00
> Here’s the best part: the battery lasts for years

I wonder how many years?

> The battery lasts for up to years of average use.

...how many?

> a battery that lasts for years

How many years does the battery last?

> That’s up to 2 years of usage.

Ah.

I guess "2" is the absolute minimum that you could describe as "years".

It's a shame because it does look like an interesting proposition. It might be more compelling if it was "send your ring back to us for recycling - and we'll send you a new one". I doubt the economics would work at this price point though.
by MindSpunk | 2025-12-09 15:29:33+00:00
They're not using a library like SDL for windowing and input as far as I can tell. All the MacOS interfaces are in Objective-C or Swift, which I would wager (I've never used Go fwiw) aren't as easy to bind to from Go code.

MoltenVK has some extra interfaces you need to integrate with too, it's not a completely hands off setup.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-09 15:29:48+00:00
It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging.

It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.

(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
by gota | 2025-12-09 15:29:53+00:00
Point (2) seems wrong intuitively. "Chopping" away UBI would be much more difficult _because_ it is not associated to a specific constituency.

Not only would there be more people on the streets protesting against real or perceived cuts;

there also would be fewer movements based on exclusivist ideologies protesting _in favour of cuts_*

* e.g. racist groups in favour of cutting some kinds of welfare because of racial associations
by lucb1e | 2025-12-09 15:30:12+00:00
Original title: Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain

It's a memo recorder in ring form. Neat idea that seems really obvious but somehow I haven't seen it before

Edit: ah. "No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling." Planned obsolescence
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-12-09 15:30:32+00:00
from the article:

> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.
by JokerDan | 2025-12-09 15:30:36+00:00
Video from a few years ago that might offer some background/context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWVKeKpNQto

The channel has a few videos on it, not watched any other than this introductory one but some of the titles look interesting.

Also the introduction video above states an initial requirement of 'every PR must have a video' but it looks like that got dropped a while ago.
by rickdeckard | 2025-12-09 15:30:46+00:00
Or, since the stock market is an emotional game (hear me out): Apple hasn't announced anything in the past year which caused comparable excitement and resulted in (further) overvaluation of their company like it happened on Microsoft, nVidia, etc.

Now, after a few months (!), reality sets in and those hyped-up investors realize that it's not as much of a short-term game as they told themselves it would be...
by deadbabe | 2025-12-09 15:31:21+00:00
It’s not worth gold, a lot of CRTs are dead or dying, the tubes have limited hours. After that, they just become junk. Most have been disposed, so you’re going to struggle to find a local one.

Shipping them is annoying and expensive, no one wants to lug around heavy ass CRTs and larger ones probably have to ship on pallets.

Small CRTs that are easy to carry will get snatched up quickly, but mostly by retro gamers who have no alternative.

The difficulty of finding CRTs is mostly a logistics problem. Not because they are so valuable that people horde them.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-12-09 15:31:56+00:00
As a person that likes programming but doesn't like some parts of the job it helps me to think about this:

"You are paid for the parts of the work you don't like".

The parts you like are the things you do after work for free as a hobby (think personal projects, playing with a new language, dabbling in microcontrollers...)
Has anyone automated social listening for Reddit/LinkedIn/ with decent accuracy?
by rade_markoski | 2025-12-09 15:32:36+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with different ways to automate “intent detection” across platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, X, and niche forums. The goal is simple: catch posts where people are actively asking for services you provide without spamming or doing low‑quality scraping.

So far, most tools I’ve tested either: • grab way too much irrelevant noise • miss actual buyer‑intent posts • or break when platforms change UI/API

I’m currently testing OptaReach, which claims to monitor multiple platforms and surface posts where users explicitly ask for something (e.g., “looking for a marketing agency,” “need a developer,” etc.). It even tracks replies and engagement. Early results look promising, but I’m curious how others here approach this problem.

Questions for the HN crowd:

Has anyone built their own system for cross‑platform intent detection?

Are there open‑source tools or frameworks that do this reliably?

How do you handle platform rate limits, UI changes, and false positives?

For those who’ve used tools like OptaReach — did it meaningfully improve your outreach efficiency?

Genuinely interested in the technical side: NLP accuracy, platform scraping legality, real‑time monitoring, etc.
by TheChelsUK | 2025-12-09 15:32:46+00:00
> The Covid Counter Fraud Commissioner, Tom Hayhoe's, final report to Parliament finds many schemes - including Bounce Back Loans and Eat Out to Help Out - were rolled out with huge fraud risks and no early safeguards -- costing the taxpayer millions.

> Weak accountability, bad quality data and poor contracting were identified as the primary causes of the £10.9 billion pound losses -- which were enough to fund daily free school meals for the UK's 2.7 million eligible children for eight years.
by thomascountz | 2025-12-09 15:32:48+00:00
The choice release a non-rechargeable/non-serviceable product feels like something that shouldn't be dismissed with "...lasts for years..." and "...you''d probably lose the charger..." This language feels patronizing to me. Even the "...[it] asks if you’d like to order another ring," begs the question: at what cost?? 99$, I presume.

The target market might not be exclusively other engineers and tinkerers, but as an engineer and tinkerer, I'm eager for more details about the testing, verification, construction, etc., of such a solution.

On the other hand, cool!