MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelandfe | 2025-12-29 18:52:21+00:00
> Not because they made things more impressive, but because they removed the part I always stalled on

> What I needed was not a better app, but a way to tolerate imperfection

> That decision was not technical, it was judgment

> What makes it interesting is not the covers, but the spines

> Claude did not invent that idea. It executed it

> my caution dropped, not because the tool was always right, but because the cost of trying ideas had collapsed

> Not because it was broken, but because it was unnecessary
by vishnukool | 2025-12-29 18:52:53+00:00
So far the creators I've worked with are all non-technical. They really just wanted to solve a problem in their niche. In the process of building it for them I kind of naturally biased towards using skills + Claude Agent SDK, to solve it for them since in my personal experience, it's by far the most capable Agent as of today.

From the creator's perspective, it's just a more powerful agentic CustomGPT that they can easily monetize. One of them has made more than $1600 so far, so I think she's happy.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-29 18:53:19+00:00
> Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it.

If you can get a few people from 2 of these groups together more than once, you've started solving this problem. Of course keeping it going for a long time is a challenge, and you want to avoid always being in the situation where you are doing all the work and others aren't contributing, but it gets easier and better with experience.
by Sargos | 2025-12-29 18:53:59+00:00
>being able to just show up in a country, download an app

This seems like a "draw the rest of the owl" situation. If I arrive in a new country with no phone data (which is why I need a sim in the first place) then how do I download an app? Being able to walk up to a guy at the airport and within seconds slide in a SIM solves that data problem.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-29 18:54:31+00:00
Improved benchmarks are undeniably an improvement, but the bottleneck isn't the models anymore, it's the context engineering necessary to harness them. The more time and effort we put into our benchmarking systems the better we're able to differentiate between models, but then when you take an allegedly smart one and try to do something real with it, it behaves like a dumb one again because you haven't put as much work into the harness for the actual task you've asked it to do as you did into the benchmark suite.

The knowledge necessary to do real work with these things is still mostly locked up in the humans that have traditionally done that work.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-12-29 18:54:46+00:00
Sweden, a counntry in the EU, did this in 2012.

Then they introduced a (small) fee.

Apparently Norway's Vipps is free for small amounts, but charges 1% for large.

Too tempting for the EU not to play, but that will replace a duopoly with a monopoly, which will end up doing what monopolies have always done. "For the greater good" here is to incentivize competition.
by rvnx | 2025-12-29 18:54:48+00:00
You can also buy boxed things and have the problem. For example FL Studio, you buy the boxed edition 300 USD, and all you get is a serial number. Once it's linked to an account, it's over (and it's actually the only way).

If legislators want to do something good, they could force platforms to allow transfer of games between accounts.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-29 18:54:49+00:00
Claiming that you can't ask people to leave a review on Trustpilot sounds like a deceptive sales tactic with no legal basis.

On the other hand, regarding reproducing reviews, I believe that (1) people own the copyright on their own reviews and (2) Trustpilot's T&Cs likely include that when you leave a review you grant them a licence. Therefore it may indeed be that the only way to reproduce a review is to get the consent of the author or of Trustpilot.
by roguecoder | 2025-12-29 18:54:57+00:00
The problem isn't programmers: it is cheap-ass executives obsessed with compliance.

Good software designers are facilitators. They don't tell people how to build software, but say "not like that" by making the technical requirements clear. They enable design to constantly change as the needs change.

It has been a long time since I've been at a company willing to actually employ someone in that roll. They require that their most senior engineers be focused on writing code themselves, at the expense of the team and skill-building necessary for quality software.

Instead we get bullshit like "team topologies" or frameworks that are more about how the company wants to manage teams than they are about how well the software works. We get "design documents" that are considered more important than working code. Even the senior engineers that are around aren't allowed to say "no" if it is going to interfere with some junior project manager's imagined deadline.

Software companies are penny-wise and pound foolish, resulting in shittastic spaghetti messes with microservice meatballs.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-12-29 18:54:58+00:00
I'm still sour of how easily I was deceived while being so happy when envisioning a future that won't come.

First with autopilot, then with boring's tunnels, then a $39k cybertruck, then ...

What's that saying about "fool me so many times I can't keep count" ?

Whatever angry feeling we may have towards Elon Musk, he's not the richest man on earth for nothing.

Lesson learned, till next time !
by mattmanser | 2025-12-29 18:55:39+00:00
The vast majority of artists in all fields don't really have their own style and are just copying other people's. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about art, literature, music, film, whatever.

It takes a rare genius to make a new style, and they come along a few times a generation. And even they will often admit they built on top of existing styles and other artists.

I'm not a fan of AI work or anything, but we need to be honest about what human 'creativity' usually is, which for most artists is basically copying the trends of the time with at most a minor twist.

OTOH, I think when you start entering the fringes of AI work you really start seeing how much it's just stealing other people's work though. With more niche subjects, it will often produce copies of the few artists in that field with a few minor, often bad, changes.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-29 18:56:07+00:00
> Was curious though so I looked it up and Tesla is currently selling more than Volkswagen, Ford, Rivian, Mercedes, and Toyota combined. Interesting.

Indeed. Global 2024 data shows Tesla selling about 1.8M.
EV's only by that group of automakers comes to around 1.5M. Toyota and Ford are hybrid-first, not EV. VW is the only legacy automaker that comes near Tesla's EV scale. Mercedes prioritizes margin over volume. Rivian is capacity-limited.
by vl | 2025-12-29 18:56:08+00:00
DB last year: I took train last year from Frankfurt airport to Bonn only to see Bonn sail past the window and train to go to Cologne.

I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were late, and this train departed from the platform already marked for Bonn! “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!” locals helpfully advised me.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-29 18:56:21+00:00
It's definitely not 0 because rebase heavy workflows involve the rerere cache which is a minefield of per-repo hidden merge changes. You get the results of "criss-cross merges" as "ghosts" you can't easily debug because there aren't good UI tools for the rerere cache. About the best you can do is declare rerere cache bankruptcy and make sure every repo clears their rerere cache.

I know that worst case isn't all that common or everyone would be scared of rebases, but I've seen it enough that I have a healthy disrespect of rebase heavy workflows and try to avoid them when given the option/in charge of choosing the tools/workflows/processes.
Show HN: Sous – App that imports recipes from URLs, and cookbook photos using AI
by sunnynagra | 2025-12-29 18:56:51+00:00
I built Sous because I was tired of:

1. Scrolling through 2000-word life stories to find a recipe
2. Trying to copy recipes from Instagram captions
3. Squinting at my phone with messy hands while cooking

The app uses Google Gemini to parse recipes from any URL (handles messy blog formats),
photos of cookbooks/handwritten notes, and even TikTok/Instagram/YouTube videos.

How it works:
- AI extracts structured ingredients and steps, pre-converts all measurements to both metric and imperial
- Live Activities show timers on your Lock Screen
- Siri control for hands-free cooking ("Hey Siri, start my pasta timer")
- AI chat assistant that knows your recipe context for substitutions and troubleshooting

I'd love feedback, especially on the parsing accuracy and cooking experience.

Learn more: https://getsousapp.com/

Try it out here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sous-smart-recipe-companion/id...
by scott_w | 2025-12-29 18:57:01+00:00
I’ll say I’m a little mixed on this, depending on how tight your timings are. A benefit of open book, I think, is that you can ask some more offbeat questions confident that the students are able to lookup the details. The challenge comes in knowing that they fully grasp the theory so they know how to find the information if it’s not in their short term memory.

Maybe a simplified example might be a question that forces you to consider different data structures and choose the right one? A student may not have the experience to know off the top of their head but they have a reference they can skim to check. The trick would be setting it out such that a student that didn’t know the principles would completely miss this and not know what to look for. Like they would do nested loops instead of populating a hashmap, perhaps.
by kenanfyi | 2025-12-29 18:57:04+00:00
I read the story and I felt like the mentioned background characters in it, saying "Deutsche Bahn..." to myself at the end of every paragraph.

Once I was travelling back to home from Munich and the train stopped somewhere in Frankfurt in the middle of nowhere. Literally stopped on the tracks and it was completely dark outside except some far away lights from the houses around.

We waited for 3 hours, with 2-3 explanations which did not make any sense. After 3 hours the train started riding again and I arrived in Cologne, which is ~1h away from home still, and they said this is the last station. I needed to spend the night in Cologne in a hotel, because it was 3 o'clock in the morning and there was no other train to my hometown.

Fortunately I was able to get a refund plus the hotel cost for that night back.
by epistasis | 2025-12-29 18:57:11+00:00
Ah, but you missed the pivot, Tesla is no longer an EV maker, it's now a robotics company.

This fully explains the market valuation, of course! Never mind a swarm of retail investors driven by a news media that covered Musk as if he were Tony Stark for years, this market cap is fully based on solid fundamental analysis of expected future revenue.
by Rochus | 2025-12-29 18:57:29+00:00
You can find all necessary information/data in the article (see references). Finding an EliteBook 2530p might be an issue though. Concerning Mandelbrot, I wouldn't spend too much time, because the runtime was so short that it likely has a big error margin compared to the other results. For my purpose this is not critical because or the geometric mean over all factors.
Ask HN: What Comic-books did you read in 2025?
by linesofcode | 2025-12-29 18:58:00+00:00
I’m getting back into comics this year and have been working through my back-log.

In 2025 I read

- Invincible (around to the same point as the show, no spoilers please)

- Blacksad (I’m simply in love with the art)

- Fables (picked it up many years ago but didn’t finish, really dig the “originality” of using fairy tale characters)

- Absolute Batman

- Absolute Martian Man-hunter

- Absolute Superman

What’s everyone reading or planning to read in the next year?
by mamonster | 2025-12-29 18:58:02+00:00
>Squeeze Ukraine for rare earths

Ukrainian rare earths are a massive meme. The only argument that is reasonable is that post-war Ukraine will have below 0 environmental protections and accept Congo-style mining.

If it was not economical enough for USSR, it won't be for any actor that knows what ROI is.

A much better economic future for Ukraine as part of Europe would be to make it the breadbasket of the entire EU but it's political suicide given the farmer protests.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-12-29 18:58:15+00:00
The reason for that is actually very funny. Electrek guy (Fred) was one of the main propagandist for Tesla's cult - he 'earned' 2 free Tesla Roadsters for his convincing enough people to buy a Tesla.

It was only once he realized that he has been duped and those will never materialize that the coverage turned negative.
by TheMagicHorsey | 2025-12-29 18:58:34+00:00
In a strange coincidence (or maybe its actually inevitable given the timing) I also saw a podcast with Matklad of Tigerbeetle and had a similar idea--I've been working on a massively multiplayer game as a hobby project, also built in zig, also fully allocating all memory at startup, and also had an experience almost identical to OP's. In my case both my client and server are in Zig. Zig is pretty great at doing performant game code (rendering and physics on the client) ... it's less great on the server compared to Go (early days and fewer batteries included, fewer things just work out of the box ... but you can find pretty much everything you need for a game server with a little hunting and pecking and a debugging few build issues).

Zig also works "okay" with vibe coding. Golang works much better (maybe a function of the models I use (primarily through Cursor) or maybe its that there's less Zig code out in the wild for models to scrape and learn from, or maybe idiomatic Zig just isn't a thing yet the way it is with Go. Not quite sure.
by jonlong | 2025-12-29 18:59:03+00:00
I suppose I erroneously assumed some familiarity with the correspondence between product types (i.e., types of pairs) and the constructive logical interpretation of "and".

Suffice it to say for now: there is an interpretation of logic that gives a tighter correspondence to programming than the set-theoretic one, under the name "Curry-Howard" or "propositions as types, proofs as programs", and which has been known and cherished by logicians, programming language theorists, and also category theorists for a long time. The logic is constructive as it must be: a program of type A tells us how to build a value of type A, a proof of proposition A tells us how to construct evidence for A. From here we get things like "a proof of A and B is a proof of A together with a proof of B" (the "BHK interpretation"), which connects "and" to product types...

I spoke up because I could not leave untouched the idea that "tagged unions are illogical". On the contrary, tagged unions (aka "disjoint unions", "sum types", "coproducts", etc.) arise forthwith from an interpretation of logic that is not the set-theoretical one, but is a more fruitful one from which programming language theory begins. You are not wrong that there is also a correspondence between (untagged) union and intersection types and a set-theoretical interpretation of propositional logic, and that union and intersection types can also be used in programming, but you are missing a much bigger and very beautiful picture (which you will find described in most any introductory course or text on PL theory).
by qingcharles | 2025-12-29 18:59:06+00:00
I often think about people in the USA, they might have some misdemeanor warrant for some traffic infraction they didn't know about on the other side of the country.

They get stopped for speeding near their home in Florida, the police arrest them, take them to the county jail where they are stuck without bond waiting for extradition to the county where the warrant was issued. You might wait a few weeks in a cell, then you can spend another five weeks stuck in the back of a van, pissing into a cup while they drive you 3000 miles to Seattle, stopping at 25 other jails on the way. Only for Seattle to give you a court date and kick you out of the door with nothing except the clothes on your back. Except it's 40°F and you were arrested in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. The cops in Florida have your phone and wallet. You have no phone numbers. You have no money. You're 3000 miles from home. Good luck, champ!

(this is a real thing that happens regularly in the USA)
by badsectoracula | 2025-12-29 18:59:07+00:00
This is true but you don't know ahead of time before you buy a game, you have to gamble on it being the case or not (i've found that while some lists exist in places like pcgamingwiki, they tend to be both very incomplete and often wrong).

Usually indie games tend to be DRM-free though, so if an indie game isn't available on GOG or Zoom Platform (another DRM-free store), i end up buying on Steam.
by submeta | 2025-12-29 18:59:19+00:00
Musk increasingly feels like a charlatan selling snake oil. He is great at hype and storytelling, not so great at execution. Big promises, missed timelines, excuses reframed as genius.

He has been promising fully autonomous Teslas since at least 2015 and “level 5” self-driving within a couple of years, yet cars still require human oversight and true autonomy remains elusive.

He said Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020 and then “next year” repeatedly, which never happened.

He promised an affordable $35,000 Model 3 and a cheap family EV, but those never materialized as advertised.

He unveiled the Cybertruck with specific features and price points that did not pan out, and several promised add-ons never appeared.

He set repeated production deadlines for the Tesla Roadster that kept slipping for years.

And his Mars colonization timelines are still nowhere near realistic.

The same cycle keeps repeating, with fans focusing on a few wins while ignoring a long list of missed commitments. At some point it stops being bold vision and starts looking like a confidence game.
by ninth_ant | 2025-12-29 18:59:33+00:00
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact.

There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more.

Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.
by german_dong | 2025-12-29 18:59:38+00:00
Many reasons:

1. Internet has made distribution frictionless. So unlike giving out Uber trips,
giving out code costs you nothing.

2. You have a real job. The "80% time" for which you're paid subsidizes
the self-promotional work you do for free, and let's not kid ourselves:
most of us write open-source not out of altruism but for the
recognition.

3. Software is immediately useful. Lawyering is a lot like programming
in that both involve putting pen to paper in just the right way. But
pro bono legal work is a lot more painful than whipping up some code.
Lawyers have to deal with people and all their bs.

4. Software is easy. I don't know why but the return on capital blows
away the return on labor. Whereas Microsoft may have once derived most
of their profit from software, they've now come around to the rest of
the tech industry which is selling hardware and compute -- the software
that comes with it is included.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-29 18:59:41+00:00
Trade secrets are not necessary (and likely wasted), for building up momentum.

An ability to pick topics, not as widely known as they are useful, develop a well received voice/style, validated by increasing visibility, is where to start.

Only when you know ahead of time that a unique post has readership would it be worth sharing. If the goal is external (i.e. a marketing/sales bump), as apposed to internal (just enjoy sharing, or using writing to self-clarify).
by Edman274 | 2025-12-29 18:59:53+00:00
Is it fair to recognize that there is a category difference between the processing that happens by default on every cell phone camera today, and the time and labor intensive processing performed by professionals in the time of film? What's happening today is like if you took your film to a developer and then the negatives came back with someone having airbrushed out the wrinkles and evened out skin tones. I think that photographers back in the day would have made a point of saying "hey, I didn't take my film to a lab where an artist goes in and changes stuff." Many people can play burning and dodging and color mapping with the stuff that makes wrinkles and blemishes go away.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-29 19:00:18+00:00
> Large corporations are just groups of people with conflicting incentives [...] The only thing we can reliably bet on is: all organizations tend towards dysfunctional bureaucracies

All societies are dysfunctional, great and small, because human beings are dysfunctional. But ultimately, the basis for any society - family, community, company, nation, human race, etc - is a common good.

So it makes sense to ask: what is the common good of a given large corporation? Why are we all here, together? I suspect many people don't have a good answer. Having the answer, however, gives you a certain agency and intellectual freedom.
by johnfn | 2025-12-29 19:00:22+00:00
I didn’t really get into it, but I think that most decisions which are not consistent are made with some feeling of “I will improve upon the existing state of this ugly codebase by introducing Good Decisions”. I’m sure even the authors of the Redux section of my code felt the same way. But code with two competing standards, only one good, is almost always worse than code with one bad standard. So breaking with consistency must be carefully considered, and the developers must have the drive to push their work forward rather than just leaving behind an isle of goodness.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-29 19:00:30+00:00
All the established brands (except for maybe Nissan and some parts of GM) wanted their cake and eat it, too. They wanted electrification while still holding onto high margins. So they made almost their EVs all sit in the luxury segment.

And in North America they failed to bring dealers to heal.

It's ok, it's only our children's future at risk.
by epistasis | 2025-12-29 19:00:36+00:00
When somebody is siding with reality, especially a media source, that's a reason to listen to them more not less.

And when it's straight up facts easily verifiable from others sources, pretending that it's not based in reality is just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "la la la la" which is something that even very few 12 year olds do.
by zephen | 2025-12-29 19:00:43+00:00
Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction.

Time will tell.

History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia.

Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use.

Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family" but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing.
by roguecoder | 2025-12-29 19:00:54+00:00
Why are you rewriting the same application a second time?

I've personally yet to have a situation where that comes up. And every application I've ever worked on has its architecture evolve over time, as behavior changes and new domain concepts are identified.

There are recurring patterns (one might even call them Design Patterns), but by the time we've internalized them we have even less need for up-front planning. Why write the doc when you can just implement the code?