MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tschwimmer | 2025-12-30 00:53:58+00:00
Unlike other commenters, I agree that there are some (arguably significant) things to complain about. The first one is price - tickets are quite expensive. I frequently travel Zurich HB -> Lugano. This is 200km and costs a whopping 120+ CHF round trip. Zurich -> Geneva, Zurich Bern are similarly expensive. However, it's a bit hard to fault them as Switzerland is an expensive country and perhaps the high prices keep the service good.

What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.

Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.
by mothballed | 2025-12-30 00:54:51+00:00
Most billionaires are billionaires are on paper, by owning capital. Capital used to produce things. I'm presuming they won't actually be taxing capital investment but if they did you simply end up driving much of those capital investments elsewhere.

If they are simply taxing whatever loose cash and personal (mostly luxury) assets people have, then yeah I don't expect it will shake things up very quickly, paying an extra ~5% to live in San Francisco isn't the biggest deal if it stops there.
by squigz | 2025-12-30 00:54:53+00:00
> Making these decisions effectively and responsibly is one of the key characteristics of a senior engineer, which is why it's so interesting that all of those years of intuition are being disrupted.

They're not being disrupted. This is exactly why some people don't trust LLMs to re-invent wheels. It doesn't matter if it can one-shot some code and tests - what matters is that some problems require experience to know what exactly is needed to solve that problem. Libraries enable this experience and knowledge to centralize.

When considering whether inventing something in-house is a good idea vs using a library, "up front dev cost" factors relatively little to me.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-30 00:55:05+00:00
> focus all tax collection to top 1%

Most of the "we should just get all the taxes from rich people" arguments ignore two fairly important things.

The first is how asset markets works, i.e. why rich people are rich. It's because there are finitely many assets and whenever anyone rich gets more money, they use it to bid up the prices. But that makes high taxes on rich people do something unintuitive at scale: It takes away the money that was making the stock market go up. And then not only do they have less money, they also have less income, because the people who would have paid them for their stock also have less money, which makes stock prices go down. Which means that increasing their tax rate from e.g. 25% to 50% doesn't generate anywhere close to twice as much revenue, and it also lowers the growth rate in the tax revenue you get from them. Which means that raising the rate will, in the long term, inherently generate less revenue. Whether you end up underwater in 48 months or 48 years depends on what the existing and proposed rates are and what the economy looks like, but there is always some period of time after which a reduction in the compounding rate is going to absorb any percentage increase in the tax rate. At which point you're paying the recurring costs and lower compounding rate from the higher tax rate indefinitely in exchange for no additional revenue, and indeed for less government revenue.

And the second is that Congress wants money to spend, so they're going to do the things that cause them to have more money to spend. Now imagine what kind of non-tax policies they're going to implement if the tax system makes it so the only way they get more money to spend is if they transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. We don't actually have an effective solution to the principal-agent problem, so perverse incentives are bad, right?
by kevinlearynet | 2025-12-30 00:56:07+00:00
The best applications I've ever been a part of building, measured by user satisfaction, are those where the engineers:

1. Value simple, effective systems

2. Understand all use cases, because they use it

3. Have enough freedom to fix small things as they find them

#3 is controversial sometimes, but I believe this flexibility and creative freedom for devs leads to much happier people and much better products.
by cube00 | 2025-12-30 00:56:18+00:00
I can't reconcile how the CEO of an AI startup is; on one hand pushing "100% Percent Code Coverage" while also selling the idea of "Less than 60 seconds to production" on their product (which is linked in the first screen-full of the blog post so it's not like these are personal thoughts).

If 100% Percent Code Coverage is a good thing, you can't tell me anyone can (including parallel AI bots with all the AGENTS.md you can imagine) is going to do this correctly and completely in 60 seconds.
Show HN: Beauty Arena – An Elo-based experiment to measure aesthetics
by railing1024 | 2025-12-30 00:56:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Beauty Arena to solve a data problem I've always found annoying: absolute rating scales (1-10) are terrible for subjective data. They suffer from massive inflation and inconsistent user baselines (one person's 7 is another person's 5).

I wanted to test if pairwise comparison (1v1) could produce a cleaner, strictly relative dataset.

Instead of asking "How beautiful is this person?", the system asks a simple question: "Who do you choose?". It uses a ranking system inspired by competitive games (Elo/Glicko) under the hood. As users vote, a global ranking emerges based on win/loss ratios against others rather than accumulated points.

I'm curious about the "wisdom of the crowd" limits here. Does a pairwise sort actually converge on a clear consensus, or does it cycle indefinitely due to intransitive preferences (A > B, B > C, but C > A)?

I'd love feedback on the ranking methodology and the overall UI.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-30 00:56:59+00:00
> They're already privately talking about deporting German citizens.

So is immigration policy supposed to be irreversible? One side can grant citizenship willy nilly, but undoing their actions is Nazism and illegal? Would not granting those citizenships in the first place also have been Nazism? The bar for branding someone a Nazi is low, and ~80% or more of the allied forces that fought in WWII would be Nazis under today's definition:

https://ia902302.us.archive.org/25/items/us-war-department-f...

https://archive.org/download/the-unknown-warriors/The%20Unkn...
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-30 00:57:03+00:00
Sure but if you need to resort to tricks to make it work are they really the right UI element for the job? Their being 1:1 is what makes these work. If you fill your UI with 20 pixel sliders which all cover .2khz to 20khz and use shift clicking or the like to make it work, it is going to get irritating rather quickly. 20 pixel knob will not be much better with such a wide range but has the advantage of being able to be used endlessly; one rotation per octave, it will still be a little irritating but a vast improvement.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-30 00:57:12+00:00
In C++ 26 reading an uninitialized variable is by default Erroneous Behaviour, which means your compiler is encouraged to diagnose this (it's an error) but if it happens anyway (perhaps because the compiler can't tell before runtime) there's a specified behaviour, it isn't Undefined Behaviour. The compiler will have chosen some value for that uninitialized variable and if it can't just diagnose that what you wrote was nonsense, it has some arbitrary value, perhaps configurable or perhaps described in your compiler's documentation.

So these variables will be more or less what the current "defanged" Rust std::mem::uninitialized() function gets you. A bit slower than "truly" uninitialized variables, but not instant death in most cases if you made a mistake because you're human.

Those C++ people who feel they actually need uninitialized variables can tell the compiler explicitly [for that particular variable] in C++ 26 that they opt out of this safeguard. They get the same behaviour you've seen described in this thread today, arbitrary Undefined Behaviour if you read the uninitialized variable. This would be similar to modern Rust's MaybeUninit::uninit().assume_init() - you are explicitly telling the compiler it's OK to set fire to everything, you should probably not do this, but we did warn you.
by bsimpson | 2025-12-30 00:58:02+00:00
Does Signal scale?

Until recently, I think the only way to join a Signal was to be explicitly added by a member. It doesn't have all the channels etc. of something like Discord.

It doesn't have enough mindshare by normies either. In San Francisco, my entire social graph was on Signal. In NYC, I'm the weirdo that uses Signal for everything. Most locals seem to only use it for things that they explicitly want to be private. Among Euro friends, only the ones with ties to the US/tech industry use it.
by somebodythere | 2025-12-30 00:58:05+00:00
What platform? He's just a skilled engineer, who happened to be on some prominent AI teams years in the past. He hasn't been hesitant to criticize the leading AI labs and their products, when that was his honest opinion.

There is a lot of breathless boosterism in this space, so I get the skepticism, but this is an incorrect evaluation of Karpathy.
by gnabgib | 2025-12-30 00:58:19+00:00
Merlin the bird app, previously:

Merlin Bird ID (637 points, 7 months ago, 215 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44176829

Behind the scenes of Sound ID in Merlin – Identify birds using your phone (2021) (235 points, 2 years ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38550737

Identify Birds by Their Chirp (93 points, 2022, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785736
by austinbaggio | 2025-12-30 00:58:39+00:00
It is overwhelming. We have support for Cursor mcp as well, but you lose a lot of the auto-magic stuff you get with the Claude Code plugin. Unfortunately, skills are pretty sticky to the Claude Code stack. It is kind of the vim of AI coding agents. . . One of the goals for this tool was to address context management in a single place. i.e instead of setting up all of the rules, claude.md, and skill.md you just semantic query a specific namespace in your knowledge base.

the docs if you are curious: https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs
by jwrallie | 2025-12-30 00:58:39+00:00
Another mistake is that they had a significant presence in Brazil through Orkut, but they didn’t bother to integrate and migrate the users in.

Orkut’s user base was already degraded through Facebook but it was not inexistent, as some features of Orkut were unique. One was that it allowed people to use alt accounts to participate on anonymous discussion, not much different from Reddit, I’m sure with some creativeness G+ could have benefited from extra users.
by Uehreka | 2025-12-30 00:58:40+00:00
From what I’ve read, you want to make sure that the setting is spelled FILMMAKER MODE (in all caps) with a (TM) symbol, since that means that the body who popularized the setting has approved whatever the manufacturer does when you turn that on (so if there’s a setting called “Cinephile Mode” that could mean anything).

With that being said, I’ve definitely seen TVs that just don’t have FILMMAKER MODE or have it, but it doesn’t seem to apply to content from sources like Chromecast. The situation is far from easy to get a handle on.
by redsymbol | 2025-12-30 00:58:41+00:00
Media buyer here (among other things), so I feel you. I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point, because Meta's generated text can in some cases mislead or flat-out lie about what is actually being sold.

The only defense is to have checklists and continually go over running campaigns to make sure everything is configured properly, which as you note is really hard to turn off. Very easy to miss a detail in ad manager's complex UI.
by saddlepaddle | 2025-12-30 00:58:47+00:00
Hmm I guess two good questions to check to see if this tool is useful for you is 1) do you use a cli coding agent for the vast majority of your work and 2) are you interested in using more than one at once? If those two assumptions are true, I think our UI is a nice way to make the git worktree workflow (a very common path to running multiple agents) a bit easier to manage! It handles copying over environment variables for you, setting up containers, and a lot of the other small things you need to think about when using git worktrees basically.

Having a more practical video is a great call-out though, we should probably have a more deep dive video of an actual session!
by kstrauser | 2025-12-30 00:59:01+00:00
Yeah, kiss m'ass. Some of those settings do need to be turned off. When I visit someone and see their TV on soap opera mode, I fight the urge to fix it. Not my house, not my TV, not my problem if they like it that way, and yet, wow, is it ever awful.

But then getting into recommendations like "turn off vivid mode" is pretty freaking pretentious, in my opinion, like a restaurant where the chef freaks out if you ask for salt. Yes, maybe the entree is perfectly salted, but I prefer more, and I'm the one paying the bill, so calm yourself as I season it to my tastes. Yes, vivid modes do look different than the filmmaker intended, but that also presumes that the viewers eyes are precisely as sensitive as the director's. What if I need higher contrast to make out what's happening on the screen? Is it OK if I calibrate my TV to my own personal viewing conditions?
by krackers | 2025-12-30 00:59:07+00:00
I'm surprised too, considering that in https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977758204139331904 he mentioned regarding his NanoChat repo

>Good question, it's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete). I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution.

And a lot of the tooling he mentioned in OP seems like self-imposed unnecessarily complexity/churn. For the longest time you could say the same about frontend, that you're so behind if you're not adopting {tailwind, react, nodejs, angular, svelte, vue}.

At the end of the day, for the things that an LLM does well, you can achieve roughly the same quality of results by "manually" pasting in relevant code context and asking your question. In cases where this doesn't work, I'm not convinced that wrapping it in an agentic harness will give you that much better results.

Most bespoke agent harnesses are obsoleted by the time of the next model release anyway, the two paradigms that seem to reliably work are "manual" LLM invocation and LLM with access to CLI.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-30 00:59:11+00:00
> Tesla is crashing and somehow people thought giving him a huge pay package made sense.

There’s only upside for shareholders.

Musk’s package is entirely performance-contingent and structured as 12 stock grants.

And the targets are very ambitious: valuation ($8.5 trillion) and operational goals (20M cars, 10M FSD, 1M robotaxis, $400B profit) over 10 years.

https://poole.ncsu.edu/thought-leadership/article/inside-the...
by qubitcoder | 2025-12-30 00:59:18+00:00
To be clear, they default to JPEG for the image preview on the monitor (LCD screen). Whenever viewing an image on a professional camera, you’re always seeing the resulting JPEG image.

The underlying data is always captured as a RAW file, and only discarded if you’ve configured the camera to only store the JPEG image (discarding the original RAW file after processing).
by mikewarot | 2025-12-30 01:00:13+00:00
>WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop editors like Visual Basic and Delphi were going to end the need for programmers.

VB6 and Delphi were the best possible cognitive impedance match available for domain experts to be able to whip up something that could get a job done. We haven't had anything nearly as productive in the decades since, as far as just letting a normie get something done with a computer.
by pornel | 2025-12-30 01:01:24+00:00
The difference is that it can behave as if it had multiple different values at the same time. You don't just get any value, you can get completely absurd paradoxical Schrödinger values where `x > 5 && x < 5` may be true, and on the next line `x > 5` may be false, and it may flip on Wednesdays.

This is because the code is executed symbolically during optimization. It's not running on your real CPU. It's first "run" on a simulation of an abstract machine from the C spec, which doesn't have registers or even real stack to hold an actual garbage value, but it does have magic memory where bits can be set to 0, 1, or this-can-never-ever-happen.

Optimization passes ask questions like "is x unused? (so I can skip saving its register)" or "is x always equal to y? (so I can stop storing it separately)" or "is this condition using x always true? (so that I can remove the else branch)". When using the value is an undefined behavior, there's no requirement for these answers to be consistent or even correct, so the optimizer rolls with whatever seems cheapest/easiest.
by consumer451 | 2025-12-30 01:01:33+00:00
Totally! Hence the dilemma.

Google.com has "AI mode," and it tries to intelligently decide when to suggest that based on a search query. I could have likely used that to find the same thing. But, I instinctively just went to chatgpt.com instead. I am not a total moron, I use gemini, claude, and gpt APIs in the 2 LLM enabled products that I am working on...

However, just last week I noticed that the AI mode default reply for some queries was giving me just horrible AI mode replies. Like gpt-3.5 quality wrong assumptions. For the first time I saw google.com as the worst option. I cannot be the only one.

I think that I might understand the problem. Google has the tech, but as a public company they cannot start to lose money on every search query, right? The quarterly would look bad, bonuses would go down. Same reason ULA can't build Starship, even if they could and wanted to. However, OpenAI can lose money on every query. SOTA inference is not cheap.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-30 01:01:49+00:00
How about another way, which is memoization: at each position in the source code we never attempt to parse the same production more than once. This solves infinite looping as discussed by the author because the “loop” will be downgraded by the memoization to execute once. Of course I wouldn't literally use a while loop in code to represent the production. I would use a higher-level abstraction to indicate one-or-more or zero-or-more in the production; indeed I would represent productions as data not code.

This also has another benefit of work sharing. A production like `A B | C B` will ensure that in case parsing A or C consumes the same number of characters, the work to parse B will be shared, despite not literally factoring the production into `(A | C) B`.
by the_af | 2025-12-30 01:02:10+00:00
Dudes claim all kinds of crap online. He already posted a PDF that indicated nothing of the sort.

If you will believe anything that seems true to you, because someone online said so, without any weight of evidence, and which is widely considered pseudoscience (go check)... I have a bridge to sell you.

What's with the wave of anti-intellectualism on HN of all places? Are we really trying to debate whether debunked crap like witchcraft and ESP is real? What's next, that Nigerian prince truly wants to gift you his money if only you can help him with a few dollars?

Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.
by olyjohn | 2025-12-30 01:02:16+00:00
I like that my current phone can do both, and I'll hold onto it as long as I can. Why can't we just have both options? Why do we need to keep removing features to save 2mm of space inside the phone? Oh right, it's not really so much to save space, it's to make an extra $0.01 per phone they sell.

RIP Headphone Jack
RIP SD Card Slot
RIP SIM Card Slot
by HDThoreaun | 2025-12-30 01:02:20+00:00
I lived in Chicago for 30 years. I didnt own a car for a decade. I’ve been to east Asia. There are massive downsides to living in cities even when done well. People in Tokyo live in tiny spaces compared to American suburbanites. In the parts of Chicago where you don’t really need a car no one has a yard. Public parks are not the same as private yards. People in New York who aren’t Uber wealthy live lifestyles that I personally can not stand. I got out of nyc as soon as I could because I hated living there. Seriously nyc is by far my least favorite of places I have lived. Going back to anything like that is unimaginable for me. I don’t like Houston either but I understand why people do and it’s not because they’re deluding themselves or because they’re close minded to the wonders of urbanism.

Light rail is terrible and anyone acting like it’s not is immediately written off as a non thinker imo. If you’re gonna do rail do it right.
by travisgriggs | 2025-12-30 01:02:27+00:00
Has anyone tried the experiment that is sort of implied here? I was wondering earlier today, what it would be like to pick a simple app, pick on OS, and just tell an LLM to write that app using only machine code and native ADKs, and skip all intermediate layers?

We seem to have created a large bureaucracy for software development, where telling a computer how to execute an app involves keeping a lot of cogs in a big complicated machine happy. But why use the automation to just roll the cogs? Why not just simplify/streamline? Does an LLM need to worry about using the latest and greatest abstractions? I have to assume this has been tried already...
by robomartin | 2025-12-30 01:02:47+00:00
Actually, they do not belong anywhere. If you look at the processing pipeline necessary to, for example, shoot and produce modern sporting events in both standard and high dynamic range, the last thing you want is a television that makes its own decisions based on some random setting that a clueless engineer at the manufacturer thought would be cool to have. Companies spend millions of dollars (hundreds of millions in the case of broadcasters) to deliver technically accurate data to televisions.

These settings are the television equivalent of clickbait. They are there to get people to say "Oh, wow!" at the store and buy it. And, just like clickbait, once they have what they clicked on, the experience ranges from lackluster and distorted to being scammed.
by saddlepaddle | 2025-12-30 01:03:21+00:00
LOL it definitely can get a little trippy but it's pretty doable! I can't get to 10 regularly but the space is moving in that direction (more agents in parallel hopefully equals more work done).

I liked this video a lot for a general idea of how it's possible, the main thing we need for 10 agents at once to be possible is less of a need for human intervention for agents, but I think it'll happen sooner (it may even be possible now with the right tools) than later.

https://youtu.be/o-pMCoVPN_k?si=cCBqufdg3nWcJDHD
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-30 01:03:58+00:00
Do raw TCP proxies still get used often? I'd imagine most proxies you'd want to detect are full HTTP proxies and this formula won't detect those.

I suppose it's possible botnets ("residential proxies") may get detected this way if they're using SOCKS to forward requests?

Still, this looks like an interesting signal to add to a system like Anubis to increase the difficulty for suspicious traffic sources.

This does very reliably detect TOR traffic, though you can just download a list of exit nodes if that's what you want.