MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gbuk2013 | 2025-12-15 12:48:03+00:00
> Also dicking around with DMARC tools. Was unhappy with all the existing tools, want something simple I can run semi-locally for a bunch of low volume email domains.

That’s a rabbit hole on my list to go down - recently set up DMARC for some domains I am hosting emails for and the XML reports that now end up in my inbox were… refreshing to see in 2025 :)
by mattmanser | 2025-12-15 12:48:06+00:00
That's my point, "It's full of features". You said it yourself.

You have bought a shallow but wide SaaS product, one with tons of features that don't get much development or testing individually.

You're then trying to use it like a deep but narrow product and complaining that your complex use case doesn't fit their OK-ish feature.

MS do this in a lot of their products, which is why Slack is much better than Teams, but lots of companies feel Teams is "good enough" and then won't buy Slack.
by Terretta | 2025-12-15 12:48:10+00:00
Love this, everything about this - I still teach the foundation, 3 columns, roof, of the persuasive essay - except one bit:

Perplexity gauges how predictable a text is. If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor."

No. No no no. The next word is "mat"!
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-15 12:48:16+00:00
The internet been the same for a long time, it's just the wording that changed. As someone who apparently thinks differently, the amount of time people just end up saying "Well, you're just a troll, no one actually believes something like that, so whatever" since I started frequenting the internet in the early 2000s is the same as always. But some people try to be trendy and accuse you of using AI for writing the replies instead, but it's the same sentiment.

Besides, of course what people write will sound as LLMs, since LLMs are trained on what we've been writing on the internet... For us who've been lucky and written a lot and are more represented in the dataset, the writings of LLMs will be closer to how we already wrote, but then of course we get the blame for sounding like LLMs, because apparently people don't understand that LLMs were trained on texts written by humans...
by meindnoch | 2025-12-15 12:48:21+00:00
>This is only good advice if you're good at soldering

I meant soldering onto the pre-welded tabs that come with the new cell (unless you have a spot welder). You don't need much soldering experience for that.

>and know details about cells like which ones have in-built protection.

It's highly unlikely that the individual cells would be protected ones. Manufacturers are not stupid to pay N times the cost of a management circuit.
by actionfromafar | 2025-12-15 12:48:53+00:00
I think YMMV here. If you watch a movie without subtitles, you are sort of forced to pick up understanding, or you won't get anything out of it. This is maybe not the best way to get started, but it helped me getting to a fluent level when talking to people, specifically the "listening and understanding" part. Before, I could read and write (horribly, but legibly, mostly), but would very often draw a blank when it came to understanding what people said.
by intrasight | 2025-12-15 12:49:50+00:00
My father worked for Haloid for a bit. Worked there while also attending NYU. Layer he moved to Kodak and in 1967 our family moved to Rochester. My father retired from Kodak in 1985.

Xerox and Kodak were both amazing companies, and created a comfortable middle or upper middle class lifestyle for many thousands of Rochesterians.
by bmitch3020 | 2025-12-15 12:49:53+00:00
I support the concept of taxing wealth, but I've yet to find a good way to implement it. The two biggest issues are that wealth is easily moved to places where it can't be taxed, and those making the tax decisions are easily influenced by those with wealth.

Wealth moves in lots of ways. Yes, as has been pointed out, we over value stock assets. When you own a significant percentage of a company, you can't just sell that ownership at the last trading price (the stock price would quickly crash). Wealth is also moved between national borders, allowing the wealthy to shop for the lowest tax location to stash their funds. Property can't be moved, but it can be financed with debt, making it taxed at effectively 0%. And the other side of that debt may just be an overseas shell company. There will be entire industries formed around avoiding a wealth tax, funded by the wealthy.

But probably the most capital efficient way to avoid the wealth tax is to buy politicians, influence the elections, and invest in lobbyist, which the wealthy do in the US to avoid taxes. Until money is removed from politics, I'm not holding out any hope that we'll find a way to tax the wealthy.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-15 12:49:53+00:00
Yeah. The real options are usually: a Chinese device from a company that seems nebulously a little close to their government, imported (so, limited need to follow local safety or privacy regulation); or, a US product from a company with explicit connections to the Google/Facebook/Amazon network, and with a warranty that lasts a whole month (as long as you don’t open the battery hatch).

I don’t know if people would pay 3X for something that actually works in their interest, probably not, but it isn’t as if such a product has been tried in the last ~50 years.
by ForHackernews | 2025-12-15 12:50:41+00:00
Are there any copper-rich asteroids out there?

Googling: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003206332...

> Asteroids have since long been considered to host significant resources of siderophilic elements such as Fe, Ni, Co, Cu, that could be exploited in situ. However bulk rock mining would be largely impractical. In this paper, we report on abundance and mineral occurrences of copper in H chondrites, identify Cu carrier minerals and interpret their distribution in the context of processes that must have affected parent bodies. This leads us to suggestion that some parts of S-type asteroids contain Cu in a form and amount that would satisfy requirements of potentially economically and environmentally more efficient exploitation.
by JetSetIlly | 2025-12-15 12:51:17+00:00
In a business I once worked for, one of the users of the online ordering system represented over 50% of the business' income, something you wouldn't necessarily want them to know.

However, because the online ordering system assigned order numbers sequentially, it would have been trivial for that company to determine how important their business was.

For example, over the course of a month, they could order something at the start of the month and something at the end of the month. That would give them the total number of orders in that period. They already know how many orders they have placed during the month, so company_orders / total_orders = percentage_of_business

It doesn't even have to be accurate, just an approximation. I don't know if they figured out that they could do that but it wouldn't surprise me if they had.
by hylaride | 2025-12-15 12:51:21+00:00
IMO, the US business industry has become over-financialised to the point of self-sabotage. R&D and capital expenditure are seen as "bad" things to have on accounting statements. Combine this with Jack Welsh type CEOs who do everything they can to cut out "costs" on financial statements and you get organizations like GE turned into (badly run) banks.

Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up other companies to milk dry. Most internal development is outsourced by suits far removed from any qualifications on quality.

We all know the foibles of Boeing, where accountants made the final calls on everything.

The only innovations the traditional American car companies seem to be able to focus on is how to make cars bigger to increase margins. It's ludicrous that it took a new company (Tesla) to make electric cars available.

I could go on. This is not to say that other countries (including China) don't have their own issues with their business climate, but the United States has an environment where some of the smartest and best paid people in the country are working their asses off to find out better ways to show ads (Google/Facebook).
by throwaway66k1 | 2025-12-15 12:51:42+00:00
G.I Gurdjieff, in Meetings With Remarkable People references the present civilization, where a "The Conversation of the Two Sparrows" concerns the European's scope of wisdom in mathematical knowledge, whereas the Asiatic understands contemporary knowledge "not by knowing but by being."

'In this anecdote it is said that once upon a time on the cornice of a high horse sat two sparrows, one old, the other young.'

'They were discussing an event which had become the "burning question of the day" among the sparrows, and which had resulted from the mullah's housekeeper having just previously thrown out of a window, on to a place where the sparrows gathered to play, something looking like left-over porridge, but which turned out to be chopped cork; and several of the young and yet inexperienced sparrow sat, almost burst.'

'While talking about the old sparrow, suddenly ruffling himself up, began with a pained grimace to search under his wing for the fleas tormenting him, and which in general breed on underfed sparrows; and having caught one, he said with a deep sigh:

'"Times have changed very much -- there is no longer a living to be had for our fraternity.

'"In the old days we used to sit, just as now, somewhere upon a roof, quietly dozing, when suddenly down in the street there would be heard a noise, a rattling and a rumbling, and soon after an odour would be diffused, at which everything inside us would begin to rejoice; because we felt fully certain that when we flew down and searched the places where all that happened, we would find satisfaction for our essential needs.

'"But nowadays there is plenty and to spare of noise and rattlings, and all sorts of rumblings, and again and again an odour is also diffused, but an odour which it is almost impossible to endure; and when sometimes, by force of old habit, we fly down during a moment's lull to seek something substantial for ourselves, then seach as we may with tense attention, we find nothing at all except some nauseous drops of burned oil."
by Timpy | 2025-12-15 12:51:46+00:00
A lot of training data was curated in Kenya[0]. I would imagine if LLM data was curated in Japan our LLMs would sound a lot like the authors of their most popular English text books. Maybe other common Japanese idioms would leak in to the training data, like "ね" or "でしょう", ChatGPT would say "Don't you agree?" at the end of every message.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...
by oldandboring | 2025-12-15 12:52:28+00:00
I'm reading this thread's comments and a LOT of you are missing OP's point. OP is not describing the risk that your SaaS product is now easily cloned by your customers' internal devs (or startup competitors) armed with agents. The risk is that certain SaaS products (but not all) mostly exist to provide answers to end users' questions about data, answers that can now be obtained by providing the same raw data to an agent with a prompt.
by Gormo | 2025-12-15 12:52:31+00:00
This is the exact argument that we had in the 1990s about content on television, and the solution ended up being exactly this -- TV networks started attaching ratings to their broadcasts, and TV sets started including "v-chips" that could be turned on and configured to block content that matched certain ratings.

Once that solution was in place, the argument was settled, and the people trying to push for censorship in pursuit of ulterior motives didn't have a leg to stand on.
by seu | 2025-12-15 12:52:37+00:00
Can we please stop saying "AI is doing this", "AI is doing that", and instead point out at the companies and individuals that are shoveling AI down our throats as the ones that are decimating industries or destroying jobs, almost exclusively for their own economical benefit?

Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.
by rukshn | 2025-12-15 12:53:04+00:00
I had a similar experience. We were talking about a colleague for using ChatGPT in our WhatsApp group chat to sound smart and coming up with interesting points. The talk sounds so mechanical and sounds exactly as ChatGPT.

His responses in Zoom Calls were the same mechanical and sounds like AI generated. I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed that it's AI written and gave points to why it believes this message was AI written.

When I showed the response to the colleague he swore that he was not using ant AI to write his responses. I believe after he said to me it was not AI written. And now reading this I can imagine that it's not an isolated experience.
by joozio | 2025-12-15 12:53:26+00:00
LLMatcher - blind testing arena to find which AI model actually works best for you.

You enter prompts, compare two anonymous responses, pick the better one. After voting, it reveals which models you preferred. Built it because model benchmarks don't match real-world preference, and blind pairwise comparison cuts through the hype.

http://llmatcher.com
by happytoexplain | 2025-12-15 12:53:36+00:00
>They couldn't afford me

The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to". It's called budgeting, and the ceiling only represents existential limits for small or dying businesses. The rest of the time, it is defined only to maximize profit, which means using their power to shift the negative part of economic changes onto individuals as much as mathematically possible, rather than the business suffering proportionately.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-15 12:53:57+00:00
> Why is Thatcher significant here? She was strongly pro-EEC

Exactly, she was pro-EEC but "Eurosceptic" in that she didn't want this to morph into a political union. I mentioned her to illustrate that the debate on what the EU should be and how far political integration should go, if go anywhere at all, has been going on forever but is more and more "smothered" by accusations of being "far right" for often being not too different from Thatcher.

Remember a famous speech in Parliament in which she said that the single currency was political union by the backdoor. Exactly right.

> it was very common for remainers to claim that the EU was just a trade organisation and not going to evolve into a full political union or federal state.

That's not true. Of course it was a political union, and that was the point of the referendum. Remember the pro-Brexit's line that the people had been sold a trade organisation (in 1975) but got a political union, instead. Now there were claims that the EU would not evolve into a federal state, and this aligns with what I wrote about EU political integration being insiduous and often deceiptful
by tete | 2025-12-15 12:54:07+00:00
Depends on your definition of "well". I hate that writing style. It's the same writing style that people who want to sell you something use and it seems to be really good at tiring the reader out - or at least me.

It gives a vibe like a car salesman and I really dislike it and personally I consider it a very bad writing style for this very reason.

I do very much prefer LLMs that don't appear to be trained on such data or try to word questions a lot more to have more sane writing styles.

That being said it also reminds me of journalistic articles that feel like the person just tried to reach some quota using up a lot of grand words to say nothing. In my country of residence the biggest medium (a public one) has certain sections that are written exactly like that. Luckily these are labeled. It's the section that is a bit more general, not just news and a bit more "artsy" and I know that their content is largely meaningless and untrue. Usually it's enough to click on the source link or find the source yourself to see it says something completely different. Or it's a topic that one knows about. So there even are multiple layers to being "like LLMs".

The fact that people are taught to write that way outside of marketing or something surprises me.

That being said, this is just my general genuine dislike of this writing style. How an LLM writes is up to a lot of things, also how you engage with it. To some degree they copy your own style, because of how they work. But for generic things there is always that "marketing talk" which I always assumed is simply because the internet/social media is littered with ads.

Are Kenyans really taught to write that way?
Show HN: Bithoven – A high-level, imperative language for Bitcoin Smart Contract
by hyunhum | 2025-12-15 12:54:31+00:00
Hey HN! I’m a researcher working on Bitcoin smart contracts, and today I’m releasing Bithoven—a high-level imperative language that compiles to native Bitcoin Script (Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot).

The Goal:

Raw Bitcoin Script is notoriously difficult to reason about. Writing raw Bitcoin Script today feels like writing Assembly in the 1970s. You have to mentally juggle the stack (`OP_SWAP`, `OP_ROT`), manually manage distinct execution branches, and pray you didn't leave a stack item unconsumed (which crashes the script). My goal was to bridge the gap between complex contract logic and raw opcodes, allowing developers to write readable, compile-time-safe code.

Key Features:

- Imperative Syntax: Write logic using familiar if/else and return statements instead of mental stack juggling.

- Type Safety: First-class support for bool, signature, string, and number types to prevent runtime errors.

- Targeted Compilation: Support for Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot compilation targets.

- Native Primitives: Built-in keywords for timelocks (older, after) and cryptography (sha256, checksig).

You can try it in the browser here (runs via WASM): https://bithoven-lang.github.io/bithoven/ide/

Here is an example of a Hashed Time-Locked Contract (HTLC):

(condition: bool, sig_alice: signature) (condition: bool, preimage: string, sig_bob: signature) { if condition { // Relative locktime (Sequence) older 1000; return checksig (sig_alice, alice_pk); } else { // Hashlock verification verify sha256 sha256 preimage == hash; return checksig (sig_bob, bob_pk); } }

The project is free open source and the academic paper is currently under review. I’d love to hear any feedback. Thanks for checking it out!
by croon | 2025-12-15 12:54:47+00:00
I'm curious what "reality" would deliver them in terms of clarity/truth/policy leanings, and how it differs from whatever they're pushed currently.

If I've learned anything from my 40+ years on this earth it's that there are no guarantees that adults/grownups are more reality-based than late teens, but they are usually more convinced they are.
by j45 | 2025-12-15 12:55:23+00:00
Ai is much more developed at its entrance to the economy than most anything during the dot com boom.

Dot com is not super comparable to AI.

Dot com had very few users on the internet compared to today.

Dot com did not have ubiquitous e-commerce. The small group of users didn’t spend online.

Search engines didn’t have the amount of information online that there is today.

Dot com did not have usable high speed mobile data, or broadband available for the masses.

Dot com did not have social media to share and alas how things can work as quickly.

LLMs were largely applicable to industry when gpt 4 came out. We didn’t have the new terms of reference for non deterministic software.
by homo_economicus | 2025-12-15 12:55:33+00:00
Interesting read with solid macro context, but it feels a bit too confident in forecasting both USD depreciation and AI-driven valuations without fully addressing tail risks. The portfolio tilt toward Europe and fixed income makes sense imo.. though the assumption that Germany’s fiscal pivot will sustain equity outperformance seems optimistic given political uncertainty.

Would be interesting to see more discussion on liquidity risks and how these allocations hold up under a sharp AI capex slowdown
by twoodfin | 2025-12-15 12:55:46+00:00
ChatGPT does not “write well” unless your standard is some set of statistical distributions for vocabulary, sentence length, phrase structure, …

Writing well is about communicating ideas effectively to other humans. To be fair, throughout linguistic history it was easier to appeal to an audience’s innate sense of authority by “sounding smart”. Actually being smart in using the written word to hone the sharpness of a penetrating idea is not particularly evident in LLM’s to date.
by Stratoscope | 2025-12-15 12:55:51+00:00
> the computer they wanted was DEC PDP-10. At this point, Paul Strassman was replacing every IBM and DEC machine at Xerox with an SDS machine.

This scenario must have played out in multiple places. I was involved in one of them.

I was working at Tymshare, and we were evaluating the PDP-10 and the Xerox (XDS/SDS) Sigma 7.

My manager called me into his office.

---

Mike, this conversation is strictly between you and me. If anyone asks, I will deny it happened.

You are our best Sigma 7 expert, and even you prefer the PDP-10.

We're doing final acceptance tests on the Sigma 7. If all the tests pass, we have to commit to it. If enough tests fail, we can return that machine.

---

I got the hint. Challenge accepted!

Knowing all the ins and outs of the Sigma 7, I found a few subtle ways to make it crash at random times, without any indication that anyone had interfered with the tests.

Eventually I slipped up and left my username visible in a core dump.

Back to my manager's office.

---

Mike, we have a problem. Xerox figured out that you were messing with the Sigma 7 system software. We told them we would fire you. So, you're fired. You can't be in the office any more.

But you do have your Teletype at home, right? You have some projects to do on the PDP-10. Can you work on those and stay away from the Sigma 7?

Keep track of your hours, and after this blows over we will hire you back and give you that back pay.

---

So I did. And they did!
by hnfong | 2025-12-15 12:56:01+00:00
The curious thing about the article is that, it's definitely premature optimization for smaller databases, but when the database gets to the scale where these optimizations start to matter, you actually don't want to do what they suggest.

Specifically, if your database is small, the performance impact is probably not very noticeable. And if your database is large (eg. to the extent primary keys can't fit within 32-bit int), then you're actually going to have to think about sharding and making the system more distributed... and that's where UUID works better than auto-incrementing ints.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-15 12:56:42+00:00
I don't think that's entirely correct. You can do TDD style development with AI and it leads to better results.

It's just that messing with a company's core manufacturing is something they don't do lightly. They work with multiple shifts of staff that are supposed to work in these environments. People generally don't have a lot of computer skills, so things need to be simple, repeatable, and easy to explain. Any issues with production means cost increases, delays happen, and money is lost.

That being said, these companies are always looking for better ways to do stuff, to eliminate work that is not needed, etc. That's your way in. If there's a demonstrable ROI, most companies get a lot less risk averse.

That used to involve bespoke software integrations. Those are developed at great cost and with some non trivial risk by expensive software agencies. Some of these projects fail and failure is expensive. AI potentially reduces cost and risk here. E.g. a generic SAP integration isn't rocket science to vibe code. We're talking well documented and widely used APIs here. You'd want some oversight and testing here obviously. But it's the type of low level plumbing that traditionally gets outsourced to low wages countries. Using AI here is probably already happening at a large scale.