MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delichon | 2025-12-12 15:23:42+00:00
Processing food doesn't necessarily make food less healthy, but it does it so often that it should not be considered neutral.

* it frequently removes the fiber and structure, making it faster to eat, and easier to over consume. * it frequently adds sugar, salt, etc., not just making it easier to over consume, but with a payload that itself does extra damage. * simply changing the form of food, without changing the contents, itself can have serious nutritional consequences [0].

For my own choices ultra processing is guilty until proven innocent. Believing that implies a radical change to how most people eat.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
by travisgriggs | 2025-12-12 15:24:15+00:00
I see this is 2023… the article refs GPT even then. Can’t believe it’s already that much time gone by, still seems like “last years big news”

I was gonna comment “this is what I really like to see on HN”. Then I saw the date and was sad that we’re having to dip into the history box to find fun/interesting articles more often of late it seems.

Anyone else interested in a temporary moratorium on all things LLM? We could have GPT-free-Wednesday, or something like that :)
by agentultra | 2025-12-12 15:24:17+00:00
Is it still being maintained? There used to be a game jam, Octojam, that was stopped years ago[0]. Seems mostly out of a lack of interest? Would be cool if it revived.

It inspired me to start zig8[1], my own CHIP-8 emulator. It's not ready for prime time yet but it's getting there. When it's ready I hope it will have a visual debugger and feel good: fast, better shaders, better sound, good defaults, etc.

CHIP-8 is a neat system. If you're interested in emulation it's a great place to start in my humble opinion. It's simple enough that you can finish it before deciding whether you like writing emulators.

Hopefully interest in CHIP-8 would pick up again, it's a neat bit of history and a cool little system.

[0] https://beyondloom.com/blog/octojam.html

[1] https://github.com/agentultra/zig8
Ask HN: The AGI Race That Might Not Be a Race
by razodactyl | 2025-12-12 15:24:47+00:00
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that every major AI company has built AGI. Not “almost general” or “sort of general” systems, but full-blown AGI that can think, reason, plan, and outperform humans in almost every cognitive task. Internally, these systems could solve problems, write code, design experiments, and maybe even win a Nobel or two. Publicly, the world sees incremental model releases, each slightly better than the last. Everyone thinks there’s a race, but the race may have ended years ago.

The catch is that each company thinks the others are behind. They see incremental improvements from competitors and assume the other labs are struggling to reach AGI. So they release small improvements to stay ahead in perception, while the real AGI sits quietly inside their servers. Every company is doing this, none of them aware that everyone else is doing the same thing.

Considering the immense amounts of compute available, what are the chances of this being an actual reality?

- ChatGPT was involved in the writing of this question but it was a random thought I came up with and asked the AI to hash out.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-12-12 15:25:41+00:00
I would love for my gout to be genetically engineered away.

I didn't have a flare up until my late 20s but it finally explained the very slight ache in my big toe. After the first one, the second and third happened within a year. I stopped drinking almost entirely aside from some gin a few times a year.

I reduced various food consumption with no change. Whisky/beer will cripple me if I have more than one of either. After some research, vegan marathon runners are even plagued by this.
by titzer | 2025-12-12 15:26:33+00:00
> But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.

In this example, you added "chopper", "patrol boat", and "handgun" to disambiguate them. There wouldn't have been enough context to do so otherwise, which IMHO is more aligned with the point the author was making.

If you were in the middle of a conversation about helicopters with people who knew lots of helicopter models, just saying "Cobra" would probably be fine. But in the software world, there are far too many obscure and new tools that are not at all clear without context. And the context just always happens to be all the dang things. A cutesy name could be any dang thing.

> It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.

I think you're just being selective because you disagree. A better example was:

> “We’re using Viper for configuration management, which feeds into Cobra for the CLI, and then Melody handles our WebSocket connections, Casbin manages permissions, all through Asynq for our job queue.”

If we want to cherry pick, your comment has:

> When you open your medicine cabinet

You used the term "medicine cabinet", a term that is not only descriptive, but not branded or jargon. It's standard and doesn't need something new. It's common usage and doesn't need to be disrupted by someone overly proud of a basic thing they made. You didn't call it Wapsooie, a "playful" take on WPSU (Wall-mounted pharmaceutical storage unit) or a MMC (Materia medica cabinet), or a whole host of other cutesy names or even acronyms that you might eventually get to if you were talking about medicine cabinets all day long, or designing or building them.

I mostly agree with the author. Software tools think they're so hilarious. I mean, the Virgil compiler is named "Aeneas" internally. Yet the cli command is "v3c"--Virgil III compiler.
Show HN: A diagram a code rendering tool for network documentation
by ratchetclank | 2025-12-12 15:26:34+00:00
Hey HN, I officially launched yesterday my new open source diagram as code tool. It allow to define network diagrams with YAML code and render them on the fly as SVG, with support for icons from many vendors to be able to represent real life networking needs.

I tried using mermaid or vizgraph but their lack of web-local rendering and lack of vendor icon pack made it hard to use for my network documentation usage.

I based myself uppon the work of a now defunct project : drawthe.net and tried to make ip more flexible and responsive and ended up rewriting most of the codebase

It's still a young tool in my eyes, so if you find any bugs or improovement idea, let me know either in the github (https://github.com/remygrandin/drawthenet.io) or here in the comments bellow.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-12 15:27:06+00:00
This is not what average people are talking about when they say it’s unaffordable. Top 10% of incomes, sure.

The median household income is under $80k, while median yearly housing cost is around $25k, food expenses for a family of 4 are $12k-$19k, median utility costs around $4k, health insurance $27k (about to go up), and median cost of vehicle ownership is $12k. Yearly figures. That’s sharing one car between both working parents and we’re using median numbers here, and the median person doesn’t live in a place with great public transit options. Already that leaves almost nothing to deal with emergencies, saving in case a parent loses their job, and miscellaneous expenses like school books/supplies and clothing. And perhaps contributing to elder care for 1-4 grandparents.

Also, this is just the median; people in the lower 50% are much worse off, except for those poor enough to receive substantial aid. And don’t forget that young people typically have lower incomes.

You really don’t want half of your society to decide that pets are cheaper, unless you want to end up with an inverted population pyramid and eventual collapse, or unlimited migration to replace lost workers (which creates its own problems).
by benterix | 2025-12-12 15:27:27+00:00
Well, this was the case decades ago, too, just few people paid attention. The US made sure their interests are always put before Polish interests, and these were regularly reported by the US embassy in Warsaw. See e.g.:[0]

"Rozanski went on to explain that Polish food products are viewed in the EU as healthy and natural, and are competitive in their current state. Use of GM seeds could threaten this perception, and thus Poland's place in the market. When Spirnak and Embassy Agricultural Counselor noted that such an approach would be of great concern to the U.S. and would be contrary to EU as well as WTO commitments, Rozanski backed off and said that Poland must comply with EU and international commitments (Note: Rozanski softened this message further at a subsequent meeting that Agricultural Counselor attended)."

[0] https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06WARSAW107_a.html

The bright point is, since it's more or less clear that the US basically stopped caring much about Europe militarily, the "great concern to the U.S." cited above is not that relevant. Trump basically destroyed most of the soft power the USA had over Europe.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-12-12 15:27:38+00:00
If you want to go full on the Universal Century (UC) timeline, go for it.

But they are from the 70s, so don't expect top notch animation and scripts (it's a product of its time).

After that you can go Char's Counterattack and Gundam The Origin (this is a recent series, so more polished animation). Later maybe try watching Zeta.

As another comment mentioned you also some shorter UC side-stories like War in the Pocket, The 08th MS Team and Stardust Memory.
Show HN: Radiotron (alpha) a Fast Medical Segmentation and Visualization Tool
by Grieverheart | 2025-12-12 15:28:24+00:00
Some years back I was working on a medical imaging project and was frustrated by the lack of available tools for segmentation that are simple to use and fast. Because of this frustration I started working on a medical image segmentation software with a focus on performance and simplicity. It's still early in development but I decided to release an early alpha version and hopefully get some feedback from anyone that might be working in a relevant field. There are several directions I could take, but what would be the minimal set of features that would make this tool useful for you? Any feedback is welcome!
by FuturisticLover | 2025-12-12 15:28:33+00:00
Canonical Tags are done perfectly. Never changed them, and the blog is quite old too. I found a pattern where Google considers a page a duplicate because of the URL structure. For example:

www.xyz.com/blog/keyword-term/ www.xyz.com/services/keyword-term/ www.xyz.com/tag/keyword-term/

So, for a topic, if I have two of the above pages, Google will pick one of them canonically despite different keyword focus and intent. And the worst part is that it picks the worst page canonical, i.e., the tag page over blog or blog page over service.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-12 15:28:44+00:00
I hate the "rewrite it in Rust" mentality, however, I think that in this particular case, Rust is the right tool for the job.

The Rust specialty is memory safety and performance in an relatively unconstrained environment (usually a PC), with multithreading. Unsurprisingly, because that's how it started, that's what a web browser is.

But Tor is also this. Security is extremely important as Tor will be under attack by the most resourceful hackers (state actors, ...), and the typical platform for Tor is a linux multicore PC, not some tiny embedded system or some weird platform, and because it may involve a lot of data and it is latency-sensitive, performance matters.

I don't know enough of these projects but I think it could also take another approach and use Zig in the same way Tigerbeetle uses it. But Zig may lack maturity, and it would be a big change. I think it is relevant because Tigerbeetle is all about determinism: do the same thing twice and the memory image should be exactly the same. I think it has value when it comes to security but also fingerprinting resistance, plus, it could open the way for dedicated Tor machines, maybe running some RTOS for even more determinism.
by roackb2 | 2025-12-12 15:29:21+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the author of CyberLoop.

I've been working as a founding engineer at a startup and got frustrated with how fragile "Chain-of-Thought" agents are in production. They tend to hallucinate or drift off-topic over long horizons.

CyberLoop is an attempt to treat agentic reasoning as a control systems problem rather than just prompt engineering.

Key ideas:

Inner Loop (System 1): Cheap, deterministic probes (using code/grep/sensors) to explore without burning tokens.

Outer Loop (System 2): The LLM acts as the controller, only stepping in to plan or evaluate.

Thermodynamics: We treat "deviation from goal" as entropy and use "relaxation ladders" to dampen the oscillation.

The repo includes a reference implementation and a demo (GitHub search agent) that shows how it self-corrects when a search yields 0 results.

It's still a research preview (v1.0.1), but I'd love to hear your thoughts on applying control theory to agent orchestration.

Link to paper: https://zenodo.org/records/17835680
by nh2 | 2025-12-12 15:29:28+00:00
JSON columns shine when

* The data does not map well to database tables, e.g. when it's tree structures (of course that could be represented as many table rows too, but it's complicated and may be slower when you always need to operate on the whole tree anyway)

* your programming language has better types and programming facilities than SQL offers; for example in our Haskell+TypeScript code base, we can conveniently serialise large nested data structures with 100s of types into JSON, without having to think about how to represent those trees as tables.
by TheKnack | 2025-12-12 15:29:42+00:00
I've been doing this for 20+ years, not with AI but just with code and taking time to understand the important parts of the processes. I still see many companies and especially educational institutions spending way too much manpower on payroll and accounts payable in particular. This is often because of unnecessary bespoke processes that people in the organization believe are necessary and are afraid to change.
by uh-quan | 2025-12-12 15:29:42+00:00
There is no "good parenting" fix that will keep children from trying to access inappropriate content, forums where unhealthy conversation takes place, pornography, and worse. Being a good parent does not and cannot remove the curiosity, temptation, and ability to access bad content. This is a problem with the human condition, not bad parenting.

As a parent myself (and, I hope, a good one), I have found it very difficult to effectively monitor and limit my children's ability to access these things. And I have more facility with technology than the average parent. It's a complex and frustrating problem and the stakes are high.
by Rover222 | 2025-12-12 15:29:57+00:00
Any company adding fancy hardware (beyond good cameras and inference chips) to achieve self driving is on the wrong track at this point. Software is what will win this game.

Of course, Waymo has achieved good results with A LOT of fancy hardware. But it's hard to see how they stand a chance against Cybercab mass production (probably behind schedule, but eventually).

I think Rivian has the best-looking line of EVs out there. Maybe they will be able to come from behind in self-driving tech. But this big reveal is not that promising, IMO.
by Symmetry | 2025-12-12 15:30:07+00:00
I'll be the first to cheer if we get rid of industrial agriculture but there's an awful lot of land in the world that doesn't receive enough rain for farming but which is still fine grazing land and when used for grazing still supports most of its original ecology. And there's a lot of damaged, blemished, etc produce that pigs are happy to eat but which can't be sold in a supermarket.

I'd like to see meat consumption to something like half to a quarter of its current level rather than eliminate it outright.
by sevensor | 2025-12-12 15:31:21+00:00
The Python stdlib does not get enough credit. People complain about things like how its http client is dated and slow, but it’s pretty amazing that it’s just right there if you need it, no external dependencies needed. And it’s sitting right next to difflib, graphlib, pathlib, struct, glob, tkinter, and dozens of others. Sure, every one of these is limited individually, but those limitations are stable and well understood!
by ajross | 2025-12-12 15:31:39+00:00
You lost this fight more than a century ago. Helvetica and almost all related grotesque fonts lack a serif on "I", and dominate modern typography. You see them everywhere, on every device. Pull your phone out your pocket and see if you can see "crossbars" on the I. They're not there, and never have been.

And people like it this way! So that's why we design fonts like this.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-12 15:31:51+00:00
The regulation is not some bureaucratic nonsense, it exists for a reason.

If its existence means the manufacturer has to do more work, and the cost might rise, that is considered worth it.

They can lobby to have the regulation changed, and regulations have changed in the past based on industry input, but saying "it's too hard" does not make the product suddenly legal.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-12 15:31:58+00:00
> I keep coming back to my own experience with limits. I've recently made a real effort to be more earnest, more sincere, transparent. I think some people find this genuinely offputting, funnily enough. I'm making a trade off - many people may not like it, but to the people that do, it will be even more magnetizing since I am fully embodying the thing they like, the thing that is me.

We are the sum of the roles we play. It's no wonder that people who reject their roles in search of their authentic self often end up as shriveled version of their inner asshole, now it being the only thing for other people to see.
by mikeyouse | 2025-12-12 15:32:12+00:00
I'm in the midwest, but at several large chains with hundreds of locations, even at the self-checkout when you buy booze, it flashes the little 'attendant needed' sign, the person comes over, scans their badge, takes your ID to do a 1 second look, and then scans it on the same barcode reader you use for your box of cereal.
by mikewarot | 2025-12-12 15:33:53+00:00
Holy cow... 16.7 Hertz[1] power?

At first that's a really odd sounding choice to this Hoosier. Turns out it's 1/3 of standard 50 Hz in Europe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_kV_AC_railway_electrificati...
by freedomben | 2025-12-12 15:34:01+00:00
You're kind of proving the articles point here. The networking stack doesn't surface that information to your code, because it doesn't have that information. To get that information, The various tools do a lot of extra things that don't typically happen on a normal network connection. This is kind of the like complaining that your typical release build stack trace doesn't also include profiling and debug information in it.
by aklemm | 2025-12-12 15:34:23+00:00
This is the way. Obviously as mentioned, a calendar is a pre-requisite and for me so are various note-taking/writing systems such as a physical notebook, more .txt files, and sometimes heavier stuff like Google Docs. But those are only for deeper work or archival stuff. Most everything starts and and ends right in thst one .txt file. Each day new stuff goes at the top. Sometimes I go through it and delete things that have become meaningless or will never be useful.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-12 15:34:41+00:00
I always thought that flagging would get the comment put into a review queue (one that would put even your ability to flag at risk), but it seems that mass flagging gets you an automated flagkill of late. People can get flagkilled for not sufficiently loving particular products or for not being orthorexic enough.

As for the N900, I just wanted one or two more hardware iterations (the design flaws were annoying, and a couple mentioned in the OP.) The N9 looked great, but I couldn't get over the loss of the keyboard (although of course that was our dictated future.) The Meego transition seemed unnecessary and annoying (not the UI changes, but everything else), especially the move to rpms from debs. They were just hostile to Debian mainline for some reason; if they had been less hostile, their work would have survived without a break even after Elop intentionally tanked the company. That proprietary moat is just irresistible.

iOS and Android literally grabbed the designers of Maemo/Meego and WebOS to update their horrible UIs. Back then, they were still even refusing to multitask. Android copied WebOS almost exactly.
by roywiggins | 2025-12-12 15:34:52+00:00
> In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.

Right, which is strictly worse than humans are at reporting how they solve these sorts of problems. Humans can tell you whether they did the elementary school addition algorithm or not. It seems like Claude actually doesn't know, in the same way humans don't really know how they can balance on two legs, it's just too baked into the structure of their cognition to be able to introspect it. But stuff like "adding two-digit numbers" is usually straightforwardly introspectable for humans, even if it's just "oh, I just vibed it" vs "I mentally added the digits and carried the one"- humans can mostly report which it was.

Here's Anthropic's research:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
by jeffwask | 2025-12-12 15:34:55+00:00
He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-12 15:35:34+00:00
Intoning What are the odds? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Penny_for_Your_Thoughts_(The...

Edit: Hm no, IMO the Sci-Fi shows came much later, and that Stargate thing with the psychics was just an offshoot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra which came much earlier, maybe just overlapping from its end, fizzling out, to the early beginnigs of Stargate. In between, and related is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe and his institute.
by autoexec | 2025-12-12 15:36:01+00:00
"Kink allows people to discover and engage in diverse experiences that bring them joy and fulfillment" wasn't anywhere on the wikipedia page I saw. I'm guessing "Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. That is an established fact." isn't there either.

Considering how AI has a tendency to lie I'm not sure I'd be a great idea to give young children an AI toy even if it only read wikipedia pages while occasionally just making shit up without any understanding how to frame what it says in way that's appropriate for children. There's a lot of very adult and child-unfriendly things on wikipedia. I don't think I need to be a Puritan to not want my six year old told about Unit 731 as a bedtime story.
by Rooster61 | 2025-12-12 15:36:12+00:00
We're only massacring the fruiting bodies. The mycelium is just fine and lives on to create even more fruiting bodies. It's like picking apples from an apple tree. The tree itself isn't harmed in the slightest. The only difference is that many fruits are designed to be eaten so that the seeds can pass an germinate, whereas mushrooms achieve this through spore release.