MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wcrossbow | 2025-12-31 12:58:32+00:00
The last and most important slide is missing.

"Ignore all the advise above and do the right thing
Subtext: This will take multiple lifetimes to accomplish"

This is particularly important considering that some of the advice is at odds with each other and engineering is an unending juggling of tradeoffs. It's also by far the hardest to achieve both technically and socially but worth striving for.
by timeproofs | 2025-12-31 12:58:55+00:00
Hi HN — I’m the creator.

TimeProofs is a small protocol to prove that some data existed at a given time,
without uploading the data itself.

You hash locally, get a signed timestamp, and store a portable proof file (.tproof.json).
Verification can be done later, even offline.

No blockchain, no accounts, no tracking.

Happy to answer questions or hear criticism.
by ramon156 | 2025-12-31 12:59:38+00:00
All the following statements can live without colliding.

- The current CPP version is extremely bloated

- CPP is not going away anytime soon

- The rise of Rust/Go/Zig is not fighting for CPP's seat

- You can target CPP code using any of these aforementioned languages

- Rust has never claimed to be "safer", it just makes it harder to write unsafe code
by an-allen | 2025-12-31 13:00:12+00:00
LLMs are by definition computations on known public data - meaning any LLM CEO strategy will be only briefly competitive.

LLMs lack networks and the ability to strategise internally an execute without the whole plan being known to everyone. So I just don’t think if your AI CEO says lets build an iCar, well someone elses AI CEO is going to tell your competitor the same basic plan.

Once LLMs have Networks and unique and private insights…
by peheje | 2025-12-31 13:00:15+00:00
Actually, this has already happened in a very literal way. Back in 2022, Google DeepMind used an AI called AlphaTensor to "play" a game where the goal was to find a faster way to multiply matrices the fundamental math that powers all AI.

To understand how big this is, you have to look at the numbers:

- The Naive Method: This is what most people learn in school. To multiply two 4×4 matrices, you need 64 multiplications.
- The Human Record (1969): For over 50 years, the "gold standard" was Strassen’s algorithm, which used a clever trick to get it down to 49 multiplications.
- The AI Discovery (2022): AlphaTensor beat the human record by finding a way to do it in just 47 steps.

The real "intelligence explosion" feedback loop happened even more recently with AlphaEvolve (2025). While the 2022 discovery only worked for specific "finite field" math (mostly used in cryptography), AlphaEvolve used Gemini to find a shortcut (48 steps) that works for the standard complex numbers AI actually uses (for training).

Because matrix multiplication accounts for the vast majority of the work an AI does, Google used these AI-discovered shortcuts to optimize the kernels in Gemini itself.

It’s a literal cycle: the AI found a way to rewrite its own fundamental math to be more efficient, which then makes the next generation of AI faster and cheaper to build.

https://deepmind.google/blog/discovering-novel-algorithms-wi... https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1knem3r/i_dont...
by shrubby | 2025-12-31 13:00:47+00:00
A nice set of examples can be found in Guido Palazzo's Dark Pattern.

“The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage teaches us about the power of context, which is stronger than reason, values, morals, and best intentions. It is an uncomfortable and painful lesson about the root causes of 'corporate infernos.' "

The context matters.

Think of the banality of evil in WW2 Germany.

We are capable of doing almost anything, good or bad, as long as the shoal around does it and pretends it normal.
by krzyk | 2025-12-31 13:01:06+00:00
But it comes from Javascript and inherits its issues, and is used mostly because there is no other option on the web and that makes it popular, not its quality, but lack of options. So a closed ecosystem with just one language - Javascript, and any other languages that can be compiled to it. And Typescript is a bandaid to make sensible type system on top of Javascript, and it still leaves option open to use Javascript lack of rules.
Concurrency in JS also looks junky.

And on readability Python also wins (if we prohibit stupidities like PEP 572)
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-31 13:01:25+00:00
I'm a bit skeptical either example is representative of "most" existing software. If anything, the mere existence of __builtin_malloc and its default use should hint that most existing software doesn't care about malloc/free actually being called. That being said...

> As an example, user kentonv wrote: "I patched the memory allocator used by the Cloudflare Workers runtime to overwrite all memory with a static byte pattern on free". And compiler would, like, "nah, let's leave all that data on stack".

Strictly speaking, I don't think eliding malloc/free would "break" those programs because that behavior is there for security if/when something else goes wrong, not as part of the software's regular intended functionality (or at least I sure hope nothing relies on that behavior for proper functioning!).

> Or somebody would try to plug in mimalloc/jemalloc [] and wonder what's going on.

Why would mimalloc/jemalloc/some other general-purpose allocator care that it doesn't have to execute a matching malloc/free pair any more than the default allocator?

I'm not sure debug allocators would care either? If you're trying to debug mismatched malloc/free pairs then the ones the compiler elides are the ones you don't care about anyways since those are the ones that can be statically proven to be "self-contained". If you're gathering statistics then you probably care more about the malloc/free calls that do occur (i.e., the ones that can't be elided), not those that don't.

In any case, if you want to use a malloc/free implementation that promises more than the C standard does (e.g., special byte pattern on free, statistics/debug info tracking, etc.) there's always -fno-builtin-malloc (or memset_explicit if you're lucky enough to be using C23). Of course, the tradeoff is that you give up some potential performance.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-12-31 13:01:46+00:00
It definitely doesn't relate, the time horizon is wrong. The software needs much longer to change, and that change needs much longer to appear in the job market. Compared to the timeframe in the article DRAM prices have only just spiked up now.

Projecting into the future, hardware expenses have always been dwarfed by salaries. I don't expect that will change enough for it to be noticeable.
by miningape | 2025-12-31 13:02:08+00:00
As another commenter wrote "how do you allocate memory without an allocator?"

Even `malloc` has overhead.

> Wouldn't dynamic scope be better?

Dynamic scope would likely be heavier than what Odin has, since it'd require the language itself to keep track of this - and to an extent Odin does do this already with `context.allocator`, it just provides an escape hatch when you need something allocated in a specific way.

Then again, Odin is not a high level scripting language like Python or JavaScript - even the most bloated abstractions in Odin will run like smooth butter compared to those languages. When comparing to C/Rust/Zig, yeah fair, we'll need to bring out the benchmarks.
by baobun | 2025-12-31 13:03:19+00:00
> For Developers

Would you mind sharing the source code?

> Copy API keys

...yeah, I think that'd be a hard requirement. I don't think there is value in a cliboard-as-a-SaaS that is not self-hostable or even auditable.

I think you are putting the cart before the horse by integrating credit card payments before sorting out the basics.
by Uehreka | 2025-12-31 13:04:35+00:00
I want this to happen, but this past month I tried using Blender’s Video Editor (after hearing the great news about Compositor Modifiers) and boy oh boy does it chug. Apparently Compositor Modifiers only run on the CPU, so trying to apply them to a track of 1080p footage totally locked up my Ryzen 7950X and froze the UI for a few minutes while it tried to render the preview.

I’m hoping GPU Compositor Modifiers aren’t too much of a lift, but at the moment they’re not actively being worked on (and I don’t have the expertise to do it myself) so I’d guess it’s at least about a year before this feature becomes usable for anything beyond really simple compositing with super-crunchy proxies.

Maybe Blender 6.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-12-31 13:05:04+00:00
This may exist already, but I'd like to find a way to query 'Supplementary Material' in biomedical research papers for genes / proteins or even biological processes.

As it is, the Supplementary Materials are inconsistently indexed so a lot of insight you might get from the last 15 years of genomics or proteomics work is invisible.

I imagine this approach could work, especially for Open Access data?
by krzyk | 2025-12-31 13:05:21+00:00
> Yes I agree, but it shouldn't take YEARS to ship anything. 11 years for a JSON api?! Come on.

Anything? Or maybe something that you specifically want?

It added records when I wanted them, it added streams and lambdas. I don't care for string templates (I thing those are ugly in any language).

null-restricted types would be nice but you have to understand that designing a language is not throwing every possible feature on top of it (like kotlin and resulting lack of readability it has and hard time updating to newer JDK), you have to design it, think of the possibilities, what users really want etc.

Valhalla type system results in addition of null-restricted types, as a natural evolution of the language.
by WJW | 2025-12-31 13:05:27+00:00
Yes, I read the article. I still think it's incorrect. Most software (especially by usage) is already not artisanal. You get the exact same browser, database server and (whatsapp/signal/telegram/whatever) messenger client as basically everyone else. Those are churned out by the millions from a common blueprint and designed by teams and teams of highly skilled specialists using specialized tooling, not so different from the latest iPhone or car.

As such, the article's point fails right at the start when it tries to make the point that software production is not already industrial. It is. But if you look at actual industrial design processes, their equivalent of "writing the code" is relatively small. Quality assurance, compliance to various legal requirements, balancing different requirements for the product at hand, having endless meetings with customer representatives to figure out requirements in the first place, those are where most of the time goes and those are exactly the places where LLMs are not very good. So the part that is already fast will get faster and the slow part will stay slow. That is not a recipe for revolutionary progress.
by imiric | 2025-12-31 13:06:20+00:00
Popularity is not required for a language to be "successful". An argument can be made that popularity can bring fragmentation, a lack of focus, security and usability issues via poor quality code and outdated information, and overwhelm core developers. Just take a look at JavaScript and Python ecosystems. Whereas less popular languages like Nim, Zig, Odin, etc., thrive within their niches.
by Uehreka | 2025-12-31 13:07:57+00:00
I’ve gotten so frustrated with AE the past couple years that my New Year’s resolution is to bite the bullet and try Resolve for my next couple projects. I’m even willing to splurge for the license if it means I can stop paying Adobe every month. I’m in a place where I definitely need a lot of AE’s pro features and performance, but I’m not locked into the plugin ecosystem, so I have a bit more flexibility than some other people.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-31 13:08:45+00:00
This is what the vast majority of users will do of course. The issue people have with it is that it breaks the "social contract" of the web, which is that part of the advertising income goes to the site that provided the information the answer is based on. That, by destroying that income, "overviews" (now including AI overviews, but that's not where it started) are destroying first publishers and I'm sure it'll go all the way through until Youtube is entirely destroyed as well.

Of course, it does not destroy Google's income ... and it destroys the promise Google made long ago, which is to never keep users on Google platforms.

Oh and to add insult to injury, want to bet Opal will force app developers into what you probably never even imaged would happen on the web? Pay-per-view. Not for a video. For a website/app.
by pheix | 2025-12-31 13:09:11+00:00
The Pheix Project has published a formal post-release engineering review following the recent From the Basement RTM (Release to Manufacturing) launch of dCMS Pheix.

The review outlines several issues identified shortly after release and documents the corrective actions taken. All items have been resolved, and no data loss or long-term system instability occurred.

Official report: https://pheix.org/embedded/post-rtm-engineering-review

A technical write-up of the post-release analysis: https://narkhov.pro/after-rtm.html
by SkyBelow | 2025-12-31 13:09:45+00:00
>If you had a choice between a phone you knew was made by slaves and a phone that wasn't I assume you'd pick the slave free version every time.

At the same cost? Sure.

At different costs? We see that is not the case.

People don't. A few do, but most don't. There are many who would still prefer the more popular phone and an ethical cost is something they only mention when asked but is given only minor weight when it comes to decision making. Some might try to justify it by saying you can't be sure a phone claiming to be ethically made actually is, but how many even considered that much when making the decision?

>While it's fine to feel guilty for your involvement in the scheme don't let that get in the way of placing the blame for it squarely on the people who set things up this way and put you in this position.

Who is really at fault on a systematic level if the population decides lower costs is what they really wants regardless of what sacrifices have to be made. If we look at a less morally challenging area, say air travel, and see how many people claim to want a nicer experience, yet airlines are always focused on cutting costs. Is that the fault of the airlines? Or is it the fault of the consumers who, despite what they say, show extreme preference for lower costing tickets? We can blame any seller at the moment, but we can't ignore the market pressures that picked the sellers who stayed and the ones who went out of business.
by copirate | 2025-12-31 13:11:25+00:00
> Except that by withholding their block, they got a headstart so they are more likely to find the second block. So it's not the same.

Withholding their block (5s or whatever) doesn't make them more likely to find the second block. The probability of finding a block is always the same, given a hashrate.

They are the only ones mining on this particular chain, but that's not an advantage either. How mining on a hidden chain is an advantage?

On the other hand, withholding certainly makes them more likely to lose the reward of the block.
by weslleyskah | 2025-12-31 13:12:05+00:00
> It's like thinking the greatest barrier to producing the next great Russian literary novel is not speaking Russian. That is merely the first and easiest barrier, but after learning the language you are still no Tolstoy.

And what do you feel is the role of universities? Certainly not just to learn the language right? I'm going through a computer engineering degree and sometimes I feel completely lost with an urge to give up on everything, even though I am still interested in technology.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-31 13:13:40+00:00
Most countries' broadest defined benefit pensions are just simple wealth redistribution schemes from workers to non workers as opposed to being paid from funds that were previously invested.

In the USA, Social Security defined benefit pensions are cash from workers today going to non workers today, same as Germany's national scheme (gesetzliche Rentenversicherung?).

The other defined benefit benefit pension schemes are what are usually invested in equities, and the investment restrictions section in this document indicate Germany's "occupational pensions" can also invest in equities. (page 12)

https://www.aba-online.de/application/files/2816/2945/5946/2...
Show HN: I built an AI tool that generates YouTube thumbnails in seconds
by samuelaidoo45 | 2025-12-31 13:13:58+00:00
Hi HN

I’m Samuel, a solo builder. As the year wraps up, I’m shipping my last SaaS of the year — YouTube Thumbnail Generator.

It’s a simple AI tool that helps creators generate click-worthy YouTube thumbnails without needing design skills or Photoshop. You describe your video (or upload an image), and it generates your thumbnail style you can iterate on quickly.

I built this after noticing how much time creators spend designing thumbnails instead of creating content.

Would love feedback from the community — especially around UX, pricing, and what features would actually move CTR.

https://www.youtubethumbnailgenerator.app/

Thanks for checking it out!
by willtemperley | 2025-12-31 13:14:12+00:00
Well yes. To me industrial software is hardened algorithms, not throwaway slop like the author is arguing. LLMs are very good at porting existing algorithms and as you say it’s about standing on the shoulders of giants. I couldn’t write these from scratch but I can port and harden an algo with basic engineering practices.

I like the article except the premise is wrong - industrial software will be high value and low cost as it will outlive the slop.
by imgopaal | 2025-12-31 13:14:46+00:00
Yeah fair point. QuickClip does store data in database, otherwise syncing between devices not possible. But here is how it works:

- Data is encrypted when sending and also when sitting in database.
- Stored only so your devices can fetch it, not for me or anyone else.
- When you delete, it’s gone. I don’t keep logs of clipboard stuff.
- I don’t look at your data, only your devices can see it.

I know trust is big thing for clipboard app. I’ll write small “how it works” page so it’s more clear. Appreciate you asking this, makes sense.
by senfiaj | 2025-12-31 13:14:51+00:00
> Euler's constant, gamma = 0.577215 ... = lim n -> infinity > (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ... + 1/n - ln(n)) (Not proven to be transcendental, but generally believed to be by mathematicians.)

So why bring some numbers here as transcendental if not proven?
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-31 13:15:01+00:00
I said that was something which would happen in the future, as in not the current level LLMs. But this is what people will pay the programmer for, the programmer will (hopefully) know when and where the LLM can be used to offload the grunt work and where they should just skip the LLM and hand code it, those things the average person will not know, the full system and this applies to current level LLMs
by skydhash | 2025-12-31 13:15:09+00:00
I have spotify (The duo plan is cheap where I’m at and my SO wanted to use it work). But I do maintain my own collection, mostly because Spotify UI is pure garbage.

My collection is store on an old mac mini (with debian). It’s directly linked to an home theater setup via optical. I have MPD on it that I control with Rigelian on my phone. But I often just ssh and use MoC to play music.

I also have gonic (subsonic server) that uses the same library. I use Amperfy to play music from my phone. I could use navidrome, but I don’t like web players.

As for the management, it’s all manual. I’ve tried beets but the overhead wasn’t worth it. I have several collections which have different filesystem organization schemes.
by freetonik | 2025-12-31 13:15:24+00:00
My blog directory/search engine [1] runs on Cloudflare workers as well. I was able to get pretty good results, too. For example, the listing of 1200+ blogs [2], each with 5 latest posts, loads in ~500ms. A single post with a list of related posts, loads in ~200ms. Yeah, it's still a lot, but it includes all the normal web app logic like auth middlewares, loading user settings, and states; everything is rendered server-side, no rich frontend code (apart from htmx for a couple of buttons to make simple one-off requests like "subscribe to blog" or "add to favorites"). A static page (like /about) usually loads in ~100ms.

This is a bit stochastic because of regions and dynamic allocation of resources. So, e.g. if you're the first user from a large georgraphic region to visit the website in the last several hours, your first load will be longer.

My other project (a blog platform) contains a lot of optimizations, so posts [3] load pretty much as fast as that example from the thread, i.e. 60-70ms.

1. https://minifeed.net/

2. https://minifeed.net/blogs

3. https://rakhim.exotext.com/but-what-if-i-really-want-a-faste...
by ignoramous | 2025-12-31 13:15:32+00:00
> That is why high security systems designed for multi-level security for shared tenants

When you say "high security" do you mean Confidential Computing workloads run by Trusty (Enclave) / Virtee (Realm) etc? If so, aren't these system limited in what they can do, as in, there usually is another full-blown OS that's running the user-facing bits?

> that need to protect against state actors

This is a very high bar for a software-only solution (like a microkernel) to meet? In my view, open hardware specification, like OpenTitan, in combination with small-ish software TCB, make it hard for state actors (even if not impossible).
by physicsguy | 2025-12-31 13:17:46+00:00
I've just done my first almost fully vibe coded hobby project from start to near completion, a village history website with a taxonomy, and it's taken so much poking and prodding and cajoling to get the software to do exactly what I want it to do. Having built plenty of production stuff, I know what I want it to look like and the data model was really clear, yet even trying every trick in the book to constrain them, I just found the LLMs went off and did totally random things, particularly as the project got further from the start.

Maybe there'll be an enormous leap again but I just don't quite see the jump to how this gets you to 'industrial' software. It made it a lot faster, don't get me wrong, but you still needed the captain driving the ship.
by barishnamazov | 2025-12-31 13:19:35+00:00
Don't want to be "that guy," but Euler's constant and Catalan's constant aren't proven to be transcendental yet.

For context, a number is transcendental if it's not the root of any non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients. Essentially, it means the number cannot be constructed using a finite combination of integers and standard algebraic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and integer roots). sqrt(2) is irrational but algebraic (it solves x^2 - 2 = 0); pi is transcendental.

The reason we haven't been able to prove this for constants like Euler-Mascheroni (gamma) is that we currently lack the tools to even prove they are irrational. With numbers like e or pi, we found infinite series or continued fraction representations that allowed us to prove they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

With gamma, we have no such "hook." It appears in many places (harmonics, gamma function derivatives), but we haven't found a relationship that forces a contradiction if we assume it is algebraic. For all we know right now, gamma could technically be a rational fraction with a denominator larger than the number of atoms in the universe, though most mathematicians would bet the house against it.
by gosub100 | 2025-12-31 13:20:27+00:00
Derivatives can be structured in a time-constrained manner that requires them to go up/down in a specific time window, thus amplifying the gains/losses. Also there's generally no way to short an asset without borrowing them with a contract to pay them back (which requires timing the market move and paying rent on the asset). This is something that options contracts solved.