MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsazan | 2025-12-19 15:38:28+00:00
I appreciate the detailed feedback (and the edits).

You are technically correct regarding IETF norms.

But you say: "Wix and Shopify have zero bearing on the standardization of the Web."

I fundamentally disagree. The Web is not just a namespace for engineers; it is an economy for millions of small businesses. If a standard is technically "pure" but unusable by 80% of merchants on hosted platforms, it fails the Web.

However, to respect the namespace: We will mandate checking /.well-known/commerce.txt first.

But we will keep the root location as a fallback. We prioritize accessibility for the "aspiring" shop owner over strict purity for the standards writer.
by greenbit | 2025-12-19 15:38:36+00:00
I've seen some of the dreck that bubbles up on those 'copilot' responses on searches, with glaring inconsistencies on subjects I'm very confident with. If I didn't know better, and used such stuff, debugging would ensue. Frankly, I'd much rather debug my own bugs than those hallucinated by some overly enthusiastic statistical algorithms.
by delecti | 2025-12-19 15:39:04+00:00
The TV would definitely spy on you, the connected device might not. And even if it does, you can pick one from a company you mind less, or who you've already given up on trying to prevent spying on you. For me, that means a Chromecast; I haven't managed the effort to de-Google, and most of what I watch is Youtube anyway. For some that might be Apple, who is probably the least egregious offender among the big companies. Or you could use a Raspberry Pi or other small computer and have even more control, at the cost of being higher effort.
by paolocermelli | 2025-12-19 15:39:12+00:00
I’ve run into the same issue in practice: a single high-authority PDF (regulator, court, enforcement notice) can dominate the SERP signal even when it’s years old and no longer representative of the current risk.

What helped a bit was separating authority detection from risk scoring. I treat authority hits as a flag (“this entity has regulatory history”) rather than letting them linearly outweigh everything else.

Then I layer:

temporal decay (old authority actions lose weight but never fully disappear),

contextual confirmation (are there follow-up articles, remediation, license reinstatements, or ongoing disputes?),

and SERP clustering (one PDF echoed 20 times ≠ 20 independent signals).

At scale, I’ve found that counting distinct adverse narratives matters more than raw authority presence. Authority is a binary condition; persistence and multiplicity are what indicate current compliance risk.
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-19 15:39:14+00:00
The mainstream didn't get mainstream by striving to go with mainstream. They got there by serving a niche well and then expanding the niche. Trying to go mainstream without having a niche moat will make you lag behind the establishment endlessly.

I'm not an Apple fan (rather an Apple hater if you would), but they are a perfect example of this. First, have a top quality niche product, then go into the big waters with the vision you got from the niche - and then people will actually be willing to give up bells and whistles the product that is good enough.

Mozilla have a well-established niche with a vision, but they can't monetize without giving up the vision they have (and apparently consider opening for small direct donations or maybe even direct bug/feature crowdsourcing not worth it). So they keep jumping on every sidetrack. And keep losing even the niche they have.
by duxup | 2025-12-19 15:39:23+00:00
That's been the case with hardware at several companies I was at.

I was convinced that the process was encouraged by folks who used it as a sort of weird gatekeeping by folks who only used the magic code names.

Even better I worked at a place where they swapped code names between two products at one time... it wasn't without any reason, but it mean that a lot of product documentation suddenly conflicted.

I eventually only refereed to exact part numbers and model numbers and refused to play the code name game. This turned into an amusing situation where some managers who only used code names were suddenly silent as they clearly didn't know the product / part to code name convention.
by sigwinch | 2025-12-19 15:39:39+00:00
Let me take the opposing position about a program to wire LLMs into their already-advanced sensory database.

I assume the CIA is lying about simulating world leaders. These are narcissistic personalities and it’s jarring to hear that they can be replaced, either by a body double or an indistinguishable chatbot. Also, it’s still cheaper to have humans do this.

More likely, the CIA is modeling its own experts. Not as useful a press release and not as impressive to the fractious executive branch. But consider having downtime as a CIA expert on submarine cables. You might be predicting what kind of available data is capable of predicting the cause and/or effect of cuts. Ten years ago, an ensemble of such models was state of the art, but its sensory libraries were based on maybe traceroute and marine shipping. With an LLM, you can generate a whole lot of training data that an expert can refine during his/her downtime. Maybe there’s a potent new data source that an expensive operation could unlock. That ensemble of ML models from ten years ago can still be refined.

And then there’s modeling things that don’t exist. Maybe it’s important to optimize a statement for its disinfo potency. Try it harmlessly on LLMs fed event data. What happens if some oligarch retires unexpectedly? Who rises? That kind of stuff.

To your last point, with this executive branch, I expect their very first question to CIA wasn’t about aliens or which nations have a copy of a particular tape of Trump, but can you make us money. So the approaches above all have some way of producing business intelligence. Whereas a Kim Jong Un bobblehead does not.
Show HN: Free .env Template Generator – Quickly throw together a .env file
by j_time | 2025-12-19 15:39:48+00:00
Hey HN,

Starting a new project and staring at a blank .env file? It's a small hassle that eats up way too much brainpower. So I threw this together to make it easier. Pick a framework and/or integration, toss in any custom vars, and snag a ready template with placeholders for your secrets.

Curious: Does this cut the setup friction for you, or am I overthinking a non-problem? Which frameworks are must-haves? Open to feedback. Thanks!
Ask HN: What would you call a package whose purpose is to import data?
by ctc24 | 2025-12-19 15:39:52+00:00
Let's assume you're writing Go, Python, or any other language in which `import` is a reserved keyword. Let's assume also that you're writing a new package, whose purpose is to "import" data.

What do you name this package?

Our team went through this exercise semi-recently, and we're curious about how everyone else would think about it. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of options we considered: imports, ingest, dataimport, ímport, impørt.
by morellt | 2025-12-19 15:39:59+00:00
I wouldn't conflate "best" with "most important". Personally I find the sappy emotions like love, happiness, and contentedness to be the best ones, generated by the best parts of life. However, I would absolutely say it is the most important feeling from a self-preservation standpoint.

There is also something to be said about today's unchecked, underutilized anxiety that one feels when sitting doing absolutely nothing. There has been an unending discussion about the causes of this, but I tend to align with the belief that since our current world doesn't provide many dangers for us to genuinely cause anxiety, our brain freaks out and finds less dire avenues to trigger it.
by lapcat | 2025-12-19 15:41:02+00:00
How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:

Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632 (10 days ago)

Show HN: Hacker News, but every headline is hysterical clickbait https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324579 (4 hours ago)
by rchaud | 2025-12-19 15:41:04+00:00
> 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about.

When was the last time anybody talked about the iPad outside of a product launch event? iPad sales are falling [0]. It, like every other type of tablet, is a glorified YouTube/Netflix player for most people. It doesn't do anything that you can't already do on an iPhone. Even on "pro" iPad apps like Final Cut, exports are cancelled if you so much as switch to another app during the process. It is in no way a MacOS device.

[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/2865180/iphone-sales-pump-u...

[1] https://www.macstories.net/stories/not-an-ipad-pro-review/
by sroussey | 2025-12-19 15:41:23+00:00
Nice. I have a simple system for typescript [1] where you can string tasks together like:

import { Workflow } from "@workglow/task-graph"; const workflow = new Workflow(); workflow .DownloadModel({ model: ["onnx:Xenova/LaMini-Flan-T5-783M:q8", "Universal Sentence Encoder"], }) .TextEmbedding({ text: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.", }); await workflow.run();

It automatically caches results of steps if you say `new Workflow({outputCache});`

PS: the example above uses a local onnx model (it switches on model name) which is a good candidate for caching, but can be anything.

You can play around writing this way if you open the console at the web example [2] which has fun console formatters not enough people know about or use in DevTools. You can write code in the console and the example rewrites it as a json format in the web page (and visa-versa).

Or just use the free web app with local user account and local models to play around with. [3]

[1] https://github.com/workglow-dev/workglow

[2] https://workglow-web.netlify.app/

[3] https://workglow.dev
by krapp | 2025-12-19 15:41:25+00:00
TikTok being owned by a Chinese company didn't represent "giving full control over local media to a foreign nation."

And it's weird that you mistrust the influence of something as banal as TikTok but apparently believe the moral panic around social media and TikTok specifically is entirely organic. Because I guess there is no such thing as propaganda or influence operations on Western social media?

If you're worried about foreign influence on social media literally every Western platform is being aggressively manipulated by both foreign and Western intelligence. It just got revealed that most of the MAGA accounts on Twitter were foreign, likely Russian-based networks. The platform that serves as the de facto psychological operations and communications channel for the current Presidental administration.

But it's just TikTok and the Chinese mind control we should worry about?
by orjfi2hsbfith | 2025-12-19 15:41:28+00:00
> But the value prop of the company isn't the software, it's the ability to solve business problems.

Clearly it's critical to the job, but to take your point to its limits: imagine the business has a problem to solve and you say "I have learned how to solve it but I won't solve it nor help anyone with it." Your employer would not celebrate this, because they don't pay you for the private inner workings of your own mind, they pay you for the effects your mind has on their product. Learning is a means to an end here, not the end itself.
by robjs | 2025-12-19 15:41:37+00:00
ICMP packets pretty much always carry some data (even though it's not _strictly_ required). This data is what is padded when the user asks for a ping with a specific packet size (e.g., when debugging MTU issues).

In some applications, using an ICMP payload and getting a quote of the IP header + 8-bytes of the original packet back in ICMP error messages is part of the application. For example, traceroute utilises the fact that it gets part of the payload back in a ICMP TTL exceeded message to identify _which_ traceroute request was being responded to.
by ben_w | 2025-12-19 15:42:06+00:00
Indeed. I never understood, let alone bought into, the NFT hype, but I think VR is a good reference point for AI:

There was a real, genuine product in the Oculus Rift. It did something that was an incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.

The Metaverse was laughable, and VR got glued to a lot of things where it added zero value, or worse negative value, for example my attempts to watch pre-recorded 3D video gave me nausea because the camera can only rotate, not displace, with my head movements.

Compare and contrast with AI:

LLMs and Diffusion models are also real, genuine products, that are incremental improvement over the previous state of the art which enabled new consumer experiences for low cost.

A lot of the attempts to integrate these AI have been laughable, and have added zero-to-negative value.
by ratrace | 2025-12-19 15:43:13+00:00
My regular, daily experience with 'AI':

'How do I do [X thing I need to accomplish in codebase]?'

"Here is here how you would do that."

Then I apply the code and it's broken and doesn't work.

'The code you supplied is broken because of [xyz], can you fix it?'

"Of course, you're so right! My apologies. Here is the corrected code."

It still doesn't work. Repeat this about 2-3 more times and throw in me deleting the entire chat window and context and trying again in a new chat with slightly different phrasing of question to maybe get it to output the right answer this time, which it often doesn't.

I hate it. It's awful and terrible. Fundamentally, this technology will never not be terrible, because it is just predicting text tokens based off of probabilistic statistics.
by uecker | 2025-12-19 15:43:34+00:00
No, in the comment you reply to, I am using safe/unsafe in the Rust sense. E.g. signed overflow changed to trap avoids the UB.

Also "If .. are implemented soundly" sounds harmless but simply means there is no safety guarantee (in contrast to Fil-C or formally verified C, for example). It relies on best-effort manual review. (but even without "unsafe" use anywhere, there are various issues in Rust's type system which would still allow UB but I agree that this is not that critical)

In C UB is part of the ISO language specification, but not necessarily part of a specific implementation of ISO C. If you argue that the ISO spec matters so much, I like to point out that Rust does not even have one, so from this perspective it is completely UB.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-19 15:43:46+00:00
But Kobo is bad too. Try refunding a book. Their website sent me in neverending circles and still I could not find a way to refund. Their stuff requires some specific reader or so. I don't quite remember the details, but I bought a book, thinking to avoid Amazon shit. Then I realized that their stuff sucks and I don't want to buy their blessed device or install special reader software. Also not DRM-free. So I wanted to refund, but couldn't. It is a very bad user experience. The only good experience you get from them is, if you go all in on their software/devices.

Since I couldn't refund, I had to pirate the book as epub/pdf from elsewhere. I decided to never again buy anything from Kobo.
by nyeah | 2025-12-19 15:44:01+00:00
"A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept"

How would we know the real-world properties of a theoretical concept from economics? We understand pieces of economics, but certainly not the whole thing. Let's say we make the market free-er and free-er. Apart from politics junkies, who knows for sure how that behaves?
by greenwallnorway | 2025-12-19 15:44:03+00:00
I've done it before. Projects about hn on hn get a lot of attention.

They're a lot of fun! And super easy to vibe code, if I'm looking to test a new model.

It's hard to restrain myself from navel-gazing, the lint in there is fascinating.

I'm not sure they satisfy curiosity as much as many posts with fewer votes, but that's okay.
by robotstxtwasbad | 2025-12-19 15:44:12+00:00
If you fundamentally disagree with that, you are simply never going to deliver a workable standard via the IETF process. Yeah, yeah, SPDY, QUIC, elephants in rooms, I realize what I'm saying, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong about this. Commerce is a _subset_ of what happens on the _technical_ Web, standards for which must consider all users (and the arena you're now playing in). We haven't even gotten to the merits yet, or how you collide with Open Graph philosophically, etc. This is just one piece of technical feedback, and I'm discouraged by your approach to it.

Thankfully, you've licensed your work CC0, so someone who wants to see this standardized could simply fork your work, fix the offending parts, and move for successful standardization without you.

You really gotta stop saying "we," too, like, it's a nit, but it speaks to your long-term intentions. You're here to build a community around an effort you've singlehandedly spearheaded over the last few weeks (I can read GitHub). Claiming you have one already, and there's Big Discussion on these points, is pretty transparent. You and I both know where you're at in the lifecycle, and that you definitely have room to consider the feedback being offered.
Show HN: I vibe-coded an aircraft AR tracking app and wasted weeks on AI bugs
by auspiv | 2025-12-19 15:44:22+00:00
Built an app entirely with Claude/AI assistance – backend (Django + C#), iOS frontend, server deployment, CI/CD pipeline, the works. Hosted on a single VPS. Postgres on VPS, Redis on VPS, Django on VPS, etc. The VPS is a VM I have in a proxmox server I have sitting in a datacenter (Dell R630, 1x Xeon 2697v4, 128GB memory, 6x 960GB Intel D3-S4610 with Optane SLOG, etc). No AWS/GCP/Vercel, etc. Incremental cost to me = $0/month. I skipped using CloudFlare tunnels for this - hoping I don't regret that.

What it does: Point your phone at the sky, see real-time aircraft info overlaid on your camera. ADS-B data from community feeders, WebSocket streaming, kinematic prediction to smooth positions between updates. No ARKit – just AVFoundation camera + CoreLocation/CoreMotion + math. SwiftUI overlays positioned via GPS/heading projection.

The humbling part: Spent 2 months debugging "FOV calibration issues." Built an 800-line calibration UI, a Flask debug server, Jupyter notebooks for pipeline analysis, extensive logging infrastructure. Hung a literal picture on the wall with a black rectangle of specific size to "calibrate" the FOV reported by my phone. The AI helped me build all of it beautifully.

The actual bug? A UI scale factor on the overlay boxes. Not FOV math. Not coordinate projection. Just scaleEffect() making things the wrong size. Commit message when I found it: "scale may have been fucking me over for a long time for 'fov issues'". Guess where the scaleEffect() function was introduced? That's right - AI generated. I asked it at one point something along the lines of "ok when you draw the boxes around the aircraft, make them smaller when the aircraft is farther away".

I went through 2-3 major model releases that I tested on this "hey I've been fighting a FOV bug for a while - can you please take a look and let me know if any issues jump out". Gemini 3 Pro, Opus 4.5, none of them found the "bug".

Takeaways from vibe-coding a full product:

- AI is incredible at building things fast – entire features in minutes. The entire UI, website, logo, etc, all AI. Claude Opus 4.5 kind of sucks at UI. Gemini 3 cleaned all that up.

- AI will also confidently help you debug the wrong thing for weeks

- Still need to know when to step back and question your assumptions

- Deleted 2,700 lines of debug infrastructure once I found the real bug

- Low performance? Just tell AI to rewrite it in a more performance language (load tested the process with 1000 connections - with Python/Django, tons of drops and latency spikes to 5000ms. Switched to c# and now it'll do 1000 and keep latency under 300ms)

Release process: painless, except for the test RevenueCat SDK key causing instacrash. Didn't test release locally. Approved in 6 minutes 2nd submission.

Question: what are people using to get super accurate heading out of Apple devices? The heading estimated error never drops below 10°. It's about 50/50 on being spot on vs not that close for the projections.

App link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skyspottr/id6756084687
by tsazan | 2025-12-19 15:44:23+00:00
JSON is great for code. It is heavy and deeply nested for Agents. The constraint is the context window. Brackets, quotes, and nesting are token tax. YAML is brittle. Whitespace errors break parsers. We chose the robots.txt model. It is dense and resilient. It is not a unicorn. It is a workhorse.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-12-19 15:44:37+00:00
Some of us actually enjoy writing code, and wish to preserve the skill, so we have no motivation to offload the task to an LLM. Do LLM coding evangelists also badger illustrators, asking why they don't just embrace machine learning image generation? Do they tell people they shouldn't have human friends because chatbots exist? Do they insist that musicians slough off their creativity like a molting snake, and just let a computer generate their songs?

There is also a big, uncomfortable truth regarding "AI" coding tools: They are trained on open-source code, yet they ignore the licenses attached to that code. If it's unethical for me to copy-and-paste MIT licensed code without including the license text, then it's unethical to let an LLM do it on my behalf.

LLMs are paving the way to a dystopia where there's no motivation for humans to create, and that world sounds miserable.
by jdpedrie | 2025-12-19 15:44:44+00:00
Those sort of flaky or non-deterministic steps are written as activities, not as part of the deterministic workflow. The orchestrator will retry the non-deterministic activity until it gets a usable output (expected error, success), and record the activity output. If the workflow replays (i.e. worker crash), that recorded output of the activity will be returned instead of executing the activity again.
by SamPatt | 2025-12-19 15:44:56+00:00
The models are good enough now that anyone who says AI doesn't work is either not acting in good faith or is staggeringly bad at learning a new skill.

It's not hard to spend a few hours testing out models / platforms and learning how to use them. I would argue this has been true for a long time, but it's so obviously true now that I think most of those people are not acting in good faith.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-19 15:45:08+00:00
The problem, especially at Intel, but also at AMD, is that they sell very different CPUs under approximately identical names.

In a very distant past, AMD was publishing what the CPUID instruction will return for each CPU model that they were selling. Now this is no longer true, so you have to either buy a CPU to discover what it really is, or to hope that a charitable soul who has bought such a CPU will publish on the Internet the result.

Without having access to the CPUID information, the next best is to find on the Intel Ark site, whether the CPU model you see listed by some shop is described for instance as belonging to 'Products formerly Arrow Lake S", as that will at least identify the product microarchitecture.

This is still not foolproof, because the products listed as "formerly ..." may still be packaged in several variants and they may have various features disabled during production, so you can still have surprises when you test them for the first time.
by ctrlmeta | 2025-12-19 15:45:58+00:00
> How much of this navel-gazing junk do we need? See also, from the same author:

Seriously! I'll admit the first post was mighty fun. But now this is turning into an AI-spam-fest! I objected in the 2nd thread but got downvoted. Apparently the community here thinks this kind of low effort Reddit-style humor is now on-topic for this place!

Not to mention the systematic downvoting of every comment that is critical of these spam posts!