MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevenhuang | 2025-12-18 08:34:44+00:00
As expected the LLM does understand what you're trying to say. A rational actor would use this opportunity to update their priors but something tells me you're not a rational actor. Pity.

This was on chatgpt, tell free to try for yourself, since you probably think it's fake.

Prompt:

Do you understand what user 2 is trying to say in below context?

User1: No one said you cannot run LLMs with the same task more than once

User2: no one said you can't turn on the radio and start listening to static

User2: Ask the LLM if it understands what I'm trying to say

Response:

Yes. User 2 is making an analogy, not a literal rebuttal.

What they’re trying to say is roughly this:

> Just because something is allowed or possible doesn’t mean it’s meaningful or useful.

More specifically:

User1’s claim: “You can run an LLM on the same task more than once.” → This frames repeatability as neutral or acceptable.

User2’s analogy: “You can turn on the radio and listen to static.” → Yes, it’s allowed — but it’s noise, not signal.

So User 2 is implying that:

Re-running an LLM on the same task (especially without controlling randomness, evaluation criteria, or epistemic grounding) may just produce stochastic variation rather than new information.

Treating multiple runs as meaningful evidence can be like mistaking static for content.

In epistemic terms, they’re criticizing procedural permissibility being confused with epistemic value. The analogy suggests:

Repetition ≠ insight

Output ≠ signal

Variance ≠ understanding

...
by d--b | 2025-12-18 08:35:27+00:00
Ok. So you'd like to promote: https://www.legitcontrol.com/ (at least you'll get your link in one comment here, no need to thank me ;-))

A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)

I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.

What you could have done is email hn@ycombinator.com telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.

Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".

Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...

That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.
by jltsiren | 2025-12-18 08:35:34+00:00
By "without preconceptions", I mean that your initial review should not be influenced by anyone else's opinions. In CS, conference management software often makes this explicit by requiring you to upload your review before you can see other reviews. (You can of course revise your review afterwards.)

You are also supposed to review the paper and not just check it for correctness. If the presentation is unclear, or if earlier sections mislead the reader before later sections clarify the situation, you are supposed to point that out. But if you have seen an AI summary of the paper before reading it, you can no longer do that part. (And if a summary helps to interpret the paper correctly, that summary should be a part of the paper.)

If you don't have sufficient expertise to review every aspect of the paper, you can always point that out in the review. Reading papers in unfamiliar fields is risky, because it's easy to misinterpret them. Each field has its own way of thinking that can only be learned by exposure. If you are not familiar with the way of thinking, you can read the words but fail to understand the message. If you work in a multidisciplinary field (such as bioinformatics), you often get daily reminders of that.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-12-18 08:36:17+00:00
Try to dig what a thing actually is, not what people say it is. Write down your current understanding with a date, so you can see years later how wrong or right you were. True learning is ugly route. Refine your own definition/understanding to be real-world bullet-proof. You need to be less-wrong over time. Use your bullet-proof learnings to build something, and don't let all the faux renduntant new ideas or manipulative generated comments destroy it.

Try to explode different things, so you can see clear boundaries of each separate thing and to minimize redundancy.

Try to map the depencency graph of a thing. Every higher level thing is a make file / spreadsheet cell DAG.
by ZuoCen_Liu | 2025-12-18 08:38:08+00:00
Apple’s Japanese Compliance Strategy: Is “Safety First” Strangling Independent Educational Apps? Apple just announced sweeping changes in Japan to comply with the Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA). While the focus is on alternative marketplaces and third-party payments, the fine print regarding "Younger Users" is concerning. Under the new rules: Under 13: Apps cannot link to websites for transactions at all. Under 18: Mandatory "Parental Gates" for any non-IAP transactions. Kids Category: Zero links to external purchase methods, period. While framed as protection against scams, this creates a massive friction taxspecifically for the education sector. Most innovative educational tools are built by small teams who can't survive on Apple's 30% (or 15%) cut but also can't afford the drop-off caused by these new "security" friction points. My concern is that this "one-size-fits-all" protection will: Deter independent developers from building for the Japanese student market. Force a consolidated market where only giant publishers with massive marketing budgets can navigate the parental friction. Create a "Compliance Moat" where Apple uses "safety" as a justifiable way to make third-party payments so annoying that parents and devs just give up. Is there a way to protect children without effectively banning the economical bypass that these new laws were supposed to enable? Or is Japan’s MSCA actually a net-loss for the educational software ecosystem?
Show HN: Groceed – The shopping list that adapts to your life
by kroniapp | 2025-12-18 08:38:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I started working on Groceed after Google shut down a shopping list tool I had relied on for years. It wasn't perfect, but it solved a very real problem for me: having a simple, shared list that didn't get in the way.

When it disappeared, I tried replacing it. Most apps I found felt wrong in opposite ways: either they were just plain bullet lists, or they tried to turn grocery shopping into a full-blown system with reminders, recipes, suggestions, and settings I never asked for.

The main frustration was repetition. Every week I was typing the same items again, even though my shopping habits barely change.

Groceed is my attempt to fix that. It's a shared shopping list where past items are first-class citizens. You can search through things you've already bought and quickly bring them back into the current list. Over time, the list starts to reflect how you actually shop, without any explicit setup or planning.

I've tried to keep the scope intentionally narrow. Groceed only does shopping lists, but it does them with the assumption that shopping is a recurring habit, not a one-off task. The app is designed to be quick to open, quick to edit, and easy to share with other people.

You can try it at https://groceed.app

A minimal login is required (magic link or Google), mainly because lists are shared and synced.

Technically, it's built with SvelteKit and runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers, using D1 as the database.

This is my first serious Show HN post. I'm mostly looking for feedback on:

- whether this approach actually makes lists more useful over time

- what would make you keep using (or abandon) a shopping list app

- things that feel overkill or, on the contrary, clearly missing

Happy to answer questions or go deeper into the implementation if that's useful.

Andrea
by jackfranklyn | 2025-12-18 08:39:27+00:00
Honestly, by being thrown into fires and surviving them. A few things that accelerated it:

1. Building mental models of the entire stack - when you understand how data flows from request to database and back, you can narrow down "where" faster than "what"

2. Getting comfortable reading logs before reaching for the debugger. Production debugging is 80% log archaeology

3. Keeping a personal incident journal. After each outage I'd write what I assumed, what was actually wrong, and what evidence I missed. You start recognizing your own blind spots

4. Pair debugging with more senior engineers when possible. Watching how someone else navigates the same chaos teaches patterns you'd never discover alone

The uncomfortable truth is there's no shortcut - you have to accumulate scar tissue from actual incidents. But deliberate reflection on each one compounds faster than just moving on.
by sofixa | 2025-12-18 08:41:31+00:00
Not who you asked, but personally I'm using an Onyx Boox Palma, which is a phone-sized Android device with an e-ink screen. I have Readwise's Reader on it, which doubles as "read later" and RSS feed reader, and works offline. Pretty happy with the workflow overall - I use it extensively when travelling and having time to waste (e.g. waiting at an airport or while on the plane/train).

Note about Onyx, they're kind of violating GPL by refusing to publish source code. Also, their Android devices are a bit special and you have to jump through a couple of small hoops at set up to be able to use Google Play (nothing special or complicated).
by emil-lp | 2025-12-18 08:42:08+00:00
So, if these posts come at the same time each year, and IDs are consecutive, then

year,id 2025,46307973 2024,42373343 2023,38467691 2022,34190421 2021,29667095 2020,24947167 2019,20899863 2018,17790306 2017,15148804

And the delta is

year,delta 2025,3.9M 2024,3.9M 2023,4.2M 2022,4.5M 2021,4.7M 2020,4.0M 2019,3.1M 2018,2.6M

Has HN peaked?
by retsibsi | 2025-12-18 08:42:12+00:00
> the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score

Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...

> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.
by iceboy | 2025-12-18 08:42:21+00:00
Wanted to teach my little brother about logic gates. Saw that for him to truly grasp the idea of it, he needed some "hands on" experience to develop the intuition about it. I decided to develop a PCB board that basically turns-on-off the lights based on the inputs. He was like "cool" and kind of threw it in the corner. Rather than just leave it, I decided to further develop it and make it as a learning tool for myself as well(web design, marketing, BOM optimization etc).

Then I started to get feedback on the initial project which was quite helpful(universities, EEVBlog and colleagues) and based on that made a "Logic Trainer" which is like very advanced version of the initial idea. It has so many features and it kind of has taken off in a sense that 2 universities want to buy it for themselves. Also I didn't expect it but most people who buy it do it for their kids. IMHO its way too complicated for kids, but practice and feedback that I have gotten shows that it really isn't. I haven't made any profits from the project yet (due to high development cost) but hopefully in the future it help to pay my rent :).

Check out the website at https://logicgat.es
by Animats | 2025-12-18 08:43:10+00:00
Then on top of that there's the slop that comes from the university's PR department, where they turn "New possibly-interesting lab result in surface chemistry" into "Trillion dollar battery technology launched".

(Now that I think about it, I haven't seen much battery hype lately. The battery hype people may have pivoted to AI. Lots of stuff is going on in batteries, but mostly by billion-dollar companies in China quietly building plants and mostly shutting up about what's going on inside.)
by Oras | 2025-12-18 08:43:31+00:00
> A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.

This is quite common especially now when the market is bad.

The pattern is a LinkedIn message with vague description (interesting role at a sector), no mention of rate, names or anything else.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-18 08:43:43+00:00
> How did we end up with this mess of disjoint chat systems each with their own userbase? Doesn't it indicate that this market desperately needs regulation?

Why do you assume that the regulation that would actually get passed by the actual government would result in effective chat interchange between different protocols, and not just entrench some existing platform while making it technically illegal for another organization to try to compete with them?

> Either you provide message interchange with any other message system operating in a specific country or you can't advertise or sell anything in this country (also app stores must country wide ban).

Would this make it technically illegal for me to use F-Droid to install an open-source implementation of a novel chat protocol that doesn't support interchange with existing chat platforms yet? Does this make it possible for me to force existing chat platforms to be suddenly illegal by releasing a novel open-source chat protocol without coordinating it with those platforms?

> Would email look the same if it was left to be invented by the corporations?

Probably not, but email is a heavily-flawed protocol, so I'm not sure that's a good thing. Also, although email was invented in the 1970s, making it one of the oldest internet protocols still used, it's been extended over the years, and I'm sure at least some of those extensions were developed by various for-profit companies (perhaps ones which no longer exist).
by jmsgwd | 2025-12-18 08:44:36+00:00
OK but you'd still be able to use the open source "password manager" to export the keys - which solves the issue lapcat raised in this thread - even if relying parties blocked it for authentication, which would be a separate issue.

Someone could develop a "passkey export tool" purely for the purpose of doing credential exchange then local export.

Or are you saying the credential exchange process itself could block providers?
by Hendrikto | 2025-12-18 08:46:25+00:00
The main reason to use Monero for stuff like this is their mining algo. They made big efforts and changed algorithms several times to make and keep it GPU and ASIC resistant.

If you used the server to mine Bitcoin, you would make approximately zero (0) profit, even if somebody else pays for the server.

But also yes, Monero has technically held up very well.
by crote | 2025-12-18 08:46:59+00:00
Obviously. If you use a language which inherently makes memory safety bugs in regular code impossible, all memory safety bugs will be contained to the "trust me, I know what I'm doing - no need to check this" bypass sections. Similarly, all drownings happen in the presence of water.

The important thing to remember is that in this context C code is one giant unsafe {} block, and you're more likely to drown in the sea than in a puddle.
by taffronaut | 2025-12-18 08:47:22+00:00
I worked at a company where managers would endlessly push this argument to open a job posting. Of course there was no budget to hire, but they would delude themselves that the perfect candidate was out there and they'd 'be able to make a case' for the budget with the stellar application in hand. Of course they had no idea what that actually entailed otherwise they would do it in advance. To HR's credit at that company their policy was never to advertise a post unless the budget was signed off. They would patiently explain this each time some deluded optimist showed up at their door. I can easily believe in companies where the rules are less explicit that the delusion would manifest as an endless procession of advertised postings that could never be actually hired because there is no money to fund them.
by whatsupdog | 2025-12-18 08:47:40+00:00
Honour evolved from the tendency to stay within a group. When you are in a group, your chances of survival increase. But in a group you also have to stand up for you comrades - leading to a feeling of honour. Women just end up with the winning team. It's much easier for a woman to ditch a losing group and join the winning one. That's why honour has not evolved in women as opposed to men.
by lazylizard | 2025-12-18 08:48:58+00:00
before (what? when? covid?) nvidia annual revenues were circa us$10b and amd was competing with it to make GPUs. after (what? when? covid?)..or now.. nvidia is a accelerator manufacturer with a small legacy GPU business and revenues are closer to us$200b. and amd is still no closer to competing with nvidia at making GPUs. intel started something in the mean time though. but everyone seems to be expecting them to try compete with nvidia at making accelerators. nobody is interested in GPUs anymore. accelerators seem to be the much bigger and more interesting market.
by elric | 2025-12-18 08:49:08+00:00
> Then a few years later, checked it out and there were thousands of courses, many clearly without as much thought or effort.

Thousands, and no decent way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Their filtering options suck. I'm also a bit disappointed that (most? all?) of their courses don't feature interactive exercises the way Khan Academy does. I mean I get they started out as basically a repository of recorded lectures, but i.e. a Linear Algebra course is pointless without practicing problems. A few overly simplistic multiple choice questions are the "best" I've seen on on Coursera.

Mean while their prices seem to go up every year.
by junon | 2025-12-18 08:50:15+00:00
It's a class of script. A language with a script that omits vowels is called a "(pure) abjad(ic)" language. Egyptian (arguably, I'm not a linguist) and Arabic are examples of "impure abjad" languages. Usually they have diacritics that hint at vowel sounds but are otherwise devoid of explicit vowel glyphs, so I'm not sure if Egyptian strictly fits that bill - maybe someone else does. Point is, it's perhaps a bit foreign to latin-language speakers but there's a whole class of languages that do this, or something similar.

There are a few purely abjadic languages, one that comes to mind I believe is Phonician.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-18 08:50:30+00:00
The article fails to explore that accomplishing more is orthogonal to working quickly. That distinction is the greatest difference between typical developers and top tier developers.

More still is that most developers fail to measure things and thus are incapable of distinguishing between faster work versus increased accomplishment. As a result many developers strive to accomplish tasks more frequently without ever recognizing that perhaps many of those efforts are completely unnecessary.
by lukan | 2025-12-18 08:50:34+00:00
"The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link"."

Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.

But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.
by sfn42 | 2025-12-18 08:50:38+00:00
There's a thing on YouTube these days where house inspectors basically shame builders. There's one guy who says "I can't tell you who the builder is" while walking past the builder's sign then proceeds to show how the house is completely fucked. Real sloppy work. Brick wall with no concrete so you can literally push it over with one hand. Tiles with voids underneath. Door and window frames cracked. Shower leaking water. Roof tiles broken. Roof vents loose, some times already blown away by the wind. Missing/sloppy insulation. Broken roof trusses.

Maybe the people who build houses should obsess a bit more over this shit.
by technusm1 | 2025-12-18 08:50:59+00:00
Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side:

I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections.

What it does

- Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files.

- Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or lightly edited (not just byte-for-byte duplicates).

- Native macOS integration with a Finder right-click scan.

Why I built it: My brother kept running out of space because of tons of photos, and every existing tool I tried either missed similar images or was slow and clunky - so I spent a couple of weekends building something that felt fast, accurate, and native.

Business side

- Free trial (no CC required).

- Paid tiers: ~$5.99/yr or ~$16.99 lifetime.

Got positive feedback and 100+ paying users shortly after launch. Been growing steadily ever since.

Link: https://maheepk.net/projects/dedupx/
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-18 08:51:11+00:00
> Did I miss a new C++ version released <2 days ago perhaps?

You certainly are missing something. C++26 was officially released 4 months ago, and support is slowly being rolled out to compilers and packages.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/26.html

If you somehow believe this kind of work is done in a couple of days, that's a good way to explain to the world how oblivious you are about the topic you are discussing.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-18 08:51:45+00:00
If you're looking for junior-ish python devs, I'd expect a good chunk of the better ones to have a python repl open and ready just as a matter of habit.

So for them, yes, it would clearly be faster to run the code than to work through it manually.

What you're doing here is selecting for candidates who are less comfortable with using the tools that they'd be expected to use every day in the role you're hiring for. It's likely to provide a negative signal.
by johnfn | 2025-12-18 08:52:10+00:00
Who reasonably believes that you can "play a game at 1 frame a minute" on Nano Banana? Isn't that a truly absurd claim, one stronger than "AGI has been achieved"? Is it really that unreasonable to ask my audience to think for half a second about what I might actually be claiming, given the literal interpretation of my words is absurd?

It feels like if I made a title saying "Make page loads feel instant" and everyone came in to say "actually no, in your post it took 0.2 seconds to load your page, and that's not instant."