MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnFen | 2025-12-29 14:33:43+00:00
This. I'm not sure why this is even a question.

Just because I'm in a pedantic mood, you can technically have very strong encryption using XOR, but it's not at all practical because you need to XOR your data with a truly random series of values that is as long as the data itself. If that series isn't actually and truly random, then the scheme becomes breakable. That random series of values is both the encryption and decryption key. It's equivalent to using a one-time pad, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings.

It's not usually practical because you have to store or transmit that key in some way, and if that way isn't itself totally secure then your scheme is not secure. If you can store or transmit that key securely, then you can also (in the vast majority of cases) store or transmit the data you want to encrypt securely, so you haven't gained anything.

This is a real case of "just use a crypto library and be done with it."
by bborud | 2025-12-29 14:33:50+00:00
Your brain does a far more impressive job of fooling you into believing that the image you see of your surroundings in your brain is actually what your sensory apparatus is seeing. It very much isn’t. Just the mechanism to cope with your eye movement without making you woozy is, by itself, a marvel.

Our brains are far more impressive than what amounts to fairly trivial signal processing done on digital images.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-29 14:34:07+00:00
The DB is and always was fully owned by the government, this is not the usual case of "dumbass executives mess things up".

Unfortunately, the DB first got hit by Thatcherite neoliberalism in the early 90s that led to "unprofitable" things like switches, railyards or lesser-used routes to be torn down and the real estate sold off (to prepare for a privatization that THANK GOD never happened), and then we got 16 years of Conservative traffic/infrastructure ministers whose job priority was to funnel money to Bavarian highways [1], not towards railways.

Unfortunately, while the left wing loves to prune its ranks in purity tests (partially because its voters demand accountability), the Conservatives have a solid "better dead than red" voter base.

[1] https://www.merkur.de/politik/csu-parteitag-bayern-markus-so...
by citrin_ru | 2025-12-29 14:34:14+00:00
> Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use

Browsing web requires more and more RAM each year but I don't think browsers are the main reason - sites use more and more JS code. With a hard cap many sites will stop working. Software bloat is a natural tendency, the path of least resistance. Trimming weigh requires a significant effort and in case of web - a coordinated effort. I don't believe it could happen unless Google (having a browser with >60% market share) will force this but Google own sites are among worst offenders in term of hardware requirements.
by bsingerzero | 2025-12-29 14:34:27+00:00
Overall I thought the article was interesting!

I did find it funny that multiple times it cited the medical resident match making algorithm as a success. Anyone who has gone through this process knows how horrible of a system it is. You essentially open an envelop that tells your job and location for the next 3-6 years. Hospitals + government love the system because they can artificially reduce resident wages, applicants cannot negotiate job offers.
by MindSpunk | 2025-12-29 14:34:55+00:00
If I'm interpreting that correctly they're using an IL2CPP compilation system that hooks into Roslyn and not using .NET Core's AOT technology. It's possible to ship C# on consoles, obviously, because Unity already does it with their own IL2CPP backend that's stuck on the old .NET versions. My point is that CoreCLR can't be used because of console certification requirements. I certainly wasn't commenting on C# as language for games. I think C# is, as of late, becoming a very powerful language for games with all the Span and similar tools to minimize GC pressure.
by apexalpha | 2025-12-29 14:35:07+00:00
> They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders,

This is not true at all.

The shareholders set the targets and since the shareholder is the government they can set any target they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets etc..

If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do so.
by techtalksweekly | 2025-12-29 14:35:14+00:00
https://techtalksweekly.io/

I'm building a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[1].

I originally built it for myself because I was subscribed to too many conference channels on YouTube and things started getting messy, so I wrote a script to fetch the new talks automatically and send myself an email once a week. Eventually, I turned it into a newsletter.

I currently have over 7,600 subscribers with email open rate consistently between 32%-35%, although I plan to trim the list soon to get into the 40-50% range.

[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly
by nindalf | 2025-12-29 14:35:23+00:00
This is such a coincidence. I had the same idea a few days ago and also vibe coded a library using Claude. https://nindalf.com/books. The original version of this was meant to encourage me to read more, and I'm pleased to say it succeeded. I hit my goal for the year after a couple of lean years. I also like looking at my highlights and notes and this UI makes it easier to read them.

My experience with Claude was mostly very good. Certainly the UI is far better than what I'd come up with myself. The backend is close to what I'd write myself. When I'm unhappy I'm able to explain the shortcomings and it's able to mostly fix itself. This sort of small-scale, self-contained project was made possible thanks to Claude.

Other times it just couldn't. The validation for the start and end dates it decided was z.string().or(z.date()).optional().transform((val) => (val ? new Date(val) : undefined)). It looked way too complex. I asked if it could be simplified, Claude said no. I suggested z.date().optional(). Claude patiently explained this was impossible. I tried it anyway, it worked. Claude said "you're absolutely right!". But this behaviour was the exception rather than the rule.
by jtakahashi64 | 2025-12-29 14:35:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I think Spec-Driven Development is a way to work with AI agents like Claude Code, but the workflow still feels a bit unrefined.

Existing tools are often too complex.

So I built a minimal and helpful tool.
It can generate spec and code from an SSOT, inspired by DB migration tools.

The process is straightforward:

1. Edit the Spec (Single Source of Truth)
2. Generate a migration file
3. Run it to update your code

I'd love to hear your feedback.

What do you think of this approach?
by fluoridation | 2025-12-29 14:35:55+00:00
The whole point of the optimizer is that it can detect inefficiencies by treating every statement as some combination of simple, fundamental operations. The compiler is not seeing "call memset() on pointer to heap", it's seeing "write of variable size" just before "deallocation". For some, optimizing that will be a problem, for others, not optimizing it will leave performance on the table.

There are still ways to obtain the desired behavior. Just put a call to a DLL or SO that implements what you need. The compiler cannot inspect the behavior of functions across module boundaries, so it cannot tell whether removing the call preserves semantics or not (for example, it could be that the external function sends the contents of the buffer to a file), so it will not remove it.
by eastoeast | 2025-12-29 14:36:02+00:00
Sweet, looking now to get some recommendations! I'm actually surprised more people don't have my two favorites overlapped more often (Mistborn and Name of the Wind)!

Question: when you don't search a book, it shows "Loved by X people", when you do, it shows "Book twins". I'd be really interested in seeing most frequently loved books, from people that like the book/books I'm searching. It would make it obvious I'm missing something!
by objcts | 2025-12-29 14:36:07+00:00
Built "Kirby Sky Jumpers" with my two kids just yesterday. It's a 2 player jumping game where you collect stars and bounce off clouds to rack up the highest score before time runs out.

Players manage an energy bar to jump, land on clouds for super bounces, and you can throw bombs at each other to steal points and cause chaos. Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, no dependencies, ~1000 lines in a single file.

The kids designed the characters (Kirby and Kee Kee) and we had a blast playtesting together... tweaking cloud bounce physics, adding a tie screen for when scores match, bumping bombs from 3 to 5. Kid-driven game design is so much fun.

Try it here: https://kirby-sky-jumpers.mfelixstudio.workers.dev

Controls: WASD + L-Shift (P1) / Arrows + R-Shift (P2)

Please give us some feedback on how to improve!
by jcranmer | 2025-12-29 14:36:34+00:00
The concept of poison here is not the same as C's definition of UB. LLVM has at least 3 different concepts that all vaguely count as UB (and probably closer to a half dozen when it gets fully formalized).

In C, UB is instant-UB--the moment you execute an operation that is UB, your program is undefined. LLVM also has instant-UB (I mean, any language that lets you dereference an arbitrary integer cast to a pointer has to have instant-UB). But poison isn't instant-UB--your program is perfectly safe to execute an operation that produces poison. It's only if a poison value reaches certain operations--essentially any control-flow decision point, or as an input to any operation that may cause instant-UB--that it causes UB in the C sense.

(This also means that operations that could trap--like x / 0--aren't modeled as poison in LLVM, but as instant-UB. It's safe to speculate an operation that causes poison, like x +nsw y, but it's not safe to speculate an operation that causes instant-UB, like x / y).
by xxmarkuski | 2025-12-29 14:36:40+00:00
When you have a simple journey and no interruptions DB in long distance is pretty good, not excellent but solid. But with more complicated things traveling with DB is not well thought out and they don't see what could be possible. Changing a platform should show you in-station navigation door to door. DB navigator should not show you impossible journeys, it presents you with train switches where the second train already left once you arrive or displays the stop is canceled entirely.
DB Navigator and bahn.de have a monopoly over german train routing and ticketing, but are not subject to anti-trust regulation enough or run by the government directly (dataquality issues, etc).
DB is very much against grassroots movements trying to improve customer experience and quality, like community built ticket stores or wallet and calendar integration.
I also think the ministry of transportation and politicians are at fault for not getting DB to step up their game. Trying to privatize DB, rigid regulations for how DB has to run and not enough attention to rail as a whole for example. I would consider the "ampel" (21-24) to be one of the better ones. After some reforms, the government is still not in a position to control the monopolist enough.
by andruby | 2025-12-29 14:36:51+00:00
Constrict the supply, and price goes up. It works like textbook economics.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting "et tu" here.

Or maybe you meant "free markets" instead. Modern RAM production requires enormous R&D expenses, and thus has huge moat, which means the oligopoly is pretty safe (at least in the short to medium term) from new entrants. They "just" need to keep each other in check because there will be an incentive to increase production by each individual participant.

I do like the "OMEC" name as a paralel for OPEC.
by lossyalgo | 2025-12-29 14:36:56+00:00
The biggest problem IMO is that they never finish new features. They start the work on implementing new tech/assets/plugins, then abandon them halfway through just as they are becoming useful for prod. There are tons of would-be-amazing tools but they are all stuck at "0.x-preview" versions, and eventually after 5-10 years either stop working completely or are over-shadowed by newer, shinier assets, which often re-invent the wheel and/or do things worse than the previous attempt. I stopped trying out new tech until its 1.0 (or preferably later, 2.0+ is safer) because I'm afraid to be bitten (again) becoming dependent on abandoned plugins and have to at some point update to something else. It's a lose-lose-lose proposition: Unity throws away time and money re-inventing plugins, we throw away time and money having to port to functioning tools, customers lose time because they get to discover bugs caused by outdated plugins/assets that cause weird errors that are hard to track down.
by srean | 2025-12-29 14:36:58+00:00
Bear with me for a possibly strange question, directed more towards chemists. Are their crystalline compounds with the formula X_2YZ where X,Y,Z are three elements of roughly same atomic size.

What I am curious if are the different symmetrical arrangements chosen by such crystals and how they compare with Bayer pattern. The analogy being X becomes a site for green and the other two for red and blue.
by pjerem | 2025-12-29 14:36:59+00:00
Actually I’m a taking the train everyday to go to work and I have barely any complaint with the SNCF.

Most of the time they do what they can to deal with issues.

I don’t feel like there are too much issues it’s just they are extremely bad at communicating issues when they happen.

Sometimes the train is not there when it should but on the screen it just disappears as if it passed. Most of the time it’s just 2-5 minutes late but you can’t know. Maybe it’s just late. Maybe the traffic is stopped. Who knows.

I just dont understand how they don’t have people whose job is just writing messages for the information screens.

What is worse is that in my region, they have a pretty decent community managers for live information but they only post information in twitter because why not. So they already have the people doing this work but those people are saying different things than what the screen shows. Just let them write things on the screens :D
by nothrabannosir | 2025-12-29 14:37:39+00:00
I agree with you, but:

> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

- Paul Graham, 2008

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-29 14:37:49+00:00
I used Qt back in the day, pre-Nokia, when it was just QtWidgets for cross-platform (Linux/Windows/Mac) desktop apps. I just wanted a decent C++ library/API to create the GUI for a Linux app (real-time spectrogram). It was a great for this, although I was never a fan of MOC - I wish they had committed to a pure/native C++ design.

For me Qt lost it's way when Trolltech was acquired by Nokia, and the focus became mobile rather than desktop, with different UI requirements resulting in QML/QtQuick being added.

Maybe the earlier addition of QtScript (or even MOC!) was a foreshadowing of what was to come, but any any case what had been a great cross-platform desktop UI toolkit, and the primary C++ one for Linux (with GTK being more C focused) ended up orphaning it's desktop roots to focus on mobile instead, having become a sprawling mish-mash of languages, GUI component technologies and scripting.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-29 14:37:50+00:00
Congratulations, you're the new head of the Department of War. It's Day 1 in your new role.

An admiral walks in and sits down and tells you that he'd like some money to research some unidentified aircraft that are buzzing US Navy pilots. Shaped like "tic tacs", that seem to defy physical laws - they accelerate incredibly fast and seem to be able to move between air and water without damaging their structure, even at high-speed. They've been caught on camera multiple times, and pilots don't know what to make of them.

You ask what is this "mumbo jumbo", and whether he is "serious". He points out to you that if these aircraft are Russian or Chinese in origin, given there is no defence against them, they pose a major threat to national security and your refusal to take them seriously will not bode well for you in the annals of time if they do turn out to be a threat.

You agree to funding a small program to research further.

Then an Army General walks in. He wants $2m for a program to research "remote viewing" and "psychokinesis". You sit in awe as he explains: multiple independent laboratories have been able to conduct experiments that show Extra-Sensory Perception, Remote Viewing and Psychokinesis may be real despite not being explained by any current physical model. There is intelligence to suggest that Chinese and Russian militaries are investing in these techniques and the US military is not able to defend against them if they're real and exploited by adversaries, or for the USA to exploit them either, because they have no understanding of them.

You hand wave it away as "mumbo jumbo" and state this is not the work of "serious people". You demand a physical model to explain it before you invest.

You are reminded that there is no single physical model that explains the entirety of how an aircraft wing works, or how anaesthetics work, and that the only way such models are created is through scientific investigation. If after spending the $2m they're able to show such claims are baseless, that is a null result that has value in that it shows the Russians and Chinese are also not a threat to US National Security.

You are reminded that such techniques may pose a major threat to national security and your refusal to take them seriously will not bode well for you in the annals of time if they do turn out to be a threat.

You agree to funding a small program to research further.

And on it goes. It's Occam's razor - if you commit to the scientific method, you have to commit to it. If you are concerned there is a science and technology that others have and you don't, you need to figure out if there is value in you being able to obtain that science or technology, even if it sounds like "mumbo jumbo" today.

These weren't idiots, they weren't corrupt, they were asking for tiny slithers of money to figure out if Western Civilisation was about to collapse into the hands of a few people who asked more questions.
by tipsysquid | 2025-12-29 14:38:09+00:00
The most maddening part about this experience is the helplessness. Its inconvenient, sure. Ive been late because of traffic, etc. Being carried along well beyond my will without a breakglass: Fine, I'll just walk! option makes my skin crawl.

Events like this seem to only be explained by accountability sink[0]. Naming it gives me some brief sense of sanity.

I appreciate that there is a safety concern; where's the humanity in large systems, especially as we trend towards more automation?

[0] https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
by creaghpatr | 2025-12-29 14:38:17+00:00
I loved this. Having recently transitioned from running ultramarathons to trying to break 100 on the course, I figured I already had the discipline to brute force effort my way by hitting balls 4-5 days per week. It wasn't until I worked with a coach and rebuilt my swing from scratch that I began to see any improvement and I actually got worse in the beginning for weeks.

One thing the two sports have in common is that good decision-making has much more leverage than in short distance sports like swimming and shorter road races (and presumably rowing, I wouldn't know). Most of my score improvement in golf so far has been due to making better shot decisions on the course rather than improved shot execution. Feels like a life metaphor in there somewhere but im sensitive about becoming one of those ppl who compare everything in life to golf.
Show HN: Zs3 – S3 server in ~1K lines of Zig, 250KB binary, zero dependencies
by lulzx | 2025-12-29 14:38:56+00:00
Most S3 usage is PUT, GET, DELETE, LIST with basic auth. This does exactly that.

SigV4 auth, multipart uploads, range requests. Storage is just files on disk.

No versioning, no ACLs, no encryption. Use MinIO or AWS if you need those.
by only-one1701 | 2025-12-29 14:39:09+00:00
I remember reading something when I was studying for AWS certs (might’ve been from AWS itself): the goal of the certifying bodies is to make as much money as possible. For this to happen, the exam can’t be so hard that nobody takes it, but it can’t be so easy that everyone takes it and it loses its value.

Organizations have been coasting on their pre-Covid reputations for a while. Now it’s time for them to adjust the slider the other way.
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-29 14:39:54+00:00
That's not what I imply. I'm saying that it eases the creation of new taxes, which are ever-increasing in the EU due to the social welfare costs that increase with immigration and aging populations.

Or new compliance obligations, such as recently the new need to provide a source of fund if you buy a watch worth more than 10k€. The watch seller has to then pay a specialized company to analyze it, the customer loses time on trying to get the documents, you leak private data to unknown parties and compliance agents will know everything about you. So much for the "privacy".
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-29 14:39:55+00:00
The general reason is, the rule exists for a reason, and the "low worker" does not understand the bigger picture, so you should follow it blindly before doing something harmful you can't foresee. It's not always working well, but to be fair, also not always bad. Knowing how much you can stretch the rules can be an art which takes a long time to acquire.
by phatfish | 2025-12-29 14:40:12+00:00
The "the UK is a police state" meme is something amplified by the US right wing (it's always people from the US going nuts about it on HN, or those that consume too much American media). Like you say, it's dumb that the police are wasting their time moderating Twitter, but if someone (or a group) was verbally abusing another person enough in real life they would be arrested.

The law should be changed to somehow accommodate assholes on social media abusing people. Probably by forcing the social media platforms to moderate their shit. What little moderation there was, was all thrown out when the Trump second term started. Either to curry favour (Zuckerberg, probably) or just to create chaos for governments (Elon).

There is an explicit strategy from the US right wing to undermine centre ground politics in Europe. This comes directly from the Whitehouse via Vance and Trump.
by grishka | 2025-12-29 14:40:17+00:00
As a Russian, this is such a bonkers idea to me. I only took a Deutsche Bahn train once so far. It got delayed 20 minutes. When I complained about it on social media, I was told something like "what do you mean, it arrived and took you where you wanted to go".

Russian trains only get delayed if there's something seriously wrong. Like an accident or an act of sabotage because of the war. A month or so ago, a Sapsan train from St Petersburg to Moscow broke down en route. People had to wait for hours to get out. It made big news. As far as I can tell, this is a weekly occurrence in Germany.
by the_real_cher | 2025-12-29 14:40:18+00:00
> understanding large areas of business operation that you don't already know

Library card, google search, LLM, Annas archive, not even joking. I've seen the curriculum, its the kind of stuff you read a book about on a weekend.

> not particularly useful for networking, since the people you meet are at your own level.

I think you may have missed the point of the MBA.