MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-12 08:12:33+00:00
> disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now

Help me to clarify. Are you saying that when Joel posted (~20 years ago), disliking exceptions was considered crazy? And, now it is normal to dislike exceptions?

Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)
by thinkingemote | 2025-12-12 08:12:40+00:00
There's a kind of stereotype we have of people that we have not met. The truth is that those groups of people that we think are nasty people are often kind and nice and full of empathy and compassion.

There is a kind of psychological pain of cognitive dissonance when we discover this "Wait, but they are meant to be ${group_member} why are they so nice and kind to me?". But one can only experience (e.g. via travelling) and learn from these experiences, it's hard to convey to others that the world really is __much__ more kinder and nicer than our preconceptions demand it should be.

It's easier and less painful to box away people into nice and not nice groups. And it's often most common to label people similar to ourselves in the nice group. It's a narrow view of the world. Travelling opens up our preconceptions of people, the opposite of a narrow view: travelling broadens the mind.
by psychoslave | 2025-12-12 08:13:33+00:00
Good luck with reproducing and eating diesel like can be done with oxen and related species.

Humanity won't be able to tap into this highly compressed energy stock that was generated through processes taking literally geological scales time to bed achieved.

That is, technology is more about what alternative tradeoffs can we leverage on to organize differently with resources at hand.

Frugality can definitely be a possible way to shape the technologies we want to deploy. But it's not all possible technologies, just a subset.

Also better technology is not necessarily bringing societies to morale and well-being excellency. Improving technology for efficient genocides for example is going to bring human disaster as obvious outcome, even if it's done in a manner that is the most green, zero-carbon emissions and growing more forests delivered beyond expectations of the specifications.
by kevin061 | 2025-12-12 08:14:28+00:00
100% agreed. The AI "bubble" has been "going to pop" for the past year or more. Sounds a lot like Bitcoin, that was definitely popping any second now but actually did not really pop and you can still buy Bitcoin at prices higher than 6 or 12 months ago.

I need people to understand that if everyone thinks something is going to pop then it won't pop because people don't put money in risky assets. Assets only pop when everyone thinks they are absolutely safe and they can never go down in price, like what happened with the housing market.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-12 08:16:35+00:00
This is a good point. It would be better for me to say pure abstract base classes... that simulate interfaces in C++. That said, I can say from experience that Qt does more than multi-inheritance with pure abstract base classes. I think the QPainter class is mixed into a few places, and that class is fuckin' major -- it is responsible to paint every (cross platform) pixel in the whole framework.
by survirtual | 2025-12-12 08:17:30+00:00
A group of very mentally ill, insecure people with a lot of material wealth control the internet and media.

They get to write the narrative.

We can analyze just one small tool in the belt of narrative control: censoring. If you've been warned or banned on Reddit, you can imagine how this works. If you've said something against the mold of what they allow, you will get censored. With so many people commenting, some subset of people will always say what you want to see. You censor or derank opinions you don't want, and boost opinions you want. This is a defensible form of writing a narrative without actually having to artificially write anything.

Of course with AI, you can now just write anything and seed ideas.

Give such sick people the reigns, and you get a false reality has little connection to what's really happening.
by tomhow | 2025-12-12 08:17:37+00:00
"Ditching Google Analytics" doesn't really clear the bar for a Show HN :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

This project had several hours on the front page less than two months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684689

That's enough please. A project (or any URL/article/story etc) can only get front page exposure about once a year, unless there's a rebuild or major upgrade/pivot.
by vladms | 2025-12-12 08:17:47+00:00
Depends what your times scale is for "being built". 50 years ago the centralization and government control were much stronger. 20 years ago probably less.

"cannot do anything" is relative. Google did something about it (at least for the first 10-15 years) but I am sure that was not their primary intention nor they were sure it will work. So "we have no clue what will work to reduce it" is more appropriate.

Now I think everybody has tools to build stuff easier (you could not make a television or a newspaper 50 years ago). That is just an observation of possibility, not a guarantee of success.
by miki123211 | 2025-12-12 08:18:18+00:00
The simplest possible such method? Single-use age verification codes, generated and validated by the government, sold on physical scratch cards with in-store verification of ID, piggybacking on the infrastructure we already use for selling alcohol and cigarettes.

This would be far easier to implement for websites too. You'd just have a single, unauthenticated API endpoint which, given a code, tells you if the code is valid (and marks it as used). Integrating with such an API is about 1 day of work for a competent dev. Even open, non-profit platforms like Mastodon could easily implement such a mechanism.

Scratch cards wouldn't have to be the only way of getting such codes. THe vast majority of people could just generate them in their banking app or whatever (which would still be far more privacy friendly than the current ID verification mechanisms).
by jbkkd | 2025-12-12 08:18:57+00:00
A new model doesn't address the fundamental reliability issues with OpenAI's enterprise tier.

As an enterprise customer, the experience has been disappointing. The platform is unstable, support is slow to respond even when escalated to account managers, and the UI is painfully slow to use. There are also baffling feature gaps, like the lack of connectors for custom GPTs.

None of the major providers have a perfect enterprise solution yet, but given OpenAI's market position, the gap between expectations and delivery is widening.
by homeonthemtn | 2025-12-12 08:18:58+00:00
I think generate-apps-on-demand is a natural evolution of our interactions with technology and data. I am hesitant to celebrate it though. It can be useful for sure, but my gut tells me:

1. This is getting over engineered for the needs of the users

2. Conversations are more arduous then keywords and commands

3. Most people don't want customization because customization comes with the responsibility of decisions.
by dbcooper | 2025-12-12 08:19:25+00:00
A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high protein productivity.

The paper notes:

>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).

The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...
by simondotau | 2025-12-12 08:19:43+00:00
> Electric cars are supposed to be simple.

The only part an EV doesn't have is the engine and gearbox. Admittedly, these are pretty major components, but it's a technology mature enough to be extremely reliable if the manufacturer cares to make it so.

But what an EV has instead is a massive battery, charging electronics, a DC-DC converter keeping the 12V battery charged, and various electric motors and actuators for the air conditioning and coolant loops. These are significant more reliable than oily engines in lab environments, but the automotive environment tests the mettle of seemingly resilient components.
by robocat | 2025-12-12 08:20:01+00:00
I hadn't heard this story:

[Kurt Vonnegut is] working at home with his wife and he tells her he’s going to buy an envelope. A sensible woman, she suggests hey, why not buy a bunch, bring them home, then we’ll have envelopes. But he insists on his original plan because he’s “going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.”
by sfn42 | 2025-12-12 08:20:47+00:00
No, I wouldn't. I have been working for years on the same codebase, it's not that hard to keep it clean and simple. I just refactor/redesign when necessary instead of adding hacky workarounds on top of hacky workarounds for years until the codebase is nothing but a collection of workarounds.

And most importantly I just design it well from the start, it's not that hard to do. At least for me.

Of course we all make mistake, there's bugs in my code too. I have made choices I regret. But not on the level that I'm talking about.
by roenxi | 2025-12-12 08:21:20+00:00
No, what I'm saying is that around 6-8 out of 10 people are worse at empathy than a chatbot, in my estimation. And even if that gets knocked down a little I still don't see how people would argue that humans have some unassailable edge. Chatbots are an AGI system. Especially the omni-models.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-12 08:21:25+00:00
It might be because depending on one's sensitivity to various factors and how much work they put into discovering the domain, things might feel okay, and yet be the completely wrong choice.

For example, how to many people MongoDB felt like a really good option during its hype cycle before it became clear how there are workloads out there, where you will get burnt badly if you pick anything other than a traditional RDBMS with ACID.

Similarly, there are cases where people cargo cult really hard or just become opinionated over time - someone who has worked primarily in Java for 20 years will probably pick that for a wide variety of projects, though this preference might make them blind to the fact that others aren't as good with it on a given team and that they might not iterate fast enough to ship, when compared with, let's say Django or Ruby on Rails or even Laravel.

Feelings can be dangerous, informed choices will generally be better, though I guess with the way we use language, those two kinda blend together. If those feelings are based on good enough data and experience, then those might be pretty valuable too - someone who has been writing code for 20 years will probably be more accurate than someone who has been programming for 2 years, yet if someone has 10x2 years of experience (doing the same thing, not learning, not exploring), then it's a toss up, worse yet if people think that still means seniority.

I kinda get why someone might react to the word "feels" in seemingly deterministic development context, but my own reaction wouldn't be so strong and with certain people, I'd trust their feelings. At the same time I've seen plenty of people who write what they believe to be a good code that is a bit of a mess in my eyes.
Ask HN: How can I delete a Substack account in Australia?
by freefrog334433 | 2025-12-12 08:23:43+00:00
Hello,

Since 10th December, Substack introduced age verification to login to your account. Unfortunately this breaks the process of deleting an account (which requires you to login).

How can I delete my account without completing the video streamed mug shot age verification process?

support@substack.com autoreply directs you to substack.com/contact -- which also requires you to pass age verification first.

The substack AI chatbot is useless - no hope of reaching a human. The process for cancelling a deceased account doesn't work either as the chatbot can't look up my account using my email address (presumably it is frozen until age verification). Tor and VPNs don't work as my profile includes my location in Australia, and my email address is Australian.

Any ideas? I'm about to cancel my credit card as a last resort.
by mmsimanga | 2025-12-12 08:23:49+00:00
Not OP and not an expert but seems the aim is outrage which leads to more engagement and more advertising clicks, more followers and so on. Distorting news and social media from reality. I must say I too have found that people are nicer than what news portrays. I had the pleasure of being able to visit New York a few years and the people were just people and pleasant.
Show HN: VideoMaker AI – Turn text into professional videos in minutes
by thenextechtrade | 2025-12-12 08:24:35+00:00
Hey HN! I built VideoMaker AI to solve a problem I kept running into: creating professional-looking videos is time-consuming and requires expensive tools or skills.

VideoMaker AI lets you generate videos from text prompts in minutes. Just describe what you want, and the AI handles scripting, visuals, voiceover, and editing automatically.

Key features: - Text-to-video generation with AI - Automatic voiceover in multiple languages - Stock footage and image integration - Professional transitions and effects - Export in various formats and resolutions

I'd love to hear your feedback! What features would make this more useful for your projects?

Try it out: https://videomakerai.app
by rich_sasha | 2025-12-12 08:24:40+00:00
I would imagine (but haven't looked at it at all) that it's a byproduct of an append only data format. Then having a historical PoV is cheap - you simply disregard changes after a certain time.

Append-only has many other benefits, including zero contention between many readers and (single) writers. In the vanilla version, writers still contend though.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-12 08:24:56+00:00
A structural engineer will not sign off on bad designs no matter how much pressure the company applies to them. They will resign and/or report the incident to their local regulator as a safety issue.

We don't have that for developers. Maybe shame/offense is our next best bet. You are free to work for a terrible company accepting and/or encouraging terrible design decisions, but you need to take into account the potential of being laughed at for said decisions.
by brucehoult | 2025-12-12 08:26:28+00:00
The X280 is nothing special as a CPU core. It's basically the U74 with added 512 bit vector unit (but only 256 bit ALU), which makes it pretty much equivalent to SpacemiT's X60 core in their K1/M1 SoCs.

There is no X280 hardware available yet for general purchase. There is the HiFive Xara X280 announced in May, but that is believed to be available to SiFive licensees only. The SG2380 was going to have X280s as an NPU alongside P670 main cores, but that's been cancelled as a result of US sanctions on Sophgo. The PIC64-HSPC is a rad-hard chip using the X280 for NASA and other space customers, but will not be cheap -- the RAD750 PowerPC chip it is replacing reportedly costs $200,000 each.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-12 08:27:01+00:00
The first question is how would the insurance find out that you are doing lots of things requiring age verification? The only body that could tell them is the government, while a distrust in the government can be healthy, I think this is the least thing to worry about, the government typically knows already much more damaging things than how often you ask for age verification.

Moreover, that would only work if there are relatively few things that require age verification and it needs more than just being looked down upon, i.e. while alcohol buying might be interesting information for insurances, watching porn is likely less interesting. Even worse, if the insurance can't distinguish between porn and alcohol (which they can't by design even if the government would give them the information about how often you ask for age verification).
by vladms | 2025-12-12 08:27:02+00:00
I do not think free is attainable for everything due to thermodynamics constraints. Imagine "free energy". Everybody uses as much as they want, Earth heats up, things go bad (not far from what is actually happening!).

I would settle for simpler, attainable things. Equal opportunity for next generation. Quality education for everybody. Focus on merit not other characteristics. Personal freedom if it does not infringe on the freedom of people around you (ex: there can't be such thing as a "freedom to pollute").

In my view Internet as p2p worked pretty well to improve the previous status quo in many areas (not all). But there will never be a "stable solution", life and humans are dynamic. We do have some good and free stuff on the Internet today because of the groundwork laid out 30 years ago by the open source movement. Any plan started today will have noticeable effect in many years. So "we can't even make" sounds more of an excuse to not start, rather than an honest take.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-12 08:27:13+00:00
It may not be intentional, but it sounds like it's a fun, emergent gameplay mechanic. How much fun have people had with physics and silliness with Valve's Source engine, which was one of the earlier full physics games? Or going back further, "surf" maps in e.g. Unreal Tournament or CS that abused the movement physics to create a movement puzzle (which, arguably, led to some of the movement mechanics in Titanfall).
by eru | 2025-12-12 08:28:27+00:00
> [...] but I can only guess it’s because it completely breaks the context caching.

Yes, but you only re-do this every once in a while? It's a constant factor overhead. If you essentially feed the last few thousand tokens, you have no caching at all (and you are big enough that this window of 'last few thousand tokens' doesn't get you the whole conversation)?
by elAhmo | 2025-12-12 08:28:46+00:00
This feels like "could've been an email" type of thing, a very incremental update that just adds one more version. I bet there is literally no one in the world who wanted *one more version of GPT* in the list of available models from OpenAI.

"All models" section on https://platform.openai.com/docs/models is quite ridiculous.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-12 08:29:22+00:00
Of course.

And I've parked in the lot of shame at a Ford plant, as an outsider, in my GMC work truck -- way over there.

It wasn't so bad. A bit of a hike to go back and get a tool or something, but it was at least paved...unlike the non-union lot I'm familiar with at a P&G facility, which is a gravel lot that takes crossing a busy road to get to, lacks the active security and visibility from the plant that the union lot has, and which is full of tall weeds. At P&G, I half-expect to come back and find my tires slashed.

Anyway, it wasn't barren over there in the not-Ford lot, but it wasn't nearly so populous as the Ford lot was. The Ford-only lot is bigger, and always relatively packed.

It was very clear to me that the lots (all of the lots, in aggregate) were mostly full of Fords.

To bring this all back 'round: It is clear to me that Ford employees broadly (>50%) drive Fords to work at that plant.

---

It isn't clear to me at all that Google Pixel developers don't broadly drive iPhones. As far as I can tell, that status (which is meme-level in its age at this point) is true, and they aren't broadly making daily use of the systems they build.

(And I, for one, can't imagine spending 40 hours a week developing systems that I refuse to use. I have no appreciation for that level of apparent arrogance, and I hope to never be suaded to be that way. I'd like to think that I'd be better-motivated to improve the system than I would be to avoid using it and choose a competitor instead.

I don't shit where I sleep.)
Show HN: Vibe CADing in the cloud with open source tools
by mister_jmm | 2025-12-12 08:29:56+00:00
Hi HN — I’m Jessy, founder of SiameseAI. We just shipped Foundry v0.1.

What it is today: a hosted workspace where you can run Blender, FreeCAD, KiCad, and JupyterLab from a browser, with persistent projects/storage.

What it isn’t: we didn’t build these tools. They’re upstream open-source projects. What we built is the cloud wrapper around them (session managment, persistent storage, and the product layer). The AI in v0.1 is a basic docs copilot (RAG) over files you upload (PDFs/specs/manuals). We are currently working on tool-native agents.

Why we built it: proprietary hardware engineering tools setup friction and environment drift burns a lot of time and cash for hardware teams just starting out. We wanted a simple way to spin up a CAD server on any machine and eventually with programmatic and AI access to the native tools.

Open-core: Foundry is open-core. We’re charging for the hosted product (compute, AI token, convenience, eventually team features). Where we modify upstream OSS, we’ll publish source as required and aim to upstream improvements when practical.

If you want to try it, we have a 7-day trial (+ $25 credit): https://askfoundry.com

Feedback I’d really value:

1. What’s the #1 dealbreaker for running these tools in the cloud? 2. What would make you use this weekly?

Support or DMs: support@siameseai.com
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-12 08:30:07+00:00
And that's consumer apps, having only glimpsed in the world of back-end / cloud shenanigans, there's heaps of data being generated and stored in datacenters. Useful data? Dunno, how useful are all access logs ever?

But it's stored because it's possible, easy, and cheap. Unlike older games, where developers would hide unused blocks of empty data for some last-minute emergency cramming if they needed it.
by seec | 2025-12-12 08:30:46+00:00
Well, that's because most vegetables are water in an organic structure with some nutrients.

Until recently, fruits and vegetables were largely something that was available only to the richest. They don't make sense from a caloric standpoint, taking far too much effort for too little nutrition.

I actually think this is why most women idealize veggies; it is a status thing primarily. You can live just fine not eating a lot of vegetables.