MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josters | 2025-12-11 08:38:30+00:00
Currently building something like this for my city. One major challenge I've come across so far is that most APIs will give you coordinates for an address of a place within a building but none of the free, paid or crowdsourced options have reliable information on outside seating polygons. Of course, you could always display the places around you with live shadow data on a map, leaving it up to the user to zoom in and decide based on the satellite image whether the restaurant or café offers outside seating. But to plot the route and then suggest nearby sun/shadow seating options to the user, you would need this information.
by yorwba | 2025-12-11 08:39:35+00:00
> It's actually insane the levels of understanding the algorithms that are responsible for serving us information have and how little we, the creators of said algorithms, understand what's going on in said algorithms.

Keyboard layout mismatches are common enough that I assume Google has a layout detection stage hardcoded just like they have typo correction hardcoded. And the creators of said algorithms probably understand very well how they work. (The naïve way would be to convert from every possible layout to every other layout, but I think you could build something more lightweight using Hidden Markov Models.)
by eptcyka | 2025-12-11 08:39:46+00:00
I have thought about writing a python web framework were instead of writing a function that handles a request, you write a docstring and the an AI JIT generates your handling code. Could we not just prompt-engineer a solution for the missing bits in the driver for the HDMI2 stuff and have it be lazily generated via a model parameter and an API key? And then, in about 10 years, we could just do it locally once the models become runnable on commodity hardware. What a future too look forward to.
by literalAardvark | 2025-12-11 08:40:31+00:00
That's a false equivalence and you know it.

The fact that you can somewhat improve your muscles doesn't change that some people need to put much less effort in or can recover fast enough to be able to put more effort in.

Same for brains. Except we don't know a way to improve a healthy brain's performance (*in a general way, ergo a way that transfers to other tasks).
by cess11 | 2025-12-11 08:41:47+00:00
If it wasn't indiscriminate, then they intentionally killed and maimed kids.

It being indiscriminate would be the lesser evil out of these two options and it is unclear to me why you would prefer this interpretation of the events.

My view is based on the technicalities as I found them reported in mass media and directly from individuals in Lebanon at the time, which gave me the impression that the israelis went ahead and detonated the gadgets at the time they did because they suspected that Hezbollah was onto them, and that they had basically no idea where exactly these devices were at the time. To me this explains why they were detonated at the same time and not 'surgically', as state terrorists like to put it.

I can sympathise with the impulse to believe that the IDF is almost omniscient and able to organise a simultaneous attack against thousands of people individually, they sure want to promote such an image of themselves and put a lot of effort into doing so. But I don't believe it, in part because they have shown themselves to be quite unprofessional and sloppy, as well as lacking in strategic sophistication. Basically, I don't think they have enough disciplined personnel to pull something like that off, and instead they just broadcast a detonation signal to all the devices based on the suspicion that their operation might be revealed and countered.
by evanharwin | 2025-12-11 08:41:49+00:00
> a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.

‘Fringe networks’, and ‘off the radar’ feel like a very negative framing for a kind of smaller, more intimate, and often pleasantly communal feeling internet that I quite like!

Old fashioned online forums—maybe even Hackernews itself?—would likely fit into this ‘fringe’, ‘off the radar’ internet, and yet, it still feels much less toxic here than it does on twitter.

> The real problem is social media. Their machine learning algorithms are optimised to boost toxic content

…and you need a massive network to enable this, right? You can’t do it without the money, and the volume of content, that the giants in this space have.

If this just pushes kids onto the small web—sure, it’s not _all_ wholesome—but at least it’s not as carefully, as deliberately manipulative.
by iberator | 2025-12-11 08:42:08+00:00
FYI: Hezbollah is a legal political party in Lebanon.

Such attacks are nothing but war crimes. Targeting civilians and harming/killing them without trial is illegal NO MATTER OF WHAT.

All kinds of retaliation attacks are also illegal if harming civilians etc.

This is not my opinion but global consensus for the past 80 years globally
by Ghoelian | 2025-12-11 08:42:45+00:00
> A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.

I didn't know this, and this explanation isn't really helping. (I did know there's a difference between typeface and font, but no idea what).

Why would this be basic knowledge when all most people ever have to deal with is the font options in Word?
by RossBencina | 2025-12-11 08:43:51+00:00
Good to see Borland's __closure extension got a mention.

Something I've been thinking about lately is having a "state" keyword for declaring variables in a "stateful" function. This works just like "static" except instead of having a single global instance of each variable the variables are added to an automatically defined struct, whose type is available using "statetype(foo)" or some other mechanism, then you can invoke foo as with an instance of the state (in C this would be an explicit first parameter also marked with the "state" parameter.) Stateful functions are colored in the sense that if you invoke a nested stateful function its state gets added to the caller's state. This probably won't fly with separate compilation though.
by throwaway77385 | 2025-12-11 08:44:01+00:00
The question is where this will lead and what, if anything will, should or can be done to put the brakes on this wealth (re-)distribution.

It feels as though over the last few decades, all we have seen is a continuing trend of increasing amounts of wealth being amassed by a smaller and smaller circle of people.

What I find incredibly hard to judge is the point at which the current system leading to this will face violent reorganisation.

We've had feudalism, communism and fascism (and even a few attempts at egalitarian democracies long before that), but they all failed. It is tempting to say they all failed because "they could have never worked". That's easy to say with hindsight.

Once the current experiment implodes, will we all be armchair experts, scoffing at the idea that this could have ever worked also? And if so, why isn't anyone looking at the system and trying to change something?

The other systems usually ended in world wars or violent revolution. Often the ruling class became too comfortable / belligerent, just to then be replaced by the same thing (but maybe with a bit of lag. See the 2nd world war's ending. The middle class thrived up until about the 70s/80s).

Would feudalism have stayed if they'd had the levels of surveillance and AI-powered control we are currently facing? How about communism? Could a planned economy work if that is suddenly super-charged with computers and AI (and the necessary oppression to achieve it)?

Capitalism mixed with strong safeguards ensuring that there is a return for productivity for everyone feels like the best attempt we've made at a system that works for everyone until all the safeguards began being dismantled in the 70s.

Can we return to that system or is regulatory capture irreversible and therefore capitalism will always inevitably lead back to feudalism? And what can be done about it once AI and automation ensure the hegemony can't be touched anymore?

I have no answers, only questions...
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-11 08:44:42+00:00
Okay, but the only part that’s specific to AI (that the companies investing the money are capturing more value than they’re putting into it) is now false. Even the hyperscalers are not capturing nearly the value they’re investing, though they’re not using debt to finance it. OpenAI and Anthropic are of course blowing through cash like it’s going out of style, and if investor interest drops drastically they’ll likely need to look to get acquired.
by wk_end | 2025-12-11 08:44:53+00:00
A little more than just a multiplication instruction (the 68000, used in, say, the Sega Mega Drive, had one of those too). Have a look at https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation/, and in particular, read about the GTE - it offered quite a bit of hardware support for 3D math.

Also, even though it didn't handle truly 3D transformations, the rasterizer was built for pumping out texture mapped, Gouraud shaded triangles at an impressive clip for the time. That's not nothing for 3D, compared to an unaccelerated frame buffer or the sprite/tile approach of consoles past.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-12-11 08:45:10+00:00
> It almost sounds like you’re saying there’s essentially an LLM inside everyone’s brain. Is that what you’re saying?

>Pretty much. I think the language network is very similar in many ways to early LLMs, which learn the regularities of language and how words relate to each other. It’s not so hard to imagine, right?

Yet, completely glosses over the role of rhythm in parsing language. LLMs aren’t rhythmic at all, are they? Maybe each token production is a cycle, though… hmm…
by gethly | 2025-12-11 08:46:39+00:00
If you want to be a serious programmer, you have to learn a compiled language, not the Python garbage. And definitely not Rust as that is for seasoned programmers. Java´/Scala/Kotlin, Zig, Odin, Jai(next year), C, C++, C#, Go, Swift, are safe bets with employment opportunities that allow you to also venture into other languages with ease.

Forget about LLM. That's for normies.

I totally understand the lack of motivation. Doing something just for the sake of doing it is pointless. So you have to find a project to do and the language will then become merely a tool instead of the whole point. So find out what you need or want to do, maybe a 3D engine, mobile application, database, search engine, image recognition/OCR, maybe robotics or some arduino automation or whatever and just start working on it.
by Syzygies | 2025-12-11 08:49:03+00:00
1977. And I didn't know what a hash table was, though I can't explain now why they didn't think of using a hash table. I was effectively using a dumb hash function.

Their 1978 second edition works in exactly the memory needed to store the answer, by simulating my algorithm in a first pass but only saving the occupancy counts.

Oh, and thanks (I guess). I really didn't expect to ever be reading FORTRAN code again. One learned to program at Swarthmore that year by punching cards, crashing our IBM 1130, and bringing the printout to my supervisor shift. I'd find the square brackets and explain how you'd overwritten your array. I even helped an economics professor Frederic Pryor (the grad student in the "Bridge of Spies" cold war spy swap) this way, when I made an ill-advised visit to the computer center on a Saturday night. Apparently I could still find square brackets.
by procinct | 2025-12-11 08:49:13+00:00
I usually just type with two thumbs and can type pretty quickly. Swiping always felt a bit awkward to me because my phone is too large to use one handed with one thumb swiping, and swiping with a finger felt awkward compared to just holding my phone in both hands and typing with both thumbs.

I imagine if you look at how most young people use their phone, it will mostly be the two thumb method and they will likely be very quick with it.
by rickdeckard | 2025-12-11 08:49:14+00:00
The full context, to avoid confusion: "because no major browser supported it back then and the majority of video playback devices were already smartphones (without vp8 decoding capabilities)"

No major browsers didn't support VP8 back then, and among the remaining devices (other appliances than PCs with those Browsers) the majority of video playback devices were already smartphones (not supporting VP8 in 2010).

Apologies for the lack of clarity.
by davedx | 2025-12-11 08:49:16+00:00
> Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles.

I mean... this sounds like the perfect use case for a third party app like "My taste restaurant finder"? There are undoubtedly apps out there like this.

I don't think Google Maps (a general purpose maps app) should try to be everything for everyone. It's good enough for what it is.
by dave1010uk | 2025-12-11 08:49:57+00:00
Thanks Simon!

My tool collection [0] is inspired by yours, with a handful of differences. I'm only at 53 tools at the moment.

What I did differently:

Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. This gives you preview URLs for pull requests out the box. This might be possible with Github Pages but I haven't checked. I've used Vercel for similar projects in the past. Cloudflare seems to have the odd failed build that needs a kick from their dashboard.

Some tools can make use of Workers/Functions for backend processing and secrets. I try to keep these to a minimum but they're occasionally useful.

I have an AGENTS.md that's updated with a Github action to automatically pull in Claude-style Skills from the .skills directory. I blogged about this pattern and am still waiting for a standard to evolve [2].

I have a base stylesheet that I instruct agents to pull in. This gives a bit of consistency and also let's them use Tailwind, which they'd seem to love.

[0] https://tools.dave.engineer/

[1] https://github.com/dave1010/tools/tree/main/functions

[2] https://dave.engineer/blog/2025/11/skills-to-agents/
by alexellisuk | 2025-12-11 08:50:35+00:00
Interesting starter post.. I took this one step further a few years ago to make the init mount various other /proc /sys etc filesystems and boot up with Firecracker - using a container image as a rootfs.. GitHub https://github.com/alexellis/firecracker-init-lab Blog post: https://actuated.com/blog/firecracker-container-lab
by cess11 | 2025-12-11 08:51:19+00:00
Yeah, that's when you plant a bomb in a device and then make it beep and subsequently explode even though you have no idea whether it's in someone's home and a kid might pick it up to bring to a parent or perhaps in a crowded civilian market where non-combatants might get hurt and so on.

If the israelis weren't indiscriminate it would obviously make their actions in this case even worse, i.e. they somehow were looking at those kids being close to the explosives and still initiated the detonation sequence to draw their attention and hurt them.

That's the position you'd take if you wanted to smear the israelis.
by skwee357 | 2025-12-11 08:51:38+00:00
I truly don't understand how people can make such comparisons, and in general defend social media. Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome?

Social media has ruined my mental health, when I fell into a deep hole of propaganda. It took me a year to recover, and I'm still not fully recovered, and I'm still trying to separate between what I truly think, and what social media "made" me think. People underestimate the power of echo chambers created by the algorithm.

I saw how friends and family got radicalized thanks to social media. Social media is currently fueling at least one war and multiple regional conflicts, where people who know nothing about the events, get "educated" by social media. Social media is fueling hatred and bigotry, further diving already fragile societies. Social media disinformation campaigns were behind Brexit. And social media is used as a tool by government to spread misinformation or influence social opinions. All these in addition to everyone being an influencer and showing their phone into the faces of people in public places, while selling crap from AliExpress for 500% markup, as if you drink electrolytes, put a nose tape, and clean your face every day -- your life will become ten folds better.

I can't name one good thing that came out of social media. None. And even if there are things, and I'm sure someone will name them out, they are minor comparing to the negative sides, or could be achieved in a more sustainable way.
by fhd2 | 2025-12-11 08:51:55+00:00
That would be interesting. I don't believe getting 100% the same bytes every time a derivative work is created in the same way is legally relevant. Take filters applied to copyright protected photos - might not be the exact same bytes every time you run it, but it looks the same, it's clearly a derivative work.

So in my understanding (not as a lawyer, but someone who's had to deal with legal issues around software a lot), if you _save_ all the inputs that will lead to the LLM creating pretty much the same system with the same behaviour, you could probably argue that it's a derivative work of your input (which is creative work done by a human), and therefore copyright protected.

If you don't keep your input, it's harder to argue because you can't prove your authorship.

It probably comes down to the details. Is your prompt "make me some kind of blog", that's probably too trivial and unspecific to benefit from copyright protection. If you specify requirements to the degree where they resemble code in natural language (minus boilerplate), different story, I think.

(I meant to include more concrete logic in my post above, but it appears I'm not too good with the edit function, I garbled it :P)
by felipc | 2025-12-11 08:52:13+00:00
Complete list of mistakes in the design of CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference

Just kidding. To me the biggest mistake was the standards' slowness in the early 2010s to provide badly needed new functionality such as a proper replacement for table layout, vertical alignment, etc. The cult of knowing specific tricks to get things working properly carried on for too long and made a lot of people annoyed at the semantic web (rip).
by drnick1 | 2025-12-11 08:52:19+00:00
Really not keen on the advertised "app-based anti-theft, vehicle movement alert, geo-fencing, GPS tracking." Inevitably, this will be used to track the user and sell the data to insurance companies, like car manufacturers already do. Also, it's entirely possible that the app won't work at all on free Android builds (dependencies on Google libraries). Other than the obvious range anxiety problem (80 miles just isn't enough especially if you ride it hard and that becomes 50 or less), I wouldn't buy any "connected" bike without knowing for sure that it can be fully disconnected by nuking the onboard modem.
Show HN: Simo.io – Security-first wired open-source Smart Home System for pros
by pysupremacy | 2025-12-11 08:53:08+00:00
I’ve spent the last 6 years building SIMO.io, a security-first, wired, open-source smart home system for professional installations (full-stack hardware + software).

The hub is a small Ubuntu Server box running a Django/Python stack (PostgreSQL, Redis, Supervisor, etc.). It sits on-prem by design, on a UPS with the router and PoE switch. Nightly LVM/Borg backups go to removable media; recovery is a bare-metal restore, not a cloud dance.

The backbone is Ethernet/PoE. Panels are DIN-rail “Game Changer” boards with 16 universal I/O plus digital interface bays for buses like DALI or I²C. You snap in relay/dimmer/input modules for lights, valves, sensors, blinds, gates, etc. Critical loops (e.g. wall switch ↔ light) run directly on the panel, so basic behavior continues even if the hub is down. Rooms are handled by Sentinel units: PoE ceiling devices with presence sensing, environment sensors, AI voice assistant, and a 100 dB siren, all talking to the local hub over LAN.

Some concrete details that may interest HN:

- Wire-first, security-first architecture: PoE spine, no radios in the backbone, UPS-aware power handling, and offline-first behavior for core functions. - Pro-grade permissions and roles: hub masters, instance superusers, and per-component ACLs so electricians, clients, residents, and guests each see and control exactly what they should. - Developer-facing design: Django Admin and key-only remote SSH into the hub, Python virtualenv for integrations, structured logs under /var/log/simo, and a documented extension model for third-party systems. - Automation model: components (lights, valves, sensors, scenes, alarm groups, global state, etc.) plus Script components running plain Python. The app can generate an initial Python script from a natural-language description; you then edit it in Admin. - Mobile-first commissioning: an installer can create an instance, pair panels, map IO, build scenes/presence lighting/alarm groups, and hand over access via QR code from a phone, then drop into Admin/SSH only when deeper work is needed.

The goal is not a pile of Wi-Fi gadgets, but something an electrician or integrator can deploy as infrastructure: repeatable panels, an auditable hub, predictable behavior under failure, and an open-source stack that developers can actually reason about.

I’d appreciate blunt feedback on the architecture, security model, and developer ergonomics, especially from people who run or deploy whole-house systems today.

Website: https://simo.io Docs: https://simo.io/wiki/ GitHub: https://github.com/SIMO-io
by signal11 | 2025-12-11 08:54:00+00:00
Design patterns are language independent, but a lot of the ones many Java devs focus on are a bit meh.

In a world with only assembly language, for instance, it’s a bit like making a big deal about a “guarded repetition” pattern (aka a while loop).

Eg in Lisps, a lot of patterns become one-liners. At that point these patterns become a “can you write decent Lisp” question[1].

[1] https://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-design-patterns/
by fcavallarin | 2025-12-11 08:55:38+00:00
Thanks! Yes - the motivation came from repeatedly switching between DevTools, Burp, and ad-hoc scripts whenever I needed to understand how an object ended up in the heap.

Wirebrowser started as an experiment to unify those workflows and make it possible to follow those values directly instead of stitching together multiple tools. It grew from the pain points I kept running into.
by pnt12 | 2025-12-11 08:55:41+00:00
On the site itself:

it's great that this was produced in 1h with 60$. This is amazing to create small utilities, explore your curiosity, etc.

But the site is also quite confusing and messy. OK for a vibe coded experiment, sure, but wouldn't be for a final product. But I fear we're gonna see more and more of this. Big companies downsizing their tech departments and embracing vibe coded. Comparing to inflation, shrinkflation and skimpflation/ enshittification , will we soon adopt some word for this? AIflation? LLMflation?

And how will this comment score in a couple of years? :)
by cess11 | 2025-12-11 08:56:26+00:00
The northern settlements were largely evacuated and used by the IDF. The party to this conflict that systematically targets civilians is the state of Israel.

One could make the argument that the US and Israel committing genocide makes paramilitary action against them legal, since the US controls the UN security council through their veto power.

Right now Israel is an occupying power that systematically destroys civilian infrastructure and threatens an international force in Lebanon, making it permissible to fight back.