MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shooker435 | 2025-12-15 15:59:00+00:00
We've been building https://nimstrata.com/ for almost three years now, we put Google's Vertex AI product discovery algorithms on Shopify and Salesforce ecommerce storefronts.

At a high level, Google does not have a product culture, so there is a lot of white space for companies like ours to make adopting Google Cloud APIs much easier for less technical users.

It's also wild how much Agentic AI is creeping into all of our conversations - this space is constantly evolving as we're building.
by bombcar | 2025-12-15 15:59:30+00:00
Most larger school systems (if they allowed it at all) would end up "locking" the device as if it were one of theirs for the duration, just like some companies allow you to bring your own laptop or phone, but it becomes "as if it were theirs" while it is managed.

Support costs, mainly.

A small school that does its own IT is more likely to be flexible.
by jsheard | 2025-12-15 15:59:37+00:00
Yep, but next year they intend to launch an alternative DNS challenge which doesn't require changing DNS records with every renewal. Instead you'll create a persistent TXT record containing a public key, and then any ACME client which has the private key can keep requesting new certs forever.

https://letsencrypt.org/2025/12/02/from-90-to-45#making-auto...
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-15 15:59:49+00:00
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 'sensor kit' from Amazon for my son to use with his Raspberry Pi. It includes some input devices (e.g. button, moisture sensor) and output devices (e.g. LED) that can be plugged onto breadboard.

The setup instructions included something to do with CircuitPython. I had not heard of it before then: https://github.com/sunfounder/universal-maker-sensor-kit/blo...
by njarboe | 2025-12-15 15:59:57+00:00
Well, you as a human train and live as a human on the output of all human civilization and if you are very efficient put people out of work. 99% of human jobs were physical labor and now machines do the work of thousands with one human superviser (oil tanker, machine loom, dump truck, train, etc). If humans are put completely out of the loop, that is a new problem for humans (super intelligent AI that takes over will likely be very bad for us) but avoiding that problem is another ball of wax.
by matt-attack | 2025-12-15 16:00:20+00:00
Use before readiness? I get immense and even life changing use out of Chatbots like Grok. I agree with your first sentiment that it’s just a misunderstanding of what a chat bot should be used for.

But I disagree that they’re not “ready” for use. I’ve never once thought to upload a photo from a CURRENT event and see what it found. That’s just silly.

This is just plain user error.
by Orygin | 2025-12-15 16:00:27+00:00
> Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief

I don't really believe it. Investment is always incentivized by tax breaks and other political gifts. But once things turn bad it's the citizen's turn to pay for it. Fire all staff? We pay for unemployment. Pollute the soil? We pay for cleanup. Empty the water table? Guess who's gonna depend on the state for clean water...

> To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid.

Please tell that to every neo liberal in my country. Reducing taxes on the rich seems to be their passtime, while every time some kind of capital gain is mentioned, everyone and their dogs become experts in economics and can tell you it's folly.

> Please don't vote.

Please don't look down on others.
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-15 16:00:28+00:00
I don’t get where the fear mongering is coming from on this. All or nearly all robot vacuums have controls for their various functions on the side. Plenty of robotic vacuums even come with remotes so you can program schedules without a phone/wifi/internet. If you go really cheap you can get decent robots that won’t even let you connect to WiFi if you tried (at least as of a few years ago).
by naasking | 2025-12-15 16:00:31+00:00
"Construct proxy" need not be a primitive in the core system though. If message passing is the only means of communication, then interposition to create facets or attenuate permissions naturally follows. This works with ACLs too. All you need to do is restrict the rights amplification authority to discriminate what a capability actually points to, but this is a rights amplification operation and so should itself be a capability that's closely held. DCCS did this right, IIRC.
by griffzhowl | 2025-12-15 16:00:33+00:00
Is the MOOC the same as the actual MIT course though? I went through one of the old Grimson Guttag Intro to CS courses on MIT OCW years ago, with zero programming background I found it a very gentle on-ramp with all the basics explained.

I think it was this one, unfortunately archived now. I don't know the new one

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00-introduction-to-computer-sc...
by pravj | 2025-12-15 16:00:34+00:00
Glad you found it relevant, and thanks for sharing the feedback.

Not going to deny that it was a bummer to read your second line, lost all the Endorphins earned from reading the first one. Nevertheless, I want to fix this if it's a legit issue.

Do you mind sharing more details on the battery consumption from the app?

I'm using IOKit power source notifications and hearing this feedback for the first time. (personally using this on my work [old M2] and personal [new M4] MacBooks for the last ~2 months).
by therealwhytry | 2025-12-15 16:00:36+00:00
You aren't wrong, but you’re underestimating the inertia of $10M+/year B2B distributors. There are thousands of these in traditional sectors (pipe manufacturing, HVAC, etc.) that rely on hyper-localized logistics and century-old workflows.

Buyer pressure will eventually force process updates, but it is a slow burn. The bottleneck is rarely the tech or the partner, it's the internal culture. The software moves fast, but the people deeply integrated into physical infrastructure move 10x slower than you'd expect.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-15 16:00:38+00:00
I'm not going to link to it, but the POTUS posted overnight about this, and even by the standards of that particular social media account, it was probably a new low. Someone in another forum I read regularly said of it "I'm going to show this to my kids to help teach them what the word sociopath means". It's not even the usual "politicizing a tragedy", just the complete inhumanity and self-centeredness on display. Look it up yourself if you want, but bring a bag.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-15 16:00:50+00:00
Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but when people are having sexy time, they are not really likely to be running the roomba. Having that thing running is the opposite of sexy. When the thing is parked on the base station, it is facing the wall. So exactly how frequently do people think a roomba is running to be capturing all of this explicit footage?

To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some of these examples are just bat shit crazy well beyond paranoid
by peppersghost93 | 2025-12-15 16:01:11+00:00
"If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic."

I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.
by howmayiannoyyou | 2025-12-15 16:01:39+00:00
No. Its a mixed bag.

Metals, eWaste, Batteries ... all profitable to recycle.

Paper & cardboard ... depends on market price.

Plastics ... depends on oil prices, market price and type of plastic.

Tires ... usually profitable, usually involves a hauling fee.

AMP's robotic solution is going to face immense competition from general edge models, probably very soon. The mechanical piece is simple engineering. All the magic is (was) recognition.
by pfdietz | 2025-12-15 16:01:40+00:00
I keep returning to cost because it's the only issue that matters.

Nuclear power is in trouble because it costs too much. The other issues -- safety, waste, proliferation -- they don't make any difference. Make nuclear much cheaper and we'd build much more of it. Improve any of those other metrics without making it cheaper and it will go nowhere.

Cost also matters because in any situation where choices have to be made between alternatives, you need a way to evaluate the tradeoffs. This can only be done by reducing the alternatives to a metric that can be compared, and that metric is in units of some currency. Even human life is reduced to a dollar value when evaluating choices, the so-called "statistical value of a human life".
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 16:02:19+00:00
Interesting, I also have glasses and am short-sighted, but for me light-emitting objects blur much faster than solid objects. It depends very much on the light type, frequency and brightness, but most LEDs, which most digital clocks use, tend to have an overgleaming effect, which makes them unreadable due to being a block of light.

> Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?

All the time? Being in a train station, sitting in a (class)room (during exam), in the kitchen, walking on the street, etc.
by integralid | 2025-12-15 16:02:32+00:00
I don't get it. Can you explain in simpler terms?

My understanding is that you say that taxing things denominated in a foreign currency is difficult? But why? I already pay taxes on my capital gains denominated in a foreign currency (for example dollars). There are official government exchange rates for tax reasons, published daily. I don't see anything to hand wave here, because there's no problem.
by mrsmrtss | 2025-12-15 16:02:37+00:00
Yes, referenced libraries will throw exceptions, but since they don't return a Result type, there is no confusion either. We simply handle the exceptions where they arise. This means we don't need to handle exceptions all over the codebase. Also, a Task will only fail if there is an exception or it is canceled, so if you handle your exceptions at the source, you don't need to worry about them anywhere else.
by bear330 | 2025-12-15 16:02:39+00:00
I'm working on ffl (https://github.com/nuwainfo/ffl), an Actually Portable Executable (APE) that turns any file or folder into a secure P2P HTTPS link via WebRTC.

Like llamafile, it's built on Cosmopolitan Libc. Getting the full Python stack + WebRTC to run as a single APE binary was incredibly tricky to pull off, but the result is super convenient. I mainly built it to solve the pain of moving large files (logs, DB dumps) in and out of containers—now it's just one command.

The repo has a demo showing a round-trip transfer between Windows (x64) and Android (arm64) using the same binary. I hope you give it a try!
by jfindper | 2025-12-15 16:02:42+00:00
Which part is news?

If certificate transparency is new to you, I feel like there are significantly more interesting articles and conversations that could/should have been submitted instead of "A public log intended for consumption exists, and a company is consuming that log". This post would do literally nothing to enlighten you about CT logs.

If the fact that OpenAI is scraping certificate transparency logs is new and interesting to you, I'd love to know why it is interesting. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Way more interesting reads for people unfamiliar with what certificate transparency is, in my opinion, than this "OpenAI read my CT log" post:

https://googlechrome.github.io/CertificateTransparency/log_s...

https://certificate.transparency.dev/
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-15 16:03:05+00:00
Dunno, but welcome to the world post-IOT.

You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...
by bloomingeek | 2025-12-15 16:03:20+00:00
<indiscriminate spraying from the air>

As a city dweller, I used to use Roundup along my fence line. Then I read an article in a newspaper about spraying chemicals when there is a breeze. So I read the label on the Roundup bottle and it said absolutely do not spray in any windy conditions. Next I polled my coworkers about this and they all said they just stay upwind!

The bottle label also said Roundup is active for up to 30 days, then I thought about my dogs. I no longer use any chemical for lawn care.

As to the plight of the farmers: I wonder if most of them bothered to used proper personal protection gear when spraying? Even if they had enclosed cabs, the chemical would still coat the tractor and tank surfaces which can be rubbed against at any time.
by detritus | 2025-12-15 16:03:25+00:00
Gosh, I miss the aesthetics of vector games of this era. My absolute favourite was Armour-Geddon (on the Amiga), which because I'd pirated it I barely had any clue what to do but.. it was still fun, and so beautiful. And fast!

I know there's Tiny Combat Arena from 'Microprose' but its development's taking a while. I'd dearly love to know if there's anything else of that contemporary ilk out there today.
by BeFlatXIII | 2025-12-15 16:03:35+00:00
The problems with teaching symbolism using novels are:

1. Novels considered “curriculum-approved literature” often have symbolism that is irrelevant to a student’s life. It was placed there intentionally by the author, and was blatant to all readers when it was published, but it is indistinguishable to a student from the teacher making things up.

2. Teachers who aren't the best end up teaching from a “it's true because it's true” mindset, which may as well be “because I made it up and said so.” These are quite common.

3. Or the teacher draws from a pool of stock symbolic and thematic answers for all novels. Astute students will spot that immediately and treat it as a game of guessing the teacher’s answer rather than engaging with the text.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-15 16:03:48+00:00
> you use it when you need to generate unique keys in a distributed manner

Just to complement this with a point, but there isn't any mainstream database management system out there that is distributed on the sense that it requires UUIDs to generate its internal keys.

There exist some you can find on the internet, and some institutions have internal systems that behave this way. But as a near universal rule, the thing people know as a "database" isn't distributed on this sense, and if the column creation is done inside the database, you don't need them.
by ben_w | 2025-12-15 16:04:03+00:00
I have a blog, hardly anyone reads it, or hardly anyone did back when it was on wordpress and I got stats for that kind of thing; now it's on github and doesn't track anything, I have no idea. Back when I did know, I found that linking to it from here got me 30-100 extra hits, compared to the 1-3 any normal post would get.

> •“Nobody needs this” / “It’s not original” […] •What made it worth it for you?

I would still recommend it: it does save me time having to explain myself in detail, as I can just post a link to whichever blog post is the essay about whatever.

> •“AI can explain most topics better than I can”

AI can be more persuasive than most humans, but it doesn't make it more correct, the lack of correctness is a common criticism of AI slop by just about everyone.

> •A bit of fear: shipping something that feels naive or low-signal

Allow yourself to be naïve, we're all that at some point. Here's one of mine, where in 2018 I look back on predictions made in 2012. Some held up well, some, it turned out, were physically impossible: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/07/17-16.09.05.html

Naïve errors: Optical-wavelength metamaterial cloaking, fabric or otherwise, is not possible, the bandwidth is too narrow; Robot cars may be technically available in many countries, but they're sure not "rapidly displacing human drivers because they are much safer and therefore cheaper to insure".

Close but no cigar: Nameplate solar power didn't reach par with global electricity use in 2024, but it did get to 1865 TW, which would have been 82% of global electricity use at the time I made the prediction. Actual global electricity use is 50% higher today than in 2012.

Correct: China's GDP did in fact more than double between 2012 and 2022: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=GDP+china+2022+%2F+GDP+...

> •Any practical format that lowers the bar (length, cadence, themes)?

Something you find interesting. Look at my blog and you won't only find deep thoughts, you'll also find this because it was fun at the time: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/12/21-09.27.02.html

But not just jokes, because I'll also write about bioprinted fairy drones: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2021/05/22-21.06.36.html
by benzible | 2025-12-15 16:04:07+00:00
> All credibility goes to the journalist. People is just a brand that hires journalists of a wide variety of credibility, like any publisher.

That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting. An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.

And "wide variety of credibility"... what? Do you think major outlets just hire random people off the street and let them publish whatever? There are hiring standards, editors, and layers of review. The whole point of a professional newsroom is to ensure a baseline of credibility across the organization.

Seems like you've reverse-engineered the Substack model, where credibility really does rest with the individual writer, and mistakenly applied it to all of journalism. But that's not how legacy media works. The institution serves as a filter, which is exactly why it matters who's publishing.
by jader201 | 2025-12-15 16:04:15+00:00
So, as a consumer (in the US), should we just dump everything in a landfill?

Or is it still worth it for some things? What about:

- Clean paper/cardboard

- Plastic grocery bags that go to a separate recycling center

How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?

I’ve tried to “do my part”, but the more I hear people talk about it, the more it sounds like we’re better off just landfilling it all.
by elevatortrim | 2025-12-15 16:04:37+00:00
You are assuming:

1. Value created for other shareholders is a good thing

2. $ "value" directly translates to actual resources or services

3. These employees and customers would not get the same or more value elsewhere if Amazon did not exist

4. This "value" created by Amazon is better compared to the alternative (such as more resources used locally instead of global trade)
by rapind | 2025-12-15 16:04:58+00:00
I far prefer it to javascript or typescript. I recommend using a coding agent to help you learn it (claude code, gemini cli, codex) if you're interested. Pick a smallish project, prompt your way through it, examining to structure and code as you go, asking the agent to explain anything you don't understand.

Probably the most underrated aspect of this new AI age is having a tutor with encyclopedic knowledge available at all times.

* To be clear, I'm not saying to "Vibe Code" it. Take the time to really understand the code, ask questions, and eventually suggest improvements.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-15 16:05:21+00:00
I live in Switzerland. It's an excellent example of a place without a capital gains tax, because it doesn't have one. I didn't say it doesn't have other taxes!

The type of tax matters a lot. The reason capital gains taxes are bad is that they discourage investment, but investment is how you create wealth. "Creating wealth" is ultimately a synonym for creating material progress. Voters like progress, and so this is a very simple and direct argument, which is why most countries that have capital gains tax it at a lower rate than income. Wealth taxes have different incidence and change incentives in different ways. Basically, they discourage having wealth rather than creating it.

It can create its own problems. Switzerland has had big problems in the past with the wealth tax discouraging the creation of tech startups. The reason is that if you create a company then sell some equity in it to investors, that creates a valuation of your company which is then considered wealth, even though it's theoretical wealth and not liquid. In other words, doing a big VC raise can land the company founders with an unpayably massive tax bill: they literally don't have the money to send the government because it's only paper wealth.

To fix that the Swiss tax authorities had to introduce a new rule that says if you have ownership of a startup, this doesn't count towards the wealth tax. What exactly is a "startup" and what differentiates it from other kinds of business? Whether it is "innovative". What counts as innovative? The taxman decides. That means creating a startup in Switzerland is quite risky as if some random bureaucrat decides your product isn't truly innovative and you do a big VC raise you could be personally bankrupted (or you have to use some of the investors money to pay yourself out each year, which is then taxed as income too pushing you into a much higher tax bracket, etc). There are lots of other practical problems with the wealth tax.

Tax incidence is complicated!

In practice the Swiss approach works because:

- The wealth tax is quite low

- This "innovative startup" hack seems to work out in practice even if it's concerning in theory (tech startups aren't the only way to create a lot of wealth)

- Wealth taxes discourage all kinds of wealth equally, so the effects are diffuse and they don't specifically discourage e.g. getting promoted over company formation over inheritances, which is a distortion a lot of other approaches do create.
by formerly_proven | 2025-12-15 16:05:29+00:00
The article is self-contradictory in that it acts like that key is super-important ("Operations becomes a nightmare. You now have a cryptographic secret to manage. Where does this key live? Protected by a wrapping key living in a KMS or HSM? Do you use the same key across prod, staging, and dev? If dev needs to test with prod data, does it need access to prod encryption keys? What about CI pipelines? Local developer machines?") but then also acknowledges that we're talking about an obfuscation layer of stuff which is not actually sensitive ("to hide timestamps that aren't sensitive"). Don't get me wrong, it's a definitive drawback for scaling the approach, but most applications have to manage various secrets, most of which are actually important. E.g. session signing keys, API keys etc. It's still common for applications to use signed session with RCE data formats. The language from that article, while not wrong, is much more apt for those keys.

That being said, while fine for obfuscation, it should not be used for security for this purpose, e.g. hidden/unlisted links, confirmation links and so on. Those should use actual, long-ish random keys for access, because the inability to enumerate them is a security feature.