MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thePhytochemist | 2025-12-25 17:58:13+00:00
Consider laboratory automation?

I work in that now. I am going through the same issue as you after studying science (there are many of us!). Jobs rarely overlap, wanting both skillsets. Am I ever going to do this scientific work I learned about? I feel entering this area has been progress.

I'm on the 'science' side right now, after doing CAD, software and firmware for a few years. The previous robots I made were not for scientific work. Now I make liquid handling robots for laboratories and I hope that my scientific skills will be valued in the workplace.

In the workplace, people mostly seem to want you to choose a box and stay in it rather than using a varied skillset. Right now I can say I "make robots" but mostly I take parts, put them in the machine we make and use them for a bit then send them on their way as tested items. The robot is largely a black box - I'm not allowed to see the CAD, software or firmware it runs, certainly not use my skills in those areas. But I'll keep trying - to bring value to the employer and find more interesting/valued work using the skills I've gained over the years. Entering a workplace for whatever they want then moving within it over time is a time tested strategy, especially in government because they are unionized and very rarely fire anyone.

Keep in mind funding sources during your search. In Canada we have SRED, which is a tax rebate for scientific work and easy to get. People, even if they studied science, seem to perceive scientific work as expensive and mostly useless so subsidies like this really help. Since it's a rebate that means you must work for a company that already has revenue, not a small startup. Look for a company with at least a room they call a lab and they will keep time sheets for all "R&D" work.
by bencornia | 2025-12-25 17:59:01+00:00
> The way Faulkner treats his characters, I treat domain name projects. I buy them with an intention to develop. And I let them take the lead. They’re the inspiration for the business itself. They guide me towards what they need to become. I’m just the dude behind the keyboard (sorta).

I feel the same way about personal projects and blogs. A good idea tends to be self-reinforcing. It just needs someone to uncover it. Selling onions on the internet seems unusual but to the right person that idea is gold.
by phil21 | 2025-12-25 18:00:22+00:00
The most likely explanation when hundreds of people make the same fuckup is the tooling and/or process sucks. Not that hundreds of people lack basic competence.

The most recent analogy I have is field techs in IT work. A company sends out "truck roll" tickets, and then complaints when there is a 40% failure/re-work rate on said truck rolls.

A single or handful of techs with said failure rate? Yep, perhaps incompetence.

A global failure rate across dozens of cities/countries and 40+ technicians total? No longer incompetence. At least at the field tech level. That's a documentation, process, and standards problem 100% guaranteed.

That some above average highly competent "hero" technicians are able to compensate for it is irrelevant.
by lukevp | 2025-12-25 18:00:54+00:00
I agree with the point that making the VS Code terminal behave in a special manner without opt-in is going to be disruptive to newer engineers. Why not make it a shell plugin instead and offer to install/customize the shell the first time someone launches a new shell in VS Code instead? Then it changes it system wide, like oh-my-zsh or something would.
Ollama token exfiltration still present in latest release
by ajtazer | 2025-12-25 18:01:59+00:00
I reproduced CVE-2025-51471 on the latest Ollama release and confirmed the issue
is still present with the proposed fix unmerged.

Short demo video showing the token exfiltration flow:
https://youtu.be/kC80FSrWbNk

Original disclosure (FuzzingLabs / Huntr):
https://huntr.com/bounties/94eea285-fd65-4e01-a035-f533575ebdc2

Fix PR (still open at time of testing):
https://github.com/ollama/ollama/pull/10750
by chrneu | 2025-12-25 18:03:20+00:00
I've been doing some version of this since college. ...holy shit that's almost 20 years.

It started as a bit of a joke on the "That's a good band name" line. It became "That's a good domain name". Yes, I went to a stem college.

Anyway, i've started 4 pretty decent businesses based entirely off that bit. My friends and I would be riffing out behind the pizza place/bar we frequented, someone would say something and then "That's a good domain name" comes out. I'd make a quick note and think about it for a few days. I found that if I come back to it after a week or so then it's maybe worth something.

Business and domain names can make or break a company.

On top of all that, i've also bought and then sold hundreds of domains for a profit based off this bit. I use various registars when they have sales, buy em up cheap for a few years, then park em.

After reading the OP, it's kinda funny. I did something similar with a garlic grower back in the early 00's. I had a domain, my brother worked for a garlic farmer, the farmer wanted to export to asia. It worked out well for a few years.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-25 18:03:30+00:00
If we take this at face value, and assume for the moment that you are talking about the US.

For homeless people there is no requirement by the US government to house them. There are some grants to provide shelter, but no statutory tool that says "you must fix this"

So right there, the "government" has got out of the way. One could observe that if it was the government's fault, then the US should have a lower homelessness problem.

If we look at the international standings, the USA has a higher rate of "unsheltered" per 100k than say france or the UK.

So if its not the government, perhaps is that US citizens are just stingy fuckers who don't want to help?
by ajtazer | 2025-12-25 18:03:36+00:00
The issue is a trust boundary failure in the registry authentication flow:
the client accepts the WWW-Authenticate realm provided by a registry without
validating origin, which allows signed authentication material to be sent to
an attacker-controlled endpoint during a normal model pull.

No exploit chain or malware is involved. The client generates and forwards
the token itself based on untrusted input.

The original disclosure credits FuzzingLabs. I focused on reproducing the
issue on current builds and validating the impact.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-25 18:04:09+00:00
M1 is indeed quite adequate for most, but each generation has brought substantial boosts in performance in single-threaded, multi-threaded, and with the M5 generation in particular GPU-bound tasks. These advancements are required to keep pace with the industry and in a few aspects stay ahead of competitors, plus there exist high end users whose workloads greatly benefit from these performance improvements.
by tptacek | 2025-12-25 18:07:07+00:00
I'm, uh, pretty familiar with the routine. I stand by what I said: you do not need any particular CSRF defense in place; you need to not have CSRF vulnerabilities. There's no OWASP checkbox-alike that requires you to have CSRF tokens, and plenty of real line-of-business apps at gigantic companies don't.
by thisislife2 | 2025-12-25 18:07:17+00:00
Great insight. And she is clearly depressed (person shows signs of deep sadness and hopelessness, withdraws from social activities and isolates themselves; has significant changes to sleep, appetite, and energy levels) so it is difficult for her to think clearly and move on to acceptance. (I'd say you too show the signs). Please take this test - https://fspcares.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Burns-Checkl... (PDF) - and encourage your daughter to do so as a first step. If she has severe depression, get her a therapist ( https://cares.beckinstitute.org/get-treatment/clinician-dire... ). As others have advised, she needs to learn new coping skills to make her more resilient to failures like these, and this is the perfect opportunity to do so as she is still in her youth.
by mhd | 2025-12-25 18:07:24+00:00
I'm also pretty sure that there was an "Elixir" in IT before there was the language said framework is written in… I mean, given that the letter "X" is in both Unix and X11, I'm pretty sure most words containing it have already been used once or twice.

(I still think they should've stuck with "Firebird", little danger of confusing a browser with a database system mostly used by Delphi devs)
by ghostghostghost | 2025-12-25 18:08:01+00:00
Nice app! I'm learning Python currently and was curious, it's a nice way to give a quick snapshot into the feel for the language.

I reached pandas (something that I've yet to dive into) and had to refresh and lost my progress. It'd be good to put a shortcut to level command to jump on a topic so you don't have to do it all over again!
by eviks | 2025-12-25 18:09:26+00:00
> Hunting for a job is a full-time occupation. Doing so while maintaining high performance at a demanding job like YouTube is a recipe for cognitive fracture.

You don't need to maintain it that high, just enough not to get fired within the expected time to find a new one?

> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction.

Indeed, but since you understand it, you also don't have to waste your time 13 times?
by dgacmu | 2025-12-25 18:09:53+00:00
Except that those same people then complain about how many homeless people there are.

Reagan's destruction of the mental health system was really awful. The system needed improvement and more accountability, but we need it.

I had an adult step-brother too ill with schizophrenia to be cared for at home (he began making violent threats and stealing things, up to and including my mom's car), but under the current threshold for being compelled to take his medication. My mom (his step-mom; an attorney) spent years trying to find ways to get him help, but he bounced in and out of being homeless and ended up being murdered at about age 60 in a halfway house. Just a stupid, tragic waste of a life and all of the resources mis-allocated.

Sadly, it's just another example of how the US is penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to social services.
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-25 18:11:18+00:00
You have a point. At the same time insurance companies are getting out of insurance because they can't afford it. Apparently (I didn't verify this), the cost to repair cars has gone up so much that the economics don't work out. So they're leaving the market. Maybe less crashes would bring them back?

Pick a source: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+insurance+companies+leav...
by billy99k | 2025-12-25 18:11:58+00:00
He basically got the other side to admit that European healthcare, which has always been used as an argument as 'better' than US care, is actually not as good.

He can intentionally start supporting things he hates at this point, and academia and the media will write articles and release research papers as to why it's actually bad.

During Covid, it was pretty dangerous when the federal government started intentionally limiting usage of things like Monoclonal antibodies in states like Florida, which was shown to work after someone already had Covid. This most definitely killed people and I really can't listen to anti-science liberals that make decisions based on politics and feelings and not actual science.

Hell, they told us that trying to limit flights at the beginning of Covid was 'racist' and that we should 'hug an Asian'. Does this sound like the party of 'science' to you?

The 'conspiracy theorists' were even right about the Covid vaccines: it's now shown to cause blood clots and it definitely resulted in deaths. There was also no testing with pregnant women and we still don't know the long-term effects.

I don't see how we can just move on with these things or how we can ever believe the medical community run by liberals again. We need trials and people need to go to prison responsible for these deaths.

Big pharma companies that don't have any accountability aren't going to care if they kill people. I used to live in a college town around 2007 or so. Anti-big pharma was a normal platform in the liberal community. It only turned to licking the assholes of the big pharma companies and anyone who supported them after Republicans were apprehensive about untested vaccines being forced onto them.

Again, this has nothing to do with science.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-25 18:12:16+00:00
I don't know how you can read about the many experiences people have with Wayland not working - even now, let alone 2020 - and conclude that "all things work".

I think we are finally at the point where you can say most things work and it's silly to go back to X11, but even so Wayland has clearly been a huge failure.
by mbreese | 2025-12-25 18:12:17+00:00
If you follow HN over the course of 24 hours, you’ll see at least 3 major waves. I tend to have an odd sleep schedule, so I’m always amused when I’m online to see which group is currently active.

There is an Asian/Australian wave, followed by Europe, and the North America. Some of the best times are when the waves start to mix (ex: early morning NYC time, you’ll get the Europe and NA groups interacting).

You’ll see different types of stories posted. Similar enough to where it all makes sense to be on HN, but it seems like a different flavor. But the comments are where I start to see more differences. You can get new takes on the same article if you see the comments from different times of the day.

This doesn’t take into account the total numbers of people active from each region, which I suspect is skewed towards more users the US coasts. But, it does, I think, speak to how US centric HN is. I think it serves the needs each of the waves in a distinct way.

In many ways, this is just an extension of the weekend HN effect. You can clearly observe differences on the site over the weekends. So, to me, it is unsurprising that you’d find differences across time zones. I’d love to actually see this analyzed more. This is just the take from someone who has been awake at enough hours to observe some anecdotal trends.
by legel | 2025-12-25 18:12:49+00:00
I happen to have a background at this interface as well, as the founder of DeepEarth and Ecodash.ai. I can tell you that I would greatly value such experience in collaboration, although I am not currently hiring. While having such a specific interdisciplinary niche can feel limiting, I also see it as a potential superpower in excelling in a very important domain. I'll also add that machine learning and other modeling techniques are a great bridge between classical natural sciences and modern tech today, that I would look for in collaborators. More specifically from the earth sciences, "GeoAI" would be a key focus.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-25 18:13:42+00:00
Wooden blocks were great.

At one point way back then, my dad made something in the workshop that improved them tremendously: Wooden boards.

These were small, thin, very flat boards of oak -- about 3/16" thick and 3/4" wide. Their lengths varied in 2" increments, and the length of each board was written on it.

With boards added in, the blocks got a lot more interesting. Fastening was still limited to gravity, but things like cantilevers started happening.
by aeyes | 2025-12-25 18:15:05+00:00
I have worked several union jobs, collective contracts usually don't touch the promotion process. If they do they often give automatic promotions after X years where X is still a fairly high number. And obviously this is not a great strategy for many reasons.

Negotiations about yearly pay raises are common but these are in the 2-5% range. Even non unionized big tech companies usually still give these yearly adjustments but its nothing compared to the 20-30% you can get when you level up.
by jrpt | 2025-12-25 18:15:17+00:00
There’s a lot of umbrella diagnoses that would benefit from more specific diagnostics first. What we call Alzheimer’s is probably actually caused by number of different causes depending on the person. This is true of a lot of things in medicine that get grouped together. That’s why testing a drug in mouse models with all the same characteristics sometimes works but fails to translate into humans who have more variety amongst each other.

The same is true of many diagnoses like pneumonia, cancer, alopecia, essential tremor: there’s multiple different groups that would benefit from different things, and if we had better ways to identify the groups, we’d give them what works for them instead of wasting their time with the wrong treatment. As an example, antibiotics won’t work for viral pneumonia and in addition to wasting the patient’s time, actually harm your microbiome. If you had a perfect way to know which is which, you’d always get the right treatment.

Precision medicine takes this even further.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-12-25 18:16:24+00:00
Right. My comment wasn't about maids from the Jetsons. General purpose robots are not soon. But for more specific tasks we've come very far in the last decade.

Warehouse automation is a reality today. Package delivery is also, just not broadly across the US. But it is very much happening right now.

Specifically my comment was about package delivery, which appears to be around the corner for most major cities, and already in place in several major cities around the world.

For indoor delivery, you don't really need Atlas. A 4 wheeled "full self drive" can fairly easily navigate cubicles and press elevator buttons. It's really not that crazy, and doesn't require any reasoning whatsoever. Basic preprogrammed pathfinding borrowed from any modern video game works fine for this. I don't think you need any advanced AI, let alone AGI.
by nake13 | 2025-12-25 18:17:08+00:00
I built a very similar experiment about 10 days ago and shared it here (the post is in Chinese):https://x.com/nake13/status/2000401664923324439

My focus was on finding a good text→URL-slug compression strategy. I used ChatGPT-5.2-Pro mainly to explore and compare different compression approaches and trade-offs.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-25 18:18:16+00:00
> If that were true, the FSF wouldn't call it a free license.

It is true; the license gives you the source, to do with as you please, including closing it off.

Famously, Microsoft included BSD licensed tools in Windows since the 90s and did not distribute the sources!

And that is completely legal. If you want to force the users to distribute their changes to your open source product when they are redistributing the product, you need to use GPL.
by softwaredoug | 2025-12-25 18:19:32+00:00
The main problem isn’t embeddings, in my experience, it’s that “vector search” is the wrong conceptual framework to think about the problem

We need to think about query+content understanding before deciding a sub problem happens to be helped by embeddings. RAG naively looks like a question answering “passage retrieval” problem, when in reality it’s more structured retrieval than we first assume (and LLMs can learn how to use more structured approaches to explore data much better now than in 2022)

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/12/09/rag-users-want-affo...
by wnevets | 2025-12-25 18:20:01+00:00
> Attributing 'smugness' is a way to duck the merits of the issue. People with mental disabilities also need a stable roof over their head, security, privacy, heat, a bathroom, a bed

But it's only one piece of a very complex problem, it's akin to the magical thinking that is incredibly provision everywhere these days. "Just stop using seed oils and America will be healthy again!"

People who have personally dealt with this know the hard truth that simply providing food and shelter isn't enough to stop a significant portion of people ending up in the streets.
Show HN: I created interactive buttons for chatbots
by itsm0rty | 2025-12-25 18:20:47+00:00
It's about to be 2026 and we're still stuck in the CLI era when it comes to chatbots. So, I created an open source library called Quint.
Quint is a small React library that lets you build structured, deterministic interactions on top of LLMs. Instead of everything being raw text, you can define explicit choices where a click can reveal information, send structured input back to the model, or do both, with full control over where the output appears.
Quint only manages state and behavior, not presentation. Therefore, you can fully customize the buttons and reveal UI through your own components and styles.
The core idea is simple: separate what the model receives, what the user sees, and where that output is rendered. This makes things like MCQs, explanations, role-play branches, and localized UI expansion predictable instead of hacky.
Quint doesn’t depend on any AI provider and works even without an LLM. All model interaction happens through callbacks, so you can plug in OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, or a mock function.
It’s early (v0.1.0), but the core abstraction is stable. I’d love feedback on whether this is a useful direction or if there are obvious flaws I’m missing.
This is just the start. Soon we'll have entire ui elements that can be rendered by LLMs making every interaction easy asf for the avg end user.
Repo + docs: https://github.com/ItsM0rty/quint
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@itsm0rty/quint
by chrneu | 2025-12-25 18:21:06+00:00
I've found more and more often the last few years that a lot of the long time businesses I use still do most of their ordering by phone. Or some version that involves talking to actual person.

The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order.

The engineering and consulting firms I work with are the same. The engineers I enjoy working with are all phone based, not a lot of emails unless there are details involved.

I'm a bit of the same way. There is a lot of peripheral information that we miss out on when everything is done via automation/email. Those dead moments when our brains wander, then we ask a silly question, tend to bear fruit.

It's gotten to the point where I generally don't order anything online anymore because I can't trust I'll get what I ordered. When I have to deal with support it's an automated system that only gives me 1 or 2 options, neither of which satisfy my needs so I have to make a compromise. I'm not interested.