MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Topfi | 2025-12-12 15:58:02+00:00
This was an incredibly informative presentation and one I found myself nodding along to quite a lot as a person with a decade+ old folder collecting every desktop environment concept I could get my hands on.

The iPad nowadays not having one, proper, sane default for window management is a nightmare for so many reasons and incidentally also in one fell swoop disproved everyone who argued MacOS level functionality on iPad OS was not happening to retain cohesiveness over the concept/the one true iPad way of doing things. Interestingly, if one wants to see cohesiveness and pushing one clear concept through, even if it may limit certain use cases, Gnome is the perfect example for that. Agree or disagree with their vision, I always appreciated that, more than any other desktop environment, whether by a Trillion Dollar company or any other FOSS team, Gnome is willing to enforce their vision and for those who it suits, is better for it. For those wo don't, there are still alternatives, which is why I never understood the significant amount of anger that Gnomes position on this front attracted, not every project needs to adhere to the same beliefs in forgoing strict, consistent defaults for more user freedom.

Liquid Glass is another clear (pardon the pun) showcase of a lack of understanding that this field entails a lot more than mere visual appeal, he did very well with the fair critique of Figma designers. Even more so, now that more of the key personnels history has come to light, which does explain the clear deficiencies in usability and accessibility that even the untrained eye quickly noticed post release.

Also agreed with the measured perspective on "AI"/LLM usage. Beyond local models having potential to enable new paradigms, I have found LLMs to be somewhat helpful in more quickly prototyping and testing usage loops/concepts and iterating on them over existing solutions for what it's worth.

Occasionally, I think back to Unity, which did such a great job of rethinking existing concepts whilst not throwing everything out with the bathwater. Some features, such as the HUD, we are barely catching up to even today and Unity just felt like people fully immersed in the users perspective were actually given both the freedom and resources to push innovative concepts forward.

Peeked at Ink and Switches output too and am finding a lot of incredibly valuable information to learn from. Truly a treasure throve of information, some I did never think about, other things I have been experimenting with for a while now as part of a project I want to finally get off the ground. Even when it's something I have already dabbled with, their writing is so incredibly expansive that they cover a lot of perspectives I'd never considered.

Overall, great presentation.
by ipython | 2025-12-12 15:58:15+00:00
How does that work in practice? I've tried to do this at home. It doesn't work at all. It's not the 90s any more- there isn't one PC sitting on a desk with a modem attached to a phone line that you need to wait for 30 seconds to dial up and establish a connection before you're online...

Now you have ubiquitous WiFi and cellular connectivity across dozens of devices in a typical household. Even refrigerators have built in web browsers now. Parental controls are a joke, treated as an afterthought at best - nonexistent at worst. Oh, and the school system provides your kids with a Chromebook with Internet access starting in elementary school.

It's victim blaming at its finest IMO. Yeah, we can all point fingers at the parents who sit their kids down with an iPad. But there's many of us who struggle to limit screen time, working against the profit motive of trillions of dollars of corporations. It's a losing battle.

Edit: crazy. Instead of providing an answer to my question of "how do you do this in practice" I get downvoted. Goes to show that there are no real solutions, just a bunch of morality police and victim blaming. Yes, parents are the victims here. The tools are inadequate and trillions of dollars of incentives are lined up against them.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-12-12 15:58:43+00:00
Agreed. But obtaining such a token/proof would still be an additional barrier kids would have to actively bypass, so while I don't think that's the best implementation I don't think it's correct to say there's no value there.

My bigger concern would be who gets to issue these tokens. If it's limited to a particular government, then that doesn't work very well on a global internet. And making the internet not global (blocking adults from accessing foreign websites that don't adhere to your scheme) is kinda authoritarian IMO.

If we're going to do age verification and blocking of adult sites, it needs to be local to the user's device (and thus under the control of parents, not governments).

E.g. Instead of mandating sites verify users, we mandate internet-capable devices sold to kids have certain content restrictions, the same way we mandate you can't sell alcohol to kids. To make this more effective than existing content filtering, implement some kind of legally-enforced content-labeling standards websites have to follow to be whitelisted on these devices. This way the rights, freedoms, and privacy of adults using adult devices is unaffected.
by bagacrap | 2025-12-12 15:58:55+00:00
I don't think zero unit tests is the right answer either. And if you actually take the time to read all 300 and cull the useless or overlapping ones, you've invested much more than 10% of the time it would have taken you.

Having a zillion unit tests (of questionable quality) is a huge pita when you try to refactor.

When I am writing unit tests (or other tests), I'm thinking about all the time I'll save by catching bugs early -- either as I write the test or in the future as regressions crop up. So to place too much importance on the amount of time invested now is missing the point, and makes me think that person is just going through the motions. Of course if I'm writing throwaway code or a POC, I'll probably skip writing tests at all.

In order to add coverage for scenarios that I haven't even thought of, I prefer fuzz testing. Then I get a lot more than 2-300 tests and I don't even pretend to spend time reviewing the tests until they fail.

If you want to use an LLM to help expedite the typing of tests you have thought of, fine. If you just tell it to write the suite for itself, that's equivalent to hiring a (mediocre to bad) new grad and forcing them to write tests for you. If that's as good of an outcome as doing it yourself, I can only assume you are brand new to software engineering.
by cwmoore | 2025-12-12 15:59:09+00:00
I am not that fond of stores scanning my ID data either. I’m over 21, there’s no question about it. Per policy, they’ll have my name and address in some log too, and with my photos and gait on camera and probably my license plates. What does all of that do for me? Are you safer because I am being recorded?

I like the (disputed) comment elsewhere on this page, requiring parents to parent. They aren’t my kids.
by Spivak | 2025-12-12 15:59:19+00:00
I'm really glad you're not in charge of making laws. The one thing you can do as a parent is override most age restrictions. You can give your child alcohol, you can take them to R rated movies, you can let them watch NC-17 movies at home, you can buy them M video games, you can just straight up buy them porn. But then parents have a legal requirement to restrict their child's internet access to whatever the government happens to approve of—utter nonsense.
by mopsi | 2025-12-12 16:00:16+00:00
> To be fair, in 90s-10s the West invaded multiple Soviet and Russian allies (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, as an example) using weakness of Russian economy an inability to help the allies at the time.

The NATO intervention in the Yugoslav wars lasted only a few months, killed fewer people than the Serbs executed on some of their most productive single weekends, and brought a definitive end to a decade of civil wars. Please explain how this is negative and what reason Russians have to bitch about it all the time.

If anything, the intervention should have taken place far sooner. Many, many civilian lives could have been saved while NATO allies spent years merely watching people in Europe being murdered for their ethnic background.

> USSR withdrew from Eastern Germany in the end of 80s as a gesture of good will in hope to improve the relations, but it was never reciprocated.

Gesture of goodwill, gimme a break. The USSR ran out of money and ceased to exist entirely (1991) before the last Soviet forces left Germany (1994).
by whizzter | 2025-12-12 16:00:19+00:00
I fully agree that's wrong (can't imagine the overhead of some larger tables I have if that had happened), that said, often people want weird customizations in medium-sized tables that would set one on a path to having annoying 100 column tables if we couldn't express customizations in a "simple" JSON column (that is more or less polymorphic).

Typical example is a price-setting product I work on.. there's price ranges that are universal (and DB columns reflect that part) but they all have weird custom requests for pricing like rebates on the 3rd weekend after X-mas (but only if the customer is related to Uncle Rudolph who picks his nose).
by Havoc | 2025-12-12 16:00:29+00:00
Not to my knowledge.

> now I have gigabit

You can host torrents to Linux isos to help. You’ll need to block some Chinese ASNs though. They use fake downloaders to detect peers. Like 99% of the traffic my node generated was that. Nodes from one ASN that do partial downloads over and over

Else hosting open map data tile server though I gather this can generate a lot of traffic
by seanhunter | 2025-12-12 16:00:34+00:00
This reminded me of the (real life) story of Oleg Gordievsky, the FSB officer who was a double agent for the west[1]. He was alerted to the fact that the FSB were on to him and had been in his apartment because there were three locks on his front door but he never locked one of them as he didn’t have the key. He came home one day to find all three were locked.

[1] read “The spy and the traitor” by Ben Mackintyre. It’s incredibly gripping and at times hard to believe the courage and perseverance of the people involved but it was real.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-12 16:01:40+00:00
To be clear I mean predicting the timing to any accuracy. That’s notoriously difficult (I’d argue pretty much impossible). A modern economist dropped in 1715 or so would be able to say with certainty that the South Sea Company and associated companies was a bubble, but they would not really be able to predict when it would pop accurately.

RE the Nasdaq, yeah, it recovered in real terms after 18 years. That would be cold comfort to most.
by swid | 2025-12-12 16:01:53+00:00
He’s talking about zero knowledge proofs - it’s a neat use of graph coloring where you send an encrypted proof that a graph can be colored with three colors and no neighbors with the same color. The verifier makes a challenge to prove two nodes don’t have the same color, and the prover provides a key to decrypted just those two nodes. This process is repeated a number of times (with new colored graphs) until the verifier approaches certainty that the prover will always be able to show all nodes have neighbors with different colors.

This coloring problem is NP complete and somehow the thing the prover is proving is encoded in the graph structure. At the end of the day, the only thing the verifier is sure of is that the prover can make the three colored graph, 1 bit that corresponds to the thing the verifier wants to know (eg - does the prover have a token that can show they are over 18).
Tell HN: AI is good for software hackers because we will be more substantial
by keepamovin | 2025-12-12 16:02:15+00:00
What i mean is: instead of spending your evenings self-hosting git and writing your own Python SMTP client, just for the lols/learning, you are freed of that (nevertheless, in-the-past interesting) "drudgery" since you can "see the results" by whipping it up in AI within an hour (or less). It no longer even has nerd points.

So now, you don't need to fritter away your time on endless experiments and gimmicks (unless that's your thing, nothing wrong with that), now you can go -- "Okay, enough of all that, I'm going to take on something big." And you can, because AI is the team that you don't have, in your home lab, wherever you are. You can use your intelligence, and your instinct, and intuition, to design, plan, envision something really cool and meaningful to you (not, yet-another-<whatever>). You know what I mean?

You can take on projects you never would have taken on before, that really matter to you, because AI gives you the ability to realize those things.

That is so cool. It's such a superpower, and it's gonna forever upend how companies get built, and the kind of companies and what they produce. It is the most amazing time to be alive.

What will you do with it?
by Extropy_ | 2025-12-12 16:02:29+00:00
I like your libertarian approach. You're right the line can move a lot. Of course, my support/interference would (hypothetically speaking) be different on a situation to situation basis, my reasoning is simply love. If I love someone, like my son, I want them to be free to make mistakes and hurt themselves, and certainly if they start hurting others I would seek to stop that. I think it's important, though, to be there for people, nut the line does change like you pointed out. So I'm really not sure- my decisions would be situationally dependent. I'm still inclined to say that prohibition is ineffective and potentially more dangerous for some people
by metadope | 2025-12-12 16:02:31+00:00
Why does the HN headline here drop the original's important word: 'why'?

Original (emphasis mine): >> Stanford Medicine study shows why mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis

Transcribed to an HN headline here: >> Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis

A significant difference, no?

Why?

----

After reading the article at Stanford, the word I'd choose is 'how' as in 'how vaccines can cause myocarditis'.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-12 16:02:36+00:00
I'd like to know what Monopoly knock-off is partly in the shot here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebA8X4HChJM

PSA: if you have family meltdowns playing Monopoly, try following the rules and allowing auctions of un-bought property. At least the game may eventually end then. Or just don't play games intended to be teachable "well isn't this shit" moments.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-12 16:02:52+00:00
I have enough industry insights to prove that your data is floating out there, unprotected, in plain text and that those that are not bound by the law are making very good use of it. Every breach leaks more bits about you.

This is the main driver behind the targeted scams that ordinary people now have to deal with. It is why people get voice calls from loved ones in distress, why they get 'tech support' calls that aim to take over their devices and why lots of people have lost lots of money.

If you think I am too conspiracy theorist by making everything black and white that is maybe simply because we live different lives and have different experience.
by gdulli | 2025-12-12 16:03:26+00:00
Ads are information. They're made up of fact and opinion. The facts are valuable. I would like to know if there's a new pizza place that opened in my town. We all, by necessity, have to buy lots of things in life, and we should know what the options are. We're also adults who can separate the fact that a pizza place exists from their biased claim that it's the best pizza.

We don't need to go overboard with calling advertising cancer. As is usually the case, we can ignore the most extremist takes. Ads are annoying more often than useful, but you can say that about lots of things in life.
by oytis | 2025-12-12 16:04:11+00:00
Do these models really lie or do they only do what they are supposed to do - produce text that is statistically similar to the training set, but not in the training set (and thus can include false/made up statements)?

Now they add another run on top of it that is in principle prone to the same issues, except they reward the model for factuality instead of likeability. This is cool, but why not apply the same reward strategy to the answer itself?
by wvenable | 2025-12-12 16:04:12+00:00
I’m not saying individual programmers consciously set out to eliminate jobs, or that every programmer's work directly replaces someone. But the historical and structural reality of the profession is that software development, as a field, has consistently produced automation that reduces the amount of human labor required.

That pattern is bigger than any one of us and it's not a moral judgment. It's simply part of what technology does and has always done. AI is a continuation of that same trend we've all participated in, whether directly or indirectly. My point is that to stop now and say "look at all these jobs being eliminated by computers" is several decades too late.
by lloydatkinson | 2025-12-12 16:04:12+00:00
> I always use the example of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This game is so well crafted that I know people who don’t even like video games but bought a console just to play it — and once they finished, they sold everything.

I feel like with the part you highlighted and this quote here that we are reading a blog post from an alternate dimension or something.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-12 16:04:15+00:00
They actually used that in the US as well for railways. I remember a post years ago on the Classic Computer Mailing List from someone who said that their father had worked on the railways and pointed out that the "high bay" station lighting all ran off 3-phase 16.7Hz power. Apparently it looked okay at ground level but was quite disconcerting when you looked up and saw the lights flickering in patterns of three.
Show HN: Base UI v1.0 Unstyled UI Components from the Creators of Radix and MUI
by colmtuite | 2025-12-12 16:04:22+00:00
After two years of development (and endless bikeshedding), we’ve finally pushed Base UI v1 out the door.

Base UI is an unstyled UI library for building accessible component libraries and user interfaces with React. 35 accessible, configurable, composable, customizable components with a focus on a11y.

Base UI is already in production at startups like Paper, Zed, and Unsplash, and being trialled by larger companies like GitHub and Vercel. There is a growing community of open-source libs built on top of it, such as Coss UI, Basecn, 9UI, and Pure UI.

Since Base UI doesn’t bundle any styles, it plays nice with Tailwind, CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS, plain CSS, or whatever styling solution you prefer. It also works with JavaScript animation libraries like Motion, or just plain CSS transitions.

The project is backed by MUI (who are profitable and UI-focused), and maintained by a full-time team of 7 engineers, designers, and managers.

https://base-ui.com
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-12 16:04:38+00:00
My saying is that if you want to be able to herd cats, you need to be cat yourself.

That can require so much experience most people could never imagine it could be accomplished at all.

But if so, you could then herd geniuses, as long as they were also cats :)

When you single-handedly have to cover a lot of bases, you do what you have to do.
by jeingham | 2025-12-12 16:05:00+00:00
I feel you man. Problem is that would be a major dollar infrastructure problem that would need federal dollars. With a deficit over 40T dollars and political wind blowing against more federal spending generally and Colorado not being a favored state at the moment I'd say the chances are slim of it happening in the next three years. It would be boffo if some liberal corporate billionaire put his shoulder against the project like that enough to inspire a combination of a Colorado bond issue, some state funding and support. The way California handled its high speed rail in Central valley here is not an inspiration I'll tell you that right now. What a fcuk-up and embarrassment that is. What were they thinking?
by Extropy_ | 2025-12-12 16:05:06+00:00
Banning substances naturally decreases use, that's obvious, but prohibition criminalizes use, which will always persist. You cannot stop drug use. Drug legalization so far has resulted in declining use of dangerous substances like tobacco and alcohol. Far more young people today choose smoking pot over smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. Many people choose not to drink because they've observed the widespread dangerous effects of it since it's been legal. If heroin was made legal all over the world today, you'd 100% see increased use. But maybe humanity needs to see the consequences in order to respect them? Just like alcohol and cigarettes?
by pessimizer | 2025-12-12 16:05:13+00:00
> Convenience stores scan ID, bars scan ID

These are new things, not old things. The idea that stores and bars should be able to record for all eternity the identities of the people who have purchased things from them is just as much of a horror. They can sell that information to anyone.

> hotels take copies of passports…

This is not really a new thing, although it is a fairly new thing (i.e. within the last 40 years, since cheap enough photocopiers.) But it comes from laws about keeping track of who is staying in temporary accommodation, 100 years ago you would have had to sign the register.
by u_sama | 2025-12-12 16:06:22+00:00
I actually dont think your comment invalidates mine. The house of lords cannot really do anything than be a pain in the ass by sending the bill 3 times. The commons will eventually outrule them if they have sufficient political capital.

My comment on elective tyranny comes from the fact that if a trifecta of: leader/party mps/house of lords are aligned there is little to stop them.

This done I think all of the debates around authoritarianism and censorship put too much blame on the government which seems to represent the views of the majority of people rather well. I think it also comes from the fact that the median age is older and older people are more conservative in their choices and thus more willing to put limitations on everything (and also the fucking boomers vote as a 25% bloc which imposes their choices on the remaining poplation i.e the infamous triple lock of retirements)
by adam_patarino | 2025-12-12 16:06:26+00:00
Yeah, that matches my experience: LLMs are amazing “script interns” and shaky “systems engineers.” One trick that helps on bigger stuff: force it into a tight loop of (1) write a failing test for a single behavior, (2) implement smallest change, (3) run tests, (4) refactor. When you make the unit of work “one green test,” the model’s tendency to wander gets way less destructive.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-12 16:06:36+00:00
Even if the end result ends up being a net positive, even by a wide margin, I think any project that goes over budget by 100% and lands 10 years late does reasonably merit the clusterfuck tag.

The Space Shuttle was one too and that was a marvel. A deathtrap politically-motivated pork-barrel hot-mess of a project, but also a shining black-and-white marvel of a glorious flying space Aga.