MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Someone | 2025-12-18 11:26:12+00:00
> However, unpublished national observations revealed groundwater depletion in some plains from as early as the 1950s. This coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats, which were sustainable groundwater extraction systems and UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites9, with (semi)deep wells.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira... says Iran’s population today is over five times that of 1950.

It also is a safe bet that water consumption per capita went up, too.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if qanats couldn’t support current water usage.

Maybe that “coincided” doesn’t imply “they stopped using qanats, so the water table dropped” but “qanats weren’t sufficient anymore, so they started drilling deep wells, and the water table dropped”?
by the_af | 2025-12-18 11:28:26+00:00
Which disparaging remarks? I just claimed HN is ok/average, not "the smartest place on the internet", and that it's typical of online communities to consider themselves "the best".

The unsubstantiated claim that "HN is the smartest place on the internet" is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, which wasn't provided.

The downvotes only prove my point.
by jmsgwd | 2025-12-18 11:28:44+00:00
Just to point out, protecting a key using the secure enclave and syncing it using end-to-end encryption aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

The security property you care about is that the plaintext key is only ever processed in use within the secure enclave (transiently, during authentication).

That doesn’t preclude syncing or backing up the encrypted key via a cloud service - if the device allows the application to do that.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-12-18 11:29:53+00:00
From last year's published in the Guardian:

> Editor’s note: the King William’s College quiz has appeared in the Guardian since 1951. The quiz is no longer sat formally; it is sent to the schoolchildren and their families to tackle over the Christmas holiday. So yes, you are allowed to Google – however, the questions are constructed to make that less than straightforward. Answers will appear on the Guardian website on 15 January 2025. Good luck!
by mft_ | 2025-12-18 11:30:15+00:00
Well-meaning feedback: on the front page, there's a pricing section lower down, which only mentions credits and doesn't give a price; the click-though goes to a login screen.

I found this so instantly frustrating that I rage-closed the page and came here to moan!

Reading the comments, I don't believe you're looking to implement a dark pattern and not show the price, but that's what seems to be happening currently.

Now I see the main pricing page, it's worth pointing out that the categories and prices there don't match with those on the front page: 'starter' with 30 headshots vs. 'novice' with 35; 'basic' with 60 headshots vs. 'proficient' with 70, etc.
by incrudible | 2025-12-18 11:30:17+00:00
This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.
by piazz | 2025-12-18 11:30:51+00:00
Thank you!

Almost all of my customers so far have been directly from the central Anki plugin directory. I made sure to use lots of SEO friendly terms / buzzwords in the title so that when people ctrl+f for AI or ChatGPT, they find mine.

My next steps I think are to better incentivize leaving reviews so that it ranks higher on the add-on list, and then launch it on various language learning subreddits. There’s a whole cottage industry of Anki influencers on YouTube as well (absurd, I know), so that’s another channel eventually.
by mrdesmondwatson | 2025-12-18 11:31:37+00:00
Hey HN, just starting out with this project and would love feedback. I kept switching between my browser and Claude constantly—summarizing articles, asking questions about docs, extracting data from pages. The tab-switching and copy-paste friction added up. So I built a browser where Claude is just… there. How it works: There’s a slide-out panel (Studio) with three modes: ∙ Chat – Talk to Claude with automatic page context. No need to paste anything, it sees what you’re viewing. ∙ Actions – One-click buttons for common tasks: summarize, extract key points, pull all links, translate, explain code, review code. ∙ Terminal – Command-line style interface for when you want more control. Browser features (it still needs to browse well): Vertical tabs, tab stacks for grouping, split view, workspaces with color coding, session save/restore, reading mode, picture-in-picture, dark/light themes. Took cues from Arc and Vivaldi but kept things minimal. Technical stuff: Electron with main/renderer process separation. Direct Anthropic API integration with streaming—no middleware or CLI wrappers. You bring your own API key and choose your model (Opus 4, Sonnet 4, or Haiku 3.5). Config stored locally at ~/.claude-browser/config.json. What I’m unsure about: Right now it’s API-key only. Keeps things simple and private, but wondering if that limits who’d actually use it. Open to thoughts. Still rough around the edges but usable as a daily driver. Happy to answer questions.
by harish095 | 2025-12-18 11:31:41+00:00
Hey all!

I'm a big fan of Tauri. In one of the apps I am working on, I wanted to include a liquid glass effect. There isn't official support or a plugin yet.

I found a similar implementation for Electron though: electron-liquid-glass.

So claude and I migrated the Electron version to a Tauri plugin. The repository also includes an example app: https://github.com/hkandala/tauri-plugin-liquid-glass/tree/m....

Hope this helps anyone looking for a liquid glass feature in Tauri!
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-18 11:32:19+00:00
The adversity is very much there, but it's all emotional and social. What's missing is (mild) physical adversity, and self-directed play and exploration.

Mild somewhat-dangerous-but-not-really play teaches that actions and decisions have consequences, and if you make a mistake it hurts - maybe a lot.

The world is a dangerous place, but some element of risk is both unavoidable and exciting. And it's safe (more or less) to explore and take risks.

When the stress is all emotional and social - high school bullying, status games, cliques and groups, gender wars, random adult authoritarianism - it teaches you that dissent is forbidden and you must conform to the group or you will be punished by it.

You never get the lessons about autonomy and exploration. You're physically comfortable but emotionally underdeveloped with a limited sense of individual agency. There's a fair chance you'll have social PTSD and confuse individuality with permanent rebellion. And your natural state will be permanently-triggered rage about something.
by unxmaal | 2025-12-18 11:32:58+00:00
“A DuckDB extension for efficiently reading data out of Microsoft PST files, with rich schemas for common MAPI types. It is fully integrated with DuckDB's filesystem allowing direct reads from local disk or object storage (with globbing). Use it to query PST files using plain SQL, or to import their data into DuckDB tables (or any other supported federated write).”
by n4r9 | 2025-12-18 11:33:28+00:00
I enjoyed this. At my own workplace it's a challenge to fit my team's work into the wider sprint-based methodology where every project must be refined, estimated, and broken down into items with <2 days effort. That makes a certain amount of sense if, say, you're building a standard web portal. It makes less sense if, say, you're adapting modern hierarchical routing algorithms to take vehicle dimension restrictions into account. It's difficult to express just how nebulous this kind of work can be. Managers like to say "Maybe you don't know how long it will take now, but you can research and prototype for a couple of days and have a better idea". The problem is that research work generally takes the following form:

* Come up with 5 possible approaches (2 days)

* Create benchmark framework & suite (1 day)

* Try out approach A, but realise that it cannot work for subtle technical reasons (2 days)

* Try out approach B (2 days)

* Fail to make approach B performant enough (3 day)

...

You just keep trying directions, refining, following hunches, coming up with new things to try etc... until you (seemingly randomly) land on something that works. This is fundamentally un-estimatable. And yet if you're not doing this sort of work, you will rarely come up with truly novel feats of engineering.
Show HN: Python SDK – forecasting with foundation time-series and tabular models
by ChernovAndrei | 2025-12-18 11:33:28+00:00
We’ve built a Python SDK for running inference on foundation models designed for time-series and tabular data. They are new SOTA models for time-series and tabular tasks and work out of the box. They do not require model training or feature engineering. The link to the GitHub repository is: https://github.com/S-FM/faim-python-client
by major505 | 2025-12-18 11:33:32+00:00
IT dosnet lag long, since both have pretty activity communities.

There are other variations that are a little faster in issueing the updates, but they are maintained by small teams, so they have more change of being corrupted by bullshit, specially this day and age where people take politics too damn serious.

Too be honest, except for niche uses, I just abandoned firefox. Their engine is behind, lags in sites that use too much javascript is visible, when even opening 3 or 4 tabs makes they browser lag behind.

I just keep it in my system this days to access some sites in my work computer and test UI rendering in firefox. Other than that, I had to surrender to chrome and its variations.
Is content convergence an incentive problem, not an AI problem?
by yostoryteller | 2025-12-18 11:34:26+00:00
We’re producing more content than ever, but most of it is forgettable. Different companies, different products but same feel.

People blame AI for being generic. I think that’s the wrong diagnosis.

The real change is cost. Generative AI made publishing almost free. When output is cheap, systems optimize for whatever is easiest to measure: speed, volume, engagement. Once that happens, convergence is expected.

Sameness isn’t a bug. It’s what optimization against shared proxies produces.

There’s some early evidence for this. In at least one natural experiment, limiting access to LLMs increased content diversity. Other studies suggest AI-generated communication is trusted less over time, even when quality looks fine.

This looks less like a creativity problem and more like an incentives + feedback loop problem.

Question: if publishing stays frictionless, is convergence inevitable? If not, what constraints would actually prevent it?
by seec | 2025-12-18 11:34:26+00:00
Yeah, I know they come pre-charged now. But I can't remember what his problem was back then. Maybe he didn't know, or he fucked up…

From what I understand, self-install should be fine up to a 12m run, but if you let too much gas leak, you may have issues because of low pressure.

At least now you can buy them for relatively cheap. Mine required a swap of the control board on the inside unit, and it was ridiculously expensive (almost as much as buying a new unit). I am not sure why it fried, but probably bad solder from old age (it's about 15 years old at this point).

It's an excellent technology, but the surrounding business feels extremely shady.
by bellamoon544 | 2025-12-18 11:36:31+00:00
MenuPhotoAI is the AI food photography tool that transforms any smartphone photo into professional restaurant-quality images in 30 seconds. Upload dark, blurry, or poorly lit photos and our AI enhances lighting, sharpens focus, and fixes backgrounds. Your real food stays authentic. No fake AI-generated dishes. Restaurants with professional photos tend to get more orders. Better photos mean more clicks, more trust, more sales. Our customers see real increases within days of updating their menus. Three powerful modes to choose from: Delivery App Mode gives you 8 styles optimized for Uber Eats, DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Just Eat. Product Photography Mode offers 18 professional styles with full color and surface customization. Two ways to use MenuPhotoAI: Self-service: Upload photos yourself and get results in 30 seconds. Done-for-you: Email us your photos and we handle everything. It's 95% cheaper than hiring a food photographer. We're talking $29 versus $600+ photoshoots. Built for restaurants, bakeries, food trucks, ghost kitchens, catering companies, and anyone selling or showcasing food.
by csomar | 2025-12-18 11:36:40+00:00
Unlikely. My country have been through this (at a whole country level, not just a single city) for two years. It sped up desalination projects. People re-adjusted to the lack of water. Prices adjusted. Lots of water is wasted and very little water is actually being used for drinking. At the end, the rain came and it coincided with many desalination plants starting operations.

The prime minister suggesting evacuations is probably political. It is much easier to adjust to lack of water than to move your home/job somewhere else.
by dsego | 2025-12-18 11:38:53+00:00
How do you compare it to the Portal games or the Talos principle? I find those superior in puzzle mechanics, sense of achievement and playing dynamics. They can be challenging but you never feel aimlessly going around without a purpose like the Witness. There is good review of the game on youtube by the title "The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play", it covers a lot and resonates well with my experience, the panels could've been a standalone mobile/tablet game. Everything else in the game is beautiful but frustrating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0
by berdario | 2025-12-18 11:39:18+00:00
Not only stupid, but also a nazi meme...

Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi

If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
by firexcy | 2025-12-18 11:39:41+00:00
Shameless plug: I wrote this as I tried to understand HN: https://hsu.cy/2025/09/how-to-read-hn/ (Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331030 ) I know it only scratches the surface, but hopefully it can provide some basics.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-18 11:39:49+00:00
I want to raise a point that so far I have not seen in the top N comments: Often simplicity and cleverness are not opposites, because you can only find the simplest way to express something, when you are clever about it. Your solution doesn't have to "smell clever", no, it can be deceptively simple, making the casual reader think "of course it works this way", but when such casual reader was supposed to come up with such a solution, they might invent something unnecessarily convoluted, because their mind has not cut through all the stuff like a knife through butter and they were not so clever. To find the simplest abstraction, that is still able to represent everything you need to represent, and at the same time doesn't have unpleasant consequences like being very slow, or super difficult to understand is the actual cleverness. Writing code no one can understand is not actually that clever. It might be clever in terms of oneself solving a problem at a specific time, but it is not so clever in terms of that thing being maintainable, adaptable, readable, improvable, in the mid and long term.

We don't write everything in lambda calculus or SKI calculus or something like that, even though those things are made up of very simple parts, complexity would emerge. They are not the right choice for most tasks. How do you make it readable? Can you write something that is very clear and performant at the same time, while preventing yourself from programming yourself into a corner? That's where you need to get really clever.
by keiferski | 2025-12-18 11:41:00+00:00
Good post, but I wish he had delved more into how modern institutions could be revamped to allow for slow, long term thinking.

I think there is an assumption that institutions inherently are short term optimized, but I don’t know if that’s actually true, or merely a more recent phenomenon.

My guess is that you’d need to deliberately be “less than hyper rational” when doling out funding, because otherwise you end up following the metrics mentioned in the post. In other words, you might need to give out income randomly to everyone that meets certain criteria, rather than optimizing for the absolute best choice. The nature of inflation and increasing costs of living also becomes a problem, as whatever mechanism you’re using to fund “long term” work needs to be increasing every year.
by walthamstow | 2025-12-18 11:41:14+00:00
I live in Britain. If you read back you'll see I am talking about the opinions of Britons and Europeans of raising children in the US.

My point is it still a very rare thing even in the most common place in the world. The weight of school shootings in people's minds is more emotional than statistical. Careless drivers kill way more people in the US and they do it every day.
by speedgoose | 2025-12-18 11:41:44+00:00
Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate.

I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently.

For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
by wongarsu | 2025-12-18 11:41:55+00:00
"ridiculous precision" being 1km resolution. Considering how one of the author's said "The U.S. taxpayers have a right to this data" I really wish they had put up a web viewer

Here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-06391-w

And the data as a bunch of zipped geotiffs: https://zenodo.org/records/15446748

A reasonable-ish resolution version of the headline image (total CO2 emissions 2010-2022): https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...

And my favorite: Difference in CO2 emissions between 2010 and 2022: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-18 11:42:01+00:00
All of those, for many or most users, would be best used as tool calls to ChatGPT. That takes care of all the hold those companies have over users, which they use to extract money. As for stealing the useful parts:

- Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Figma, Replit, Lovable - are all kinds of Computer Aided creation tools, and once converted into tool calls, can be gradually reproduced and replaced feature by feature.

- The rest, they're just fancy (and user disempowering) wrappers around proprietary databases and/or API calls to humans. Those cannot be trivially reproduced, because code is neither their secret sauce, nor their source of value. But they can still be pressured into becoming tool calls along with competition, and subsequently commoditized.
by guenthert | 2025-12-18 11:42:46+00:00
> CCL, as far as I can tell, is abandonware

Last release was August 14 2024. For a 30+ year old project, that's quite recent methinks.

It clearly doesn't move as fast as SBCL, but I wouldn't call it abandoned either.

ototh, afaiu, SBCL gave up on ARM32. Can't blame them for that, but until 2023 I was still using an early Banana Pi with such. CCL worked there much better (also it's GC seems more robust).
by tialaramex | 2025-12-18 11:42:48+00:00
Right, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important "out of nowhere" type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash. I'd fail code reviews for a lot of what was done, and there are cracks in the façade where a player will hurt themselves as a result - e.g. there's a bug where animations overwrite so you get short changed on the resources you were gathering when you go "too fast". Some of the intended features, especially in the 1.0 release, just don't work for reasons like somebody typo'd a variable name, or they forgot how a function worked.

But the game is amazing and that's what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.
by jll29 | 2025-12-18 11:43:03+00:00
As a companion:

Frank Liang's thesis on hyphenation (developed for/used by TeX), supervised by Donald E. Knuth:

Liang, Franklin Mark (1983) WORD HY-PHEN-A-TION BY COM-PUT-ER, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University. https://www.tug.org/docs/liang/liang-thesis.pdf
by adito | 2025-12-18 11:43:04+00:00
I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above:

> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.

Here the post after just for a full picture

> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
by jasode | 2025-12-18 11:44:16+00:00
The timing of this article and the submission seems to coincide (and possibly a reaction) to the other story on HN frontpage: Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) (jsomers.net)

To clarify, some are misunderstanding James Somers to be advocating sloppy low quality work, as if he's recommending speed>quality. He's saying something else: remove latencies and delays to shorten feedback loops. Faster feedback cycles leads to more repetitions which leads to higher quality.

"slowness being a virtue" is not the opposite of Somer's recommendation about "working quickly".
by rightbyte | 2025-12-18 11:44:26+00:00
Glad to hear you figured it out. I somewhat identify eventhough I didn't go as deep.

> if I did my homework before they got home they wouldn't believe me and would make me do some kind of schoolwork so they could see it happening, so basically for 4 years the majority of my free time was spent playing WoW and posting on 4chan.

Oh I hate this. Busywork. Also I think you and I got incentivized to play as much computer games as possible due to the arbitrary limitations of it and constant fear of being pulled off to some busywork. It was like a never ending battle ...

I think many parents don't realize that "doing the laundry" on command is like 10x the work of doing it when you please. You can't relax after school.
by rjmunro | 2025-12-18 11:46:38+00:00
The problem with that is you might still get a huge bill if something goes wrong, then they try to charge it to your card at the end of the day/week/month/whatever, and it fails.

Now you still owe them the money, but haven't paid, so they tell you to pay on another card. If you refuse, they start debt collection against you and you could end up with your credit rating being affected, and maybe court cases and so on.

I want give the company an amount of money, then know that it's run out and I have to pay for more. You can set monthly limits (https://github.com/settings/billing/budgets), but if you are like me and have personal projects that you work on for a week or two a few times a year, that doesn't really work.