MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rstuart4133 | 2025-12-13 21:33:57+00:00
That doesn't work for two reasons. Firstly the law in my country specifically forbids introducing what they call a "systemic weakness". Among other things, that bans them from demanding every device is bugged. Instead they must get an judge to authorise targeting an individual, then get the manufacturers to replace the firmware in that device.

Secondly, they have no control over companies not based where I live. So I could just import it myself, provided you are successful get ever country to pass a law the denies me the right to do this the way I want to do it.
by ctippett | 2025-12-13 21:34:06+00:00
I get advertisements for VPN providers almost everywhere. I've never been interested, but I do subscribe to Mullvad via Tailscale. So, I'm thankful and appreciative that they did their due diligence and partnered with a reputable provider. I've been very happy with the service.

Edit: Welp. How could this possibly be my most downvoted comment. Am I not entitled to an opinion? I ain't no AI.
by flumpcakes | 2025-12-13 21:34:23+00:00
I also use Mullvad VPN exclusively for my VPN needs. The fact I can get 6 months of access with a scratch card bought from a store & my account is just a random integer number is an example of privacy by design: no email, no phone numbers, no credit cards. I don't even do anything illegal, I'd just rather have a (what I feel) trusted option when I want to browse the Internet anonymously.
by Telemakhos | 2025-12-13 21:34:37+00:00
I guess I have three questions here.

1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.

2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?

3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
by calmbonsai | 2025-12-13 21:34:57+00:00
To be precise, we're talking about "Desktop Computers" and not the more generic "information appliances".

For example, we're not remotely close to having a standardized "watch form-factor" appliance interface.

Physical reality is always a constraint. In this case, keyboard+display+speaker+mouse+arms-length-proximity+stationary. If you add/remove/alter _any_ of those 6 constraints, then there's plenty of room for innovation, but those constraints _define_ a desktop computer.
by sandspar | 2025-12-13 21:35:20+00:00
Probably in part, yes! Since it’s a pet peeve, I must be making extra special note of it every time I see it. So it’s probable that I’m overweighting it!

That being said I’m quite sure that it’s being used more frequently recently. For example, I read a shortish 2000-word article yesterday that uses the word “quietly” four times. And ChatGPT 5.1 used it in most of its responses. Also I’d expect that the frequency illusion wears off quite quickly, whereas I’ve noticed “quietly” for some time and the feeling doesn’t seem to be wearing off. Maybe you’ll start to notice it now too!
by captn3m0 | 2025-12-13 21:36:04+00:00
This was a discussion point at the WriteTheDocs conference this year, and lots of teams were managing multiple release docs: changelog (mostly automated and granular), then release notes for notifying customers, followed by feature specific announcement blogs, which get condensed to the notification feature in the app itself.

One of the things that stood out was the need for the docs teams to have visibility and early notice about what is going into a release. Some teams mentioned using slack emojis for markers to help review what is proposed for promotion for eg. another was the buy-in to treat these various docs as strict release requirements (will you be willing to block a release because the docs aren’t ready?)

Lots of LLM-driven tooling attempts, but the Ghostty one is the only one I remember reading publicly.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-12-13 21:36:17+00:00
Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into?

I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.

Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.
Show HN: Free API for REVE EEG Foundation Model
by briandaley26 | 2025-12-13 21:37:31+00:00
I built a REST API for REVE (the 60K-hour EEG foundation model released in October). It's free to use: https://web-production-73111.up.railway.app/docs

Use case: If you're building anything with EEG and don't want to deploy the model yourself, just hit the API with raw signals and get back embeddings.

Also working on training a better model on private data from devices/ labs. If you're collecting EEG data and want to partner, DM me.

Feedback welcome!
by Xylakant | 2025-12-13 21:38:27+00:00
I’m amazed by the idea that providing escape capsules would have saved many lives. The Christmas tsunami caused about 230 000 fatalities in a densely populated area. People didn’t even get to higher ground. Where are you going to store the hundreds of thousands capsules that you’d need to even make a dent in that number. And how will people get into those capsules within minutes of the warning?
by dmurray | 2025-12-13 21:38:34+00:00
Yes, I was going to note that this doesn't necessarily apply on derivatives exchanges. But

a) I don't know of any exchange where this could be true for specifically Apple and Tesla, so the example is OK

b) you can still get some level of isolation, even on commodities exchanges you can't typically affect the gold book with your crude oil order (the typical case is that your order to buy oil futures in 2027 matches against someone selling oil in 2026, plus someone selling a calendar spread)

c) for exchanges that do offer this kind of functionality, one of the ways they deal with high volumes is by temporarily disabling this feature.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-13 21:39:45+00:00
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.

HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].

[0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou...

[1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/

[2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/
by irishcoffee | 2025-12-13 21:40:15+00:00
I was a lifeguard for about 8 years in high school and college. I pulled out close to 20 people. Never had to administer CPR: if you get there quick enough it’s maybe a bit of coughing.

I wonder if any of those people remember that.

I also cannot sit by a body of water with people swimming without falling back into lifeguard mode. I’ve pulled out a few people as a civilian. Nothing serious, but it would have been. Little kids and beaches are a rough combo.
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-13 21:40:16+00:00
I feel like microservices have gotten a lot easier over the last 7 years from when Twilio experienced this, not just from my experience but from refinements in architectures

There are infinite permutations in architecture and we've collectively narrowed them down to things that are cheap to deploy, automatically scale for low costs, and easily replicable with a simple script

We should be talking about how AI knows those scripts too and can synthetize adjustments, dedicated Site Reliability Engineers and DevOps is great for maintaining convoluted legacy setups, but irrelevant for doing the same thing from scratch nowadays
Show HN: I built a "Headless CMS" for my resume (Next.js and Puppeteer)
by lpipe | 2025-12-13 21:40:40+00:00
I got tired of maintaining resume_google.docx, resume_amazon.docx, and resume_v5_final.pdf.

Version control for resumes is broken. So I built a "Single Source of Truth" system.

The Logic:

The Database: You dump everything (all projects, 10 years of history) into one JSON-like structure.

The Query: You paste a Job Description.

The Render: The system "queries" your history for matching skills/bullets and renders a tailored 1-page PDF using a custom Puppeteer engine.

It’s basically CI/CD for job applications.

Tech Stack:

Next.js 15 (App Router)

NestJS (Backend logic)

Puppeteer (Custom rendering engine to fix page-break issues)

Live Demo: https://resumefy.pro

I’m open to roasting on the code or the "matching" logic.
by bogtog | 2025-12-13 21:40:50+00:00
That's fair. I sometimes find myself pausing or just talking in circles as I'm deciding what I want. I think when I'm speaking, I feel freer to use less precise/formal descriptions, but the model can still correctly interpret the technical meaning

In either case, different strokes for different folks, and what ultimately matters is whether you get good results. I think the upside is high, so I broadly suggest people try it out
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-13 21:40:52+00:00
It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great.

It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.
by jammcq | 2025-12-13 21:41:28+00:00
Does my key fob have more computing power than the Lunar Lander? In this episode of Runtime Arguments that just dropped today, Wolf and I dive into that question and we reveal some information that might surprise you. We had a lot of fun doing the research and we hope you enjoy it. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. And, if you enjoy it, please tell all of your friends. We'd really appreciate it.
by ade_code | 2025-12-13 21:41:31+00:00
Good Afternoon Folks - I hope you’re well.

Apologies for the impromptu message.

I’m working on an AI audio tech startup with a Carnegie Mellon CS PhD grad.

Would it be possible to hear your thoughts?

- Spaw, AI music platform for making banging beats with text

- It’s like Chat GPT/Gemini for beats

Please feel free to respond here or drop me a message on LinkedIn(FYI, my profile is not up to date).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ade-lawal-solarin-66b970ba/
by andy99 | 2025-12-13 21:41:39+00:00
That was my thought, it feels like something a career college or high school would do. Are CS students going to have to take a “how to talk to chat gpt course”? That’s probably less condescending than making an arts student or someone else that doesn’t need to have anything to do with LLMs have to sit through it.

I though Purdue was a good school, these kind of gimmicks are usually the province of low-tier universities trying to get attention.
by vunderba | 2025-12-13 21:41:40+00:00
I did something similar many years ago. I fed about half a million words (two decades of mostly fantasy and science fiction writing) into a Markov model that could generate text using a “gram slider” ranging from 2-grams to 5-grams.

I used it as a kind of “dream well” whenever I wanted to draw some muse from the same deep spring. It felt like a spiritual successor to what I used to do as a kid: flipping to a random page in an old 1950s Funk & Wagnalls dictionary and using whatever I found there as a writing seed.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-13 21:41:41+00:00
> Microservices is a service-oriented software architecture in which server-side applications are constructed by combining many single-purpose, low-footprint network services.

Gonna stop you right there.

Microservices have nothing to do with the hosting or operating architecture.

Martin Fowler who formalized the term, Microservices are:

“In short, the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery”

You can have an entirely local application built on the “microservice architectural style.”

Saying they are “often HTTP and API” is besides the point.

The problem Twilio actually describe is that they messed up service granularity and distributed systems engineering processes

Twilio's experience was not a failure of the microservice architectural style. This was a failure to correctly define service boundaries based on business capabilities.

Their struggles with serialization, network hops, and complex queueing were symptoms of building a distributed monolith, which they finally made explicit with this move. So they accidentally built a system with the overhead of distribution but the tight coupling of a single application. Now they are making their foundations of architecture fit what they built, likely cause they poorly planned it.

The true lesson is that correctly applying microservices requires insanely hard domain modeling and iteration and meticulous attention to the "Distributed Systems Premium."

https://martinfowler.com/microservices/
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-13 21:41:43+00:00
In general it's obvious this is the trend & amazing.

It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...
by MrDarcy | 2025-12-13 21:42:11+00:00
Reading it with hindsight, their problems have less to do with the technical trade off of micro or monolith services and much more to do with the quality and organizational structure of their engineering department. The decisions and reasons given shine a light on the quality. The repository and test layout shine a light on the structure.

Given the quality and the structure neither approach really matters much. The root problems are elsewhere.
by phrasecode | 2025-12-13 21:42:19+00:00
Thanks for spotting that — to clarify: the current production implementation of Live Queries is Postgres only.

MySQL/MariaDB support is in progress (binlog-based) and is why the docs say “coming soon.”

The post wasn’t meant to imply that MySQL/MariaDB are already live; the intention was to describe the overall design rather than claim full parity. I’ll update the wording to avoid that confusion.
by oblio | 2025-12-13 21:42:21+00:00
That is the hill you want to die on? The fact that at income levels greatly above the median income, taxes aren't capped?

You should look at it the other way, where ANY income or income equivalent, of any kind, should be taxed like income.

So when Bezos spends $5bn per year, that means he made $5bn per year (at least), so his tax statement should show him paying $2bn or whatever the top tax rate would imply.
by commandersaki | 2025-12-13 21:42:37+00:00
Did a road trip in our teens from Melbourne to Sydney. On our way back we stopped at the petrol station at Pheasant's nest. We were nearly out of petrol, didn't have any money. My friend had some cigarettes, so we started awkwardly trying to sell a pack to people, just needed about $20 (back in those days petrol was a lot cheaper and obviously the dollar had better value). We approached a lady with her kids, told her our story of needing petrol to return home, and we had some cigarettes if she needed. She straight up gave us a $50 without asking anything in return.

This has been burned in my memory going on for more than 25 years. I have gone over and beyond for both people and strangers, but I have yet to be in a similar situation to pay it forward.
by rurban | 2025-12-13 21:43:14+00:00
It's not that Ferrari is not functional. It is, but it severely hampered by management.

When they were successful, they tried every new idea out, directly at the track. Because they they had their own track at the door. When they weren't allowed to do that anymore (all others complained about their unfair advantage), they had a gap from the idea to get the result from trying it out. So they build simulators (which all the others already had). But they were still used to try anything out, so that their simulators couldn't reproduce anything anymore. Because they constantly changed all the settings. So the managers went radical and restore backups of the simulators every single night. They became stable, but the engineers lost all of their work every single day. So they stopped improving the system. That's when the car stopped improving also.

Management problem.
by phil21 | 2025-12-13 21:43:21+00:00
It’s the going from zero to 100 that gets folks it seems.

Deep, heavy, wet snow is called heart attack snow for a reason. It sneaks up on you - a driveway you just cleared for years with normal snowfalls is all of a sudden a 10x workout from usual, and your brain doesn’t completely process this. Anything else at that level of intensity would likely trigger you to take breaks.

That said - I think inactivity is far worse. But I still make a point to go shovel my elderly neighbors walks here in Chicago before they have a chance to do it when we get particularly deep snowfalls.
by coryrc | 2025-12-13 21:45:03+00:00
And this also leaves out all the heating power still consumed directly from fossil fuels. The gap is much larger.

This doesn't have have to be by switching consumption; using less is possible: Passivhaus is from Germany, after all. However, you can't do that and keep all your historical protections on buildings and layers-upon-layers of red tape on renovations.
by ramity | 2025-12-13 21:45:17+00:00
Contrasting take: RTT and a service providing black box knowledge is not equivalent to knowledge of the backbone. To assume traffic is always efficiently routed seems dubious when considering a global scale. The supporting infrastructure of telecom is likely shaped by volume/size of traffic and not shortest paths. I'll confess my evaluation here might be overlooking some details. I'm curious on others' thoughts on this.
by eek2121 | 2025-12-13 21:45:20+00:00
For the same reason we don't reinvent the wheel. Or perhaps, the same reason we don't constantly change things like a vehicle. It works well, and introducing something new means a learning curve that 99% of folks won't want to deal with, so at that point, you are designing something new for the other 1% of folks willing to tackle it. Unless it's an amazing concept, it won't take off.
by theturtletalks | 2025-12-13 21:45:30+00:00
It’s using AISDK and MCP-UI, which is standard for chats. If you check the cart in the input, there’s only 2 stores added for now.

Also, that chat is just one part of it. Those stores are running on Openfront, our Shopify alternative. Please check our ethos to get the full vision.

Also, I was working on this before AI. Openfront and the/marketplace are part of an ecosystem. We built Openship, an e-commerce order management system, years ago.
by luckylion | 2025-12-13 21:46:02+00:00
You can easily test this, of course -- the problem isn't that you, the user, cannot find out, it's that you pay for being able to use an endpoint in those countries and can't, because they don't exist.

It's not only small countries either, it affects much of Latin America, including Brazil (PIA's servers were in Miami for BR as well last time I checked). I've occasionally seen it also affect US states where e.g. Massachusetts would be served from Trenton, NJ.
by tootie | 2025-12-13 21:46:17+00:00
The next hot thing (pun intended) is geothermal. The tech to drill deep enough opens up the possibility of extracting geothermal energy in most of the world. The tech exists and is deployed. Scaling is not yet proven but is very plausible. Geothermal runs 24/7 and can be clean base load power.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-13 21:46:18+00:00
> Once the code for all destinations lived in a single repo, they could be merged into a single service. With every destination living in one service, our developer productivity substantially improved. We no longer had to deploy 140+ services for a change to one of the shared libraries. One engineer can deploy the service in a matter of minutes.

If you must to deploy every service because of a library change, you don't have services, you have a distributed monolith. The entire idea of a "shared library" which must be kept updated across your entire service fleet is antithetical to how you need to treat services.
by phil21 | 2025-12-13 21:46:44+00:00
Yep this is me. I get super pumped whenever we get a snowfall large enough to justify pulling out my ridiculously overkill snowblower.

The entire block on both sides plus the alley gets done those days. Neighbors here at first were skeptical since I guess it’s not normal (it is in Minnesota - every block there has a hero) for the big city, but now I get treats from various houses that catch me doing it.

I honestly do it for the pure joy of using awesome equipment I could otherwise nowhere remotely justify purchasing. Plus knowing I’m helping out my community in a small way is a nice bonus. Also helps me meet people and be social as an introvert.
by praptak | 2025-12-13 21:47:16+00:00
Stability of icebergs is tricky. They don't "become" top heavy as the article states, they are constantly top heavy.

The center of mass of the iceberg is above the center of buoyancy 100% of the time. What prevents the flip is a flat base which hopefully counters the small tilts by moving the center of buoyancy in the same direction as the center of mass.
by concerneddude | 2025-12-13 21:47:25+00:00
Hi HN — I put this together as a plain-language, systems-oriented proposal rather than an advocacy piece.

The goal was to ask a narrow question: is it possible to design a fiscal accountability mechanism that is enforceable, non-partisan, and hard to subvert by the same actors it governs?

I’m mainly looking for flaws in the logic, edge cases, or historical examples that show why this would or wouldn’t work.
by _puk | 2025-12-13 21:48:00+00:00
Brings back memories of a recent 16 year old stood in tears whilst they took her details to prosecute her because she was travelling on a child ticket "but my mum always bought me a ticket".

No mercy. Fuck those guys.

Same guy that stung me for not having a ticket when every other day they'd come round and let me buy a ticket on the train.. I even went to the window at the destination for a ticket, and then got referred for a penalty fare. Fuck that guy.