MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scythe | 2025-12-18 14:30:36+00:00
Sanctions, including an attempted blockade [1] of oil exports, imposed by the British Empire, still in existence at the time, in response to a dispute over the ownership of Iranian oil fields, which were a primary factor in the fall of Mossadegh. See e.g.:

https://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/the-tragedy-of-1953/

It should be noted that while the Shah obviously benefited from the coup, he remained suspicious of the Western powers who had supported it; he was not foolish enough to believe they were honest allies. Consequently, he was inclined to support attempts at autarky.

1: https://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/march-...
by jncfhnb | 2025-12-18 14:30:46+00:00
> manufacturers targeted to areas with high rates of smoking-related illness

Oof

> epigenetic changes making smokers more susceptible to opioid use disorders

This one seems… a bit mystic to me. I would have been much quicker to suggest that a psychological propensity to start smoking mirrors a propensity to start using other drugs vs. arguing for emergent effects of cellular behavior.
by airstrike | 2025-12-18 14:30:52+00:00
I'm on macOS.

I'm kinda strictly against Chromium because I first installed Chrome to break up a browser monopoly that threatened the long term future of the web. I uninstalled it once it flipped from "the browser that's making the web better" to "the browser that's making the company Google better at the expense of the web"

It's not really a political stance, but a pragmatic one. I appreciate that makes it hard to find alternatives, but I can't logically justify using Chrome.
by hylaride | 2025-12-18 14:30:54+00:00
Nominally I agree with you, but your example is classic survivorship bias.

The chances of getting kidnapped are and always were far, far, far less than automobile related injuries and deaths, yet we just see that as a normal risk of modern life.

I have been wondering if the fact that the current generation of 20-somethings isn't going out as much is because of this "over parenting" that they received. I'm sure it's also TikTok, living costs, and avoiding other vice related behaviour (drinking, sex) at such high rates, but it does make me think...
by giantg2 | 2025-12-18 14:31:29+00:00
Yeah, but you had to integrate it until it at least compiled, which kind of made people think about what they're pasting.

I had a peer who suddenly started completing more stories for a month or two when our output was largely equal before. They got promoted over me. I reviewed one of their PRs... what a mess. They were supposed to implement caching. Their first attempt created the cache but never stored anything in it. Their next attempt stored the data in the cache, but never looked at the cache - always retrieving from the API. They deleted that PR to hide their incompetence and opened a new one that was finally right. He was just blindly using AI to crank out his stories.

That team had something like 40% of capacity being spent on tech debt, rework, and bug fixes. The leadership wanted speed above all else. They even tried to fire me because they thought I was slow, even though I was doing as much or more work than my peers.
by lsaferite | 2025-12-18 14:31:55+00:00
> For example, in OpenAPI 3.1, the type field of a schema can be a single string (e.g., "string") or an array of strings (e.g., ["string", "null"]).

> In a statically typed language like Go, this is usually handled by using interface{} (which loses type safety) or complex pointer logic.

Having worked on JSON Schema parsing in go very recently, I disagree with this assessment. You create a `Type` in one of a few (2?) ways, depending on your specific needs. The simple method being that it's a `[]string` under the hood with a custom UnmarshalJSON receiver function. If reproducing the exact input structure is important you can cover that by making `Type` into a struct with a `[]string` and a `bool` to track if it was originally a single or an array. Then you have custom MarshalJSON and UnmarshalJSON receiver functions. That is, in fact, how I've seen multiple existing go JSON Schema libraries handle that variable type. No use of `any` or complex pointers.
by gorjusborg | 2025-12-18 14:31:56+00:00
> “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

Such a great axiom.

I had a mentor/colleague give me a piece of advice that is somewhat related:

"People will remember the quality of your work far longer than the time it took".

I've found it to be true through my experience. I will admit though, I generally do not get tapped to do the quick hacks when in a pinch, but that's a feature, not a bug, in my opinion.
by empath75 | 2025-12-18 14:32:01+00:00
It's the same problem with trying to reconstruct dinosaurs, with probably the same solution in terms of public communication -- producing a _range_ of possible reconstructions based on the available evidence.

That said -- I think we actually do have more indirect evidence than what the reconstructions used -- in fact 3 separate lines of evidence A) paintings of statues B) contemporary descriptions of statues and C) contemporary paintings in general. All of which suggest that the coloring would have been more subtle and realistic.

I think if we had contemporary paintings of dinosaurs with feathers and contemporary accounts in writing that dinosaurs had feathers, but no feathers in the fossil record, you would still be fairly justified in saying that dinosaurs probably had feathers.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-18 14:32:10+00:00
Who cares if chatgpt can write my essay if writing my essay is no longer worth doing?

Do you think programming Doom from scratch in 2025 would give the programmer the same sense of satisfaction and material security as it did in the 90's? Maybe technology progressing actually devalues the rewards for your outputs?

And saying "chatgpt" is pretty rich considering it's not at all clear at this point whether the societal benefits outweigh the negatives.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-18 14:33:00+00:00
note that this example isn't doing these things professionally, but leveraged them to get into a good school, which nets a lot of valuable connections... it's not all or nothing, this person will be fine even if they don't become a pro tennis player

also I hear you on the suicides, but I grew up in a much poorer background and those are just overdoses in my situation.... there's easily a dozen kids in my graduating class that weren't pressured to do anything, had no idea what to do, and got addicted to drugs that killed them

there's no single right path
by ericmay | 2025-12-18 14:33:26+00:00
In the case of the humanities, art, or architecture in academia if you disagree with the orthodoxy you might end up labeled something you don’t want to be labeled as, and you don’t get very far.

In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.

Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.

And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.

Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-12-18 14:33:45+00:00
As it has and will in many other countries, regardless of their stance on Israel.

Going back to the 80’s to find the primary cause of a current event strains credibility.

> Other cities are also experiencing water scarcity that could have been avoided with leak reduction, the use of recycled water, groundwater management, desalination plants in coastal areas and other measures. The water depletion from over-pumping aquifers is causing land to sink in the provinces of Tehran and Isfahan. Buildings and water pipes are beginning to crack because of land subsidence.

You could write this same paragraph about many places in the US and China.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-12-18 14:34:31+00:00
> I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy.

A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]

Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.

[0] https://eatshistory.com/the-oldest-recorded-recipe-babylonia...

[1] https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-18 14:34:47+00:00
many lawyers report these products aren’t reliable enough for them to trust

First, the lawyers will learn from experience that current probabilistic AI is inherently unreliable. And having learned this, they will then direct their attention to others who adopt and make use of AI for any sort of "serious" work.

Applying technology that is widely known to be unreliable fits the classic legal definition of "negligence".
by D13Fd | 2025-12-18 14:34:49+00:00
Yeah. I did the same when I was aged 8-12 in the early 1990's. I'd bike or walk everywhere, go into all kinds of stores and the library, and get into all kinds of minor trouble with the neighborhood kids. I'm very sad that my kids aren't able to have that kind of a life (even though I get that it's largely my own fault, because we live in an area where that is just not possible).
by jfindper | 2025-12-18 14:34:54+00:00
You say your mornings are sacred now; before you made the change did you treat your nights as sacred? Do you think you were always a "morning person", but didn't/couldn't realize it?

Not specific to your comment here, but speaking more generally: I always found it sort of interesting how "morning people" are typically thought of as more productive, less lazy, etc. than "night people". If you say you wake up every morning at 5am people are impressed and assume you are highly motivated, but if you tell people you go to bed at 3am every day people assume you're lazy and maybe depressed. Yet everyone has roughly the same amount of waking hours -- the only thing that should matter is what you're doing with them, not when you have them.
by griffzhowl | 2025-12-18 14:35:36+00:00
Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to the public
by ogogmad | 2025-12-18 14:35:57+00:00
> Are they the _only_ flavour of curve that has a nice geometric group law?

For affine conics over the real numbers, the non-degenerate ones are ellipses (affine transform to complex unit circle), hyperbolas (affine transform to y=1/x and use the group law (x,y)(x',y')=(xx',yy')) and parabolas (affine transform to y=x^2 and use (x,y)(x',y')=(xx',yy')).

I was thinking about projective conics, but it turns out there are no algebraic group laws on those, because they're always ill-defined over an algebraically-closed field. Moreover, over the reals and other non-algebraically closed fields k, the definition of a "regular map" needs to consider points with coordinates taking values in the algebraic closure of k.
by gnfargbl | 2025-12-18 14:37:15+00:00
Both you and the poster above you may be misunderstanding the point that Jonathan Hall KC appears to be making. If you take a look at what he actually writes [1], then it is pretty clear that he is presenting these hypothetical cases as examples of obvious over-reach.

This is a warning from the independent reviewer that the law is too potentially broad, not an argument to retain these powers.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69411a3eadb57..., pages 112 and 113
by nirui | 2025-12-18 14:37:57+00:00
> Developers of apps that use end-to-end encryption to protect private communications could be considered hostile actors in the UK.

So say if my UK friend connected directly to my PC with SSH/RDP, both uses end-to-end encrypted link, to chat with me using `wall`, `write` or Windows Task Manager, then all of sudden this is a hostile and Mr Big Ben will just launch laser at me to burn me to death. Wow, this is just messed up.

Someone should check the cognitive of those lawmakers, because these guys are clearly not good at their jobs. If such they failed to understand such simple concept, how can they understand much much more complex construct such as society?
by bluGill | 2025-12-18 14:38:02+00:00
> Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though?

Not quite. NBA is for a tiny minority a a great well paying career. Most parents who raise their kids to play in the NBA will fail in that goal. However if you instead make the goal get a great scholarship playing basketball which is then used to pay for the degree that becomes their career it can be a great plan.

However here it sounds like the sailing was done not to get a great career, but to get a great college scholarship. This is likely a great plan. I suspect that while there are more basketball scholarships than sailing scholarships, there is a lot less competition for the sailing ones. It wouldn't surprise me if the typical sailing scholarship was higher than the typical basketball one - if you want someone on your team you need to get them away from the other schools, while for basketball if someone isn't obvious NBA bound (and thus your star starter) if they go elsewhere you just pick the next kid on the list for the scholarship.

The above isn't just sports. In music Violin vs Bassoon gets the same issues. Acting also fits in somehow. And your kids may well be doing more than one of the above.

> I’ve seen far more of my helicopter-parented high-performance peers burn out

I've seen a lot of kids burn out from all backgrounds. The real problem I see with helicopter is because the kids never get to make mistakes they don't learn how to deal with them. The less controlled kids learn to be a little cautious and so when they rebel they are not going to go as far.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-12-18 14:38:08+00:00
Yeah, they definitely need time to look out a window and imagine.

But I think there is serious value in organized activities. From Junior high through high school I had a rule for mine to do one thing with school, and one thing outside of school. I would have supported more than those 2 things, but I'm so glad I didn't have to.

I'm thinking about enforcing the same rule in college, with a caveat that Gym and Girlfriend don't count, but it seems weird to make those kinds of mandates for someone that has a job.
by zwnow | 2025-12-18 14:38:31+00:00
> And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR

Yea I know its just a display of the industries indecisiveness. Everytime we need something new and fresh some old favorite is revived until after 5 years its old again. I like being able to do things differently, I hate having to implement "security" features knowing all too well that they aren't secure at all. Minimizing attack surface should not be the default. And its not like this is a new problem. For some reason web devs love to work around a problem instead of fixing it.
by tyleo | 2025-12-18 14:38:33+00:00
This is close to my approach. I love copilot intellisense at GitHub’s entry tier because I can accept/reject on the line level.

I barely ever use AI code gen at the file level.

Other uses I’ve gotten are:

1. It’s a great replacement for search in many cases

2. I have used it to fully generate bash functions and regexes. I think it’s useful here because the languages are dense and esoteric. So most of my time is remembering syntax. I don’t have it generate pipelines of scripts though.
by jncfhnb | 2025-12-18 14:38:53+00:00
I’m surprised that Iran can contemplate affording this. There must be such immense losses of all the land, homes, and capital assets in Tehran. And then operational costs of moving people around, building new homes, etc.

$100B is such a high number that it becomes funny money but… idk, doesn’t it still feel like a lowball in terms of losses?
by dathinab | 2025-12-18 14:39:03+00:00
yes, and here is a fun fact, most of the push for mass surveillance comes from the European Council, the thing is that literally are "just" the locally elected leaders...

not some vague far away "the EU (personalized)" thing

which also mean you can locally enact pressure on them

furthermore the EU supreme court(s) might have more often hindered mass surveillance laws in member states then the council pushing for them...

and if we speak as of "now", not just the UK, but also the US and probably many other states have far more mass surveillance then the EU has "in general".

so year the whole "EU is at fault of everything" sentiment makes little sense. I guess in some cases it's an excuse for people having given up on politics. But given how often EU decisions are severely presented out of context I guess some degree of anti-EU propaganda is in there, too.
by jokoon | 2025-12-18 14:39:05+00:00
I wish I had a job

But honestly I settled with my unemployment.

I just don't want to deal with all the bs of applying, and playing nice with recruiters. Either they need me or they don't. I don't want to play games.

I don't have the privilege of having a degree or being well networked, or being a great developer.

It's a market. There can't be a job for everyone.
by pantalaimon | 2025-12-18 14:39:18+00:00
That's what TFA is saying

> Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
by lioeters | 2025-12-18 14:40:02+00:00
> We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.

So the price change is not cancelled, as the post title says, but just postponed. A big difference.

When they say "we read your posts", I wonder if they're running a language model to digest HN comments for sentiment analysis. It was overwhelmingly negative, so they're backtracking on it. If it weren't for the public reaction, they would have happily went through with the plan.

Feels similar to the recent announcement by the new Mozilla CEO to make Firefox into an "AI browser". The majority of users expressed disfavor, and now they're de-emphasizing it, while scheming behind the scenes to implement it anyway. Like how the new GitHub CEO said, basically, that programmers who don't embrace AI will become irrelevant. That was unpopular so they had to reframe the messaging for marketing purpose.
by Atomic_Torrfisk | 2025-12-18 14:40:11+00:00
at 30mph breaking is about 50/50 perception time and breaking time for a total of 3-4s. Self-driving cars would an improvement for sure, they would have a max 2 second emergency break, but not quick enough as far as I understand. Even if that were enough, I would not appreciate my cab emergency breaking randomly because a kid steps out in front of a bus. Its best to slowly stop, then slowly accelerate. Maybe the optimal solution is to creep past the buss?
by marklubi | 2025-12-18 14:40:46+00:00
> They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences

My son competes on the national and international level in two different sports, so we do a lot of traveling. The bonding is very important, just as it is knowing when to get out of the way and let them shine.

In one sport, I drop him off and pick him up for practice (he gets distracted/flustered when someone is there watching him practice). In the other, I practice with him and am trying to stay better than him as long as I can.

There are a few other things I think are important...

If they don't want to do something, don't push them to. My son decided not to compete in a national ranking event in a couple of months because his competitions are on Thursday and Saturday and he would miss three days of school when factoring in travel.

Try to anticipate their eventual needs and make sure the right tools/equipment/etc. are available for them before they realize they needed it. Also, have backup equipment just in case something breaks or fails.

Make sure that they understand the 'why' behind all the things that both they have done, and what you have done, to enable them to get to that level.

Finally, from a young age, teach them to "always do your best, and always do better next time." The first national competition he went to, he literally finished dead last out of over 250. When we were in the airport heading home, I let him know that it's alright if he doesn't want to do more of them. He didn't back down in the slightest, and asked me when the next one was because he knew he could do better. Next month will be the second time he competes in the Junior Olympics for that sport.
by dpark | 2025-12-18 14:40:50+00:00
Much of this is not essential complexity, but accidental complexity.

* Based on the data they identify - This is a minefield of accidental complexity. Data changes and needs to be redacted for GDPR and other data laws. What do you do when someone demands you delete all personally identifiable data but you’ve burned it into invoice ids that you need to retain for other legal reasons? This is also begging for collisions and very much at odds with making IDs short.

* easy to remember - This is a nice to have. Short is convenient for sharing on the phone. Memorable didn’t matter much. I don’t remember any invoice number I’ve ever received.

* versioned - Versioning is only interesting because you’re trying to derive from real data. Again, accidental complexity.

* easy to index - Sure.

* sortable - Nice to have at best.
Show HN: FastRAG Next.js RAG boilerplate with precise PDF citation highlighting
by workwithtrp | 2025-12-18 14:41:00+00:00
Hey HN,

I built this because I was tired of setting up the same RAG pipeline for every side project.

The Problem: Most RAG tutorials give you an answer but don't show where it came from. Hallucinations are a dealbreaker for real apps.

* The Solution:* I built a pipeline using Pinecone metadata to map vector chunks back to the original PDF page/text. The UI highlights the source snippet when the AI answers.

Stack:

Next.js 14 (App Router)

Pinecone (Serverless)

LangChain (Streaming)

Supabase (Auth)

Demo: https://www.fastrag.live

Happy to answer questions about the chunking strategy or the citation logic.