MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-12-30 15:49:50+00:00
I hope the plane gets found but we've basically known for a decade what happened. We just need to confirm it.

And that is that upon leaving the airspace of Malaysia into Thailand, the pilot changed course to take the plane over the Indian ocean to commit suicide.

It's likely the pilot depressurized the cabin as hypoxia would've rendered the crew and passengers so they were unliikely conscious for any of this. Whether this happened before or after the course change is unknown.

Given the minimal wreckage, it was likely a soft landing in the ocean rather than the pilot succumbing to a medical event. He almost certainly was conscious up until the ocean landing.

The pilot knew the range and likely chose a part of the Indian Ocean that was remote and deep so the wreckage wouldn't be found as the black boxes would reveal this was intentional and it seemed like he intended his family to get the settlement and life insurance.

It's unclear if the pilot was aware of the pinging that has narrowed down the location.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-30 15:50:15+00:00
The "real programming" people are moving the goalposts of their no true scotsman fallacy so fast they're leaving Roadrunner style dust behind them.

Yes, there are things LLMs can't do at all, some where they are actively dangerous.

But also there are decently sized parts of "software development" where any above average LLM can speed up the process as long as whoever is using it knows hot to do so and doesn't fight the tool.
by hn-acct | 2025-12-30 15:50:41+00:00
Do people actually believe that there are too many keywords? I’ve never met a dev irl that says this but I see it regurgitated on every post about Swift. Most of the new keywords are for library writers and not iOS devs.

Preventing deadlock wasn’t a goal of concurrency. Like all options - there are trade offs. You can still used gcd.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-30 15:50:45+00:00
> I can't think of an automaker with better software.

So I have a Zoe, tesla has much fancier software, the remote control on the phone for the tesla is great.

the Zoe has a chugging navigation system and no adaptive cruise control.

But it has buttons. Its cheap to run and is super easy to drive. Its also faster than most ICE cars.

More importantly its smaller than a model Y, and I don't look like a massive penis driving it.

Also the doors shut properly, the trim isnt hollow and its not falling apart.

The software is shite though.
by tsss | 2025-12-30 15:51:00+00:00
All of what you said is accurate, but the problems are unfixable at this point, for two reasons:

1. Millie Bobbie Brown, the actor of Eleven, is unfathomably stupid (watch any out-of-character interview with her) and the role has simply outgrown her acting abilities. They can't make Eleven do anything interesting because Millie can't act it.

2. Writers have introduced so many supporting characters and separate story lines that it is impossible to give any of them enough screen time for proper character development.

There are other major writing problems with the show, like the overreliance on cheap 80s culture references, but I think the main problem is with the characters. The writers simply don't understand what made the first season so good.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 15:51:02+00:00
It's not about being able to do more faster, but be able to faster get help doing what you wanted to do. For example, before LLMs, if I wanted to figure out how to do something with a specific analog synth I basically spent time reading manuals and browsing internet forums, piecing together whatever I could find into something actionable, sometimes slightly wrong, but at least in the right direction.

Nowadays, I fire off the LLM to figure it out for me, then try out what I get back, and I can move on to actually having fun playing on the synth, rather than trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do.

The end goal for me with my hobbies is more or less the same, have fun. But for me the fun is not digging through manuals, it is to "do" or "use" or "perform" or whatever. I like music production because I like to make music, not because I like digging through manuals for some arcane knowledge.
by machomaster | 2025-12-30 15:51:06+00:00
I will share a related communication insight.

If the mistake happened, there are only 2 possible positions to take: either downplay or overplay it. The nuance is that whatever you take, your customer is going to take the other one (thus balancing the Universe).

If the bug happened and you start downplaying it, this will make the customer angry, feeling that his pain doesn't matter, that he needs to amp the communication power in order to make you fully understand the frustration. "Screaming will continue until understanding arrives".

Alternatively, if you take the "this is terrible, we are so sorry, the sky is falling, we will fix it immediately" (genuinly, without sarcasm), then it is the customer who is going to take the "Thank you for listening and responding, it's no big deal" stance.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-12-30 15:52:19+00:00
> Most of my friends have money, houses

Yeah, these are genuinely the only people worth advertising to anymore in a practical sense, if you are selling something non-essential.

Because of the K shaped economy a lot of people in the US are spending whatever they make on bare essentials like rent, food and paying off debt like student loans and consumer debt.

Advertise to those masses all you want, on whatever platforms you want, cant get water from a stone.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-30 15:52:52+00:00
Water usage of the DC itself can vary a lot. If they're in an area where clean water is cheap, then they might use evaporative cooling which probably has the most significant water consumption (by volume and the fact that it's been processed to be safe to drink). In other areas they may use non-potable water or just a closed loop water system where the water usage is pretty negligible. The electricity is going to be the much larger consideration on the larger scale (though still affected by local grid capacity). Also, the capital cost is a very significant part of these systems: there's a pretty big gap in pricing between 'worth building' and 'worth keeping running'.

(I recommend this video by Hank Green on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc . Water usage of data centers is a complex and quite localized concern, not something that's going to be a constant across every deployment)
by underlipton | 2025-12-30 15:52:55+00:00
I already addressed that. It takes time to ramp up production. In the meantime, Americans would have wanted action on the part of their political reps. The obvious out for those reps would have been expanded mass transit, as production costs and timing for a bus or train are going to be more advantageous than the amount required to put the equivalent number of people in cars.

If you want to pass judgment, please try to understand the argument first.
by Twey | 2025-12-30 15:52:57+00:00
‘Obviously’ AI and programming are antonyms. AI is defined as the ability for computers to do whatever it is that humans can do that (most) computers can't currently do. Conversely, ‘programming’ is whatever activity is required to fully take advantage of computer hardware that (most) humans can't currently do.

Both sets of goalposts are firmly affixed to their wheels :)
by ntoskrnl_exe | 2025-12-30 15:53:55+00:00
Pretty much all the Renderware based GTAs have issues these days that only community made patches can mitigate.

A recent example is that in San Andreas, the seaplane never spawns if you're running Windows 11 24H2 or newer. All of it due to a bug that's always been in the game, but only the recent changes in Windows caused it to show up. If anybody's interested, you can read the investigation on it here: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-30 15:54:25+00:00
Also 5: "But LLMs produce a bunch of code I need to read and review".

Yes, but so do your coworkers? Do you complain about every PR you need to read? Are they all compressed diamonds of pure genious, not a single missed character or unoptimised function? Not a bad or suboptimal decision in sight?

If so, shoot me a mail, I want to work where you're working =)
by alexfoo | 2025-12-30 15:54:27+00:00
We just take it for granted here in the UK. The number of people who die accidentally on the tracks each year is very low, and much lower than those who choose to commit suicide that way.

There's a strong "stay away from train tracks" education whilst growing up.

Those who grew up in the 70s/80s had the benefit of some utterly horrific public information safety films such as https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line... (well, that one was never used in the end, but it sets the tone...)

More horror here: https://artofthemovies.co.uk/blogs/original-movie-posters/sc...
by swed420 | 2025-12-30 15:54:58+00:00
> Eschew flamebait.

Arguably the OP borders on flamebait if that's the standard.

> Avoid generic tangents.

OP encapsulates an example of my comment, and is not a generic tangent.

> Omit internet tropes.

meme != trope

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Like the first point, all or nothing.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Point taken.
by cratermoon | 2025-12-30 15:55:06+00:00
My full list of ambiguous letters, from https://gajus.com/blog/avoiding-visually-ambiguous-character...

- O / 0
- I / l / 1 / 7
- 5 / S
- 2 / Z
- 8 / B
- 6 / G
- 9 / q / g
by corford | 2025-12-30 15:55:28+00:00
It's funny how things change but stay the same. I cut my teeth online in the mid nineties with usenet and IRC. When reddit got big, subreddits always reminded me of usenet groups. Now Discord is big and reminds me of IRC. Substack reminds me of personal blogs. Twitter/X sort of reminds me of ICQ/AIM.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-12-30 15:55:39+00:00
Kiro is just trying to build a product around exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not a fan, because it's simultaneously too heavyweight and agents don't respect all the details of the specs it creates enough to make the time investment in super-detailed specs worthwhile.

I have a spec driven development tool I've been working on that generates structured specs that can be used to do automatic code generation. This is both faster and more robust.
Show HN: ReviewSense – AI-powered review monitoring and reply assistant for SMBs
by berkan_sesen | 2025-12-30 15:55:53+00:00
Hi HN — we built ReviewSense to help small and multi-location businesses
monitor and respond to Google and other online reviews using AI.

We’re focusing on:
• Reducing response time
• Consistent brand tone in replies
• Surfacing recurring themes across reviews

Would love feedback from anyone running local businesses or agencies.
Happy to answer questions.
by kamaal | 2025-12-30 15:55:54+00:00
>>there is less overhead.

There have been methods to reduce overhead available over the history of our industry. Unfortunately almost all the times it involves using productive tools that would in some way reduce the head counts required to do large projects.

The way this works is you eventually have to work with languages like Lisp, Perl, Prolog, and then some one comes up with a theory that programming must be optimised for the mostly beginners and power tooling must be avoided. Now you are forced to use verbose languages, writing, maintaining and troubleshooting take a lot of people.

The thing is this time around, we have a way to make code by asking an AI tool questions. So you get the same effect but now with languages like JS and Python.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-12-30 15:55:56+00:00
So the only two options you can imagine entail his detractors being irrational and emotional? You can not comprehend that anyone can have any valid complaint regarding him and his behavior at all?

Musk has accomplished some remarkable things, by having grand visions, ruthlessly executing on them, and being willing to repeatedly take on a massive amount of risk. If that had been all, I don’t think many people would be decrying him like this. It’s still easy to justify admiring those bits, if you’re so inclined

But he has also done a lot of things that make him unlikable and are harder to justify. He happily whips up massive amounts of hype, regardless of how likely his claims are to actually manifest (which is a large part of why the Tesla stock price is where it’s at). He sucks himself off at every possible turn, and takes dubious personal credit for a lot of things his companies achieve. He is vindictive and has exacted retribution on people with much less power than him (or pouts about it in an undignified fashion when the opponent is too powerful to crush, like the SEC). He has an easily bruised ego and lashes out in a very childish manner (remember the diver he called a pedo on Twitter). He enters into realms he has no expertise in and proclaims to the whole world that he has all the answers. He directly interferes in US and world politics by wielding his wealth and influence, sometimes with disastrous results (it doesn’t help that his political views usually are unsophisticated and immature, especially since he acts so certain of them). Etc, etc

Basically, he’s a dickhead that thinks he’s the best in the world at everything, and many of whose actions are detrimental to both individuals and the world at large. He doesn’t get a free pass for that just because he’s done some impressive things with his businesses
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-30 15:56:12+00:00
>The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.

Yup. Though there is a third option: completely ignore the meritocracy vs. equity zero-sum game and simply argue that demographic-based weighting of applicants is an ineffective way to rectify those historical injustices. It is treating a symptom, not the underlying disease.
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-30 15:56:35+00:00
Near 50 and I can't say I need any email from 3 years ago; this is conservative, I'm probably ok with not needing emails from a year ago. Just like I don't need chat history either. What are you storing in your emails that you need to keep it beyond this? Genuinely interested. Genuinely have no clue why you'd be storing emails any length of time.
Show HN: I analyzed 297k HN posts – your fate is sealed in 2 hours
by 7777777phil | 2025-12-30 15:56:43+00:00
I built an archiver that tracked every HN item for 27 days (Dec 3-30, 2025) and captured 72k temporal snapshots to see how posts gain and lose attention.

Key findings:

- Early velocity (points/hour in first 2 hours) predicts final score with ρ=0.82. A simple classifier achieves 98.4% precision for viral prediction.

- No Matthew effect: high-scoring posts don't get more upvotes per hour than low-scoring ones (ρ=-0.04). HN's gravity penalty actually works.

- Yet extreme inequality persists: Gini=0.89, meaning bottom 80% of posts get <10% of total upvotes. Inequality without cumulative advantage.

- Attention decays as a power law (α=0.52), slower than exponential; quality content has longer tails.

Paper (open access): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263

Code + data: github.com/philippdubach/hn-archiver
by snowpid | 2025-12-30 15:56:55+00:00
" It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . "
That's plain wrong. The owner decides which happens to the profits and how much the leadership got paied.
Besides that, it is just rambling. Again calling the DB privatised is a sign of stupidity.
Show HN: Tidy Baby is a SET game but with words
by brgross | 2025-12-30 15:57:01+00:00
Hi HN —

Tidy Baby is a new game made by me and Wyna Liu (of NYT Connections!) that is inspired by the legendary card-based game SET that we assume many of you love (we too love SET).

In SET, you’ve got four dimensions: shape, number, color, and shading, each with three variants.

In Tidy Baby you only have to deal with three dimensions:

- word length (3, 4, or 5 letters)
- part of speech (noun, verb, or adjective)
- style (bold, underline, or italic)

Like in SET, you are trying to form sets of three cards where, along each dimension, the set is either all the same or all different. If you’ve never played SET there are more details/examples at “how to play” in the game.

The mechanics of Tidy Baby are sort of inspired by a solitaire/practice version of SET I sometimes play where you draw two random cards and have to name the third card that would make a valid set.

In Tidy Baby you are presented with two “game cards” and a grid of up to nine candidates to complete a valid set – your job is to pick the right one before the clock runs out.

Unlike in SET, you get points for “partial” sets where your set is valid on one or two dimensions (but not all three). It’s actually a pretty fun challenge to try to get only sets that are invalid along all three dimensions.

In building the game, we were sort of surprised that the biggest challenge was ensuring that all words were unambiguously one part of speech. You’d be surprised how hard it is to find three-letter adjectives that are not also common verbs or nouns. We did our best!

We’ve got three “paces” in the game: Steady, Strenuous, and Grueling (s/o MECC!)

Let us know what you think!
Ask HN: How do people validate deep self-study in math or CS?
by _willhf | 2025-12-30 15:57:19+00:00
I recently decided I wanted to better understand modern cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs. Although I took mathematics courses in college, that was years ago, so I began working through an undergraduate abstract algebra textbook on my own, reading and solving problems most evenings.

I made progress, but found it difficult to stay motivated without a clear external benchmark. I kept wishing there were a standardized, rigorous abstract algebra examination I could register for in advance. Something that would motivate sustained study and provide an objective measure of understanding, much like signing up for a marathon months ahead of time.

As far as I can tell, exams like this largely do not exist outside formal degree programs. That raised a question for me: why not? Would there be value in a small set of written subject matter exams, for example linear algebra, abstract algebra, or algorithms, designed to assess depth of understanding rather than speed or memorization?

I have heard and investigated the common answers, such as GRE subject tests, MOOCs, certifications, and "just build things," but none of those felt quite like what I was looking for. I may be missing something.

I am trying to understand whether this idea is fundamentally flawed, impractical, or simply undesirable. I would appreciate thoughtful feedback. Thanks.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-30 15:57:21+00:00
The model of patching+recompiling the world for every OS release is a terrible hack that devs hate and that users hate. 99% of all people hate it because it's a crap model. Devs hate middlemen who silently fuck up their software and leave upstream with the mess, users hate being restricted to whatever software was cool and current two years ago. If they use a rolling distro, they hate the constant brokenness that comes with it. Of the 1% of people who don't hate this situation 99% of those merely tolerate it, and the rest are Debian developers who are blinded by ideology and sunk costs.

Good operating systems should:

1. Allow users to obtain software from anywhere.

2. Execute all programs that were written for previous versions reliably.

3. Not insert themselves as middlemen into user/developer transactions.

Judged from this perspective, Windows is a good OS. It doesn't nail all three all the time, but it gets the closest. Linux is a bad OS.

The answers to your questions are:

(1) It isn't backwards compatible for sophisticated GUI apps. Core APIs like the widget toolkits change their API all the time (GTK 1->2->3->4, Qt also does this). It's also not forwards compatible. Compiling the same program on a new release may yield binaries that don't run on an old release. Linux library authors don't consider this a problem, Microsoft/Apple/everyone else does. This is the origin of the glibc symbol versioning errors everyone experiences sometimes.

(2) Maintaining a stable API/ABI is not fun and requires a capitalist who says "keep app X working or else I'll fire you". The capitalist Fights For The User. Linux is a socialist/collectivist project with nobody playing this role. Distros like Red Hat clone the software ecosystem into a private space that's semi-capitalist again, and do offer stable ABIs, but their releases are just ecosystem forks and the wider issue remains.

(3) It hasn't change and it's still bad.

(4) Docker: "solves" the problem on servers by shipping the entire userspace with every app, and being itself developed by a for-profit company. Only works because servers don't need any shared services from the computer beyond opening sockets and reading/writing files, so the kernel is good enough and the kernel does maintain a stable ABI. Docker obviously doesn't help the moment you move outside the server space and coordination requirements are larger.
by zahlman | 2025-12-30 15:57:30+00:00
From my experience, it seems like a lot of the grousing is from people who don't like the "activation script" workflow and mistakenly think it's mandatory. Though I've also seen aesthetic objections to the environment actually having internal structure rather than just being another `site-packages` folder (okay; and what are the rules for telling Python to use it?)

The very long discussion (https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-582-python-local-packages-d...) of PEP 582 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0582/ ; the "__pypackages__" folder proposal) seems relevant here.
by neom | 2025-12-30 15:57:37+00:00
You're right. I've thought that before and made, I guess brief, peace with it...And frankly, it's TV so who cares? All my objections and frustrations are around how it should be enjoyed and how the creative process and artists should be respected all my interpretations of how I think it should be - ofc a recipe for frustration. So you're right: at the end of the day, who cares, if people enjoy the show, they enjoy the show... thanks for reminding me. :)
by thwarted | 2025-12-30 15:57:39+00:00
It's odd that searching for "section" finds U+2E39 (Top Half Section Sign) but not U+00A7 (Section Sign).

The directions for input on on each operating system are all the same, use an app? On Windows there's a key sequence based on the codepoint integer. It should tell you exactly what to type. The Linux one is especially odd "Use the Character Map app or a Compose key sequence, then paste into your app" because if there's a compose key sequence you don't need to paste it.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 15:57:41+00:00
> was the apparent benefit so incredibly variable?

Yes, lots of people were very vocally against horseless-carriages, as they were called at the time. Safety and public nuisance concerns were widespread, the cars were very noisy, fast, smoky and unreliable. Old newspapers are filled with opinions about this, from people being afraid of horseless-carriages spooking other's horses and so on. The UK restricted the adoption of cars at one point, and some Canton in Switzerland even banned cars for a couple of decades.

Horseless-carriages was commonly ridiculed for being just for "reckless rich hobbyists" and similar.

I think the major difference is that cars produced immediate, visible externalities, so it was easy for opposition to focus on public safety in public spaces. In contrast, AI has less physically visible externalities, although they are as important, or maybe even more important, than the ones cars introduced.