MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-12-29 22:11:17+00:00
> For example, writing more vanilla JS instead of React, you're just reinventing the necessary abstractions more verbosely and with a higher risk of duplicate code or mismatching abstractions.

Right, but I'm also getting pages that load faster and don't require a build step, making them more convenient to hack on. I'm enjoying that trade-off a lot.
by keyle | 2025-12-29 22:11:18+00:00
I'm not sure anyone commented on this but the usability of what he vibe produced is absolutely terrible.

It's amusing that the author might feel a sense of accomplishment and super powers when in fact this is a complete moo point in terms of real gain and a tool of entertainment (consumption) and not productivity as original intended.

There is a silver line in there, for the people that care about software.
by dilyevsky | 2025-12-29 22:11:29+00:00
I ready the FortiGate link and this is the gist:

The DNS filter setting on the FortiGate analyzes the DoH traffic and strips out the ECH parameters sent by the DNS server in the DoH response. If the client does not receive those parameters, it cannot encrypt the inner SNI, so it will send it in clear text.

So basically they mess with DoH ECH config and trigger fallback behavior in the clients. I don't think any browsers do this yet but I think this loophole is not gonna last.
by baxtr | 2025-12-29 22:11:51+00:00
This is a great analogy and approach!

One rough heuristic I use is people-watching on the subway. Just a quick glance from a distance at their phones. What are they actually looking at? (Yeah I know it's a bit nosy...)

I see: short-form video, WhatsApp/Messaging, YouTube long-format - in that order.
by deadbabe | 2025-12-29 22:12:09+00:00
This is the biblically accurate version. In heaven the body has no more purpose than the clothes people wear, so the bodies should just drop dead empty of souls.

However, a more terrifying interpretation could be that the bodies have no reason to just drop dead just because the soul is gone, instead, they would continue functioning as P-Zombies. This could mean the rapture already happened and we're just not aware of it. If you are not a P-Zombie, you weren't raptured. This could be a premise for a pretty cool story.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-29 22:12:23+00:00
Yeah, I don't think EAP-TLS with client certs would work out well for Eduroam applications. You have a very large number of end users, they're only barely under your authority (students, not staff) and they have a wide variety of devices, also not under your control.

But even in Enterprise corporate settings I did not ever see this though I'm sure some people do it. It sounds like potentially a good idea, of course it can have excellent security properties, however one of the major downside IMHO is that people wind up with the weakest link being a poorly secured SCEP endpoint. Bad guys could never hope to break the encryption needed to forge credentials, but they could trivially tail-gate a call center worker and get real credentials which work fine, so, who cares.

Maybe that's actually enough. Threat models where adversaries are willing to physically travel to your location (or activate a local asset) might be out of your league anyway. But it feels to me as if that's the wrong way to look at it.
by benoau | 2025-12-29 22:12:29+00:00
My library includes games I played with my father and games I played with my own children. Given the option my children would certainly revisit their favourite titles with their own children one day, or for their own nostalgic memories.

One thing you are missing with your logic is that "throw it out" is probably more like "give to charity", the unwanted goods are not necessarily being destroyed and may be redistributed to people who do value them. If my kids didn't want my Steam account I'm sure there's others who would, and preservation groups and museums that would probably take it.
by efultz | 2025-12-29 22:13:26+00:00
If everybody uses the term "bubble" in a way that doesn't match the author, then the author's definition of "bubble" is wrong. He even implies that the 90s dotcom bubble was not a bubble, just perfectly rational market forces at the time...

And the author conveniently ignores the self-inflationary feedback loop of nvidia striking deals with companies to buy chips with minimum-usage guarantees.

I want to give the author credit for some reasonable statements in this piece, but I can't support his through-line. I agree some companies can/should make wild swings for a percent chance at a huge upside. But when the hype is coupled to the investments, and then investments are coupled to the hype - it's a bubble

Can anyone point me to some good meta-analysis of financial opinion pieces like this? I suspect the majority of them are just trying to nudge the markets based on privately held positions, but has this been studied?
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-12-29 22:13:27+00:00
None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).

That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.

Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
by jennyholzer3 | 2025-12-29 22:13:35+00:00
I don't know about all this AI stuff.

How are LLMs going to stay on top of new design concepts, new languages, really anything new?

Can LLMs be trained to operate "fluently" with regards to a genuinely new concept?

I think LLMs are good for writing certain types of "bad code", i.e. if you're learning a new language or trying to quickly create a prototype.

However to me it seems like a security risk to try to write "good code" with an LLM.
by didgetmaster | 2025-12-29 22:14:13+00:00
Surprise, Surprise. LLMs will respond according to the set of data that their model was trained on!

While just about every LLM is trained on data that far surpasses the output of just one person, or even a decent sized group; it will still reflect the average sentiment of the corpus of data fed into it.

If the bulk of the training data was scraped from websites created in 'WEIRD' countries, then it's responses will largely mimic their culture.
by sgk284 | 2025-12-29 22:14:13+00:00
I never claim that 100% coverage has anything to do with code breaking. The only claim made is that anything less than 100% does guarantee that some piece of code is not automatically exercised, which we don't allow.

It's a footnote on the post, but I expand on this with:

100% coverage is actually the minimum bar we set. We encourage writing tests for as many scenarios as is possible, even if it means the same lines getting exercised multiple times. It gets us closer to 100% path coverage as well, though we don’t enforce (or measure) that
by kccqzy | 2025-12-29 22:14:19+00:00
Google never sells your data to anyone. Why would they sell the primary data that they themselves use to determine how to show you ads? Doing so means a deep-pocketed new advertising platform can just buy data from Google and get started with competing against Google on their primary revenue source. It’s like having a goose that lays golden eggs and selling the goose. It’s corporate suicide. I’m surprised anyone on HN even believes Google will sell your data. It takes five seconds of thinking to dispel that notion.
by xtracto | 2025-12-29 22:14:24+00:00
Glad to see I'm not the one that sees the similarity in "zapping" or channel surfing to what people do nowadays with those shorts...

I remember my brother loving to do channel surfing in the 80s when we were young. I've always hated it! maybe that's why I cannot stand the current Tiktok media format (so sad that Youtube is pushing more and more the same format).

Also, remember when telephones started and people who took vertical video where seen as sinners? How times change!
by starkparker | 2025-12-29 22:14:27+00:00
Odd how it works out, but my work Pixel 8 on Google Fi forgets its eSIM about once every three Android updates. Usually takes 15 minutes to an hour to work itself out, with no indication as to what happened or why. Turned me off completely from eSIM-only devicess and Google Fi for personal use.

Hell, as I write this my on-call phone just notified me that its eSIM isn't valid. Good thing I'm not on call yet!
by dtj1123 | 2025-12-29 22:15:37+00:00
I like to think of the set of all people you'll ever meet as a cloud of points, where the centre of the cloud is the most average person who'll ever cross your path, and the more exotic and interesting you get, the further away from the centre you sit. A really unusual person is going to be way out on the fringes, without many nearby points, and finding those points - the people who get them - is going to take time. If you're one of those people then it's going to suck, especially in the beginning. But as time passes and you start to accumulate those rare relationships where things feel like they click, you'll probably be glad of it. The people you find will almost invariably be interesting weirdos, and enriching to be around in a way that people from the centre tend not to be. And on top of that, my experience has been that they appreciate the value of a good friend.

Follow your interests and your values, be patient, and eventually you'll find into your people.
by trevor-e | 2025-12-29 22:16:12+00:00
The treemap screenshot doesn't look correct. Nearly all charting libs (like Apache Echarts) will group nodes with a heading name, so not sure why they claim it would be hard to notice the "drivers" node. I guess in that screenshot, sure, but that looks like just a bad implementation of a treemap. Maybe this was the case back in 2017?

Flame graphs I have a love/hate relationship with. The hierarchy is very useful, but the name and coloring can be very confusing and misleading. Most people I show them to think red == something bad, but the color is actually just for aesthetics.
Show HN: HN-Brief – Catch up on the top stories in 5 minutes
by jnd0 | 2025-12-29 22:16:55+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve built HN-Brief, a self-updating static digest of Hacker News.

It is a static daily digest that fetches the top 20 stories summarizing both the article content and the community discussion (digest) into a cohesive 5-minute read.

How it works:

A Cloudflare Worker runs on a cron schedule, fetches stories via the Algolia API, generates markdown summaries, and commits them directly to GitHub. Cloudflare Pages then serves the static site.

While excellent tools like hndigest.com exist for email subscriptions, HN-Brief is a web-first alternative that is fully open source.

Source: https://github.com/jnd0/hn-brief

I’d appreciate feedback on the summary quality, reading experience and the UI!
by drnick1 | 2025-12-29 22:17:06+00:00
> It's unnatural to search an LLM for a product. It's why Alexa never became a shopping portal.

There is plenty of evidence that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for that too. And it's entirely possible that ChatGPT and others are already being trained to mention some products first or to present them in a more positive light.
by sarusso | 2025-12-29 22:17:08+00:00
Just found a strange switch on a CD burning app (Burn-OSX) which stated: "Pre-emphasis of 50/15μs". Turned out to be a historical hidden gem, aimed at "boosting the signal (especially the higher frequencies) in the recording before it was put onto CD, and embedding flags in the disc's subcode to tell a CD player to apply de-emphasis on playback. Some CD players even had a de-emphasis button that could be used to manually apply de-emphasis".
by hinkley | 2025-12-29 22:18:46+00:00
Linear probing could get pretty nasty corner cases in a concurrent system. Particularly one where the table is “warmed up” at start so that 80% of the eventual size shows up in the first minute of use. If that table is big enough then pressure to increase the load factor will be high, leading to more probing.

If you have ten threads all probing at the same time then you could get priority inversion and have the first writer take the longest to insert. If they hit more than a couple collisions then writers who would collide with them end up taking their slots before they can scan them.
by CaliforniaKarl | 2025-12-29 22:18:47+00:00
That kindof makes sense to me: If I drop something into a post office’s mail box (outside or inside) after the day’s last pickup, even if the mail is inside the post office, it’s not going to be touched by USPS hands until the next day that the post office is open.

This can be tricky. For example, at the Stanford post office, the drop boxes outside the post office have Saturday pickup times, but the ones inside the building do not (the signs inside warn about this).
by riazrizvi | 2025-12-29 22:18:55+00:00
Googles Search Ad revenue is dead, but the business is diversified and positioned for change. As of 2024:

Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn
Youtube = 36bn
Cloud = 40bn

Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.

I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-29 22:18:58+00:00
> ...vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising...

I have seen a comment about them being terrible for advertising, it looks like a "good" idea but it is not.

The problem is that the attention of people watching these videos drop to almost zero, too much is happening in a too short amount of time, and as a result nothing is remembered, including the ads. It is a very good deal for whoever is monetizing this content, they show a lot of ads, plenty of revenue, but not for those who are paying for the ads. It is like subliminal messages, "good" idea, but not very effective. For ads to work, people need to pay attention.

I don't know how ads in chatbots will turn out and what form it will take, but I think it is inevitable.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-29 22:19:18+00:00
That rule doesn't work in reverse. If there's no dash it could be either.

So now you've got to try to enforce some practice of using hyphens in all tag names that used to be class names, even if they're a single word that has no place for a hyphen?

It's getting even more confusing now, you see? Not less.

Just use classes. That's what they're there for.
by alanbernstein | 2025-12-29 22:19:19+00:00
Personally, I find treemaps unmatched for disk space analysis. Specifically, I like to use the squarify layout algorithm, to NOT use the "cushion gradient" shading method, to use inset frames to convey depth visually, and to include filenames. This maximizes glanceable information density, for the use case of identifying large objects to delete to recover space.

This is how the old spacemonger app worked, and I liked it so much I had to recreate it for Linux/Mac: https://github.com/alanbernstein/treemonger. My version still needs some work, but it's minimally useable.
by Moto7451 | 2025-12-29 22:19:48+00:00
> The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.

And to add to this, the dark pattern of the time was to register in the Phone Book as “AAA Your Real Business Name” which was exactly what my first job did.
by 15155 | 2025-12-29 22:19:51+00:00
> Of course it works in reverse

This math doesn't work in reverse because there aren't as many applicable people or relevant districts in the rest of the states.

Mississippi has far fewer total disenfranchised Democrats (in both absolute number, district count, etc.) than California has disenfranchised Republicans.

Without extreme gerrymandering, there simply aren't enough eligible-to-be-swung electoral votes to meaningfully benefit Democrats in rural states.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-12-29 22:19:53+00:00
Finally a voice of reason. The tools will just get better and easier to use. I use LLMs now, but I'm not going to dump a bunch of time learning the new hotness. I'll let other people do that and pickup the useful pieces later.

Unless your gunning for a top position as a vibe coder, this whole concept of "falling behind" is just pure FOMO.
by kkukshtel | 2025-12-29 22:19:57+00:00
Wanted to chime in here with some thoughts/clarifications as I'm the Enginnering Manager of the VM team at Unity, aka the team that is leading the charge on .NET Modernization and the CoreCLR transition (and also owns IL2CPP). Also speaking here as myself and obviously not on behalf of the company.

First thing is that CoreCLR is _very_ much an active development effort and we're committed to the roadmap we presented at Unite, with at least a CoreCLR-backed Player (aka, what you "Build" when you build your game with Unity) being delivered as a technical preview around the 6.7 release timing. This would basically mean being able to select "CoreCLR" as a scripting backend option (similar to IL2CPP) and see some of the upside and benefit the author mentions here.

That said, Unity isn't a pure C# environment. As lots of people know, there is a robust native layer underlying a lot of the managed (C#) code operating a pseudo-ECS design (not literally DOTS/Entites but an engine architecture thing). This means that a lot of the load-bearing code Unity-the-engine is running every frame is notably _not_ C# code, but instead native code that is, in a lot of cases, already very fast. This means that for tight loops of certain systems in the engine, moving to modern .NET isn't going to carry an implict performance increase of those systems. Said differently, CoreCLR isn't a magic performance bullet for Unity. What we like to say though is that "CoreCLR will make C# code faster", so if your game (or general scripting architecture like the author brings up, with lots of "loose" C#) is very C# dependent, you _will_ see a lot of benefit.

One thing we starting to investigate is how much performance there is to gain in Unity-the-engine by migrating legacy native C++ code to C# backed by CoreCLR. C# code can be a lot more maintainable and I'd be lying if I said that we really need _every_ managed->native->managed jump we do in the engine, especially with the performance benefit CoreCLR gives us. There are additional things as well like getting intrinsic-backed (or JIT'd) SIMD code for any C# we write with apis like Span<T>, covering for plenty on places in native code where we aren't directly checking for processor arch at runtime or the compiler misses some optimization. This is especially relevant as we also move the editor to CoreCLR, and obviously want it to be as fast as possible, and represents some of the attendant benefits of really focusing on .NET modernization.

Regardless, CoreCLR is very much the future of Unity and we're all very excited about it and the progress we're making. The player in 6.7 is the first step and there are lots of other parts (like modern C# lang versions) that will be major boons to development writ large. I (personally, as a game developer) see a lot of awesome things possible downstream of the shift and am (again, selfishly) very excited about what's possible.
by MostlyStable | 2025-12-29 22:20:07+00:00
My experience was quite the opposite, and the reason why I switched to Kagi: any search that was anywhere adjacent to a product would be almost nothing but SEO garbage. Non-product related searches were better, but I also think they had noticeably degraded over the past several years to a decade.

And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.

(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)
I spent my 27th birthday yesterday coding to solve my own frustration
by alexcloudstar | 2025-12-29 22:20:12+00:00
I spent my 27th birthday yesterday coding a prototype to solve my own frustration.

Trying to plan that birthday and NYE in a group chat was a total nightmare—essential info buried under 300 messages and zero consensus. We have professional tools for work, but our personal lives are still stuck in high-entropy chat threads.

I’m building Squad In Sync to kill the chaos of messy group chats and move social planning into a structured logistics layer.

Join the waitlist: squadinsync.com

I'd love your feedback on how we can better bridge the gap between "chatting" and "actually meeting up."
by mkozlows | 2025-12-29 22:20:16+00:00
I like this. "Best practices" are always contingent on the particular constellation of technology out there; with tools that make it super-easy to write code, I can absolutely see 100% coverage paying off in a way that doesn't for human-written code -- it maximizes what LLMs are good at (cranking out code) while giving them easy targets to aim for with little judgement.

(A thing I think is under-explored is how much LLMs change where the value of tests are. Back in the artisan hand-crafted code days, unit tests were mostly useful as scaffolding: Almost all the value I got from them was during the writing of the code. If I'd deleted the unit tests before merging, I'd've gotten 90% of the value out of them. Whereas now, the AI doesn't necessarily need unit tests as scaffolding as much as I do, _but_ having them put in there makes future agentic interactions safer, because they act as reified context.)
by sgk284 | 2025-12-29 22:20:17+00:00
I suspect it will still fall on humans (with machine assistance?) to move the field forward and innovate, but in terms of training an LLM on genuinely new concepts, they tend to be pretty nimble on that front (in my experience).

Especially with the massive context windows modern LLMs have. The core idea that the GPT-3 paper introduced was (summarizing):

A sufficiently large language model can perform new tasks it has never seen using only a few examples provided at inference time, without any gradient updates or fine-tuning.
by 9dev | 2025-12-29 22:20:22+00:00
Well. I was a sceptic for a long time, but a friend recently convinced me to try Claude Code and showed me around. I revived an open source project I regularly get back to, code for a bit, have to wrestle with toil and dependency updates, and loose the joy before I really get a lot done, so I stop again.

With Claude, all it took to fix all of that drudge was a single sentence. In the last two weeks, I implemented several big features, fixed long standing issues and did migrations to new major versions of library dependencies that I wouldn’t have tackled at all on my own—I do this for fun after all, and updating Zod isn’t fun. Claude just does it for me, while I focus on high-level feature descriptions.

I’m still validating and tweaking my workflow, but if I can keep up that pace and transfer it to other projects, I just got several times more effective.