MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-12-03 14:19:44+00:00
> I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind.

Because this plays into a weird flaw in cognition that people have. When people become leaders because they are assholes and they are wrong, then after the wind blows the other way they see the light and do a mea culpa, there is always a certain segment that says that they're even more worthy to be a leader because they have the ability to change. They yell at the people who were always right that they are dogmatic and ask "why should people change their minds if they will be treated like this?"

If one can't see what's wrong with this toy scenario that I've strawmanned here, that's a problem. The only reason we ever cared about this person is because they were loud and wrong about everything. Now, we are expected to be proud of them because they are right, and make sure that they don't lose any status or position for admitting that. This becomes a new reason for the people who were previously attacking the people who were right to continue to attack the people who were right, who are also now officially dogmatic puritans whose problem is that they weren't being right correctly.

This is a social phenomenon, not a personality flaw in these leaders. People can be wrong and then right. People can not care either way and latch onto a trend for attention or profit, and follow it where it goes. I don't think either of these things are in and of themselves morally problematic. The problem is that there are people who are simply following individual personalities and repeating what they say, change their minds when that personality changes their mind, and whose primary aim is to attack anyone who is criticizing that personality. They don't really care about the issue in question (and usually don't know much about it), they're simply protecting that personality like a family member.

This, again, doesn't matter when the subject is stupid, like some aesthetic or consumer thing He used to hate the new Batman movies but now he says that he misunderstood them; who cares. But when the subject is a real life or death thing, or involves serious damage to people's lives and careers, it's poisonous when a vocal minority becomes dedicated to this personality worship.

It's so common that there now seems to be a pipeline of born-agains in front of everything, giving their opinion. Sir, you were a satanist until three years ago.
Show HN: PhenixCode – Local, open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot
by nesall | 2025-12-03 14:20:09+00:00
Hi all! I built PhenixCode — an open-source, self-hosted and customizable alternative to GitHub Copilot Chat.

Why: I wanted a coding assistant that runs locally, with full control over models and data. Copilot is great, but it’s subscription-only and cloud-only. PhenixCode gives you freedom: use local models (free) or plug in your own API keys.

Tech: Pure C++ core with RAG (HNSWLib for vector search, SQLite for metadata). UI is Svelte + webview — lightweight, cross-platform, and designed to be hackable.

Status: I’ve been dogfooding it for weeks; the core is stable. Would love feedback — whether you find it useful, hit bugs, or want to discuss design decisions. Happy to answer questions!
by bborud | 2025-12-03 14:20:12+00:00
Yes, they should, but there are a couple of things to consider here. In most countries we are talking about very low numbers of cars that are exempted. You can see this as a safety valve of sorts: provide some leeway to ensure you don't give the automotive lobby reason to push back too hard against regulation. Because the automotive lobby is insanely powerful and you need them on your side in order to ratchet up regulations. (And I'm not just talking about those that represent the industry).

What you really care about is that we are able to tighten regulations for 99.9% of cars. That's what is going to make a difference. Not running after the 0.1%. It just isn't worth the effort.

And we do this for new cars. We constantly ratchet up the safety requirements. Ensuring we slowly make the overall fleet safer. Not only do the Euro NCAP rules get stricter over time (hence "ratchet"), but the "NCAP star rating" is being tilted towards what are now termed as "Vulnerable Road Users". (Note that the percentage weights haven't changed that much but the rules that decide the number of stars have).

(The reason we now have the concept of Vulnerable Road Users rather than just pedestrians is so we can broaden the scope to include cyclists)

Note that the 99.9% / 0.1% figures are _guesses_ and that they are most likely way too conservative. I was not able to find exact official figures on exactly how many excempted cars are have valid registration. But I could find some numbers on the specific class that large US pickup trucks belong to. And when you compare these to total automobile sales, these numbers are trivial. That's 0.076% of EU car sales that year, and 0.057% of European car sales.

It would be thoroughly pointless to focus on them.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-03 14:20:12+00:00
i have a system76 laptop. underpowered for its price point but okay.

the firmware and OS integration is fairly smooth and it generally runs faster than i'd have assumed for a laptop that old.

i have money to spend these days and can afford a thinkpad or mac so i'll probably lean that direction but i would consider another system76 too
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-03 14:20:32+00:00
> You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.

Without including proper credit, it is classic infringement. I wouldn't personally call copyright infringement "theft", though.

Imagine for a moment, the generosity of the MIT license: 'you can pretty much do anything you want with this code, I gift it to the world, all you have to do is give proper credit'. And so you read that, and take and take and take, and can't even give credit.

> Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response

Precisely: maybe it was just a mistake? So, the author politely and professionally asks, not for the infringer to stop using the author's code, but just to give proper credit. And hey, here's a PR, so doing the right thing just requires an approval!

The infringer's response to the offer of help seemed to confirm that this was not a mistake, but rather someone acting in bad faith. IMO, people should learn early on in their life to say "I was wrong, I'm sorry, I'll make it right, it won't happen again". Say that when you're wrong, and the respect floods in.

> By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack

This is not quite accurate, from my recollection of events (which could be mistaken!): the community didn't even know about it until after the author respectfully, directly contacted the infringer with an offer to help, and the infringer responded with hostility and what looked like a case of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
by sjw987 | 2025-12-03 14:20:43+00:00
Writing is as much for the self as it is for other people.

My grandad used to be a farmer, and used to keep a diary in which he wrote an entry every day before bed. It was all just really simple sentences of the things he did from one day to the next. What he had for breakfast, the work he did, what he sold, who he met down at the market and the little things going on in his life and the lives of those around him.

I do the same now, as a programmer. I write down what happened in my day, albeit digitally, and with a few more thoughts and ideas than he did (he was much more serious and hardworking than me). The place I put them is public, because sometimes I share a link when I've written something I think a family member or close friend might find interesting.

Both he did, and I do it for the same reason. It's for us, the writers, to use as an outlet. I don't think grandad ever looked back at things in his book, and nor do I with my digital entries. We just date them, write them, and forget them. I think it's just useful as a place to write everything off of the brain. The actual writing process can help you in your writing, which is always a bonus, regardless of how many people are viewing it.

When he died a couple of years ago, I kept his books. A part of me actually feels odd reading them, like they are not for me, despite the normal contents. I think that, as a matter of fact, he would actually have wanted me to destroy them. He was always a very serious person. I'm keeping them stored away, like my own, because those books are a bit like having him here. When I do read bits, it's like he is still here. I can see him from the simple things he's written down, even if he wasn't an author or professional writer.

Maybe when I'm gone, my descendants will read my writings in the same way as I've found his.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-03 14:21:05+00:00
Nominal returns are only 11% more compared to a riskless VOO for the past 5 years. But NANC expense ratio is 0.74% per year while VOO is 0.03% per year. Every year, NANC would have to return an additional 0.7% just to break even with VOO, not accounting for the additional risk.

So we're looking at 11% - 3.5% = 7.5% real return over 5 years, or roughly 1.5% per year. I'll easily recommend passing on this one.

https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/NANC/VOO
Show HN: Subtitio – AI powered subtitle translation (API available)
by cadillac | 2025-12-03 14:21:14+00:00
I built Subtitio after hours of frustration searching for subtitles in my language.

---

Subtitio.ai is an AI service that translates SRT subtitle files into 50+ languages while preserving all timestamps and structure.

# Key features - Keeps timing/cues/timestamps intact - 50+ language support - Async processing (upload → translate → download) - Parallel processing of multiple files - API available with OpenAPI/ReDoc schema for integration

# API availability - Designed for automation pipelines, batch jobs or app integrations - OpenAPI spec - ReDoc docs and JSON schema describing request/response format

# Use cases - Creators localizing video captions at scale - Education and training videos requiring multilingual SRT - Teams needing a lightweight programmatic alternative - Apps that must translate subtitles without invalidating timing

# Differentiator - Built with timestamp safety first, translations never modify cue timing or corrupt the SRT structure, ensuring downstream compatibility with editors, players, and pipelines.

# Drawbacks - Support for SRT files only

Feedback welcome and happy to answer questions.
by jerf | 2025-12-03 14:21:21+00:00
"but other than that am I missing something?"

I think the big one is that a futures based system no matter how you swing it lacks the characteristic that on an unbuffered Go channel (which is the common case), successfully sending is also a guarantee that someone else has picked it up, and as such a send or receive event is also a guaranteed sync point. This requires some work in the compiler and runtime to guarantee with barriers and such as well. I don't think a futures implementation of any kind can do this because without those barriers being inserted by either the compiler or runtime this is just not a guarantee you can ever have.

To which, naturally, the response in the futures-based world is "don't do that". Many "futures-based worlds" aren't even truly concurrently running on multiple CPUs where that could be an issue anyhow, although you can still end up with the single-threaded equivalent of a race condition if you work at it, though it is certainly more challenging to get there than with multi-threaded code.

This goes back to, channels are actually fairly heavyweight as concurrency operations go, call it two or three times the cost of a mutex. They provide a lot, and when you need it it's nice to have something like that, but there's also a lot of mutex use in Go code because when you don't need it it can add up in price.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-03 14:21:49+00:00
Sounds boring, but per Wikipedia:

> Propylene is the second most important starting product in the petrochemical industry after ethylene. It is the raw material for a wide variety of [...] In the year 2013 about 85 million tonnes of propylene were processed worldwide.

So think of this like finding a better algorithm for some very common type of computation.
by infecto | 2025-12-03 14:21:56+00:00
Surpassed is probably the wrong word but the intent is more that it can comprehend quite complicated algorithms and patterns and apply them to your problem space. So yea it’s not a human but I don’t think saying subpar to a human is the right comparison either. In many ways it’s much better, I can run N parallel revisions and have the best implementation picked for review. This all happens in seconds.
by Lightkey | 2025-12-03 14:22:06+00:00
They took their sweet time but both the project lead Ryan Houdek as well as Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais (username Plagman here in the comments) have now come out saying that FEX-Emu was not just sponsored by Valve but is actually their project and that they approached suitable developers with the idea who they have been paying for the development: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valve-have-been-fundin...
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-03 14:22:12+00:00
> it is why politicians should be required to put their stocks in a blind trust

Don't these people get a salary already? If "serving the people" isn't enough as an incentive, maybe they shouldn't be in a position for serving the people?

Outlaw politicians owning stocks at all, it makes no sense they ever could in the first place, when the incentives are so obviously misaligned. It simply lives too much room for misbehaving actors, no matter how much bandage you put on top.
by danaris | 2025-12-03 14:22:14+00:00
> When they don't have the tools to exercise that capability, it's a distinction without any practical impact.

It has huge practical impact.

If a human doesn't currently have the tools to exercise the capability, you can help them get those.

This is especially true when the tools in question are things like "enough time to actually think about their work, rather than being forced to rush through everything" or "enough mental energy in the day to be able to process and learn, because you're not being kept constantly on the edge of a breakdown." Or "the flexibility to screw up once in a while without getting fired." Now, a lot of managers refuse to give their subordinates those tools, but that doesn't mean that there's no practical impact. It means that they're bad managers and awful human beings.

An LLM will just always be nondeterministic. If you're the LLM "worker"'s "boss", there is nothing you can do to help it do better next time.

> they can sometimes recognise they made a mistake and correct it.

...And other times, they "recognize they made a mistake" when they actually had it right, and "correct it" to something wrong.

"Recognizing you made a mistake and correcting it" is a common enough pattern in human language—ie, the training corpus—that of course they're going to produce that pattern sometimes.
by rmoriz | 2025-12-03 14:22:18+00:00
Well, diversity is great but I think many people underestimate the quality and service of GitHub, especially the free services. Even commercial vendors have failed to provide such a free service over time (Docker Hub, Bintray, Sourceforge). They all have/had the power to earn money though commercial offerings and ads, but in the end had to cut down their free services. I still wonder, how codeberg plans to cover the exploding costs.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-03 14:22:49+00:00
> as the electorate has already shown they don't care enough to vote their representatives out for doing it

The problem arises from how we run elections. It's very hard to dislodge an incumbent when the small group of people voting in a primary are very biased, and then the people voting in the general election really don't want the candidate from the other party.

I suggest reading "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America" by Lee Drutman.

https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Two-Party-Doom-Loop-Multipar...
by Plankaluel | 2025-12-03 14:23:22+00:00
I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem.

Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares

I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.

Sorry, rant over ;P
by someguyiguess | 2025-12-03 14:24:19+00:00
This explains why Claude started transpiling & running JavaScript code! Yesterday, when I asked it to generate a document for me in JavaScript, it generated the JavaScript and then ran it to generate a document. I had never actually seen it compile and run any code before. It only would ever output code and either use the shell (Claude code) to run it on my local computer or allow me to copy and paste it.
Show HN: Pylar – Fix over-querying, data leaks, and governance for AI agents
by Hoshang07 | 2025-12-03 14:24:33+00:00
Hey HN! We're Hoshang & Vishal, the team behind Pylar - a governed access layer between databases and LLMs. We previously led data and AI and we kept seeing the same problem across teams using LLMs internally: agents are great with unstructured data, but the moment you want them touching your actual systems of record — Snowflake, Postgres, CRMs, product DBs — everything becomes fragile, risky, or outright unsafe.

Two issues show up every single time:

1. Agents over-querying They don’t understand cost. They’ll happily generate queries that blow up your warehouse bill.

2. Accidental data exposure PII, financials, customer history leaking through prompt injection or poorly scoped access. Most teams I’ve spoken to don’t feel comfortable letting an agent anywhere near production tables.

The options today aren’t great:

Off-the-shelf MCP servers: There are thousands out there, most too generic for production and a surprising number are malicious.

Hand-rolled API wrappers: Takes months, spreads governance across repos, and you end up maintaining a brittle patchwork of endpoints and policies.

ACLs and row-level permissions weren’t designed for autonomous systems. Locking agents down neuters them; opening things up puts your data at risk. We kept seeing this tradeoff.

So we built Pylar.

It sits between your agents and your databases. You connect your sources, create sandboxed SQL views that define exactly what an agent is allowed to see, convert those views into deterministic MCP tools, and publish them to any agent builder through one secure link.

From one place, you can:

- Give agents scoped, sandboxed access (never raw tables)

- Apply consistent governance across all data sources

- Get observability into agent behavior and queries

- Contain misuse before it becomes a breach

- Plug into anything: Claude, Cursor, LangGraph, n8n, etc.

We’ve been working with a few early teams already, across internal analytics agents and customer-facing AI features driven directly by production data.

If you’re solving similar problems around safe structured-data access for agents, I’d love your thoughts.

Here's our - Docs (https://docs.pylar.ai) - Website (https://www.pylar.ai) - Demo (https://youtu.be/w8DPxS5RP2Y?si=4xyO_B4UgjPlIFvM)

You can try our product on a 14 day trial here - https://app.pylar.ai/signup

We're excited to launch here and get feedback on how we're approaching this.
by wolrah | 2025-12-03 14:24:39+00:00
> I'm talking about managing two certificates so I can share a static site with a handful of friends. Each one takes about 10 minutes a year to update.

The personal site I started with is one certificate for a static site that I use for basically the same thing. It took me 10 minutes to set up in 2016 and I haven't thought about it for a second since then. It just works.

> Adding automation means I have to set up a process that I have to check up on at least once every 6.5 weeks to make sure it's still working.

Assuming you're using a common automation package and not rolling your own it should be included. I personally use acme.sh which can be configured to use email, XMPP, or HTTP(S) requests with prebuilt templates for most popular webhooks, as well as supporting fully custom notification scripts. I get an email every time it attempts a renewal that tells me if it succeeded or failed. Again one-time setup, easy, did it once literally almost a decade ago and haven't had to think about it since. As I pointed out in my previous post I did once have two of my systems fail to renew, I was notified, and I fixed it within a few minutes of seeing the emails.

Let's Encrypt also used to send their own emails if a cert was expiring but they stopped doing that this year for a variety of reasons: https://letsencrypt.org/2025/01/22/ending-expiration-emails

Now that I'm actually thinking about the topic, these days for my work systems I have a platform that monitors for periodic updates and alerts me if they don't come in so I should probably reconfigure my notifications to use that instead of email and clean up my team's inboxes a bit by no longer needing to receive a couple dozen "everything's OK" mails every couple of months (or soon, couple of weeks).
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-03 14:24:42+00:00
> out of all the corruption you see from Washington this one seems the most benign

Lawmakers deciding what laws to argue against/for based on how much money it'll get them personally is a benign issue? It's a very hard problem to solve, when the people making the laws have to outlaw behavior that makes them rich, but it's a very worthwhile one if you manage to get it down, because then you'll again get politicians working for the people rather than against.
by georgeburdell | 2025-12-03 14:24:48+00:00
I’m also in the camp of paying government officials more. In my town, the mayor and council make about $30k each while the median income in the city is well over $100k and houses cost over $1M. That self-selects out the majority of qualified candidates who must work for a living.

We have several high tech companies as well as a pro sports team that perpetually influence politics to the city’s detriment, and the stooges that get put on our ballot each election are simply under-equipped to combat them.
by jsheard | 2025-12-03 14:24:57+00:00
Yeah, I don't think any of the stores charge developers in proportion to how much bandwidth they use. If that changed then the priorities could shift pretty quickly.

Publishers do have to care somewhat on the Switch since Nintendo does charge them more for higher capacity physical carts, but a lot of the time they just sidestep that by only putting part (or none) of the game on the cart and requiring the player to download the rest.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-03 14:25:04+00:00
I don't understand how paying them more will curtail this. This is a mixture of a crime of convenience and greed. It's not a Les Mis situation where they need these stock picks to survive (or even thrive). The current US Administration is full of rich people who are still not above corruption.

Obama signed the STOCK act into law, but of course, who watches the watchmen? The Restore Trust In Congress Act is sitting there, waiting for Mike Johnson to bring it to a vote.