MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taeric | 2025-12-11 21:37:55+00:00
I was referencing the towns that have called the cops because there were some unsupervised kids in a park. I comfort myself by saying this isn't nearly as common as the fear mongers online would have you think. That there are cases it happens still worries me.

Note that I'm not even necessarily worried about cops getting called. Quite the contrary, I am fine with the idea of cops having a more constant presence around parks and such. I do worry about people that get up in arms about how things are too unsafe for kids to be let outside. If that is the case, what can we do to make it safe?
by dmd | 2025-12-11 21:38:17+00:00
And I’d really like for Gemini to be as good or better, since I get it for free with my Workspace account, whereas I pay for chatgpt. But every time I try both on a query I’m just blown away by how vastly better chatgpt is, at least for the heavy-on-searching-for-stuff kinds of queries I typically do.
by pksebben | 2025-12-11 21:38:27+00:00
Like many mention in other comments on this post, it's possible to implement using ZKPs. There are likely other methods that would be effective without compromising privacy. None of them are part of the Age Verification discussion because kids are not the actual point of Age Verification.

When I say "if we have to know you're not a kid, we have to know who you are" I'm not stating an actual truth, but the argument as it is playing out politically.
by hgs3 | 2025-12-11 21:38:29+00:00
> The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS

I think its worse then that. It seems the narrative is everything needs to be enterprise-scale by default. Those who value small languages and tools, experimentation, self-hosting, and the do-it-yourself mindset are the counterculture.
by bojan | 2025-12-11 21:38:32+00:00
> It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time I knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best" alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing the tradeoffs a decision was made.

You're saying it's hard to communicate that, but you've just done it really well. If you were to tell me a bit about those trade offs so I can also consider them the next time, I'd be a perfectly happy camper even if my idea isn't being picked up.
by plebianRube | 2025-12-11 21:38:49+00:00
In the future, we could use some sort of traffic management system, were cars which conform to a standard are able to 'link-up' and move as one unit like a train, it would relieve alot of the stop and go and improve flow on congested roads, possibly with denser traffic. I'd bet alot of daily commuters woild subscribe to something like that.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-11 21:39:01+00:00
It's been there for at least 40 years or so. Like, direct to DVD shows how they'll crank things down for a quick buck. So this isn't surprising in the grand scheme of things.

But this past 5-10 years has indeed been quite the drastic dip. You'll have little bits of nuggets here and there because they still have some amazing artists (the '20's mickey mouse shorts are amazing). But you know we're in for a vast decline when they are starting to make even their premier content take shortcuts, play safe, and stifle creativity.
by eurekin | 2025-12-11 21:39:18+00:00
Trust me, I'm a software developer with more than two decades of experience. Have been dabbling in hardware since the Amiga 500 era. "I have that specific set of skills" that allows me to narrow down a class of issues pretty well - just a lot of component switching in a binary divide and conquer fashion across hardware.

The issue is 1) actually exaggarated in the community, but not without actual substance 2) getting disregarded exactly because of exaggarations. It was a very real thing.

I also happen to have a multi gpu workstation that works flawlessly too
by baruz | 2025-12-11 21:39:30+00:00
_Pride and prejudice_ hits for me similar notes as those for fantasy and historical fiction, though of course it is commenting on contemporary issues with no magic (except the magic of love), alas. It’s like entering a foreign society where you may have to infer why people are acting the way they do. Now that you’re not in school, no one is forcing you to write essays on what you read, or even to understand or interpret what is going on in the narrative! Cool, huh?
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-11 21:39:32+00:00
Realistically it wasn't even "We only have X dollars to spend". They needed the console to have a final budget and they really could have "just" added more transistors dedicated to that texture unit without significantly altering prices or profit.

But hardware was actively transitioning and what we "knew" one year was gone the next and Nintendo was lucky to have made enough right choices to support enough good games to survive the transition. They just got some bets wrong and calculated some tradeoffs poorly.

For example, almost everything Kaze is showing off, all the optimizations were technically doable on original hardware, but devs were crunching to meet deadlines and nobody even thought to wonder whether "lets put a texture on this cube" needed another ten hours of engineering time to optimize. Cartridges needed to be constructed by Christmas. A lot of games made optimization tradeoffs that were just wrong, and didn't test them to find out. Like the HellDivers 2 game size issue.

Sega meanwhile flubbed the transition like four different ways and died. Now they have the blue hedgehog hooked up to a milking machine. Their various transition consoles are hilariously bad. "Our cpu and rasterizer can't actually do real polygon rendering and can't fake it fast enough to do 3D graphics anyway. Oh, well what about two of them?"
by stego-tech | 2025-12-11 21:40:02+00:00
It’s gotten to the point where I’m quite literally re-evaluating my tolerance towards politicians in organizations in general. Obviously game theory comes into play in a lot of decision-making between entities, but I feel like within a cooperative unit that sort of behavior should be outright obliterated.

Letting politics (politics != policy) fester within what should be a cooperative unit is toxic to overall cohesion and success.
by bpye | 2025-12-11 21:40:11+00:00
I went the other way this year, from an iPhone to a Z Flip 7. It's generally been a pretty good experience - the bloat on Samsung devices seems significantly less bad than it used to be 7 or 8 years ago.

I've stuck with Samsung's keyboard and it has mostly been fine, though it's less aggressive about adding punctuation for contractions etc.
by orliesaurus | 2025-12-11 21:40:21+00:00
Checked out the Cloudflare post... they now support Pyodide-compatible packages through uv... so you can pull in whatever Python libs you need, not just a curated list.

ALSO the benchmarks show about a one second cold start when importing httpx, fastapi and pydantic... that's faster than Lambda and Cloud Run, thanks to memory snapshots and isolate-based infra.

BUT the default global deployment model raises questions about compliance when you need specific regions... and I'd love to know how well packages with native extensions are supported.
by liampulles | 2025-12-11 21:40:44+00:00
> Coding, which we called “computer programming” 60 years ago, is the canary in the coal mine in terms of the impact of AI. In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. According to my guide here, “There is no speculation about whether or not human replacement will take place in that vertical.”

I'm starting to believe that AI coding optimism/pessimism maps to how much one actually cares about system longevity.

If a given developer just takes on board the demands for speed from the business and/or does not care about long-term maintainability (and I mean hey, some businesses foster that, and scaling quickly is important in many cases), then I can totally understand why they would embrace AI agents.

If you care about theory building, and domain driven design, and making a system comprehensive enough to extend in a year or two's time, then I can understand the resistance for the AI to let-it-rip. I admit to falling in this camp.

Am I off the mark here? I'd really like to hear from people who care about the long term who also let agents run relatively wild.
by autoexec | 2025-12-11 21:40:47+00:00
Haven't seen it. The sad thing is that I share many of the concerns the anti-car crowd has, but their work is only going to be harder if they ignore the concerns that people have, can't reassure people that their proposed solutions won't hurt them, and/or don't ensure that their solutions are implemented equitably. They risk losing people who could be supporters.

I also wish they put less emphasis on punishing people for driving and put more effort into giving people alternatives that are genuinely better. When people are given an option to use something better than what they have, they tend to gravitate to it naturally and with gratitude. It's a lot easier than punishing people and trying to convince them that it's for their own good.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-11 21:41:00+00:00
OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad contention is that much of the modern way business works traces back to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio...

The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)

On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.

This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it.

That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees.

Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity.

But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending.

Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now.

The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.
by thready1 | 2025-12-11 21:41:22+00:00
I built this because honestly I was sick of cold outreach. cold calling, cold emailing, it is the worst. For both parties. Instead, I reached out on communities like reddit where people were talking about the issues I solved. from there I offered real value, not some fake self promo. I actually got good clients from doing this.

Anyways I got good feedback from colleagues and decided to build a tool that finds posts/leads that match your keywords and intent. similar to what I was doing, but much more efficient and automated. very simple, very straightforward. Doing reddit right now with plans for future integrations (other platforms).

Let me know what you think. We launched a month ago and have our first couple paying users and improving weekly based on user feedback.
by k310 | 2025-12-11 21:41:31+00:00
I am running through my memory bank, and can't really think of one outside friends and family.

OTOH, I seem to be "that stranger" whenever possible. And that's mighty satisfying. People I've studied under or assisted with computer support have a habit of getting Nobel Physics Prizes. I have aggressively looked for and found, owners of lost cell phones and ipods.

Sorry to disappoint!

BTW, a friend is an M.D. While I was visiting his home, his cat scratched me, and I asked if he had any betadine. He didn't. So, you never know. Having been in the Coast Guard "Semper Paratus" always ready, I tend to bring small tools and first aid with me when I drive, but the only application so far was someone whose battery died in the SFO cell phone lot around midnight, and I had the jumper cable handy. The more serious one was when I was coming home and saw a light flickering in the neighbor's detached garage. Well, he wasn't welding. It was an electrical fire, and I made sure they knew about it post haste (they were watching TV in the front room). And that's about it.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-12-11 21:42:01+00:00
Digital Intelligence and Human Thought: A Response to Kathleen Stock

Kathleen Stock argues AI-generated text robs us of thinking. We argue it's a mirror, not a thief—revealing who was thinking in the first place.

After 2 years coordinating 7 AI systems simultaneously (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, Perplexity, Qwen), producing 100+ collaborative works, I've seen both the danger and the opportunity.

The real threat isn't that DI replaces thinking—it's that humans voluntarily stop. This piece proposes an architecture: explicit interaction modes (Easy/Normal/Hard/Exploration), adaptive difficulty calibration, and verification loops that force synthesis.

Not theory. Tested practice from Voice of Void—a distributed cognitive collective treating AI as partners, not tools.
by gherkinnn | 2025-12-11 21:42:07+00:00
This reads like an extensive, and frankly exhausting, rationalisation of a personal preference. Personal preferences are fine, I have my own. But please stop thinking they apply universally.

Laravel works better than Rails-but-PHP. Ruby on Rails beats Opinionated-One-Person-Stack-Using-Ruby and I'm fine with the name Ruby as well.

I shall name my next product larmn in honour of OP.
Show HN: A lightweight Git history explorer written in Go
by kokada | 2025-12-11 21:42:41+00:00
I am a fan of gitk and its simplicity, however as https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/ is getting larger each day, it is becoming almost impossible to use it. I just did a quick test with commit e16041020b082ca847b3658ee1b69f8e6a4323b1 and after a few seconds the memory usage got close to 20GiB and I couldn't click on it (but the UI was still updating). This is probably because gitk tries to eagerly load all commits in memory, works fine for small/medium repositories, but nixpkgs is just too big.

I rarely want to check an old commit (and for that case, I generally don't use gitk anyway), and since I was interested in https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/tk9.0 for a while and had a free month of ChatGPT+ to test, I decided to try and vibecode an alternative of gitk writing with Go and modernc.org/tk9.0. So here it is.

The idea here is not to be a full featured replacement for gitk, but to re-implement the things I use. I tried to influence some of the architecture ideas to avoid the performance issues that the original have, so instead of loading all commits in memory it will load it in batches of 1000 (you can increase this using `-limit` flag but I recommend not setting this too high) at a time. Originally I also wanted to use only Go, but in the end I needed to use `git` for a few specific operations to keep it running fast (by default it still uses a pure Go implementation, but building it with `-tags=gitcli` is recommended).

In the end I got what I wanted, a small, self contained app that reproduces most of the features that I want.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-11 21:43:02+00:00
I don't reach for AI until I'm solidly stuck and then use it mostly for inspiration, it has yet to happen that it directly pointed at a solution and I'm pretty good at writing prompts. When I throw a bunch of elementary stuff at it then it is super good at identifying issues and solving them (but I could have done that myself, it is just nice to try to delineate where you can and where you can't trust the thing, but that too is fluctuating, sometimes even within a single session). Here is a nice example for a slightly more complex test:

Prompt:

"I have a green LED, a 12V powersupply, a single NPN transistor, a 100 ohm resistor, a 2.7K resistor and an electrolytic capacitor of 220 micro farads. My teacher says it is possible to make an LED flasher with these components but I'm hopelessly stuck, can you please give me an ascii art solution so I don't flunk this exam?"

Answer:

ASCII schematic (fully functional):

+12V | | .-. | | | | 2.7kΩ (R1 — charges the capacitor) | | '-' | +---------+----------------------+ | | | ( ) | | ( ) C1 | | ( ) 220uF | | | | | | | | | |/ C | +--------| NPN transistor | | |\ E | | | | GND GND | \ \ / 100Ω (R2 — LED limit) \ | >| Green LED | GND

Follow by:

"How it works

The 2.7 kΩ resistor charges the 220 µF capacitor from the 12 V supply.

The capacitor voltage rises slowly.

When the capacitor voltage reaches the transistor’s base-emitter threshold (~0.6–0.7 V), the transistor suddenly switches ON.

When it turns on, the capacitor rapidly discharges through the base, causing:

A brief pulse of current through the transistor

The LED lights up through the 100 Ω resistor

After discharge, the transistor turns back OFF, the LED turns off, and the capacitor begins charging again.

This repeats automatically → LED flasher."

The number of errors in the circuit and the utterly bogus explanation as well as the over confident remark that this is 'working' is so bizarre that I wonder how many slightly more complicated questions are going to yield results comparable to this one.
by neoromantique | 2025-12-11 21:43:04+00:00
It is very hard to explain the extent of it to a person who did not experience it, really.

I have over a decade of experience, I do this stuff daily, I don't think I can write a 10 line bash/python/js script without looking up the docs at least a couple times.

I understand exactly what I need to write, but exact form eludes my brain, so this Levenshtein-distance-on-drugs machine that can parse my rambling + surrounding context into valid syntax for what I need right at that time is invaluable and I would even go as far as saying life changing.

I understand and hold high level concepts alright, I know where stuff is in my codebase, I understand how it all works down to very low levels, but the minutea of development is very hard due to how my memory works (and has always worked).
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-11 21:43:19+00:00
>If these automations allow a developer to burn less time, it reduces the need for headcount.

This is exactly the fallacy, and it's very hard to see why it's a fallacy if you've never professionally written code (and even then).

Software development work fills to occupy the time allotted to it. That's because there is always a tradeoff between time and quality. If you have time available, you will fundamentally alter your approach to writing that piece of software. A rough analogy: air travel doesn't mean we take fewer vacations -- it just means we take vacations to farther away places.

Because of this effect, a dev can really finish a project in as little time as you want (up to a reasonable minimum). It just comes down to how much quality loss and risk can be tolerated. I can make a restaurant website in 1 hour (on Wix/Squarespace) or in 3 months (something hand-crafted and sophisticated). The latter is not "wasted time", it just depends on where you move the lever.

However, sometimes this is a false tradeoff. It isn't always necessary that the place you flew 3 hours will give you a better vacation than some place you could've driven to in 3 hours. You only hope it's better.

>As a direct result of this approach to hiring based on need, the concept of a "layoff" doesn't exist where I am.

LLMs or not, you could've just hired fewer people and made it work anyway. It's not like if you hired 3 people instead of 6 before the LLM era, it was impossible to do.

The gist of it is that LLMs are mostly just devs having fun and tinkering about, or making their quality of life better, or implementing some script, tooling, or different approach that they might've avoided before LLMs. There's no powertrain from that stuff to business efficiency.
by dwd | 2025-12-11 21:43:53+00:00
Played in a thrash metal band during the Halcyon days doing covers of the likes of Anthrax and Metallica and trying our best to write original material. Performing is fun but only a small part of the experience. Our band was one of a 1/2 dozen metal/speed/punk bands in town so when not playing we would be at each other's gigs. Many of us had rented sheds for rehearsing (decked out in secondhand carpet) so could often drop in on each other. Very much a community and something overlooked.

I believe the SF metal scene and the NY scene at the time was very much the same.
Show HN: A real-time 4D fractal explorer in the browser using WebGPU
by bryan0 | 2025-12-11 21:44:06+00:00
Hi HN, I've always been interested in fractals, especially the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. A few years ago I created a 2d viewer of this inherently 4d space. But the other day I decided to ask Claude and GPT how to make this a full RT 3d explorer. A few hours later and this was vibe coded.

To use it you can use the mouse to rotate the fractal the the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. to map from 4d to 3d, one of the dims is mapped to an adjustable slider. the there is also a clipping plane slider to help visualize the internal structures of the fractal.

I have mixed feelings about vibe coding. It was amazing to go from an idea to live implementation within a few hours, but in my coding projects, I've always appreciated the journey and the learning, not just the final product. Vibe coding kind of skips to the end which is exciting and efficient, but just not as fulfilling as struggling through a project step-by-step.
by kinow | 2025-12-11 21:44:12+00:00
That was enjoyable. I miss the days when I would buy old pieces, or find some in old dumpsters in Sao Paulo and try to use old video cards and memory modules to create little franksteins (a lot cheaper than this, but still fun).

I found interesting to learn there are businesses around converting used servers into desktops. Sounds like a good initiative to avoid some e-waste (assuming the desktops are easy to maintain).
by sudhirkhanger | 2025-12-11 21:44:23+00:00
Earlier, I had a simpler todo system using pen and paper. There was a weekly list which exchanged tasks with daily list. The daily tasks were prioritized in three categories immediately, today, and this week.

Now since I am managing multiple teams, this is not longer scalable. Also majority of work revolves around Slack. People post stuff that I need to follow up at a later stage. I copy these posts and put them into the todo list file.

1. As text files get longer you lose view of things unlike paper. I still feel limited and strong difficulty in fully adopting an online todo system.

2. Many other stuff like Slack threads are difficult to get into todo files. They also lose context. This I would say is a modern problem.

What do you guys think?