MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-12-28 20:37:42+00:00
If you're writing Python tools to support OS operations in prod, you need to target the system Python. It's wildly impractical to deploy venvs for more than one or two apps, especially if they're relatively small. Developing in a local venv can help with that targeting, but there's no substitute for doing that directly on the OS you're deploying to.
by rco8786 | 2025-12-28 20:37:50+00:00
Yea I'm not attempting to make any broad statements about regulations or who has or hasn't been laid off. Only that a common mistake I see a lot of people making is trying to apply AI/LLMs to tasks that need to be deterministic and, predictably, seeing bad results.

There is a class of task that is well-suited for current gen AI models. Things that are repetitive, tedious, and can absorb some degree of error. But I agree that this class of tasks is significantly narrower than what the market is betting on AI being able to accomplish.
by kaoD | 2025-12-28 20:38:33+00:00
And it was treated as potentially malformed and hence the panic. That's what panic is for! When invariants are not upheld at runtime, in Cloudflare's case an abnormal amount of entries IIRC.

I mean, if the error was handled what would you have done if not crashing the service with an error message?

I think the post's point is that you don't panic if someone submits a malformed PDF (you just reject their request) but I don't think there's any way to gracefully handle a malformed config file that is core to the service.
by dkdcio | 2025-12-28 20:39:52+00:00
you could just do that with Rust, right? you’re just saying cargo makes it too easy not to

I’m very tempted to go this direction myself with Rust, vendoring in and “maintaining” (using Claude Code to maintain) dependencies. or writing subsets of the crates I need myself and using those. the sprawl with Rust dependencies is concerning
by Maxatar | 2025-12-28 20:39:54+00:00
I don't see how you could have read the article and come to this conclusion. The first few sentences of the article even go into detail about how a cheap $1200 consumer grade computer should be able to handle 10,000 concurrent connections with ease. It's literally the entire focus of the second paragraph.

2003 might seem like ancient history, but computers back then absolutely could handle 10,000 concurrent connections.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-28 20:40:59+00:00
> I just wish all the crypto experts doing that would point me to an alternative that is functionally equivalent.

The entire point of every single valid criticism of PGP is that you cannot make a single functionally equivalent alternative to PGP. You must use individual tools that are good at specific things, because the "Swiss Army knife" approach to cryptographic tool design has yielded empirically poor outcomes.

If you have an example of how age broke for you, I think its maintainers would be very interested in hearing that -- I've been using it directly and indirectly for 5+ years and haven't had any compatibility or runtime issues with it, including when sharing encrypted files across different implementations of age.
by netsharc | 2025-12-28 20:41:36+00:00
I wish SNL was currently on the air and made a hell of a joke out of that announcement...

Here's my sketch idea: Naval officers unveil the ship, but when they pull the curtains, they murmur that it's smaller than claimed (The ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship, according to Trump(1)). Stormy Daniels shows up and says "Oh yeah, he likes to brag, but it's more like a mushroom.".

Cut to the bridge of the ship, the navigation officer comes to the Captain and says "Sir, the ship can't navigate properly. It seems whatever coordinates we set it always wants to head to... Epstein Island!"

Then the radar officer says "Sir, we are picking up something on the radar. It's a big, it's long...". Cut to footage of a big, black, submarine. The Captain interrupts with "That must be the Obama-Class submarine! The biggest, baddest ship we've ever had!", and the crew look at it in awe.

Then Obama shows up and lectures the viewing public: "Impressive, huh? But in reality there's no Obama-class submarine. The legacy of leading the country should be measured by how it improved Americans' lives, not by the ships and ballrooms." (this message needs to be workshopped...)

Stormy Daniels reappears and says "I know which ship I'd rather be on (wink).". Then fade out the scene with the crew panickedly saying "Captain, the ship is losing power! It looks like it's falling asleep!".

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/22/trump-new-na...
by ourmandave | 2025-12-28 20:41:50+00:00
The spec on this piece of propaganda is the main battery is all missile systems. And the secondary is 5" guns, lasers, and a railgun.

The Navy stopped trying to install railguns back in 2021 but never stopped development.

I assume the lasers are future tech that sound cool, except this thing will be cancelled right after the next admin renames Dept of War back to DoD.
by zingababba | 2025-12-28 20:42:42+00:00
So I did this, straight up deleted my account with all my connections. I eventually came crawling back years later. It's crazy to me, I had an interview with a CISO a few weeks ago and he was critiquing my profile. I told him: dude I consider LinkedIn to be a complete joke and its sole purpose it serves for me is job acquisition. The emotional investment people have in that platform is weeeird. The ThOuGhT LeAdErShIp posts are insane.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-28 20:42:55+00:00
> If you read the various how-tos out there it is not that hard to use, just people do not want to read anything more than 2 lines. That is the main issue.

The video linked above contains multiple examples of people using GnuPG's CLI in ways that it was seemingly intended to be used. Blaming users for holding it wrong seems facile.
by nonninz | 2025-12-28 20:43:27+00:00
Absolutely beautiful story thank you so much for sharing.

I don't mind AI translation at all. The style comes off as a bit weird indeed, but I just took it off as a style I'm not used to because it comes from a different culture than mine. I wouldn't mind much the naysayers, I'd like to see them posting something in chinese and see how they'd like it ;)

I really enjoyed the writing style actually, all these different anectodes condensed in shorter sentences, without fluff or trying to connect them in a single narrative. Maybe this is not the correct way to put it, but I'm also not a native English speaker nor I have any classical training in writing.

Yours is the first substack I ever subscribed to and can't wait to read part two. It actually pushed me to start writing some of my childhood experiences.

Thank you again. Absolutely fascinating.
by bastienbeurier | 2025-12-28 20:43:34+00:00
When recruiting, LinkedIn is useful for three things for me:
1. Propagating the job ad
2. Verifying that an applicant is real (profile picture, network, work history, etc.). I’m seeing more and more fake applications lately.
3. Letting candidates apply with just a LinkedIn URL (when they keep it reasonably up to date)

None of this is really about social networking.

Ideally, I’d much rather have a universal résumé platform with proper ID verification, and separately a job board with reach comparable to LinkedIn.

Until something like that exists, deleting LinkedIn mostly means candidates lose out on discovering jobs and applying quickly to them.
by gherkinnn | 2025-12-28 20:43:38+00:00
Related to the definition of Battleship for the fellow pedantic: What is a tank

https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not...

Less humorously, the proposed Trump class "Battleship" is what a teenage armchair general would dream up. The kind of person who thinks Ministry of War sounds cool and cosplays as his favourite operator.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-28 20:44:34+00:00
Starlink satellites are initially launched into such orbits, then use their built-in thrusters to raise themselves to somewhat higher orbits.

If somebody's launching "blow up a box full of BBs" weapons into orbit...their ability to control even the initial orbits of all those BBs will be kinda limited. (But if 10% of a million BBs go where you wanted 'em to - probably good enough, eh?)

BBs with lower perigees may fall out of orbit within days - but that's plenty of time to hit something, if a particular orbit was being targeted.
by tomhow | 2025-12-28 20:44:37+00:00
You've entered a community that has clear guidelines and a clearly stated purpose and you've brought an ideologically combative energy, in clear breach of the site’s guidelines and intended use. This is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to contribute positively and raise the standards up rather than dragging them down. People have no trouble getting to the 500-point threshold to enable downvoting when they contribute positively to the site for a few months, with interesting submissions and thoughtful comments. We have tools anyone can use to report breaches if they want to earnestly show they intend to use the site as intended – flagging and emailing us (hn@ycombinator.com). We push back on anyone we see breaking the guidelines, regardless of “side” (we don't care about the side and often don't even know), and we're routinely accused of favoring the other side by people who refuse to take responsibility for their own conduct.
by tptacek | 2025-12-28 20:44:38+00:00
Look, if defending "message history consistency" is a reason you're choosing some other secure messenger rather than Signal, then I don't think this argument is very productive; use some other secure messenger then. But if "message history consistency" is a reason you're endorsing encrypted email over Signal, you're committing malpractice.

The point is that whatever secure messenger you use, it must plausibly be secure. Email cannot plausibly be made secure. Whatever other benefits you might get from using it --- federation, open source, UX improvements, universality --- come at the cost of grave security flaws.

Most people who use encrypted email are doing so in part because it does not matter if any of their messages are decrypted. They simply aren't interesting or valuable. But in endorsing a secure messenger of any sort, you're influencing the decisions of people whose messages are extremely sensitive, even life-or-death sensitive. For those people, federation or cross-platform support can't trump security, and as practitioners we are obligated to be clear about that.
by below43 | 2025-12-28 20:45:07+00:00
Thanks. It's interesting to compare the original HN article with the browser-translated story (from https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20240110A03FKJ00).

I definitely appreciate the style of the HN English article, but I think the browser-translated version possibly gives a bit more context to some of the story.

e.g. This is the English version
"We would clutch candy wrappers in our hands, giggling endlessly. The teacher would scold us for disturbing the nap, but we Hid behind our parents, still laughing."

This is the browser-translated version:
"I kept giggling when I saw her, and she giggled too, and we kept laughing with small sugar paper during our lunch break. When my parents came to pick us up, the teacher criticized us for being undisciplined, and we still hid behind our parents and giggled."
by Natanael_L | 2025-12-28 20:45:24+00:00
You need a private PKI, not keyring. They're subtly different - a PKI can handle key rotation, etc.

Yes there aren't a lot of good options for that. If you're using something like a Microsoft software stack with active directory or similar identity/account management then there's usually some PKI support in there to anchor to.

Across organisations, there's really very very few good solutions. GPG specifically is much too insecure when you need to receive messages from untrusted senders. There's basically S/MIME which have comparable security issues, then we have AD federation or Matrix.org with a server per org.

> You could say, we do not need gpg, because we control the mailserver, but what if a mailserver is compromised and the mails are still in mailboxes?

How are you handling the keys? This is only true if user's protect their own keypairs with strong passwords / yubikey applet, etc.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-28 20:45:27+00:00
Well once Tim started hanging out with Trump and licking his boots and awarding him participation trophies and illegal gilded emoluments, the MAGA attitudes that empathy is a weakness, transparency is performative cosmetics, accessibility is for crippled people who should be mocked, and usability is for DEI hires, all start trickling down into the culture and user interface design.

Liquid Glass looks like Trump hooked Alan Dye up with Don Jr's coke dealer.
by kcb | 2025-12-28 20:45:35+00:00
The US navy is in freefall. The best we can do is build a 40 year old destroyer hull and an aircraft carrier class that we plan to be building for literally 100 years. Shipyards can't build anything. Every design is mismanaged so poorly and leached on by traitorous defense contractors so badly that we get essentially nothing but the bill.
by throwaway270925 | 2025-12-28 20:46:09+00:00
Yeah, 2016-2019 were severely cooling constrained unfortunately.

If you want to keep using it (maybe not as your main machine) there are some workarounds and fixes:

The simple software only way is to deactivate Turbo and/or HT. Less performance but also less power use meaning less heat. And checking gmail or browsing the web you probably wont notice much of a difference.

Or you can open it up and add thermal pads to your VRMs, finally giving them adequate cooling. Just dont touch the bottom of your macbook afterwards or rest it on your bed or couch, that thing can get hot!
Show HN: Git-walkthrough – Learn unfamiliar codebases by walking through history
by yoouareperfect | 2025-12-28 20:46:19+00:00
Built this because I kept getting lost trying to understand how codebases evolved. git-walkthrough lets you navigate through commits with arrow keys and view diffs between them as uncommitted changes in VS Code.

Just run npx git-walkthrough in any repo and step through the commit history. Press 'd' to toggle diff mode, and it shows you what changed between commits right in your editor.

Handy for:
* Understanding how an unfamiliar codebase evolved
* Code reviews where you want to step through changes
* Learning from open source projects

Auto-restores your git state when you quit so nothing gets messed up.

https://github.com/mikealche/repo-walkthrough

Would love to hear what you think!
Ask HN: PC Data Privacy in PC Repair Shops
by giardini | 2025-12-28 20:46:39+00:00
A friend bought a new PC that will store personal financial information and be used to log into financial sites. I told him to buy a refurb from Amazon and get an Asurion extended license. Asurion uses the "ibreakUfix" repair shops apparently.

If I have a serious PC problem I fix it myself (if I can). But I don't want to inadvertently get into the PC repair business. If he needs repairs, whom he can trust to do repairs while leaving his data undisturbed? Are there bonded PC repair businesses? (I mean, look what happened to Hunter Biden!)
by bossyTeacher | 2025-12-28 20:47:45+00:00
> they need others to solve the social problem.

You assume it is a solvable problem. Chances are that you will have bots following laws (as opposed to moral statements) and each jurisdiction will essentially have a different alignment. So in a social conservative country, for example, a bot will tell you not being hetero is wrong and report you to the police if you ask too many questions about it. While, in a queer friendly country, a bot would not behave like this. A bit like how some movies can only be watched in certain countries.

I highly doubt alignment as a concept works beyond making bots follow laws of a given country. And at the end of the day, the enforced laws are essentially the embodiment of the morality of that jurisdiction.

People seem to live in a fictional world if they believe countries won't force LLM companies to force the country's morality in their LLMs whatever their morality is. This is essentially what has happened with intellectual property and media and LLMs likely won't be different.
by Animats | 2025-12-28 20:49:24+00:00
It's all hype, as the article points out. "Battleship", it's not. No mention of armor. A battleship is supposed to be able to withstand a hit from its own primary weapon.
The British Navy had a fad for light cruisers at one point, "eggshells armed with sledgehammers". They did not do well in WWI and WWII.[1] Nor did the armored battleships. No Japanese or German battleship in WWII survived a determined air attack. Yamato, Tirpiz, Bismark - all lost to air attack.

But they looked really cool.

Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them. If there's a war over Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait will be a no-go zone for US warships. Being near a hostile coast held by someone with modern weapons is death to a navy today. The sinking of the Moskva was the first demonstration of this, and Ukraine has since taken out about eight more Russian warships and many smaller craft, using various missiles and drones.

[1] https://hmshood.org.uk/history/bcorigins.htm

[2] https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/china-s-df-27-miss...
by arcbyte | 2025-12-28 20:50:07+00:00
I agree with you and have agreed with you for a long time. However, I definitely see the writing on the wall. More than one person in my circle have traditionally been Android users and the lack of innovation from both Apple and Android have them comparing devices on specs MUCH more. I include myself in this lost on my next upgrade. I'll be looking largely at specs on the next upgrad because honestly there's not much day to day difference in usage between apple and android anymore
by _flux | 2025-12-28 20:50:09+00:00
I mean no, you don't need to be open source at all. Just don't release the data and call the release "open weights". Or do release the data, and the training process, and call yourself "open source".

Though, I do think it's still acceptable if you just point how to get the data (i.e. if it was the offline version of Wikipedia and then URL to that) if actually providing the source data is overwhelming. Offering to provide a copy at cost would be quite acceptable (i.e. I deliver the media to you to make a copy).

But if there's no way another person can acquire that data, even in theory, then I think it's pretty clear the source was not open. Just use the more appropriate term and everyone is on the level what the release is about.
by zingababba | 2025-12-28 20:50:10+00:00
It sucks that you had to go through that. I often wonder how close psychedelics bring you to that same sensation. I've had some harrowing trips where at the end of it all I can think about is mending or bolstering relationships which I will often spend considerable time doing in the days/weeks after. I'll often reach out to people I haven't talked to in months/years just because I suddenly feel like it's important. It obviously wanes though.
by chasing0entropy | 2025-12-28 20:50:17+00:00
Common sense tech regulation from non ameri-centric societiy is becoming too common. While we (US) are trying to hoard chat bot technology, the rest of the world is hoarding solar, EV, and agricultural tech useful for their survival and ability to flourish in a resource poor world; instead we strive to eliminate jobs while turning water and electricity into text and photoshopped videos.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-12-28 20:50:28+00:00
My controversial take on Rust errors is to use anyhow everywhere until you have an immediate demand for explicit Enums. YANGNI

The pros for using anyhow are big: Easily stack errors together - eg file.open().context(path) -, errors are easily kept up to date, and easy to find where they occur.

An enum error is pleasing when you're finished, but cumbersome in practice.

It's niche situation that you need to write a function that exposes a meaningful Error state the caller can branch on. If the return state is meaningful, you usually don't put it in the Err part. eg parsers using { Ok,Incomplete,Error }. IMO Error enums are best for encoding known external behavior like IO errors.

For example: The Sender.send_deadline returning { Timeout, Closed } is the exception in being useful. Most errors are like a Base64 error enums. Branching on the detail is useless for 99.99% of callers.

i.e. If your crate is meant for >1000 users, build the full enum.

For any other stuff, use anyhow.
by whstl | 2025-12-28 20:52:07+00:00
I think you're both right.

I have also met a lot of completely unreasonable designers that would insist on the most minimal things (even to the detriment of usability), and would act like assholes towards developers.

I have also had situations where developers would beg to work with a certain designer because their experience made development a breeze, even for complex layouts. Funny enough, the projects where this designer worked would always get done, and the visual result was always great.
by maxglute | 2025-12-28 20:52:22+00:00
It's not limited to BRICs but many emerging economies or distressed countries PRC wants to gain influence. Dollars attached to specific PRC projects, i.e. BRI, so they buy PRC industrial inputs, goods, equipment, contracts PRC SEOs to build XYZ. It goes from a Chinese bank to a Chinese contractor who buys other shit. But the shit they are not buying is US treasuries, and even if they did, not at PBoC/central bank for storage low yield rates that subsidizes US debt. Sometimes there's more generalized debt servicing swaplines, but regardless When dollars come due, PRC can take rmb/commodities/assets (rarely aka debt trap). If borrowing countries payback in USD, then cycle repeats. PRC is basically exploiting UDS network / liquidity effects without paying exorbitant privilege. Well they do pay, as in they take on lending risks, but their USD reserve is inherently not safe anymore post RU sanctions, so might as well as use it now.
by csours | 2025-12-28 20:52:57+00:00
"Trump Class Battleship" - absurd

"Gulf of America" - absurd

"Tariffs will reduce inflation" - absurd

"Trump Kennedy Center" - absurd

"Mexico will pay for the wall" - absurd

"Ukraine started the war" - absurd

"We'll make drugs 1500% cheaper" - absurd

---

Why does MAGA love absurdity so much?
by IAmGraydon | 2025-12-28 20:53:25+00:00
Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase - Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in sight. This price increase was engineered.

The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of it started swirling in September. Take a look at the RAM price charts. Anyone who attributes this just to "AI growth" has no idea what they're talking about. AI has been growing rapidly for three years and yet this price increase just happened exactly when Altman signed this deal.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/