MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-12-31 11:04:01+00:00
> Do western governments not subsidize their car makers with tariffs, bailouts, tax cuts, etc?

Yes, but the Chinese ones are done better.

UK government essentially* self-lobotomised with civil service cuts in the post-GFC "austerity" measures, so it doesn't have a good grasp on how to solve problems.

Throwing money around without sufficient care to the precise thing being subsidised, that just promotes wasteful spending, it doesn't grow the thing the subsidy was meant to grow. Cobra effect, etc.

* this wasn't their intent, of course; the rhetoric was all the usual stuff about "bloated" and "bureaucratic" and so on.
by palata | 2025-12-31 11:04:32+00:00
It is precisely what this discussion is about. From the article:

> The key idea behind this strategy, called Selfish Mining, is for a pool to keep its discovered blocks private, thereby intentionally forking the chain. The honest nodes continue to mine on the public chain, while the pool mines on its own private branch. If the pool discovers more blocks, it develops a longer lead on the public chain, and continues to keep these new blocks private. When the public branch approaches the pool's private branch in length, the selfish miners reveal blocks from their private chain to the public.

> In bitcoin the goal is not to be the first. The goal is to find a winning hash that's on a chain that will not be abandoned.

The goal is to be the first (or very close to the first), because it makes it much more likely that your chain will not be abandoned. If you wait 2 days before you reveal your block, obviously it will be abandoned...
by pyrale | 2025-12-31 11:04:58+00:00
The article kind of misses that cost has two axes : development cost and maintenance cost.

low cost/low value software tagged as disposable usually means development cost was low, but maintenance cost is high ; and that's why you get rid of it.

On the other hand, the difference between good and bad traditional software is that, while cost is always going to be high, you want maintenance cost to be low. This is what industrialization is about.
Show HN: DBcooper – Open-source database client for macOS built with Tauri
by pixxxel | 2025-12-31 11:05:10+00:00
Hey HN! I built DBcooper, a native macOS database client using Tauri (Rust) + React.

Supports PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, and ClickHouse in one app.

Features:
- Schema visualizer with interactive ER diagrams
- AI-powered SQL generation (bring your own OpenAI key)
- Command palette for keyboard-first navigation
- SSH tunnel support for remote connections
- Fast and lightweight (~9MB) thanks to Tauri

This started as a side project because I wanted something simpler than the existing options.

Built with: Rust + Tauri, React + TypeScript, shadcn/ui

Would love feedback from fellow developers. What features would you want in a database client?
by oldnewthing | 2025-12-31 11:06:24+00:00
Created modfin.lyfbits.com. Wrote it to help me model and determine various types of investment scenarios. Continuing to work on it. Not strictly vibe-coded. I use a brainstorm -> write specs with Gemini (requirements, APIs, user journeys, user experiences etc.) -> ask Claude to implement from Specs -> iterate and refine until it is exactly what I want it to be.

I have found that the initial specs only go so far; as I use, "what's missing" becomes clearer.

Workflow is build -> checkin to git -> build container -> deploy to Cloud Run. I have a number of instructions for Claude for logs, frontend, backend, logging etc. based on my past experience. Note that I am mostly a backend developer (AWS, Azure, GCP); I can't code frontend to save my life and on that front, the agents are helping me realize ideas rapidly.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-31 11:06:29+00:00
Both Odin and Go have the "zero is default" choice. Every type must have a default and that's what zero signifies for that type. In practice some types shouldn't have such a default, so in these languages that zero state becomes a sentinel value - a value notionally of this type but in fact invalid, just like Hoare's NULL pointer, which means anywhere you didn't check for it, you mustn't assume you have a valid value of that type. Sometimes it is named "null" but even if not it's the same problem.

Even ignoring the practical consequences, this means the programmer probably doesn't understand what their code does, because there are unstated assumptions all over the codebase because their type system doesn't do a good job of writing down what was meant. Almost might as well use B (which doesn't have types).
by cykros | 2025-12-31 11:06:38+00:00
The issue is that broad money isn't money. It's credit. And measuring credit is like measuring both velocity and position at the same time.

The Fed tried to measure dollar supply globally for decades before giving up as they finally got their heads around how the Eurodollar network works, and they've kept somewhat quiet about the fact that they're just not actually at the center of it.
by imiric | 2025-12-31 11:06:42+00:00
> It's really hard to not become hateful towards a group of people when you are shoved information

Yeah, psychological manipulation is a large problem that's mostly unacknowledged. Entire industries rely on it (e.g. advertising), and the platforms we've built can be used by anyone to push their agenda.

> However, I also started to believe that there is always a natural balancing effect

That's true, but the thing is that there's so much noise, with everyone pulling in their own direction, and most of it being machine curated and generated, that there's no chance for civil discourse and common understanding to happen. We have no way of discerning fact from fiction anymore, and whether someone is actually being honest, or if we're talking to a real person at all. All of this produces a cacophony of viewpoints where the loudest party "wins". To be honest, I don't think we can get out of this situation, save for backtracking on and strictly regulating many of the systems we have in place today, which has no chance of happening, and could have its own problems. So things can only get much worse, before they get any better, if at all.
by idoubtit | 2025-12-31 11:08:12+00:00
Not much...

I wrote a few times to my local MPs ("député", as we call them in France). I usually got a response, though I suspect it was written by their secretary with no other consequence. In one case (related to privacy against surveillance), they raised a question in the congress, which had just a symbolic impact.

It may be different in other countries. In France, Parliament is de-facto a marginal power against a strong executive power. Even the legal terms are symptomatic of this situation: the government submits a "project of law" while MPs submit a "proposal of law" (which, for members of the governing party, is almost always written by the government then endorsed by some loyal MP).
by Squeeze2664 | 2025-12-31 11:08:58+00:00
I'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you would even consider doing it in space in the first place is because, on Earth, gravity and other forces are stronger and result in lower-purity crystals. Basically, what I'm getting at, is that I believe this is pretty much a glorified oven. Moving the entire manufacturing process in space wouldn't make sense, as I don't think the benefits to other steps of the process like CVD would outweigh the insane costs of sending things into orbit.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-31 11:10:39+00:00
I am not a programmer, so I did not know the name.
But I just looked him up, and I can see why he is a legend.

His philosophy—stripping away the unnecessary to focus on the reality (data/hardware)—resonates deeply with me.
The practice you described (building from scratch daily) is exactly the "Tea Ceremony" of the digital age.
It is not about the tea (the result), but about the procedure (the internalization).

Thank you for introducing me to such a Master.
by WJW | 2025-12-31 11:10:44+00:00
This essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA puts it) of production and distribution is already handled perfectly well by CI/CD systems and CDNs.

What software developers actually do is closer to the role of an architect in construction or a design engineer in manufacturing. They design new blueprints for the compilers to churn out. Like any design job, this needs some actual taste and insight into the particular circumstances. That has always been the difficult part of commercial software production and LLMs generally don't help with that.

It's like thinking the greatest barrier to producing the next great Russian literary novel is not speaking Russian. That is merely the first and easiest barrier, but after learning the language you are still no Tolstoy.
by baobun | 2025-12-31 11:11:48+00:00
Why are you saying lies?

I just installed fresh chromium and firefox in a clean Linux VM and typed "google.com" (and a few others) in the URL bar with tcpdump running and they both initiated with TCP port 80. Can confirm that the https-only setting is disabled for both when looking in settings/preferences.

> HTTP is only used as a fallback.

Separately, using HTTP as fallback makes the whole thing mostly pointless security-wise. If an attacker can MitM port 80 it is very likely that they can also interfere with 443 to silently force a protocol downgrade. STRIPTLS.

We don't really need HSTS to address most scenarios. Just have browser not attempt http:// for addresses in the address bar unless explicitly specified. Have it try https:// without falling back to http://.

SMTP STARTTLS has the same problem. ISPs and authorities have been known to harvest email traffic by the same technique.
by pyrale | 2025-12-31 11:12:46+00:00
> You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost.

...Or so think devs.

People responsible for operating software, as well as people responsible for maintaining it, may have different opinions.

Bugs must be fixed, underlying software/hardware changes and vulnerabilities get discovered, and so versions must be bumped. The surrounding ecosystem changes, and so, even if your particular stack doesn't require new features, it must be adapted (a simple example: your react front breaks because the nginx proxy changed is subdirectory).
by Closi | 2025-12-31 11:13:55+00:00
Just comes down to your own view of what AGI is, as it's not particularly well defined.

While a bit 'time-machiney' - I think if you took an LLM of today and showed it to someone 20 years ago, most people would probably say AGI has been achieved. If someone wrote a definition of AGI 20 years ago, we would probably have met that.

We have certainly blasted past some science-fiction examples of AI like Agnes from The Twilight Zone, which 20 years ago looked a bit silly, and now looks like a remarkable prediction of LLMs.

By todays definition of AGI we haven't met it yet, but eventually it comes down to 'I know it if I see it' - the problem with this definition is that it is polluted by what people have already seen.
by gethly | 2025-12-31 11:14:56+00:00
I think Odin should market itself for aforementioned games and graphics. Otherwise it will become very niche language. Even now, I think there is only about 5k Odin repositories on github while it is essentially a complete language. Contrast it with Zig, which is still evolving and has breaking changes, being still at 0.x without clear sight of 1.0, and it has over 27k repositories and big projects like Ghostty, Bunt or Tiger beetle are written in it.

Once Jonathan Blow's Jai comes out next year, the language that inspired conception of both of these, Odin will likely have no chance competing on the marketing side of things with programmers and will be taken over by Jai, and Zig in a large extent as well. So the future of the language might not be as solid as it might seem and it might end up just as an internal tool for JangaFX, which is how it originated.

Having the "web stuff" can attract literally millions of developers whom can elevate the language into more stable and broadly used language. More documentation would become available, libraries, youtube videos, internet presence in general.
by grunder_advice | 2025-12-31 11:15:00+00:00
Could be a lot of things and probably a bit of everything. You might have social anxiety, even if you don't feel particularly shy. If you're too clammed up, people recognize that and keep a certain distance. It could also be that you have a very rigid personality. It might simply be a matter of lack of socialization. I don't think there is any way to diagnose this and pinpoint the problem. Learning how to be social is very much a lot like learning how to program: try lots of things, spend a lot of time doing it, and don't be afraid of breaking things. Eventually you'll develop your own methods to keep people entertained and then people will take more interest in you.

Been there, done that.

BTW, you're 19 and actually at 19 this is not all that abnormal. Lots of kids in college find themselves in your situation.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-31 11:15:21+00:00
>Why am I thinking scam?

It seems scam adjacent because a high proportion of other stuff written in the same tone by the same types of people is a scam. The researchers don't write these puff pieces generally and the people that do spend the rest of their day writing "not technically a lie" type inflated corporate newspeak puffery that are basically "we're actually doing the customer a factor by charging more for less" tier lies.

It's also not unlikely that the experts involved provided a list of possible use cases and "making benzene from 3rd world dirt" was way down it and they had no idea the writer would lead with it.
by comrade1234 | 2025-12-31 11:15:24+00:00
Right now I have a large and stylish open kitchen but there are times where I miss having a galley kitchen, where I could stand in one place and reach everything I needed - pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, knives and accessories on magnetic racks on the walls, fridge contents reachable while standing at the stove... somehow it even had enough prep space.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-31 11:17:14+00:00
Thank you for this cultural translation. You saved me.

I checked the link, and it makes perfect sense.
In my world (Japanese Banking), we are trained to "Read the Air" (Kuuki wo Yomu).
Everything is high-context. Saying things too directly is considered rude or immature.

But I realize that here on HN, "Code" is the context.
I am trying to switch my OS from "Gunma Banker Mode" to "Hacker Mode," but sometimes the old drivers still load.
Thank you for understanding.
by MORPHOICES | 2025-12-31 11:17:50+00:00
What I've been pondering is the nature of what makes the user interface of some software "industrial" versus "complicated." ~

“The difference I return to again and again isn’t tech depth. It’s constraints.”

"Rough framework I’m using lately:"

Consumer software aims at maximizing joy.

“Enterprise software is all about coordination.”

"Industrial software operates in a environment of the real-world "mess", yet its

"Industrial stuff appears to be more concerned with:

a.

failure modes

long-term maintenance

predictable behavior vs cleverness

But as soon as software is involved with physical processes, the tolerance for ambiguity narrows quickly.

Curious how others see it:

What’s your mental line between enterprise and industrial? What constraints have affected your designing? “Nice abstractions.” Any instances where these failed the test of reality?
by bwb | 2025-12-31 11:18:01+00:00
Gotcha, sorry I don't know that one but we have 12,000 lists by authors I've interviewed over the last 5 years.

Here is an example:
https://shepherd.com/best-books/sci-fi-fantasy-historically-...

We try to make it really clear who picked them, who they are, and what they wrote.

What do you think?
by alecco | 2025-12-31 11:18:13+00:00
It's way more complex. Technology is driving deflation even for equities as extraction and refinement becomes cheaper.

But the worst is mass migration an the bulge of the world population pyramid entering working age [1]. Labor costs down for corporations and our wages evaporate. Compound with AI and automation.

I think the future is very unpredictable.

[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2025/
Show HN: SSH-add helper for WSL to store passphrases in wincred
by ilpianista | 2025-12-31 11:18:23+00:00
$corporate recently moved us from Linux to Windows. While I'm disappointed, I quickly setup a WSL-first approach, which actually works really well. However, I soon realized there was no keystore available in my env.
`pass` is my go-to, but not everyone wants to deal with GPG setup, so I looked into alternatives for my team. Most people recommend gnome-keyring, but I’m not a fan of bloated solutions. The thing is, I already have a keystore just outside WSL: the Windows Credential Manager (wincred).

So here we are, let's welcome `winaskpass`: a Rust tool to store secrets in wincred using a C# script via powershell from WSL.
by epolanski | 2025-12-31 11:19:02+00:00
Like railroads, internet, electricity, aviation or car industries before: they've all been indeed the future, and they all peaked (in relative terms), at the very early stages of these industries future.

And among them the overwhelming majority of companies in the sectors died. Out of the 2000ish car-related companies that existed in 1925 only 3 survived to today. And none of those 3 ended up a particularly good long term investment.
by ben_w | 2025-12-31 11:22:40+00:00
I doubt Brexit would've been much different. The constituency nature of UK general elections means that a substantial majority of MPs knew they had to support it even though it was only a 48-52 split in a supposedly advisory referendum.

But to the extent that it might have been different, the many incompatible visions for it that gridlocked UK politics might have coalesced into a single vision, and while that would still have been worse than not having done Brexit as all, it might have been less bad than five mutually incompatible visions that got brushed under the carpet long enough to make it happen only by Boris Johnson promising all things to all people.

OTOH, things can be much much worse than Brexit. Musk's tweets about civil war in the UK, his willingness to support people too far right to even be in the most far-right of the top 8 polling parties, what Grok calls itself…

On that kind of theme, there's a psych study, Robbers Cave, worth reading about. Also note some summaries fail to mention that both groups resented being manipulated by the researchers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...
by bananaflag | 2025-12-31 11:23:49+00:00
> If someone wrote a definition of AGI 20 years ago, we would probably have met that.

No, as long as people can do work that a robot cannot do, we don't have AGI. That was always, if not the definition, at least implied by the definition.

I don't know why the meme of AGI being not well defined has had such success over the past few years.
by samiv | 2025-12-31 11:24:06+00:00
Heh...I've worked for 25 years and basically I'm yet to put code into production. Mostly projects that were cancelled or scrubbed either during development or shortly after or just downright never used since they were POC/prototypes.

I think I've overall just had just 2 or 3 projects where anyone has actually even tried the thing I've been working on.
by choult | 2025-12-31 11:24:27+00:00
Thanks for your contribution to this Ben - I was quite stunned by Megalag's finding, and I agree with you that it could definitely be characterized as wire fraud.

I think the very interesting wrinkle here is that, for the most part, their victims are corporations - meaning, sadly, that it's much more likely they will be prosecuted, either in civil or criminal court.
by xorcist | 2025-12-31 11:25:18+00:00
Too many articles are written comparing LLMs to high-level languages. Sure, if you squint enough, both has to do with computers. But that comparison misses everything that is important about LLMs.

High-level languages are about higher abstractions for deterministic processes. LLMs are not necessarily higher abstractions but instead about non-deterministic processes, a fundamentally different thing altogether.
by MORPHOICES | 2025-12-31 11:25:38+00:00
One area that I keep seeing carbon capture touted as a clean solution: data centers and industrial facilities. ~

What I have problems establishing is where it actually applies.

The way I’m currently thinking of it:

It functions in its optimal way when there are concentrated emissions.

The cost can add up quickly when scaled.

It simply relocates issues rather than solving them.

That doesn’t make it useless. Only very conditional.

Curious how others think about this:

Where is carbon capture really justified?
Interesting tidbits
Interesting tidbits Where does it feel like a delaying tactic? Which of the following constraints are most important in practice?
by well_ackshually | 2025-12-31 11:26:19+00:00
400k could get you 10 Dell Poweredges with a 128 core CPU, 256GB of RAM and multiple terabytes of storage _multiple times_. 400k easily covers two of these machines, and colocation space is about 2k per year.

Cloud hosting only makes sense at a very, very small scale, or absurdly large ones.
by jacknews | 2025-12-31 11:28:02+00:00
This is great keep going.

I find mis-en-place is a great optimization, especially if you have kids.

For hot water, I have a 2L thermos which I keep filled with boiling water to make hot drinks, with a quick reboil if necessary, and also to use as cooking water. I think there are plumbed in versions of this which would be even better.

Bread-making - I just use a bread machine to make day-to-day bread (specials hand baked etc on weekends sometimes.) For the daily, I pre-measure ingredients (both wet and dry) for 10+ loaves, individually packaged (kids are a great production line again). The to make the bread, just throw in the packets and press the buttons...

No doubt most people already do this, but for some reason my wife can't get it .. keep everything in the same place all the time. It really wastes time and 'stressergy' to have to hunt for the measuring spoons or the molasses or whatever because they were put back in a different place.

I'm sure commercial chefs could add a huge list of tricks that are still applicable at home to this.
by nchmy | 2025-12-31 11:28:15+00:00
I generally agree. Industrialization puts a decent floor on quality, at low cost. But it also has a ceiling.

Perhaps an industrial car is better than your or my artisanal car, but I'm sure there's people who build cars by hand of very high quality (over the course of years). Likewise fine carpentry vs mass produced stuff vs ikea.

Or I make sourdough bread and it would be very impractical/uncompetitive to start selling it unless I scaled up to make dozens, maybe hundreds, of loaves per day. But it's absolutely far better than any bread you can find on any supermarket shelf. It's also arguably better than most artisanal bakeries who have to follow a production process every day.