MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdimitar | 2025-12-01 10:01:13+00:00
What is there to get? Bull-headed egomaniacs on a power trip are the norm in most of the world -- on the executive positions, middle managers included.

Reasoning with unreasonable people is not impossible but drains too much time and energy... and you don't know if they will not come back to you next week and hit you with "You know what, I actually think that your idea is not as good. Let's get back to mine and...".

I have danced this dance. As much as it pains my younger idealistic self to say this, you'll know how well you'll work with somebody after the end of the first week. All the signs are there, we just choose to ignore them because you can't bail during your first month after all.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-01 10:01:46+00:00
Yeah, time is almost certainly the thing that kills most people's progress but that's not the root cause.

I think it comes down to experience, exposure to problems, and the ability to recognise what the problem boils down to.

A colleague who is an all round better coder than me might spend 4 hours bashing away trying to solve a problem that I might be able to look at and quickly recongise it is isomorphic to a specific classic Comp Sci or Maths problem and know exactly how best to attack it, saving me a huge amount of time.

Spoiler alert: Take the "Slam Shuffle" in 2019 Day 22 (https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/22). I was lucky that I quickly recognised that each of the actions could be represented as '( a*n + b ) mod noscards' (with a and b specific to the action) and therefore any two actions like this can be combined into the same form. The optimal solution follows relatively simply from this.

Doing all of the previous years means there's not much new ground although Eric always manages to find something each year.

There have also been some absolutely amazing inventions along the way. The IntCode Breakout game (2019) and the adventure game (can't remember the year) both stick in my mind as amazing constructions.
Can LED lights harm the eyes?
by emmasuntech | 2025-12-01 10:02:18+00:00
Nowadays, LED lights are used at home, in the office, and even on children's desk lamps. They are indeed energy-efficient and bright. But recently, I've come across many claims that LED lights emit blue light and flicker, and prolonged use may harm the eyes, especially for children and those who often stay up late using computers.

Is it true? Is it safe to just buy something a bit more expensive and from a big brand? Or is it that no matter what kind of LED light it is, using it for a long time will have an impact on eyesight? Are there any reliable purchasing suggestions or usage precautions? Please help me solve my doubts!
by asdefghyk | 2025-12-01 10:02:31+00:00
A interesting related technical explanation from Reddit

"...NukeRocketScientist • 1d ago There's really only two ways to physically lower the likelihood of bit flips from cosmic rays, one, redundancy, and two, increasing the distance between transistors. One of the downsides of making transistors as small as they are nowadays, they are much more prone to bit flips. This is due to when a cosmic ray proton at high energy interacts with materials, you can get essentially a "splashing" effect of electrons around where the proton went through the material. By having transistors as close as possible this splashing or shockwave of electrons has a higher likelihood of electrons flowing into the transistors imparting a charge and causing a 0 to flip to a 1. Redundancy is important as a cosmic ray interacting with one computer chip wouldn't have any effects on another one nearby and like you said for error checking as well.

You could of course try to physically shield the computer, but trying to stop a cosmic ray proton is far easier said than done as they can travel at more than 50% the speed of light depending on energy. It can also be even worse if you don't stop the proton fully as cosmic rays stop both kinetically and electromagnetically causing the cosmic ray to impart more of its energy into the material than if it was at much higher energy. This is called the Bragg peak and is important in proton beam therapy for treating cancer.

Source: I worked in cosmic ray interactions with materials and semiconductors for my undergrad school's CubeSat program ...." https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1p9upno/a320_pilo...
Show HN: I built a small tool that lets you edit your RAG data efficiently
by FineTuner42 | 2025-12-01 10:02:50+00:00
So, during my internship I worked on a few RAG setups and one thing that always slowed us down was to them. Every small change in the documents made us reprocessing and reindexing everything from the start.

Recently, I have started working on optim-rag on a goal to reduce this overhead. Basically, It lets you open your data, edit or delete chunks, add new ones, and only reprocesses what actually changed when you commit those changes.

I have been testing it on my own textual notes and research material and updating stuff has been a lot a easier for me at least.

repo → github.com/Oqura-ai/optim-rag

This project is still in its early stages, and there’s plenty I want to improve. But since it’s already at a usable point as a primary application, I decided not to wait and just put it out there. Next, I’m planning to make it DB agnostic as currently it only supports qdrant. Also might want to further improve the MCP feature, to make it accessible on other applications.
by simgt | 2025-12-01 10:03:16+00:00
I did not think much of the title before reading the parent comment as I also read "humanity", but now it's the lack of consistency and double standards that annoy me. "France detected Lightning on Mars", fine, let's stop cutting the funding of public research so we can keep on saying we. Also let's title "We released GPT-5", "We landed a rocket on a barge".
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-01 10:03:18+00:00
No, it's like saying that if you release under Apache license, it's not open source even though it's under an open source license

For something to be open source it needs to have sources released. Sources are the things in the preferred format to be edited. So the code used for training is obviously source (people can edit the training code to change something about the released weights). Also the training data, under the same rationale: people can select which data is used for training to change the weights
Crypto privacy seems to be a real product-market fit
by DarkVeil | 2025-12-01 10:03:22+00:00
Data shows: • Private transactions >10K/day across protocols • Privacy TVL at multi-year highs • Revenue-generating privacy DApps now sustain $600K/month peaks

Triggered in part by global reporting requirements and device surveillance trends. Is this momentum sustainable, or does regulation eventually crush privacy infrastructure?
by nosianu | 2025-12-01 10:04:03+00:00
I think a good reminder for many users is that LLMs are not based on analyzing or copying human thought (#), but on analyzing human written text communication.

--

(#) Human thought is based on real world sensor data first of all. Human words have invisible depth behind them based on accumulated life experience of the person. So two people using the same words may have very different thoughts underneath them. Somebody having only text book knowledge and somebody having done a thing in practice for a long time may use the same words, but underneath there is a lot more going on for the latter person. We can see this expressed in the common bell curve meme -- https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/the-iq-bell-curve-meme -- While it seems to be about IQ, it really is about experience. Experience in turn is mostly physical, based on our physical sensors and physical actions. Even when we just "think", it is based on the underlying physical experiences. That is why many of our internal metaphors even for purely abstract ideas are still based on physical concepts, such as space.
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-12-01 10:07:07+00:00
I assume you're downvoted for pedantry (understandable) but it is a real pattern. Whenever it's a space topic it's always "we" or "Japan" or "America". Nobody is so vague on other topics. I suspect it's a throwback to the Cold War space race when the major players did flights in a geopolitical context. If the institute's name is very long, like here, maybe "Scientists detected ..." or "Researchers ..."
by wongarsu | 2025-12-01 10:08:30+00:00
This discovery is thanks to Perseverance having microphones. It's crazy to think about that 2021 was the first time we had working microphones on Mars.

The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing. The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads
by stinos | 2025-12-01 10:08:51+00:00
I don't agree it is 'almost worse' than the slop but it sure can be annoying. On one hand it seems even somewhat positive that some people developed a more critical attitude and question things they see, on the other hand they're not critical enough to realize their own criticism might be invalid. Plus I feel bad for all the resources (both human and machine) wasted on this. Like perfectly normal things being shown, but people not knowing anything about the subject chiming in to claim that it must be AI because they see something they do not fully understand.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-01 10:08:53+00:00
Linux explicitely allows you to do things that makes cheating *really* easy.

There is also complete lack of secure boot and a way to validate that your kernel hasn't been compromised.

I mean seriously, making a cheat for a proton supported game that no anticheat has any hopes of detecting are in 100 lines of a kmod driver and 1 console command: insmod.

On windows you at least need to use scuffed tools like KDU to bypass signature verification requirements and every anticheat can detect you with a simple physical memory scan.
by freehorse | 2025-12-01 10:09:55+00:00
The journalist writing the article starts with

> Scientists analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.

Not with

> We analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.

Nor

> Humanity analyzed 28 hours of recordings over two Martian years, listening for electrical signals.

Somehow it would be weird to assume that "everybody" put the effort into this, but "we" all reap the success.

On the other hand, this is done with taxpayer money, and even if not, it is done in the context of the whole global economy and we are all interconnected and everybody steps on the shoulders of giants anyway, so, in the grand scale of things, a use of "we" can make sense for everything that happens.

Moreover, OP's argument holds also for the france case anyway.
by urlwolf | 2025-12-01 10:10:28+00:00
The only linux distro where I've never experienced disruption whatsoever when a new version comes in. A testament to the validity of the approach they are using (immutability). They also have a simple way to package things, and this produced the largest repository of packages of any linux distro. If something works, it stays working, breakage after updating is unheard of. The unofficial motto is "nixos fixes that."
by cachius | 2025-12-01 10:11:06+00:00
This is nice! What I find hard to grapple with is, how do other concepts of the file system map to these providers, even more so to Alias, Environment, Function or Variable? Like creating an item, deleting an item, copying an item, viewing contents and properties like permissions, size, visibility of an item?

For the Certificate provider specifically: When I think certificates and hierarchy, I think signing hierarchy of issueing certs. But this is not what is exposed here, just the structure of the OS cert store without context. and moving items has much more implications that inside a normal data folder. Thus I prefer certlm/certmgr.msc as they provide some more of it.

Sometimes It feels as they crammed too much into that idea, a forced concept. https://superuser.com/q/1065812/what-is-psprovider-in-powers...
by businessmate | 2025-12-01 10:11:12+00:00
Advanced reasoning systems increasingly suppress operational transparency, breaking the historical link between surface signals and assistant outputs. As models move from retrieval toward latent reasoning, enterprises cannot infer visibility, ranking, or selection logic from traditional content signals. This paper outlines the structural forces driving the disappearance of the optimization layer and identifies the governance implications for organizations that rely on assistants for discovery, interpretation, and delegated decision making. This version is prepared for Zenodo and references AIVO Journal as the primary publication source.
by schmuhblaster | 2025-12-01 10:12:19+00:00
> But my bet is that the proposed program-of-thought is too specific

This is my impression as well, having worked with this type of stuff for the past two years. It works great for very well defined uses case and if user queries do not stray to far from what you optimized your framework/system prompt/agent for. However, once you move too far away from that, it quickly breaks down.

Nevertheless, as this problem has been bugging me for a while, I still haven't given up (although I probably should ;-). My latest attempt is a Prolog-based DSL (http://github.com/deepclause/deepclause.ai) that allows for part of the logic to be handled by LLMs again, so that it retains some of the features of pure LLM_based systems. As a side effect, this gives additional features such as graceful failures, auditability and increased (but not full) reproducibility.
by yongjik | 2025-12-01 10:13:48+00:00
This blog post could have been better without the long intro featuring Timnit Gebru. It just reads as a boring "someone finds a mistake in a book, someone else quotes it sarcastically, a bunch of others call it out with 'bro why so butthurt'" story. You'll find better stories in r/subredditdrama.

As it reads now, I'm not sure if this is an objective critic of EA or gripes of someone who orbited in the same social space having a public fallout.
by freehorse | 2025-12-01 10:14:07+00:00
I assume it is essentially more about if it includes the author of the article. In the specific case, the author is a journalist not a scientist part of the actual group that did the work, so their "we" seems to forcingly include everybody in the planet, thus also OP here. I dont think OP would have an issue if one of the scientists in this case used "we".
by pdimitar | 2025-12-01 10:14:10+00:00
Well maybe you get hit with the gray arrows because you first make a sweeping generalization and then say "I have no sympathy for you". Food for thought?

I have communicated the business value in addressing tech debt, as in I have pointed out how many critical customer features got delayed by it and we churn customers we really can't afford to.

Still got overruled. The tech lead stepped in and threw his weight around with zero explanation to the CTO or the CEO. Who needs to hear what the engineers on the ground have to say, right? They cannot communicate!

Man, tearing down strawmen is easy. You should do better and see nuance. A lot of engineers communicate very well and are still ignored.
by Vinnl | 2025-12-01 10:14:12+00:00
Makes sense that that's the case: there's usually a limited amount of beginner's knowledge, and then you get to the medium level by arbitrary combinations of that beginner's knowledge, of which there's an exponential number, making it less likely that someone has produced something about that specific combination. Then at the expert level, people can get real deep into some obscure nitty-gritty detail, and other experts will be able to generalise from that by themselves.
by Zak | 2025-12-01 10:14:19+00:00
I think the most stringent types of Windows anti-cheat rely on remote attestation of the operating system. It's theoretically possible to design a Linux-based OS that supports such a capability, but the sort of people who choose Linux are unlikely to accept a third party having the final say over their computer.

I, for one am disappointed that anyone has accepted it. Once it's widespread, service providers can demand it, as we're seeing with mobile banking apps and game anticheat.
Show HN: 3 yrs later, my JS sandbox has 11M users and an AI agent
by ianberdin | 2025-12-01 10:14:39+00:00
Hi HN! Some of you might remember my 2022 post about building a JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years.

A lot has happened since:

- 200K monthly users → 11M total users

- 23M projects created

- 9 years total (yes, I started in 2016)

The biggest update: I built an AI coding agent. Works like Cursor, but entirely in your browser. No downloads, no setup.

Why browser-based AI coding makes sense:

- Instant start (no VS Code, no API keys)

- Works on any device

- Perfect for business automations, landings, blogs, prototyping, learning, interviews

- Share your work with one link

The AI part: - All the latest 12+ models (Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini)

- Real-time streaming

- Multi-file editing

- Pay only for what you use

Still bootstrapped. Still mostly solo. Competing with well-funded startups now, but 11M users and 18 years of refinement is hard to replicate. Yea, I'm insane.

Try it: https://playcode.io

Happy to answer questions about building a browser IDE or adding AI to a mature product!
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-01 10:15:27+00:00
The problem is, for construction, trades and what remains of agriculture the competition is brutal. It's a low-skill job in terms of prior required education which means there is a looooot of people without degrees flooding into that market already, and then comes immigration that's further driving the wages down because (again) it's work that doesn't require much education or language skills.

I've done a stint in construction (I think y'all call it "civil engineering", aka digging trenches and moving soil) myself, it was rare to find Germans - most of my colleagues came from Eastern Europe.
by jsheard | 2025-12-01 10:15:41+00:00
A trusted entity (probably Valve) could provide a locked down distro where kernel integrity is enforced through secure boot and TPM attestation, but that would mean giving up some control over your own system. There's no guarantee that anything client-side is impossible to bypass of course, but the goal would be to more or less match what Windows offers, which isn't perfect either.
by mid-kid | 2025-12-01 10:17:02+00:00
> makes it impossible for attackers to add new executable files to the system which stops almost all attack vectors

If you have code execution - any kind - you have code execution. It really doesn't matter if a shell is available or not, you're always an open(2), write(2), and execve(2) away from creating and invoking a new executable, or just mmap(2)ing a new executable region in the current process. Yes, most exploits leverage a shell because it's convenient, so you're making it a little bit more annoying by having to first write an executable, but it really doesn't stop attacks like this.

Much more effective measures are those that prevent program takeover in the first place (SSP, ASLR), and things like W^X.
Show HN: Flowctl – Open-source self-service workflow automation platform
by cv_h | 2025-12-01 10:17:20+00:00
Flowctl is a self-service platform that gives users secure access to complex workflows, all in a single binary. These workflows could be anything, granting SSH access to an instance, provisioning infra, or custom business process automation. The executor paradigm in flowctl makes it domain-agnostic.

This initial release includes: - SSO with OIDC and RBAC - Execution on remote nodes via SSH (fully agentless) - Approvals - Cron-based scheduling - Flow editor UI - Encrypted credentials and secrets store - Docker and Script executors - Namespaces

I built this because I needed a simple tool to manage my homelab while traveling, something that acts as a UI for scripts. At work, I was also looking for tools to turn repetitive ops/infra tasks into self-service offerings. I tried tools like Backstage and Rundeck, but they were either too complex, or the OSS versions lacked important features.

Flowctl can simply be described as a pipeline (like CI/CD systems) that people can trigger on-demand with custom inputs.

Would love to hear how you might use something like this!

Demo - https://demo.flowctl.net

Homepage - https://flowctl.net

GitHub - https://github.com/cvhariharan/flowctl
by orwin | 2025-12-01 10:17:37+00:00
That will be hard to explain in English but you can find what you're paying to French healthcare system by looking at your paycheck (the document you receive every month that detail your paycheck rather). It basically either 7% or 13% of your paycheck (and .5% of non-work income via the CSG), and you have a hard cap on total contributions (4k/month, and healthcare if a bit more than half of that, so a bit more than 2k/month). It cover universal healthcare of course , but also maternity/paternity leave and invalidity benefits.

Paternity/maternity also cover the pension parents get (half a year of contribution to the pension system per child if you take care of them til they are 13, plus half a month for giving birth) (that's so awkward explaining this in English, sorry)
by Mordisquitos | 2025-12-01 10:18:35+00:00
>Wouldn't it be correct to have two fathers in a child adopted by gay parents?

Having two fathers doesn't mean having a father and an "other father". It means having two fathers, in the same way that having two parents doesn't mean having a parent and an "other parent".

In the original riddle it makes sense to refer to "another father", but not in the revised version in which there is no mention of a father involved in the car crash.
by omnicognate | 2025-12-01 10:20:59+00:00
Visual Studio Code has absolutely nothing to do with Visual Studio. Both are used to edit code.

.NET Core is a ground up rewrite of .NET and was released alongside the original .NET, which was renamed .NET Framework to distinguish it. Both can be equally considered to be "frameworks" and "core" to things. They then renamed .NET Core to .NET.

And there's the name .NET itself, which has never made an iota of sense, and the obsession they had with sticking .NET on the end of every product name for a while.

I don't know how they named these things, but I like to imagine they have a department dedicated to it that is filled with wild eyed lunatics who want to see the world burn, or at least mill about in confusion.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-01 10:21:16+00:00
I need to tinker less because there's no distro maintainers that constantly change stuff.

It did take a while to set it up but then it runs fine. I don't view my OS as a hobby, but I do want to have full control over it and to be able to understand how it works. I don't want to have to trust a commercial party to act in my best interests, because they don't. The current mess that is windows, full of ads and useless ai crap, mandatory telemetry, forced updates, constantly trying to sell their cloud services etc is a good example. FreeBSD doesn't do any of those things.

Most Linuxes don't either but there's still a lot of corpo influence. I feel like it's becoming a playing ball of big tech. You only need to see how many corp suits are on the board of the Linux foundation, how many patches are pushed by corp employees as part of their job etc. I don't want them to have that much influence over my OS. I don't believe in a win-win concerning corporate involvement in open-source.

FreeBSD has a little bit of that (netgate's completely botched wireguard is and example) but lessons are learned.