MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d-us-vb | 2025-12-27 13:45:19+00:00
For the kinds of things you’d need to reach for an LLM, there’s no way to trust that it actually generated what you actually asked for. You could ask it to write a bunch of tests, but you still need to read the tests.

It isn’t fair to say “since I don’t read the source of the libraries I install that are written by humans, I don’t need to read the output of an llm; it’s a higher level of abstraction” for two reasons:

1. Most Libraries worth using have already been proven by being used in actual projects. If you can see that a project has lots of bug fixes, you know it’s better than raw code. Most bugs don’t show up unless code gets put through its paces.

2. Actual humans have actual problems that they’re willing to solve to a high degree of fidelity. This is essentially saying that humans have both a massive context window and an even more massive ability to prioritize important things that are implicit. LLMs can’t prioritize like humans because they don’t have experiences.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-27 13:45:24+00:00
> But I'm always tickled by logicians who think type theories are philosophically superior to set theories because in some of the latter you might be able to prove something like 1 ∈ 2

Note that this is actually how the basic ZF construction works, where 0 = {} and successor(n) = n ∪ {n}, so you immediately get 2 = {0, 1} and thus 1 ∈ 2 , without any need for a proof.
by teitoklien | 2025-12-27 13:45:25+00:00
i figure out the niche ffmpeg commands various chain filters, etc
then expose them from my python cli tool with words similar to what this gentleman above has done.

If one has fewer such commands its as simple as just bash aliases and just adding it to ~/.bashrc

alias convertmkvtomp4='ffmpeg command'

then just run it anytime with just that alias phrase
i use ffmpeg a lot so i have my own dedicated cli snippet tool for me, to quickly build out complex pipeline in easier language

the best part is i have --dry-run then exposes the flow + explicit commands being used at each step, if i need details on whats happening and verbose output at each step
by btreecat | 2025-12-27 13:45:50+00:00
>, but what if the problem can’t be fixed because there’s no forward secrecy for the hundreds of millions of documents that are already out there?

What if you are not the only folks who have found and exploited this vulnerability?

You can play the "what if" game to justify not doing the right thing all day long, when really it should be one "if" that guide you. What if someone else found this?
by fulafel | 2025-12-27 13:46:15+00:00
Here's a web source about how much cpu time it took from 5 years ago: https://github.blog/open-source/git/git-clone-a-data-driven-...

Using the slowest clone method they measured 8s for a 750 MB repo, 0.45s for a 40MB repo. appears to be linear so 1.1s for 100MB should be a valid interpolation.

So doing 30 of those per second only takes 33 cores. Servers have hundreds of cores now (eg 384 cores: https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-linux-619).

And remember we're using worst case assumptions in a 3 places (full clone each time, using the slowest clone method, and numbers from old hardware). In practice I'd bet a fastish laptop would suffice.
Show HN: An immutable ostree-based Arch Linux image
by mxxc | 2025-12-27 13:47:16+00:00
i've been a big fan of fedora's atomic distros and i decided to make my own but arch based to get the best of both worlds, which is kind of funny now because it looks exactly like silverblue. is it worth it? not sure, but it's been a interesting experience – and it's usable as a daily driver if your specs match.

worth noting that because of the constraints of the setup you can develop something similar on your main machine without any realistic possibility of data loss since you never really touch the bootloader or the filesystem (partitioning and so on).
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-27 13:47:22+00:00
If you want to bet, you could do so in regulated markets like financial markets.

This isn't a smartass remark "stock market is gambling". I literally mean that the financial markets went through all this bullshit 100 years ago, and came up with rules to make them fairer. For example, you won't be blocked from the stock market just because you do really well.
by jpalomaki | 2025-12-27 13:50:06+00:00
Learned once the hard way that it makes sense to use "flock" to prevent overlapping executions of frequently running jobs. Server started to slow down, my monitoring jobs started piling, causing server to slow down even more.

*/5 * * * * flock -n /var/lock/myjob.lock /usr/local/bin/myjob.sh
by gcanyon | 2025-12-27 13:50:39+00:00
Last I read was early 2025, Brust was saying that he had over half of the next-to-last book written, and as I said, he's been on a pretty regular schedule. Plus, he's not (only) telling a single story that has to come to some earth-shattering conclusion (as GRRM is). It would be nice if he pulled that off, but there is a lot going on in the background of his Dragaera that I expect he won't fully resolve: there are multiple types of death, multiple types of magic, Vlad is the reincarnation of an ancient Dragaeran, he's going to/has killed a god, the Jenoine are a mystery to resolve, and the whole planet has a science fictional foundation despite very clearly being fantasy in general.

But maybe he will; I'm actually several books behind at this point -- I'm pretty much waiting for him to finish so I can (re) read the whole thing from start to finish.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-12-27 13:51:40+00:00
This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as:

1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.

2. Build a solution to solve for it.

3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.

When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.

My personal examples of solving for a pain are:

[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction:
https://github.com/langroid/langroid

[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools
One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.
by ben_w | 2025-12-27 13:52:57+00:00
They can pass or fail depending on how they're configured.

The default configuration is easy to spot.

It's easy to change that configuration and make them hard to spot.

The default style, that is easy to spot, is also a style that actual real humans use, leading to false positives. I myself have been accused of being a LLM here on this site, just from my style.
by rbanffy | 2025-12-27 13:52:59+00:00
I learned C on QNX (back then, it booted from a floppy on a PC/XT). It was a nice little Unix-like OS, with all the things you'd expect from a nice little Unix-like OS, plus a reputation of being rock-solid like nothing else.

I think it's a real shame Blackberry didn't manage to etch a third (or fourth - I also loved Palm's WebOS) niche for their QNX-based phones. Blackbberry 10 was an amazing mobile OS.
by shkkmo | 2025-12-27 13:53:44+00:00
> This is completely belied by "It works exactly the same for a LLM."

I specifically used the word "training" in the sentence aftwards. "It" clearly refers to the sentence prior which explains that infringement happens when the copy is created, not when the original is memorized/learned/trained.

> If you want to not appear mendacious, then don't claim equivalence between human learning and machine training.

I never claimed that. I already clarified that with my previous comment. Instead of bothering to read and understand you have continued to call names.

> Hilarious, coming from the one who wrote "if it helps your comprehension."

You seemed confused, you still seem confused. If you think this genuine (and slightly snarky) offer to use terms that sidestep your pointless semantic nitpick is "being an asshole"... then you need to get some more real world experience.
Show HN: OpenAPI-batch: library for batch execution of LLM requests
by spannercode | 2025-12-27 13:54:31+00:00
`openapi-batch` is a small Python library for running batches of LLM requests reliably.

It provides:
- Async submission by default (you don’t block while the batch runs)
- Durable state in SQLite (track progress, resume inspection)
- Retries + partial failure handling
- Native batch support where providers offer it (OpenAI, Gemini)
- Provider adapters (no gateway required)
- Callbacks for progress, per-item completion, and job completion

License: MIT
by candiddevmike | 2025-12-27 13:54:39+00:00
I was a fiber installer once upon a time in the 00s. A guy I worked with who was "the splicer" for our team and has years of experience using the little easy bake oven thing swore by going off the smell to know when it's "ready". Probably not the greatest thing for your health considering he did at least 10-12 of these a day.
Ask HN: Would anyone pay for a social network with no ads or data harvesting?
by neilfd | 2025-12-27 13:54:49+00:00
Most large social networks rely on advertising and data collection, which pushes them toward algorithms, engagement optimization, and scale at all costs.

I keep seeing complaints about this, but usage rarely changes. A lot of past attempts at “better” social networks seem to stall despite good intentions.

I am curious how people here think about this:

Would a small, paid social network focused on existing relationships have any realistic chance of adoption, or do network effects and user behavior make this fundamentally unworkable?

If you think it fails, what tends to be the real blocker: pricing, lack of novelty, switching costs, or something else?

I am looking for reasons this does not work, not encouragement.
by frankcaron | 2025-12-27 13:54:53+00:00
I found my own site, as well, and I found that particularly charming.

Recently went back [0] to the open web and feel like this inclusion alone justified that move.

Thanks for sharing. Humble and heart-warming way to end 2025 for an old Internet man.

[0]: https://frankycaron.medium.com/of-an-open-web-rebirth-and-bi...
by CTDOCodebases | 2025-12-27 13:55:19+00:00
Not so much hindsight as "what I've been saying all along".

It was a dynamic situation and it sounds like the only things that you were optimizing for in your mind was inflation and covid deaths whiles ignoring second order effects and data that likely wasn't available to the public.

You are like a person who kept telling everyone it was 12:00am but it wasn't, then when it finally became 12:00am and everyone agreed you jumped up and said "See guys it's 12:00am why didn't anyone listen to me! I was right all along!".

It's a bit rich to blame all the inflation on the financial response to the pandemic without taking into consideration the effect the pandemic had on logistics or considering what would have happened if the government didn't spend enough. Also it's probably worth mentioning that the Fed operates independently and is tasked with only financial functions.

> The science was out in the open in papers and government statistics for anyone with scientific training to read. Politicians were caving to polarized public opinions on both sides to take advantage of and encourage their chosen pole.

No argument here except to say it's one thing to know the science and it's another thing to act on the science.

> Those of us talking about moderation and common sense reactions were demonize by one side or usually both depending on the venue. Nobody in leadership had the balls to lead and try to make people understand a middle path based on reason.

If there is one thing I know it's that common sense only exists when people share the same values and assumptions. Why for example was it acceptable to you that 1 out of 1000 people died of covid? Why not more? Why not less?
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-27 13:56:20+00:00
Some people just want to use an intuitive tool with better QoL, even if it leads to compromises, to do a job swiftly without going over documentation/learning a ton of new things. Not everything has to be an educational experience. ffmpeg exists in its original form like you prefer, but some folks want to use lossless cut. Nothing wrong with that IMO.

Personally I think it’s great that it’s such a universally useful tool that it has been deployed in so many different variations.
by markusde | 2025-12-27 13:56:34+00:00
This is a topic of contention in formalized math with no universal right answer. Some libraries go heavy on the dependent types, and some like mathlib try to avoid them. I do math in both Rocq and Lean and I find I like the latter style a lot more for my work for a couple reasons:

- Fewer side conditions: Setting a / 0 = 0 means that the law a * /a = 0 holds even for a = 0, and so you don't need to prove a != 0. This is super nice when the denominator is horrible. I heard once that if you set the junk value for a non-converging Riemann integral to the average of the lim sup and lim inf you can obliterate a huge number of integrability side conditions (though I didn't track down this paper to find out for sure).

- Some of the wacky junk arithmetic values, especially as it relates to extended reals, do show up in measure theory. Point being: "junk arithmetic" is a different mathematical theory than normal math, but it's no less legitimate, and is closely related.

- Definition with Hilbert's epsilon operator. If I want to define a function that takes eg. a measurable set S as an argument, I could do the dependent types way

def MyDef (S) (H : measurable S) := /-- real definition -/

but then I need to write all of my theorems in terms of (MyDef S H) and this can cause annoying unification problems (moreso in Rocq than in Lean, assuming H is a Prop). Alternatively, I could use junk math

def MyDef' (S) := if (choose (H : measurable S)) then /-- real definition -/ else /-- junk -/

I can prove (MyDef' S = MyDef S H) when I have access to (H : measurable S). And the property H here can be be really complex, convergence properties, existence properties, etc. It's nice to avoid trucking them around everywhere.
by orrbenyamini | 2025-12-27 13:58:33+00:00
Hi HN - I’m the author of Jsonic.

I built it after repeatedly running into friction with Python’s built-in json module when working with classes, dataclasses, nested objects, and type hints.

Jsonic focuses on:
- Zero-boilerplate serialization and deserialization
- Strict type validation with clear errors
- Natural support for dataclasses, enums, tuples, sets, nested objects etc.
- Optional field exclusion (e.g. hiding sensitive data)
- Extra features like transient fields definition, suport for __slots__ classes etc.
- Clean interop with Pydantic models

The goal is to make JSON round-tripping feel Pythonic and predictable without writing to_dict() / from_dict() everywhere.

I’d really appreciate feedback on the API design and tradeoffs.
by magnitudes | 2025-12-27 14:00:06+00:00
I mean seriously is this the prediction folks are going with? Ok so we can build something like our SOTA coding agents today, breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction, and your prediction is it will be worse from here on out? Do you realize coding is a verifiable domain which means we don’t technically even need any human data to improve these models? Like in your movie of 2050 everyone’s throwing their hands up “oh no we made them dumber because people don’t need to take 8 years of school and industry experience to build a good UI and industry best practice backend infrastructure”. I guess we can all predict what we want but my god
by zdragnar | 2025-12-27 14:00:08+00:00
https://www.acer.com/us-en/chromebooks/acer-chromebook-315-c...

10 hour battery life, 15 inch screen, not bulky, $200. A bit more money will get you better specs, screen or battery life from this or another brand, but it hits all the spots for someone who doesn't need downloaded software.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-27 14:00:52+00:00
I could ask this question without AI. How are you going to notice that while you were working on ~/projects/acme3000, you for some reason deleted ~/photos/2003/once-in-a-lifetime-holiday/?

AI is of course not a real person and it makes mistakes that real people probably would not. However, this class of mistake—deleting completely unrelated directories in ways that aren’t immediately noticeable—does not appear to be a common failure mode.

(Disclaimer, I’m not OP and I wouldn’t run Claude with —-dangerously-skip-permissions on my own system)
by hnarn | 2025-12-27 14:01:00+00:00
> Some people just want to use a tool to do a job swiftly. Not everything has to be educational.

> some folks want to use lossless cut

In that case I would encourage you to ruminate on what the following in the post you're replying to means and what the implications are:

> "ff convert video.mkv to mp4" (an extremely common usecase) maps to `ffmpeg -i video.mkv -y video.mp4` here, which does a full reencode (losing quality and wasting time) for what can usually just be a simple remux

Depending on the size of the video, the time it would take you to "do the job swiftly" (i.e. not caring about how the tools you are using actually work) might be more than just reading the ffmpeg manual, or at the very least searching for some command examples.
by saaaaaam | 2025-12-27 14:01:27+00:00
I didn’t see a super introverted thing for super introverts. I saw something that, from a place of very genuine personal belief, is at once useless, probably counterproductive to developing good writing, and possibly dangerous - particularly if, as some people have suggested, it’s about journaling and introspective practice. It just feels like a way to accelerate your way to a state of AI induced psychosis.

If you want to write, write.

If you want to write for an audience write and make your writing public.

If you want to write for an audience and get feedback, join a writing group - in person or virtual.

If you want to use AI to workshop ideas, craft characters or build frameworks to write around, do that.

But a cosy little claque of glad handing AI simps? Honestly, what’s the point?
by Closi | 2025-12-27 14:02:08+00:00
> There is no research I’m aware of on people for whom the prospect of punishment did act as a deterrent (i.e. people who decided not to commit the crime).

Surely this can’t be true - as a trivial example I would be surprised if removing parking fines wouldn’t increase parking violations, or if Singapore stopped punishing littering that it wouldn’t affect the amount of littering etc

Maybe the difference between a 10 year or 20 year sentence for murder doesn’t make much difference, but if murder had no punishment at all I would be very surprised if that wouldn’t raise the murder rate!
by krapp | 2025-12-27 14:03:50+00:00
I don't know, maybe.

The mundane nature of these kinds of reports suggest at least something other than mental illness or drug use might be going on. People aren't reporting being tailed by a Romulan Warbird (obviously, because they would be cloaked.) You'd think the stories would be weirder, but "I saw an object I can't explain do things I also can't explain" doesn't read as a trip to me. Just a lot of unknowns.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-27 14:04:04+00:00
The C3's attendees are quite knowledgable in computing topics, so there is no need to bring coals to Newcastle.

The CCC is a German organization. In Germany, the general public already is quite skepctical of tablets in classrooms, so there is not such a necessity to inform the general public of something many people already think.

While there exist initiatives to use tablets in school in Germany (see for example [1]), these (in my opinion misguided) initiatives rather typically fail for financial reasons and because most teachers simply are incapable of using the technology. And, of course, tablets fail all the time.

So, in other countries this may be an important problem, but in Germany, any initiative for tablets in school already fails by the mere incompetence and the mills of bureacracy, so this is rather a potential topic for hacker conventions in other countries.

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Schuelertablets-in-Niedersachsen-M...
by coldpie | 2025-12-27 14:04:35+00:00
I think it is literally by the colors of the screenshots. Nothing to do with the contents.

> I just want to encode the high level aesthetic details of webpage screenshots. Because of this, I fell back on an old friend: the triplet loss on top of a small encoder. The resulting output dimension of 64 afforded ample room for describing the visual range while maintaining a considerably smaller footprint.
by FunShot | 2025-12-27 14:04:39+00:00
Yep, the project is completely AI generated. I don't hide it. You can see the specs that I used initially for this project. And it was generated by multiple different AI tools.
As it's just a small tool I've created for myself, and share with others. :) It's not a thing I'm selling here. So, yep, it's not something with super high quality, especially from the code perspective. I know it. :)

And thanks for your comment. I'll apply your recommendations. ;)
Or feel free to open a PR, if you want. I'll be grateful.

For me, it's a tool I created because I'm often running stuff with docker, it takes a lot of memory. And additional memory on macs costs too much. :D
by singron | 2025-12-27 14:04:57+00:00
You can still make that bet at 10% "yes" for the next year. Previous years had similar patterns, so it's not a reaction to Trump.

To be fair, we don't need to find little green men in a UFO. It's sufficient to e.g. find fossils of extinct microorganisms on Mars, which is a slim possibility that's a goal of the Mars Sample Return mission.

These markets also have low volume at reasonable prices. If you bought $10K of "no" right now for next year, you would only get an 8% return, not 10%. You could execute better trades to get better prices, but the odds also become more sane over the year. The S&P 500 is also up 18% YTD (13% YoY for the last 5) and you can buy as much of that as you want.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-12-27 14:04:59+00:00
Read:

Thomas Mann’s Glass Bead game. Needed some patience to get through.

Benjamin Labatut/ When we cease to understand the world. (Fictionalized accounts of some scientists)

Bird/Sherwin: American Prometheus

Started but abandoned midway:

Stanlislaw Lem’s : His Master’s Voice
Thomas Mann’s: Magic Mountain.

About reading habit: I find it useful to make it a point to read in bed at least 30 mins before sleeping.
by impossiblefork | 2025-12-27 14:05:00+00:00
I haven't tried Dramatron, but my experience is that it isn't possible to do sensibly. With regard to the second part

>AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.

Transcription and summarization is indeed fine, but try posting a longer reddit or HN discussion you've been part of into any model of your choice and ask it to analyze it, and you will see severe errors very soon. It will consistently misrepresent the views expressed and it doesn't really matter what model you go for. They can't do it.