MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-12-13 18:25:02+00:00
> I don't understand why the PSF is begging me to donate by showing an intrusive (and borderline manipulative) banner ad disrupting my reading flow.

Putting aside matters of real-world politics and "culture war", my main objection to the PSF is their funding allocation. Almost all core developers are volunteering (aside from a couple of "developer-in-residence" positions; we're talking about on the order of a hundred volunteers here), and presumably not all of them have high-paying day jobs at major tech companies (although certainly a lot of the more easily recognized names do). Many more administrative staff are paid, not obscenely much but certainly more than zero.

And then the lion's share of the rest of the budget goes to operating PyCon US. I guess (reviewing the financial reports) this is profitable for them, given that their "operating service revenue" must be pretty close to 100% from that. But it's hard for me to imagine why people would pay those prices to see talks that will later be available on YouTube (and which could almost universally do with a lot of editing) unless they're really there to meet people in person. Meanwhile other meetups worldwide get a pittance in support. I know that there are grants awarded specifically to enable the less privileged to attend PyCon, but the whole thing still strikes me as rather elitist.

But on the other hand, I do sympathize with the Python project (not so much the Foundation) being severely underfunded for what it is. When I see the Wikipedia banners I'm disgusted because I know the Wikimedia Foundation is already, by non-profit "do good things on the Internet" foundation standards, absolutely drowning in cash. But the PSF's existing dues and contributions wouldn't even cover the costs of the "Packaging Work Group / Infrastructure / Other" category in the 2024 breakdown. And that is without considering Fastly's generous in-kind donation of bandwidth (which AIUI is in the exabyte/year range now). The PSF really have not "been paid massively", notwithstanding estimates of the value of that in-kind donation. You can see the numbers for yourself (https://www.python.org/psf/annual-report/2024/).
by helain | 2025-12-13 18:25:17+00:00
If you don’t want to reinvent all of this yourself, this is exactly the problem we’re solving at Ailog.

Most local LLM setups break down because people try to use the model as both the reasoning engine and the memory store. That doesn’t scale. What works in production is a layered approach: external long-term memory (vector DB + metadata), short-term working state, aggressive summarization, and strict retrieval and evaluation loops.

That’s what we built at https://www.ailog.fr . We provide a production-ready RAG stack with persistent memory, retrieval controls, grounding checks, and evaluation tooling so models can handle long-horizon, multi-step tasks without blowing up the context window. It works with local or hosted models and keeps memory editable, auditable, and observable over time.

You can still build this yourself with Ollama, Chroma/Qdrant, and a custom orchestrator, but if you want something already wired, tested, and scalable, that’s the niche we’re filling.

Happy to answer questions or share architecture details if useful.
by sandruso | 2025-12-13 18:25:40+00:00
I missed last train due to delays and there was a group of in the same situation. One nice person offered me to that I can sleep on their couch. And they were so nice to give me a ride to the station the next day.

I was so angry at first when I found out that this was my last train and I missed it but it turned out to be great story I can tell :)

Thank you strangers, I'll repay it back to somebody in the future
by lern_too_spel | 2025-12-13 18:25:41+00:00
Snowden's documents revealed that the federal government wasn't "spying on us all," as had been feared but was in fact paring down domestic data collection and had only one illegal program left (phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for "spying") that was pared down and then shut down soon after. They did reveal a lot of Chinese targets, which Snowden unsuccessful used to try to parlay into Hong Kong asylum.
by bogtog | 2025-12-13 18:26:10+00:00
I'm using Wispr flow, but I've also tried Superwhisper. Both are fine. I have a convenient hotkey to start/end recording with one hand. Having it just need one hand is nice. I'm using this with the Claude Code vscode extension in Cursor. If you go down this route, the Claude Code instance should be moved into a separate window outside your main editor or else it'll flicker a lot
by PaulKeeble | 2025-12-13 18:26:57+00:00
Symptom wise and quite a lot of the biology they definitely appear similar. The problem is the genetics studies show some overlap, about 80 combined SNPs for ME/CFS out of 270 and out of around 150 for Long Covid.

There is more to it than just different genetic mappings because while both conditions share mitochondria differences which compartments are different. Depending on how deep you dig into the biology they appear the same or quite different and a number of multiple point blood, urine and saliva tests can distinguish the diseases from each other.

I think at this point its more accurate to say they are overlapping conditions, they have similarities but they are different conditions. Sister diseases much in the same way there is overlap in Fibromylgia and Gulf War syndrome with ME/CFS and each other. Long Covid is another post infection Neurological and immune disease with unknown biomarker/core pathology. There are clearly a lot of measurable changes that are dysfunctional so its every bit as real biological disease as the others. What they definitely share is a high amount of debilitation, severe disability and patient reduction in quality of life on the same set of 280 symptoms in a very similar patter of prevalence.

Its also now a disease with very little research funding world wide as well so the situation is unlikely to improve for the 400m+ sufferers world wide.
by fyrn_ | 2025-12-13 18:27:01+00:00
Many "solar power stations" can be used as a UPS, with competitive switching speed. Just not sold under that label. You can even get one made entirely in the US, but it will cost you: https://enphase.com/store/portable-energy/iq-powerpack-1500-...

But yeah, the cheap chinese "power stations" run circles around most UPS capacity wise. UPS market is very complacent.
by soared | 2025-12-13 18:27:07+00:00
Surprised AI studio isn’t recommended here - you can go from prompt->preview->deploy in like a couple seconds.

They have a library of sample apps you can edit but I wish they included the prompts and history to build each since I generally can’t get large apps to work - after a while the I’ll just produces more bugs as complexity grows. But I’m also a bad vibe coder and never read the code so entirely my fault :)
by Seattle3503 | 2025-12-13 18:27:51+00:00
No, it's a question about how a government would break cryptographic protocols, or force others to.

If the identifiers are pseudonyms, if the government compelled someone to share their user IDs, all the government would see are basically a bunch of UUIDs keyed to that provider.

So what specific actions are you talking about. What is your threat model?
by aczerepinski | 2025-12-13 18:28:25+00:00
Easy listening implies that there’s not much of anything there. Nothing surprising or unique about the song or the performance. No insightful message and nothing worth reflecting on after.

I don’t think the alternative is “difficult” for its own sake. Rather, those who would use the term as a pejorative are likely seeking new experiences and viewpoints in their music and get bored by same old diatonic melodies over plain inoffensive grooves. Novelty is a source of dopamine for some.

A lot of jazz music is difficult to the untrained ear, and I have distinct memories of hearing albums that I now feel are too conservative but in my youth thought they were too chaotic. I now understand that it was never difficult from the performer’s perspective - just high level musicians playing the music they hear. I wish everyone could hear jazz just once through the ears of a jazz musician.
by proee | 2025-12-13 18:29:01+00:00
Eating at nice restaurant with my entire family. When we finished the meal the waiter came out with a dessert and said that someone across the restaurant paid for our entire meal. I was shocked, I looked around and I think I might know who it was, but they were already gone. That was probably a $150-$200 dollar check. I'm still shocked to this day.
by abrgr | 2025-12-13 18:29:16+00:00
Great article!

> There exists a higher level problem of holistic system behavior verification

This is the key observation. Strict, code-level verification of every line, while valuable in the small, doesn't contribute very meaningfully to understanding or building confidence in higher level system properties.

I see a future of modules with well defined interfaces and associated contracts. Module level contracts can be formally verified or confidently believed via property based testing. Higher level system behavior can then be proven or tested by assuming the module contracts are upheld.

Module boundaries allow for varying the desired level of confidence module by module (testing, property based testing with variable run time allotments, formal verification).

LLMs can handle each step of that chain today, allowing humans to invest specifically where we want more confidence.
by grvbck | 2025-12-13 18:29:55+00:00
Yes! I have stories like that from every Japanese city or town I've been to. Easily the most hospitable, kindest locals I've ever encountered while traveling.

Although, I am often surprised by how kind/helpful/generally nice people are when I travel. Even in places like Paris or Glasgow, that have a reputation of being a bit rude or at least reserved toward outsiders.
by state_less | 2025-12-13 18:30:00+00:00
The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.

I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
by drweevil | 2025-12-13 18:31:20+00:00
>I’m not sure where there is. But I’m happy to let China or other countries arrive at that unhappy destination while I wait behind and watch.

This. I am utterly fed up with this "AI race" BS. No one who makes this argument explains exactly why it's so damned important to "win the AI race with China". Whatever that reason may be be, I am morally certain that it won't be good for the vast majority of Americans.
by caseyw | 2025-12-13 18:31:32+00:00
The approach I’ve been taking lately with general AI development:

1. Define the work.

2. When working in a legacy code base provide good examples of where we want to go with the migration and the expectation of the outcome.

3. Tell it about what support tools you have, lint, build, tests, etc.

4. Select a very specific scenario to modify first and have it write tests for the scenario.

5. Manually read and tweak the tests, ensure they’re testing what you want, and they cover all you require. The tests help guardrail the actual code changes.

6. Depending upon how full the context is, I may create a new chat and then pull in the test, the defined work, and any related files and ask it to implement based upon the data provided.

This general approach has worked well for most situations so far. I’m positive it could be improved so any suggestions are welcome.
by jackfranklyn | 2025-12-13 18:31:53+00:00
The barcode font trick from valbaca is brilliant. I've done similar things with base64-encoded data URIs to make tools completely standalone - no network calls, no CDN dependencies.

One pattern I've settled into: keeping tools under ~200 lines of JS total. Past that threshold I start losing the ability to hold the whole thing in my head, and the main benefit of these tools is that you can open them in a text editor and understand everything immediately.

The CORS limitation that xnx mentions is real though. I've worked around it a few times by having tools accept paste-from-clipboard instead of fetching URLs directly. Less elegant but it keeps the tool self-contained and avoids the proxy problem simonw mentioned.
by lyu07282 | 2025-12-13 18:31:53+00:00
You also have to think deeper than that, media in the west is propaganda, you have to ask why are they all pushing the "children are in danger from social media" narrative? You should never make the mistake to be so naive to trust in their genuine good intentions, this has nothing to do with children.

The real purpose is to build broad consensus for surveillance, control and censorship of social media, "to protect the children" is the thing they tell you to justify it. They are recognizing they have lost the narrative control. How do you manufacture consent for war and genocide when you have completely lost young people, they see the wall of carnage and dead children and will not be persuadable by the legacy media telling them to close their eyes and ears.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-13 18:31:54+00:00
I'd be interested in seeing some of the neuroscience research, because the narrative spun by this post - that the primary reason for a change to the "zero fucks to give" attitude is hormonal and biological - seems weak to me.

I'm also someone (a man FWIW, as the article was mainly focused on the experience of women) who reached an abrupt mental shift in my late forties. And sure, there could be some underlying biological shift I'm not conscious of, but a lot of it is simply that "pretending" at this stage no longer serves a useful purpose, and most people become aware of it at this stage of life.

I love the saying "over the hill" because it gives me a good visual of what's going on. When you're young, and looking up "from the bottom of the hill", you can fantasize about all sorts of possibilities and outcomes that can happen to you. As you age, though, more and more avenues get cut off - you're not going to be the sports, movie or rock star you dreamed of, you're not going to invent a cure for cancer, you're not going to become a billionaire, etc. When you're "over the hill", you can see pretty much into the valley below, and you have to be realistic about the possibilities. I think a lot of people may switch their "people pleasing" ways because they stop fantasizing about the benefits that may happen by "keeping all doors" open. You see you no longer have infinite time left, and you decide where to spend it more wisely. It's like the famous Confucius quote "Every man has two lives, and the second begins when he realizes he has only one."

One reason I didn't like this essay is that it seems to be trying, ironically, to explain this change in perspective/behavior, and the negative response that can come from it, especially for women, as a "biological/hormonal consequence". The whole point of having "no fucks left to give" is that you don't care how others respond to your less pleasing attitude. If you're still trying to explain it so you can understand (or try to ignore) other's negative responses, I feel like you've missed the point.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-13 18:32:04+00:00
This correlates with tourism. Low touristy places you standout and people treat you nicer than normal.

In touristy places you are just a target. It’s just different places have different strategies for fleecing you. For example in Japan you probably wouldn’t even know you got ripped off but India they are likely so obvious about it you never get fleeced.
by jeffbee | 2025-12-13 18:33:45+00:00
The article doesn't even gesture at the reason why West Coast is disfavored by some: it's the white flavor. A lot of people feel that the White clique of West Coast jazz capitalized on the popularity of the genre without really contributing much to it. It was the safe, commercial style at the time.

Note that this isn't my personal take. I love Art Pepper. I can tolerate some Brubeck. But I admit there was plenty of slop in the record stores, too.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-12-13 18:34:04+00:00
Truth is we are no closer to having a biomarker for fatigue. There is no particular reason why the normal fatigue that people get from working hard has anything to do with the chronic fatigue that ME/CFS and other chronic diseases face. ME/CFS is unique in its payback where a sufferers pushes through the fatigue and ends up with symptoms worsening and new symptoms 12-72 hours later that can last a day to the rest of their lives. That isn't just fatigue and the UK doctors have been trying to make ME/CFS all about fatigue since the 1980s and it caused immense harm. It actually has about 280 symptoms, of which fatigue is just one and not even the most debilitating or important one.
by snowe2010 | 2025-12-13 18:34:12+00:00
I understood what you meant about GDA. It just doesn’t come out to that unless you put stuff in and never touch it, which is a valid use case! Don’t get me wrong, I planned on doing the same but with restic it would cost so so much more than wasabi and backblaze that it was a massive waste of money and really revealed amazon’s strategy, which is lock your data away and charge you to access it.

I wasn’t talking about B2 though, I was talking about Backblaze personal, which you can run on a NAS with a docker container.
by kbolino | 2025-12-13 18:34:32+00:00
Go has both assembly language and unsafe pointer operations available. While any uses of these more advanced techniques should be vetted before going to production, they are obviously able to break out of any sandboxing that you might otherwise think a garbage collector provides.

And any language which can call C code that is resident in the same virtual memory space can have its own restrictions bypassed by said C code. This even applies to more restrictive runtimes like the JVM or Python.
by neilv | 2025-12-13 18:34:51+00:00
> I have no idea the real ratios, but imagine 20% are genuinely good people, 60% are just going about their lives, and 20% are miserable for some reason and drive like miserable people.

Lately, this is my experience in general, not only cars. Though I want to say both that 20% and 60% are genuinely good, and that first 20% are readily above-and-beyond.

In the big-name college town where I live, which still pretends to be warm-fuzzy (the remaining hippies are silver-haired), eventually you pick up on a pervasive undercurrent of selfishness.

A lot of people only get into the prestigious places because they look out for their own interests, and being here is only temporary and transactional.

And a lot of people are strained by the high cost of living for lousy conditions, and are just trying to get by.

Still, I've seen, for example, delirious (opioids?) street people slump off a bench on the gritty main drag, and quickly be surrounded concerned and helpful passersby who looked like yuppies. (And the only phones out were multiple people calling 911, no social media content creation, just genuinely helping and then disappearing.)
by lern_too_spel | 2025-12-13 18:35:27+00:00
He fled to China by choice and gave them plenty of documents about Chinese targets, some of which are in the article we are discussing.

The government wasn't violating the trust of the American people. If you ask about the single illegal domestic data collection program in the leak (phone metadata collection) and how it was used (to find associates of surveilled foreign agents working against the national security of the U.S.), you will find that most people don't care.
by sorcercode | 2025-12-13 18:35:37+00:00
this makes sense and as usual great eye by Simon. progressive disclosure is such a powerful concept, that every other tool is going to start adopting it. we've personally had such great results adopting it, especially for performing high quality large migrations.

I wrote about this but I'm certain that eventually commands, MCPs etc will fade out when skills is understood and picked up by everyone

https://kau.sh/blog/claude-skills/
by bogtog | 2025-12-13 18:35:52+00:00
> Claude on macOS and iOS have native voice to text transcription

Yeah, Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini all offer this, although Gemini's is basically unusable because it will immediately send the message if you stop talking for a few seconds

I imagine you totally could use the app transcript and paste it in, but keeping the friction to an absolute minimum (e.g., just needing to press one hotkey) feels nice
by quinncom | 2025-12-13 18:35:52+00:00
I use Spokenly with local Parakeet 0.6B v3 model + Cerebras gpt-oss-120b for post-processing (cleaning up transcription errors and fixing technical mondegreens, e.g., `no JS` → `Node.js`). Almost imperceptible transcription and processing delay. Trigger transcription with right ⌥ key.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-13 18:36:06+00:00
Well... who else is going to defend victims if they're not going to defend themselves? Particularly when the person is presumably rather well resourced.

Justice is dead when nearly everybody just makes backroom deals with no admissions of guilt and nondisclosure of terms if they even defend themselves at all.

A person who is capable of defending themselves owes it to those who aren't as able; if even the most resourced people won't defend themselves, what chance to the rest of us have?
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-13 18:36:30+00:00
If it's a single application exposed to the internet that is using those tokens then an env file is perfectly fine. If the application gets breached the secrets will be in memory anyway (as the app needs them to do its work), so they will get exposed no matter how they were sourced.

If your vendors support IP-based restrictions (few do, thanks to "zero trust" and other bullshit), a very strong defense would be to enable that and restrict use of those secrets to your server's IP, so that the tokens become useless to anyone else even if leaked.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-12-13 18:37:18+00:00
You are right, that's exactly my point. I was in such situation multiple times. People will say "it's impossible" but they actually mean "it's impossible given my motivation connected to money, time I could be given, freedom to experiment without boss looking at the calendar, and probably a bunch of other things". When the same people are given sudden motivation kick (even as a hypothetical) they start to actually think. Maybe they'll figure out that it's impossible anyway and won't do it for a $100M. Myself, I'd immediately start to think how to do it.