MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjm11 | 2025-12-02 14:12:12+00:00
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not claiming that AI is the worst thing ever. I too think that complaints about that are generally overblown. (Unless it turns out to kill us all or something of the kind, which feels to me like it's unlikely but not nearly as close to impossible as I would be comfortable with[1].) I was offering examples of ways in which LLMs could plausibly turn out to do harm, not examples of ways in which LLMs will definitely make the world end.

Getting worse at mental arithmetic because of having calculators didn't matter much because calculators are just unambiguously better at arithmetic than we are, and if you always have one handy (which these days you effectively do) then overall you're better at arithmetic than if you were better at doing it in your head but didn't have a calculator. (Though, actually, calculators aren't quite unambiguously better because it takes a little bit of extra time and effort to use one, and if you can't do easy arithmetic in your head then arguably you have lost something.)

If thinking-atrophy due to LLMs turns out to be OK in the same way as arithmetic-atrophy due to calculators has, it will be because LLMs are just unambiguously better at thinking than we are. That seems to me (a) to be a scenario in which those exotic doomy risks become much more salient and (b) like a bigger thing to be losing from our lives than arithmetic. Compare "we will have lost an important part of what it is to be human if we never do arithmetic any more" (absurd) with "we will have lost an important part of what it is to be human if we never think any more" (plausible, at least to me).

[1] I don't see how one can reasonably put less than 50% probability on AI getting to clearly-as-smart-as-humans-overall level in the next decade, or less than 10% probability on AI getting clearly-much-smarter-than-humans-overall soon after if it does, or less than 10% probability on having things much smarter than humans around not causing some sort of catastrophe, all of which means a minimum 0.5% chance of AI-induced catastrophe in the not-too-distant future. And those estimates look to me like they're on the low side.
by mlrtime | 2025-12-02 14:12:17+00:00
The cost of urban development has a lot more to do with regulation and limits on building rights than with income inequality. Zoning rules, permitting, height caps, and other constraints keep supply artificially low, which pushes developers toward higher-end units because the fixed costs are so high. If cities simply allowed more building by right, supply would go up and prices would come down. Things like limiting long-term vacancies can help deal with speculative ownership, but none of this is primarily an inequality problem.

RE Valve: using revenue per employee isn’t a meaningful way to tie this to inequality. High revenue/employee in a software distribution business just reflects scale. Developers use Valve because it gives them access to a big market, not because Valve is “extracting” in some zero-sum way. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, the distribution market would become less efficient, not more equal, and consumers or developers wouldn’t actually be better off.
by rokob | 2025-12-02 14:12:27+00:00
There was definitely a widely held belief in the late 90s, early 00s that programming was commoditized to the point that it would be fully offshored to the lowest cost of labor. This happened in some areas and failed. It still happens now and then. But I remember hearing some of that based on OO and libraries making it so unskilled people could just put together legos.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-02 14:13:31+00:00
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy

IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.
by youchen_ | 2025-12-02 14:14:09+00:00
Hey HN, I'm the builder. I built this because Canny is great but becomes prohibitively expensive ($99/mo) for bootstrapped startups. The Problem: Most feedback tools are "One-Way." You push a ticket to Linear, but when you close it, nothing happens on your public board. You have to manually update customers. The Solution: I built Feedvote to handle Deep 2-Way Sync. Linear/Jira -> Feedvote: When you mark an issue 'Done' in your issue tracker, Feedvote auto-updates the roadmap status. The Loop: It automatically emails all the voters on that ticket to tell them it shipped.

The Stack: Frontend: Next.js Backend: Nest.js Infrastructure: Cloudflare for SaaS (to handle Custom Domains for users)

It's a Lifetime Deal ($149) during beta because I hate monthly subscriptions. The syncing logic was the hardest part (handling race conditions between Linear webhooks). Would love you to roast the implementation.
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-02 14:14:10+00:00
The thing is, there is always tar(1) even in the most basic of distributions. And everyone uses tar.gz's or .bz2's or whatever for distributing all kinds of things, so tar is pretty ubiquitous. But the moment you want to do some C development, or any binutils-related, nope, install and use ar(1) which is used for literally one single purpose and nothing else. Because reasons.
by atlasunshrugged | 2025-12-02 14:15:02+00:00
I thought this was one of the most interesting stats: Among Core Republicans, 80% oppose political violence. Among New Entrants, by contrast, 54% say political violence can be justified. Support for political violence is also high among those who believe many conspiracy theories and among those who tolerate openly racist or antisemitic individuals. Age is one of the strongest predictors: just 13% of those over 50 in the Current GOP justify political violence, compared with 57% of those under 50.
by Rupal_S | 2025-12-02 14:15:02+00:00
Location: Bangalore, India (Working across US/UK/AUS/NZ/EUR time zones) Remote: Yes - FinTech: Embedded Finance, B2B Payments, LendingTech, WealthTech, KYC/AML, Crypto On/Off Ramp (Expertise in Plaid, Dwolla, Rutter, Stripe, Chargebee, Coinbase SDK, ACH, Underwriting Automation)

- AI & ML: LLM Agents (OpenAI, GPT-4, Claude, GPT4All), RAG Pipelines, LangChain, Workflow Copilots (Currently working with 4 clients on AI automations and document intelligence solutions)

- SportsTech: Performance Analytics, Scouting Tools, Fan Engagement Platforms (US, Australia) (Includes fantasy sports, live feeds, coaching platforms, and AR-ready data models)

- Legal Tech: Agreement Builders, eSignature Workflows, OCR + Document AI, Blockchain Proofing

- Sportstech - Real-Time: Video/Audio Streaming, WebRTC, Group Coaching, Townhalls, EdTech Live Tools

Schedule a Chat: https://calendly.com/mobilefirst-intro

Email: unnat(.)fintegration(@)gmail(.)com
by mleo | 2025-12-02 14:15:16+00:00
There is a lot of data shuttling or shuffling in enterprise applications and if agents can write that part, so be it. I can spend more time on the harder business and technical problems that require creativity and working through the options and potential solutions. Even here, the speed to write multiple different experiments in parallel, is fantastic.

As for “it-compiles” that is nothing new. I have written code that I go back to later and wonder how it ever compiled. I have a process now of often letting the agent prototype and see if it works. Then go back and re-engineer it properly. Does doing it twice save time? Yeah, cause who’s to say my first take on the problem would have been correct and now I have something to look at and say it is definitely wrong or right when considering how to rebuild it for long term usage.
by an0malous | 2025-12-02 14:15:18+00:00
If I write JavaScript that outputs “5+5=55” we would rightfully call that an error regardless of the implementation details. But when an LLM does it, you’re saying it’s not an error, it’s “generated tokens that fall within the statistical limits of the present configuration.”

My point was that, from the perspective of the end user, this is an error. If ChatGPT was described as a “random text generator” then sure maybe this wouldn’t be considered an error because “5+5=55” is random text. But that’s not what 90% or ChatGPT users expect nor how the app is marketed, it’s marketed as an Artificial Intelligence Assistant.
by Erlend_Dugstad | 2025-12-02 14:15:35+00:00
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend was harassed while walking home at night in Paris. After that, I realized how little traditional navigation apps consider safety when suggesting walking routes. They optimize for speed, not for risk. So I started building Streetwise, a safety-first navigation app designed to help women (and anyone feeling unsafe at night) choose better routes. Streetwise works by assigning a safety score to each street segment based on a weighted graph: The current model uses:

* Infrastructure Data (Police Stations, Lightning etc.) * Criminal Data (Scraped with Ai Agents from News websites since Paris do not publish them) * User generated Data (Incidents that have been reported by a user etc.)

Instead of minimizing travel time, Streetwise minimizes risk.

I’m still early in the process and would appreciate hearing from people who have gone through something similar to what my girlfriend experienced, or who know someone who has. Happy to answer any questions.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-02 14:15:36+00:00
> So, at this point, it helps us understand more about problems we already understand a little about, but nothing yet about new problems.

I don't think this caution makes any sense!

The more we learn about theorem/axiom equivalences (or more generally, the lattice of such connections) between existing proofs, the more insights we will gain into how unproved conjectures may relate to existing proofs or each other.

Only in the strictest possible sense does saying showing X tells us nothing about showing Y. Meaning a proof or identification of X is not a proof or identification of related thing Y. But that is an obviously pedantic statement.

Not to critique the person being quoted. I feel like an offhand remark may have got unduly elevated by being quoted in a "two-sides of a story" writer's dramatization reflex.
by wlesieutre | 2025-12-02 14:15:44+00:00
Charts are one I've wondered about, do I need to try to describe the trend of the data, or provide several conclusions that a person seeing the chart might draw?

Just saying "It's a chart" doesn't feel like it'd be useful to someone who can't see the chart. But if the other text on the page talks about the chart, then maybe identifying it as the chart is enough?
by baranul | 2025-12-02 14:15:53+00:00
> Honestly, rust is slightly more readable than obfuscated perl.

> Rust is the kind of language that would push me to write a new language that isn't rust.

It's wild how draconian and forced the use of Rust has become. It's one thing to be caught up in corporate induced hype, yet another level to force one's preferences or ideology on everybody else.

Many people don't like Rust, for various acceptable reasons, and their right to choose should be respected. Sticking with C, is an equally acceptable option. In addition to there being various other newer C alternatives languages; with greater readability, memory-safety, and ease of use. There is also Fil-C[1][2], that can provide memory-safety, with no to minimum changes to the code.

[1]: fil-c.org/

[2]: github.com/pizlonator/fil-c
by jmclnx | 2025-12-02 14:15:54+00:00
A long time ago I was out for a ride with some friends. A guy on a unicycle ran into us and rode with us for 20 miles (~25km).

He was riding across country (US) and his setup was amazing, his wheel was maybe 700x35, his things were packed under his seat.

He had a WEB site but sadly I lost the link :(
by phkahler | 2025-12-02 14:16:01+00:00
>> If Intel becomes the leading foundry, even if their x86 chips are a little behind Apple, they'll still be ahead of AMD. Apple start shipping 3nm back in 2023. It's looking like AMD will get there in another year.

No? AMD is beating Intel in power and performance. It's true they will only reach 3nm for desktop next year with Zen 6, but they're beating Intel which is already at a smaller node. In essence AMD is lagging on process because they can. They're being very strategic while Intel is struggling to catch up. Zen 7 is going to be my next build, and it may be my last x86.
Show HN: Steer – Stop debugging agents, start teaching them (Open Source)
by steer_dev | 2025-12-02 14:16:31+00:00
Hey HN, I’m the author.

I built Steer because I was tired of the 'Confident Idiot' problem—where agents output broken JSON or hallucinate facts, and I only find out when the app crashes.

Existing tools just log the error. I wanted to fix it.

Steer creates a local feedback loop:

1. Catch: It blocks the bad output (e.g., Markdown in a JSON field).

2. Teach: You click 'Teach' in the local dashboard to define the fix.

3. Fix: It injects that rule into the agent's context for future runs.

It’s Python-native, works with any LLM (OpenAI/LangChain/etc), and stores data locally.

pip install steer-sdk

Repo: https://github.com/imtt-dev/steer

I’d love feedback on the API design—specifically the @capture decorator pattern.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-02 14:16:38+00:00
I meant it as a shorthand for the standard gripe of "love my job, hate the paper work.". Many surgeons will also admit that they hate clinic work too, it's so much nicer once the patient is sedated and they can drop their bedside manner.

However there are jobs close to "recreational surgery".

One is surgical assisting. The pay is poor compared to being the primary surgeon, but has none of the patient or bureaucratic responsibility. Retired surgeons often do this, and not because they need the money.

Another is volunteering in the third world. Little bureaucracy and no long term patient contact.
by bilekas | 2025-12-02 14:16:46+00:00
> HN has become downvoting machine.

You could have mentioned what you just have in your original answer, your original answer would be more suited to facebook, so it's considered low quality, so it's down voted, don't take it personally.

> Was he already on antiviral drugs? I think so.

The article is focusing on the surprise that the cells did NOT contain the CCR5 mutation. When they we confident this was a key factor in curing patients.

> was declared free of the virus for more than two years after receiving stem cells without the CCR5 mutation, suggesting CCR5 isn’t the whole story

> It is an intervention but I am not convinced you need all this pain to cure him from HIV.

Again you're making this broad statement as you have some insight into the matter, I don't know about it, the doctors who do seems to have admited they're still learning things. Thats the nice thing about this article. More places to sudy and research.
by mnau | 2025-12-02 14:16:56+00:00
There is invisible hand, literally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

Yes, I can do it. In my free time. But that part of my job that was enjoyable? Poof. Not anymore. Can't compete, get on with times, be more productive.

I spend a 40% of my "alive" time in work. It's a massive downgrade.
by TrackerFF | 2025-12-02 14:16:58+00:00
I see people argue “But other people hate their jobs in other industries, just push through and grind, money is money”

Sure, but I want to point out that software development is kind of unique. I can’t think of too many other professional jobs where the line between hobby and work blends, for so many of its workers.

Let us be honest with ourselves, many of the toxic things in this industry are caused by a strong culture and “It’s my hobby, and I’m extremely passionate about it” mentality.

So people are willing to learn new skills in their spare time, unpaid of course. They’re willing to pull OT and weekend work, for the mission.

And those that don’t, are deemed lazy or fakes, not passionate enough.

You don’t see investment bankers / lawyers / management consultants / etc. go on about side projects, leveling up their skills during the weekend, and other things that are considered completely normal in this industry.

My point is - those are the types of people you’re up against. Those are the type of people many employers love.

If you have zero interest for the craft, and just plan on grinding for the money, there are other similarly lucrative ventures, which might align with your own interests, and where it is accepted to be in it for the money.
by doubled112 | 2025-12-02 14:16:59+00:00
On my home server, sometimes I do take some snapshots and upgrade a few VMs and LXC containers.

Sometimes I even run testing because stable will be out shortly and I don't feel like upgrading.

It's a very different experience to the single Windows laptop in my house, where the latest stable is always subtly broken in ways I notice. Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening, for example.
by ThatMedicIsASpy | 2025-12-02 14:17:00+00:00
So what is your plan on dealing with wikipedia? I accessed porn in 2011 when I was 11. I played Postal 2 when I was 10. But no English skills at that age means not much came out of that game at that time except cat silencers.

How many kids these days play 18+ rated games?
by tomalaci | 2025-12-02 14:17:13+00:00
I usually give myself 30-60 mins to solve. If I can't do it by then I will look up solutions and -study- them (also break it piece by piece and see if I can generalize it for future problems). I would look at solutions even after solving it by myself.

I find that to be the best balance between challenge and learning something new. You will mentally burn yourself out if you keep bashing against the wall for hours or more, not quite a healthy thing to do :)

Meanwhile, people who actually try to compete on this stuff have already developed rich library of specialized algorithms to leap ahead of average programmer. Well, I guess nowadays a lot of it is LLM assisted too.
by cv_h | 2025-12-02 14:17:45+00:00
Hi! Sorry for the late response.

The key difference is the use case. n8n and Zapier are designed for integration automation for connecting apps and services together.

Flowctl focuses on operational workflows that require human approvals and inputs, things like database migrations, infrastructure changes or scheduled maintenance tasks.

n8n has some permissions features, but approvals aren't built-in. Zapier is cloud-only and expensive at scale. Flowctl is fully open-source with no enterprise only features.
by aaronax | 2025-12-02 14:18:12+00:00
Scott Locklin is one of my favorite reads, in occasional doses though. Kind of unhinged-seeming but always some perspective that seems fresh.

He's like Casey Handmer turned up to 11, and throw in a use of the word "retarded" in pretty much every post which surely is some repellent just to make certain types of people go away.

Actually I'm not sure I really get anything out of reading either of them but they provide some enjoyment and glimpse of a possible future.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-02 14:18:14+00:00
I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers.

For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.

If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.
by milsebg | 2025-12-02 14:18:19+00:00
> You don’t care about your work because you’re depressed. > Same with everything else. > take it seriously and find a good psychiatrist to help with it.

So, you're seeing a depression as an external "illness" that can only be cured by pharmeceutical compounds?

I can only speak for myself, but to me that was dangerous advice. it removed accountability for my actions. the only thing that helped was getting into new actions. actively changing small things.

i was diagnosed with severe depression more than once in my life. things started to change for me only when I stopped believing this narrative.

a psychiatrist will give you pills, a psychologist will talk to you with a "playbook", both will try do bring some predefined indexes of clinical depression down. nothing of this is tailored to your personality.

because you mentioned it: gym does not change everything miraculously (neither do pills), but it taught me that my actions have significant effect. going through a perceived hamster wheel all the time, that realization was a big step forward to me. i did things that i did not want (like meeting people, applying for jobs, etc.). that helped, and it gets easier with each step.

ymmv
by voidUpdate | 2025-12-02 14:18:37+00:00
Personally, I really don't like the "swiping down in different areas does different things" that apple does, especially on a phone. The area is just too small for it to have multiple interactions. I much prefer how my android phone does it, with a single down-swipe area pulling down the "control panel", and swiping up to get to the apps menu/search area. I don't even know what top-left swipe down is on apple, is it just showing the time, but bigger?
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-12-02 14:18:50+00:00
I'd recommend going on Thriftbooks and ordering a textbook. I can't remember the exact copy I had years ago when I was self-learning CS, but it was like $4.00 for a really incredible textbook.

Now, I don't have a degree, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but the book was really really good, and honestly, if you've been programming for awhile, I think most of the concepts didn't require a heavy math background (of course, it would probably help). The chapters were like: Symbolic Logic, Set Theory, Proofs, Algorithms, Cryptography, and other things which I can't remember.

Edit: The book is free to read online

EDIT EDIT: Removed link as I don't know if that was a "legal" link.

It's out of stock on Thriftbooks, but looks to go for $6-8 on there.
by choult | 2025-12-02 14:18:58+00:00
Headline: Saved by Stoppard

Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.

Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.

Michael Baum Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-02 14:19:03+00:00
Pinning the intermediate CA should work. Alternatively, calculate the cost of updating the cert pinning mechanism if it's custom and compare it to paid, 1 year certificates (though those will go away eventually too).

On the other hand, if you're using an app specific server, there's no need for you to use public certificates. A self-generated one with a five or ten year validity will pin just as nicely. That breaks if you need web browsers or third parties to talk to the same API, of course.