MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kamaal | 2025-12-17 03:20:23+00:00
>>That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war.

Speaking as Indian, Our population growth happened when we were poor, and masses were uneducated/illiterate.

I have one more theory that- Population growth happens when poor people have access to lots of carbohydrates. Plus having lots of children is somewhat akin to having meat robot automatons whom you can send for physical work and make money.

If you want to use sanctions to do reduce population it doesn't work in the modern era. Poor people eat well and make babies.
by mikiskk | 2025-12-17 03:21:57+00:00
This formal verification course I took by Manos Kapritsos and Jon Howell is taught in Dafny and assumes no former experience with the subject. Most of the exercises are to some degree “self-grading” as proof success means you have a correct solution, provided your spec is correct. I highly recommend.

https://glados-michigan.github.io/verification-class/fall202...
by wodenokoto | 2025-12-17 03:22:02+00:00
There’s another school of teaching, where kana and kanji are banned for the first 2-3 semesters because they are a distraction to learn and internalize words and grammar.

I’ve met a few students of this textbook system when I was on exchange and my impression was that they were very skilled at Japanese for the amount of time they’ve been a student and what they told about their seniors was they pick up kanji fast, since they already know the words.

The big problem of course is that it is completely incompatible with other schools. Where do you place them when they go on exchange? With the n3 or n5 students?

Anyway, I always thought it was interesting that the exact antithesis of RTK* exists and works.

*RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-12-17 03:22:02+00:00
Most people who has Firefox installed is either installing because that's what they have always used or is using because someone recommended it. They have to be explicitly installed. Keep that in mind. Don't you remember firefox installation fest and stuff? That 1% pushes Firefox to non-users at home, in their companies and where not. That 1% is responsible for a lot of the rest of the 99%.

The folks Mozilla is trying to attract don't care for all of these. Their biggest selling point is privacy and being community friendly. If it's getting deteriorated, why should the general folks who don't know what Manifest V3 is install it?

Especially when tech enthusiasts are talking bad about it. What impression does it make to a non-tech guy who woke up one day drinking filter coffee and thought... Huh! From today onwards, I want privacy!!??
by defrost | 2025-12-17 03:22:52+00:00
It's an odd piece to post to HN now, it was topical three years ago .. and the hands of time have moved on since.

That said, I did look to place it and noticed the author:

Patrick Howse is a former BBC reporter and producer

worked for the BBC 1989-2015 (ish) and since almost exclusively dined out on writing BBC hit pieces.

~ https://bylinetimes.com/author/patrickhowse/

I'm sure there's much to criticize after 25 years inside but it does make one wonder just how acrimonious the exit must have been and what was the story there.

A decade's a long time to carry a grudge, still it may just be a case of the anti-BBC dirt pays better and we've all got rent to pay one way or the other.
by godelski | 2025-12-17 03:24:15+00:00
I live in an urban area, but not what I'd call a big city. There are plenty of dark areas so people do put on their brights even though it actually isn't necessary. I see people turn them on anytime there's 100ft without a streetlight. Though I've still seen some of this in major cities like LA, though I feel like the highbeam rate is lower.

Then again, I also see people turn them on in the fog and rain...

But I'm convinced it isn't a singular problem. I'm certain the LEDs are part of the issue, but not the whole story. I mean for example, improperly aligned headlights isn't as big of a problem when the lights aren't as bright. But when they are brighter then this matters a lot more. Hell, I've seen brand new vehicles be misaligned.
by Zak | 2025-12-17 03:25:15+00:00
Maybe I'm less sensitive to that, but I hadn't really noticed on a phone that wasn't high-end in 2020 and certainly isn't now. I'll have to pay attention to sites being slow and compare a Chromium-based browser next time I notice one.

I switched from Firefox desktop to Chrome when Chrome was new because it was multi-process and one janky page couldn't hang or crash the whole browser. I vaguely remember the renderer being a little faster, but multi-process was transformative. Firefox took years to catch up with that.

I'm very sensitive to ads though. If a browser doesn't have a decent adblocker, I'm not using it. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chromium browser with good extension support on Android is Edge.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-17 03:26:01+00:00
> Is there any plan for a non-“compatibility layer” way to do anything manual or nontrivial?

It's really helpful to have examples for this, like the one you provide below (which I'll respond to!). I've been a maintainer and contributor to the PyPA standard tooling for years, and once uv "clicked" for me I didn't find myself having to leave the imperative layer (of uv add/sync/etc) at all.

> As a very basic example I ran into last week, Python tooling, even the nice Astral tooling, seems to be almost completely lacking any good detection of what source changes need to trigger what rebuild steps.

Could you say more about your setup here? By "rebuild steps" I'm inferring you mean an editable install (versus a sdist/bdist build) -- in general `uv sync` should work in that scenario, including for non-trivial things where e.g. an extension build has to be re-run. In other words, if you do `uv sync` instead of `uv pip install -e .`, that should generally work.

However, to take a step back from that: IMO the nicer way to use uv is to not run `uv sync` that much. Instead, you can generally use `uv run ...` to auto-sync and run your development tooling within an environment than includes your editable installation.

By way of example, here's what I would traditionally do:

python -m venv .env source .env/bin/activate python -m pip install -e .[dev] # editable install with the 'dev' extra pytest ... # re-run install if there are things a normal editable install can't transparently sync, like extension builds

Whereas with uv:

uv run --dev pytest ... # uses pytest from the 'dev' dependency group

That single command does everything pip and venv would normally do to prep an editable environment and run pytest. It also works across re-runs, since it'll run `uv sync` as needed under the hood.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-17 03:26:20+00:00
> One model is Shanghai, which is run by the central government as a province rather than a city

> The Tokyo Metropolitan Government (tmg) is responsible for big-ticket public services such as water, sewage and public hospitals. Beneath it sit 23 wards and a host of peripheral cities and towns. Each municipality has its own elected mayor and assembly, responsible for services such as schools, waste management and community planning. The tmg co-ordinates between them. It is a sensible split that clearly delineates authority while also making sure that decision-making is joined up.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-17 03:26:35+00:00
They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes.

Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.
Show HN: Clamp – Git-like version control for RAG vector databases (CLI/Python)
by ahthapa | 2025-12-17 03:27:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this because I thought it was weird that we treat vector DBs like mutable buckets instead of versioned knowledge bases. RAG apps break easily when embeddings drift, and I wanted `git checkout` for my vectors.

Clamp lets you commit and rollback your vector DB state without copying data. It works by managing metadata flags on points, so "rollbacks" are just instant filter updates, even for large collections.

Basic flow: $ clamp init $ clamp commit docs.txt my_kb "v1 - initial" $ clamp checkout my_kb HEAD~1 # Instant revert

It's a CLI/Python wrapper around Qdrant right now. I'm a student at UW and built this to learn more about vector storage internals.

Code: https://github.com/athaapa/clamp PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/clamp-rag/

Happy to answer questions about the implementation!
by dagmx | 2025-12-17 03:28:53+00:00
It’s both sad and believable when I hear that Boz is the most sane of them all.

Boz is such a grifter in his online content. He naturally weasel words every little point and while I have no doubt he’s smart, I don’t think I could trust him to provide an honest opinion publicly.

My friends at meta tend to not hold him in the highest esteem but echo largely what you said about the politics and his standing amongst them.
by ThailandJohn | 2025-12-17 03:28:54+00:00
Hi! Limitations of tree sitter, its insanely fast, easy to use but hits a limit on syntax/nodes only. Typescript compiler provides semantic with full type checking and cross module resolution. Its a small nightmare as I have to write every extraction and parser for it (why i call it "pseudo compiler"). Its a necessity to gain full call chain provenance across callee/caller, framework and validations, which is a "hard" requirement for the taint analysis to work. If you want to get down into code for it? The top layer is ast_parser.py which routes a few places but taking js/ts as an example? look at data_flow.ts / javascript.py which shows the ast/extraction/analyzing layers to capture and make sense of it in the database. :)
by dzink | 2025-12-17 03:29:47+00:00
Yes, and… The thin is nowadays engineered to be addictive, so weaning off of it may be hard. Going cold turkey during a vacation or completely ditching devices for a while may help.

Yes, but… The call to hipsterdom (doing something precisely because it doesn’t scale) may not be necessary - if a person has successfully weened themselves of the pacifier of cheap dopamine they should use all of that spare brain power to create things other people who are still addicted can use to get out of the quicksand of social media. Or to make things that will help the world - scaling is up to the creator. No merit to sealing off away from the world. Improve the world.
by octaane | 2025-12-17 03:30:18+00:00
I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience? No shit it isn't going well.
by eszed | 2025-12-17 03:30:59+00:00
> when there are other cars around that would need the indication

This has a failure state of "when there's a nearby car [or, more realistically, cyclist / pedestrian] of which I am not aware". Knowing myself to be fallible, I always use my turn signals.

I do take your point about turn signals being a reminder to be aware. That's good, but could also work while, you know, still using them, just in case.
by anonymousiam | 2025-12-17 03:31:00+00:00
This sort of thing is already becoming a reality. Not necessarily with Apple/Google IDs, but with email addresses. As the owner of a few dozen Internet domain names, I use some of them with catchalls so I can create new and unique email addresses for various entities I correspond with.

Sometimes this has failed, because the entity uses some third-party validation service that can find no record anywhere of the existence of the new email address. So it's sometimes impossible to register a new account somewhere unless you use an email address that is "known" to the validation system.

I'm not sure what "problem" they were trying to solve by doing it this way, but they've created a new problem by doing it.

Also, sometimes I've tried to use very short email addresses such as: x@xxx.com, and they're flagged as invalid even though they're not.

I've also had valid accounts disabled without notification because the email address I used had the name of the entity within. E.g. google@xxx.com Some companies assume you're trying to impersonate them if you do this, and silently disable existing accounts. Usually the tech support staff aren't even aware of these restrictions, which makes it even more difficult to recover.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-12-17 03:31:35+00:00
With 7 reported crashes at the time, Tesla’s Robotaxi was crashing roughly once every 40,000 miles [...]. For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles. This means Tesla’s “autonomous” vehicle, which is supposed to be the future of safety, is crashing 10x more often than a human driver.

That is a possible explanation for why Musk believes in people having 10x as many children. /s
by sgammon | 2025-12-17 03:31:56+00:00
People absolutely might confuse a DI framework for Android with this, seeing as lots of teams use both? They are both software products, to start?

> > can’t live up to owning it.

> ?

Dagger, the DI framework, is very popular, supported by Google, and the primary way to do DI on Android (for many). It is not going anywhere. It is unlikely that this tool or product will create a bigger audience. Therefore, it might never "live up to the name," compared to the benchmark set by current Dagger. It's a simple concept.
by franklyworks | 2025-12-17 03:33:06+00:00
Runner price based on CPU/memory and time makes sense, since those are the costs associated with executing runners.

The costs for GitHub doing action workflows (excluding running) is less related to job duration.

The most charitable interpretation is that per-minute pricing is easier to understand, especially if you already pay runners per minute.

The less charitable interpretation is that they charge that because they can, as they have the mindshare and network effect to keep you from changing.
Show HN: Scrappy Free AI Code Assistant
by VibeGuy | 2025-12-17 03:34:02+00:00
After 319 commits, scrappy is finally ready to be called v1.

https://pypi.org/project/scrappy-ai/

pip install scrappy-ai

The app orchestrates free tier LLM providers to create a free code assistant. Current models for code agent:

# 1. Cerebras Qwen 235B - instruction-tuned, massive model # 2. Groq Llama 4 - fast, good tool use # 3. Groq Kimi K2 - fast, 128k context # 4. Gemini - fallback (JSON issues but huge context)

Features include: semantic code index with lancedb/fastembed, conversation history, custom task routing, streaming chat.

Get free API keys from Cerebras, Groq, and Gemini and give it a shot! Use it and contribute!
by throw4847285 | 2025-12-17 03:34:44+00:00
I'm not a scientist, and I don't even have a very good statistical background, so correct me if I'm wrong; would it be far to say that the lack of skepticism about fMRI studies in the broader public is due to scientism? Because of naive reductionism and a gut understanding of what is "scientific", people are far more skeptical of a study that says, "we surveyed 100,000 people" vs. "we scanned the brains of 10 people." I've noticed a similar phenomenon with psych vs. evolutionary psych. People have an image in their head of what is scientific that has nothing to do with statistical significance and everything to do with vibes.
by simianwords | 2025-12-17 03:35:27+00:00
Claude code and other AI coding tools must have a * mandatory * hook for verification.

For front end - the verification is make sure that the UI looks expected (can be verified by an image model) and clicking certain buttons results in certain things (can be verified by chatgpt agent but its not public ig).

For back end it will involve firing API requests one by one and verifying the results.

To make this easier, we need to somehow give an environment for claude or whatever agent to run these verifications on and this is the gap that is missing. Claude Code, Codex should now start shipping verification environments that make it easy for them to verify frontend and backend tasks and I think antigravity already helps a bit here.

------

The thing about backend verification is that it is different in different companies and requires a custom implementation that can't easily be shared across companies. Each company has its own way to deploy stuff.

Imagine a concrete task like creating a new service that reads from a data stream, runs transformations, puts it in another data stream where another new service consumes the transformed data and puts it into an AWS database like Aurora.

``` stream -> service (transforms) -> stream -> service -> Aurora ```

To one shot this with claude code, it must know everything about the company

- how does one consume streams in the company? Schema registry?

- how does one create a new service and register dependencies? how does one deploy it to test environment and production?

- how does one even create an Aurora DB? request approvals and IAM roles etc?

My question is: what would it take for Claude Code to one shot this? At the code level it is not too hard and it can fit in context window easily but the * main * problem is the fragmented processes in creating the infra and operations behind it which is human based now (and need not be!).

-----

My prediction is that companies will make something like a new "agent" environment where all these processes (that used to require a human) can be done by an agent without human intervention.

I'm thinking of other solutions here, but if anyone can figure it out, please tell!
by stevenwoo | 2025-12-17 03:37:19+00:00
This happened to me when the local credit union, TechCU, overhauled their web interface and app. I called their help line and stumped them for a while. I finally figured out their interface allowed me to use a period in my password and confirmation field and accepted them but somehow their login process did not. To their credit the characters they listed as allowable did not list period which I did not read carefully and just skimmed the first time I saw it.
by Anon1096 | 2025-12-17 03:38:46+00:00
負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native speakers still distinguish these.

Feel free to try listening yourself though:

頬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care about hoo: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja

方 https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%...

In some cases though there is still a clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠
by itake | 2025-12-17 03:40:50+00:00
I wish they left space to discuss the Japan’s Furusato Nōzei and China's Hukou system and how they impact non-residents.

For example, if your hukou is registered to a rural community, you do not have access to the same level of public healthcare that people with Shanghai hukous have.

edit: replaced 'Jūminhyō' with Japan’s Furusato Nōzei
by naniwaduni | 2025-12-17 03:40:57+00:00
It was almost never quite Hepburn either, usually shi/chi/tsu/fu/ji with no di/du, but often alongside wo/he/ha (in roughly that order of likelihood, not always consistently), macrons almost never, っち is cch. Ironically, I have to imagine there's more "bastardized Nihonsiki" out there than "bastardized Kunreisiki", because the differences between the two are exactly the ones that matter when typing them out, and of course everyone in the j/e scenes is by far most often inputting wa-puro ro-maji (and of course that's ji, not zi, because which one is on the home row?).

In short, the usual infelicities of Japanese romanization as practiced in the wild on keyboards people actually have, and there is a method to the madness but it's not what any of the standards reflect.
by jrjeksjd8d | 2025-12-17 03:41:19+00:00
To be more charitable to TFA, machine translation is a field where there aren't great alternatives and the downside is pretty limited. If something is in another language you don't read it at all. You can translate a bunch of documents and benchmark the result and demonstrate that the model doesn't completely change simple sentences. Another related area is OCR - there are sometimes mistakes, but it's tractable to create a model and verify it's mostly correct.

LLMs being applied to everything under the sun feels like we're solving problems that have other solutions, and the answers aren't necessarily correct or accurate. I don't need a dubiously accurate summary of an article in English, I can read and comprehend it just fine. The downside is real and the utility is limited.
by hatefulheart | 2025-12-17 03:41:29+00:00
I’m afraid the boosters hear nothing.

The commenter you’re replying to, in their heart of hearts, truly believes in 5 years that an LLM will be writing the majority of the code for a project like say Postgres or Linux.

Worth bearing in mind the boosters said this 5 years ago, and will say this in 5 years time.
by mmooss | 2025-12-17 03:41:32+00:00
Who provides resources to the Es and Ds? Who hires new ones? Who raises money from investors and banks, and ensures you have cash flow and ROI? How do you manage 100 Es and Ds without a PM?

Small teams are more efficient but (obviously) can't produce at scale. When you scale up, there's enough HR or finance or marketing, or PM, etc. work for full-time specialists. And larger orgs need bureaucracy - if you have a way around that, the world is yours.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-17 03:42:20+00:00
I would strongly suggest you use your turnsignals, always, without exception. You are relying on perfect awareness of your surroundings which isn't going to be the case over a longer stretch of time and you are obliged to signal changes in direction irrespective of whether or not you believe there are others around you. I'm saying this as a frequent cyclist who more than once has been cut off by cars that were not indicating where they were going because they had not seen me, and I though they were going to go straight instead of turn into my lane or the bike path.

Signalling your turns is zero cost, there is no reason to optimize this.
by stephen_g | 2025-12-17 03:42:53+00:00
I'm sure it should help bring down the background levels of airborne pollutants, which should help as kind of a layered defence. But I expect it would be unlikely you could get it low enough to be in the same ballpark as a laminar hood, just because of the huge difference in air volume (the room is huge in comparison to the space the hood covers, so you need to filter way more, unless it was extremely well sealed in which case you'd just have to filter for long enough)
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-17 03:43:45+00:00
Sure, you can always remove it, but an average person posting AI images on Facebook or whatever probably won't bother. I was skeptical of Google's SynthID when I first heard about it but I've been seeing it used to identify suspected AI images on Reddit recently (the example I saw today was cropped and lightly edited with a filter but still got flagged correctly) and it's cool to have a hard data point when present. It won't help with bad/manipulative actors but a decent mitigation for the low effort slop scenario since it can survive the kind of basic editing a regular person knows how to do on their phone and typical compression when uploading/serving.