MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cchianel | 2025-12-01 04:19:15+00:00
That depends; do you want the optimal solution?

If so, I agree it is impossible for a fully general problem solver to find the optimal solution to a problem in a reasonable amount of time (unless P = NP, which is unlikely).

However, if a "good enough" solution that is only 1% worse than optimal works, then a fully general solver can do the job in a reasonable amount of time.

One such example of a fully general solver is Timefold; you express your constraints using plain old Java objects, so you can in theory do whatever you want in your constraint functions (you can even do network calls, but that is extremely ill-advised since that will drastically slow down score calculation speeds).

Disclosure: I work for Timefold.
by dfe | 2025-12-01 04:19:24+00:00
This is a time-tested winning strategy that too few corporate owners embrace.

When you look at some of the most well-known industrial companies, their founders basically did this.

Difficulty: give away too much of the company trying to raise capital and most investors won't let you do this. Of course, you aren't really the owner then anymore, are you?

I think that's the allure of effective altruism. You founded a company or were early enough in a company to have enough shares to sell to investors. Those investors want big returns. The company is now at their mercy, but hey, they gave you a pile of cash so you can spend it on feeling good.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 04:19:39+00:00
Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood.

Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).
by lesuorac | 2025-12-01 04:19:53+00:00
> Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running.

I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones.

It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-01 04:19:54+00:00
I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.

My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out.

We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(
by dwohnitmok | 2025-12-01 04:20:09+00:00
> How do AI did it? Using already existing math. If we need new math to prove Collatz, Goldbach or Riemman, LLMs are simply SOL.

An unproved theorem now proved is by definition new math. Will LLMs get you to Collatz, Goldbach, or Riemann? Unclear.

But it's not like there's some magical, entirely unrelated to existing math, "new math" that was required to solve all the big conjectures of the past. They proceeded, as always, by proving new theorems one by one.
by jeffjeffbear | 2025-12-01 04:20:30+00:00
I have seen this particular idea come up a lot lately.

Personaly I think Intel's early investment in linux had a lot to do with it. They also sold a compiler and marketed to labs and such which bought chips. So linux compatibility meant a lot to decision makers.

AMD the underdog went more in on Linux compat than NVIDIA. Which may have been a business decsion.

I dunno, maybe the GPL effect was more a market share thing with developers than a copyleft thing.

Nota Bene: I do love copyleft and license all my own projects AGPL
by Stevemiller07 | 2025-12-01 04:21:01+00:00
Interesting move from AWS. Multi-cloud networking has usually required third-party solutions, so seeing a native option signals how much demand has grown. The real question is how well this integrates with existing setups, especially for teams that already manage complex routing between providers. Will be worth watching how pricing, latency, and operational overhead compare to current cross-cloud tools.
Show HN: Two physics-based programming languages (WPE/TME and Crystalline)
by yodamonk1 | 2025-12-01 04:21:59+00:00
Hi HN! I've been working on two novel programming languages built on field theory from superconductor research.

*WPE/TME* - A geometric calculus language for structural and temporal reasoning. Think: mathematical notation for encoding semantic relationships. Four parameters (domain, shell, phase, curvature) let you explicitly represent how components couple, influence each other hierarchically, and evolve over time.

*Crystalline* - A code synthesis language that generates provably optimal code through physics-guided evolution. Not template filling. It discovers novel optimizations (async I/O, streaming, parallelization, loop fusion) through energy minimization, achieving 3-4× performance improvement.

Both languages share the same geometric foundation from superconductor physics but serve completely different purposes. WPE/TME is for semantic reasoning (great for LLM scaffolding). Crystalline is for generating high-performance code.

Key differences from existing approaches: - Deterministic (same input always produces same output) - Explainable (energy equations show WHY decisions were made) - Novel code generation (genuinely discovers optimizations) - Mathematical guarantees on performance

Crystalline has a Python implementation. WPE/TME has a Python reference implementation, but it's really a notation system (like how LaTeX is a language for typesetting math).

GitHub: [will add link on launch day] Papers: [will add ResearchGate links - 3 papers explaining theory]

I'd love feedback on: 1. The language design - does geometric encoding make sense? 2. For Crystalline: what benchmarks would convince you the synthesis works? 3. For WPE/TME: would explicit structure help your AI reasoning tasks?

Happy to answer questions about the physics, the languages, or the implementations!
by rapjr9 | 2025-12-01 04:22:38+00:00
Not everyone sees color exactly the same way, for example some people can see a little into the IR and UV. While the pilots may not be colorblind, the people who repair the displays might be. Situations can also make pilots colorblind, like strong glare coming through a window. It's better to have an unambiguous display that is easy to interpret rather than to rely on something that can be subjective like color. People can only reliably identify a few distinct colors, so if you have 300 kinds of planes and missiles to identify using shades of red and purple doesn't work so well. An ID number next to an icon can handle thousands of kinds of entities. People can tell color #F0479E is different then #F04750 when comparing them side by side, but they probably can't tell you what the exact name of each shade is, and at a glance they might think they are both the same color. So it's not so much colorblindness as it is the limits of human perception. What I call Hunter Green and English Racing Green might look like the same color to you.
by kragen | 2025-12-01 04:22:59+00:00
CI runners would be the main advantage of GitLab over bare Git, I think. Also if you want to show other people your personal project at some point, it may be nice to be able to link to a diff or a historical version of a file that they can see in a browser. Or just a syntax-highlighted file or a rendered Markdown or Jupyter file. Also previous release tarballs.
by adastra22 | 2025-12-01 04:23:06+00:00
I don’t disagree with what you say. But why did Linux work on all that hardware? I assert that if you trace that line of thinking to its conclusion, the answer is the GPL.

Many people and organizations adapted BSD to run on their hardware, but they had no obligation to upstream those drivers. Linux mandated upstreaming (if you wanted to distribute drivers to users).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 04:23:34+00:00
>Junior engineers can fight back against this by

Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.

>This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:

This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.

And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-12-01 04:24:23+00:00
Do note the 'ls' usage:

PS Cert:\LocalMachine\Root\> ls PSParentPath: Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::LocalMachine\Root Thumbprint Subject EnhancedKeyUsageList ---------- ------- -------------------- CDD4EEAE6000AC7F40C3802C171E30148030C072 CN=Microsoft Root C… BE36A4562FB2EE05DBB3D32323ADF445084ED656 CN=Thawte Timestamp… A43489159A520F0D93D032CCAF37E7FE20A8B419 CN=Microsoft Root A… 92B46C76E13054E104F230517E6E504D43AB10B5 CN=Symantec Enterpr… 8F43288AD272F3103B6FB1428485EA3014C0BCFE CN=Microsoft Root C… 7F88CD7223F3C813818C994614A89C99FA3B5247 CN=Microsoft Authen… 245C97DF7514E7CF2DF8BE72AE957B9E04741E85 OU=Copyright (c) 19… 18F7C1FCC3090203FD5BAA2F861A754976C8DD25 OU="NO LIABILITY AC… E12DFB4B41D7D9C32B30514BAC1D81D8385E2D46 CN=UTN-USERFirst-Ob… {Code Signing, Time Stamping, Encrypting File System} DF717EAA4AD94EC9558499602D48DE5FBCF03A25 CN=IdenTrust Commer… DF3C24F9BFD666761B268073FE06D1CC8D4F82A4 CN=DigiCert Global …

Now do the same without a convoluted hodge-podge of one-liner involving grep, python and cutting exact text pieces with regex.

I always love how linux fans do like to talk without any experience nor the will to get the said experience.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-12-01 04:24:31+00:00
I some months back called every independent EV mechanic I could find a listing for in my state to see if they would help me disable the cellular modem of any of the models I was interested in buying, and they mostly told me either that they couldn't or wouldn't. One of the more polite shops I got in touch with explained that many models don't have a separate board that can be disabled anymore, or otherwise have more things on the board that need to be talking on the CAN bus for other, actually important parts of the car to function. As such, I still have my old car.

Since then, I've learned about the 50ohm dummy antennas you can buy. I might try that if my car dies before an AWD/4WD Slate truck becomes an option, and also if my living situation can accommodate charging.
by lesuorac | 2025-12-01 04:24:37+00:00
Recession are a natural part of the business cycle though. Like it's good to have them, Democrats not allowing a recession to occur just makes the next bubble even bigger. And all kinds of inefficient businesses are allow to zombify when the resources could be used elsewhere.

Now, the bigger problem is that you're supposed to raise taxes during the boom so that you can run deficits during the recession to recover quickly. Unfortunately we run deficits during the boom so that the crash is even bigger as well ...
by echelon | 2025-12-01 04:24:45+00:00
A big tech breakup needn't be anti-capitalist. In fact, it might be the most pro-capitalist move.

If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit.

Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc.

Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V.

Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies.

Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.
by cperciva | 2025-12-01 04:25:43+00:00
each point release is only supported for about three months

Where are you getting 3 months from? It's usually 9 months and occasionally 12 months.

Also, major versions are supported for 4 years and unless you're messing with kernel APIs nothing should break. (Testing is always good! But going from 14.3 to 14.4 is not a matter of needing lots of extra development work.)
by 8organicbits | 2025-12-01 04:25:51+00:00
> like CA vectors

This gets complicated because you're not safe on your home or corporate network either when CAs are breached. The incident everyone talks about, DigiNotar (2011), had stolen CA keys issuing certificates that intercepted traffic across several ISPs. If that's the threat you're looking to handle, "avoid public wifi" isn't the right answer. Perhaps you're doing certificate pinning, application level signing, closed networks, etc.

> Entrust (2024)

I recently wrote a blog post[1] about CA incidents, so I notice this one isn't like the others. Entrust's PKI business was not impacted by the hack and Entrust remains a trusted CA.

> Click here or use your login

Password manager autofill is the solution there, both on public wifi and on a corporate network. Perhaps an ad blocker as well.

> people connecting to an unknown unsupervised network

Aren't most people's home networks "unsupervised"?

[1] https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/
by Lerc | 2025-12-01 04:26:44+00:00
Never. Started with Level 1 Basic on a TRS-80. Used many things s since. I long resisted python, but Torch managed to push past my distaste whitespace based coding.

I look forward to seeing the languages that come from people with the benefit of a few years of Rust deciding what works for them and what direction they would like to move.

Still waiting for something that is like JavaScript with optional typing, none of the autocasting that causes Wats, and parallel loops and map,filter,reduce, etc. Oh, and tuples, immutables, and a pony.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-12-01 04:27:12+00:00
This letter is from a leading defamation law firm but it does not actually threaten legal action, it just asks the Times to "do right by its readers" (maybe that's after the first four pages that are shown in this tweet). If they thought they had a good case, they would make that very clear. The fact that they spend a lot of time complaining about things that the Times didn't actually report and complaining that he was treated differently than other people tells me that this is all for PR.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-01 04:28:08+00:00
Can you explain the pattern?

I mean, not "look at the Conway's Game of Life, and extrapolate from that, we are nothing but this". This is not a proof, right?

What I mean by "damn if you try" is the fact that consciousness in the current state of things is unreachable. Anything you can say about it is unfalsifiable. It's as if it doesn't exist (although everyone experience the phenomena every day).

So it's quantum that gives rises to atoms, and then quantum stops there. Above that layer, it's atoms. Then above that layer, chemistry takes the torch, and so on. If you need something about "mind", it's on the psychology layer or something, and it's built on previous ones (evolution, chemistry, etc).

There is no room to talk about consciousness in this arrangement, so the problem is tucked away as "emergent" (other word is "illusion"). Meanwhile, there are phenomena that definitely happen (you feel conscious, don't you?) that would benefit from having an explanation, even terminology that is not poisoned.
by master_crab | 2025-12-01 04:29:53+00:00
I agree, Let’s encrypt and ACME played a massive role. But it’s still far easier having Cloudflare handle TLS encryption for you.

And i say this as someone who uses ACME in certmanager and certbot at home and still prefers the ease with which Cloudflare generates a cert for my domain and terminates TLS for the public side of my cloudflare tunnel.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-01 04:30:23+00:00
I saw this coming way before AI became a thing around 2016 when I was 42. Software development was becoming a commodity where there were plenty of “good enough” developers where no matter what, it was going to be saturated.

If someone is trying to sell themselves as an undifferentiated developer in 2025 or later, it’s going to be an uphill battle unless you can lean on your network.

At 51, if my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life.

Anecdotally, I found software development adjacent roles quickly when I was looking both last year and the year before.
by Mtinie | 2025-12-01 04:31:03+00:00
As I think more on how this could work, I’d treat the fully commented code as the source of truth (SOT).

1. SOT through a processor to strip comments and extra spaces. Publish to feature branch.

2. Point Claude at feature branch. Prompt for whatever changes you need. This runs against the minimalist feature branch. These changes will be committed with comments and readable spacing for the new code.

3. Verify code changes meet expectations.

4. Diff the changes from minimal version, and merge only that code into SOT.

Repeat.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 04:31:06+00:00
There's a recent podcast that talked about this if you have 15 minutes to watch a segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYRCYdxVMaM

TL;DR Gen Z is "slightly better off" in pure financial status compared to older generations , even with inflation adjusted. But the distribution on what got cheaper overtime and what got more expensive is causing the true strain among Gen Z.

It also helps to explain a bit of a generation clash when you see how older generations can chastise the younger ones over what were "luxuriies" when they were that age. The entire market is flipped.
by squeek502 | 2025-12-01 04:31:48+00:00
That would only interact with the shell, as `%` is not actually part of the environment variable name, it's just a way to tell the shell you want it to get the value of an environment variable. The environment block itself is a NULL terminated list of NULL terminated WTF-16 strings of the format <key>=<value>, so `=` would be the more interesting thing to try.

And indeed, it looks like using `=` as a drive letter breaks things in an interesting way:

=:\> cd bar Not enough memory resources are available to process this command. =:\bar>

`cd` exits with error code 1, but the directory change still goes through.

With a program that dumps the NULL terminated <key>=<value> lines of the environment block, it looks like it does still modify the environment, but in an unexpected way:

Before `cd /D =:\`, I had a line that looked like this (i.e. the per-drive CWD for C:\ was C:\foo):

=C:=C:\foo

After `cd /D =:\`, that was unexpectedly modified to:

=C:==:\

Funnily enough, that line means that the "working directory" of the C drive is `=:\`, and that actually is acted upon:

=:\foo> cd /D C: =:\>

---

You might also be interested to know that '= in the name of an environment variable' is a more general edge case that is handled inconsistently on more than just Windows: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23331
by ux266478 | 2025-12-01 04:32:52+00:00
People will roll out the trades whenever employment is mentioned, but do you have tradies in your family? Do you have friends who are tradies? It's not easy to get in, it takes a long time to make journeyman, and work can have seriously spotty periods no matter who you are. Fact of the matter is, it's not really an alternative to anything except other types of bluecollar work.
by GaryBluto | 2025-12-01 04:33:09+00:00
I lost what little respect I had for Codeberg when they tried to spin a teenager exploiting an opportunity to spam/troll[1] that GitHub had solved several years prior[2] into "hate campaigns from far-right forces" that "endanger free/libre software projects" so they could toot their own horn at how good they were in the face of adversity[3] (and generally have a good moan about the right-wing) instead of admitting they should've seen this coming and prevented it happening in the first place.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1786

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627061

[3] https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha...
by mattbillenstein | 2025-12-01 04:34:29+00:00
I've done all the years and all the problems.

The part I enjoy the most is after figuring out a solution for myself is seeing what others did on Reddit or among a small group of friends who also does it. We often have slightly different solutions or realize one of our solutions worked "by accident" ignoring some side case that didn't appear in our particular input. That's really the fun of it imho.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-01 04:35:09+00:00
I see this in a similar light to the opioid crisis. While it won’t directly kill you like opioid addiction or overdose, economically strip mining Gen Z and Gen Alpha for gains using meme stocks, crypto, sports betting, prediction markets, and similar systems is going to leave us in a bad spot after these enterprises have left with their gains.

Indicators to track will be suicide, bankruptcies, domestic violence, military washout rate, etc.

Related:

The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025

”Giving Up": The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5770722 - November 19, 2025
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 04:35:26+00:00
Based on the numbers we had before the BLS clammed up, all sectors except healthcare is going down. But yes, tech is one of the bigger slumps. If your job isn't to help take care of the aging boomer population, you're not having a good time.

I work in games and have the occasional slump. But this time is much different. all staffind agencies for temp work in my city pretty much said there's nothing out there. my local area is pretty much a bunch of fractional janitorial roles and that's it.
by tzs | 2025-12-01 04:37:09+00:00
It's not clear to me that I should care if my data was in the breach. For my data to have been in the breach the following must have happened.

1. I opted in to sharing my information with everyone that 23andMe identified as relatives. "Relatives" in this context means genetic 4th cousins or closer. For me that turned out to be 1500 people, all of whom are as far as I know complete strangers to me (I'm adopted).

2. One or more of those 1500 people used the same password on 23andMe that they used on some other site that suffered a breach that gave up plaintext passwords.

3. That password was included in a credential stuffing attack that let someone get into their 23andMe account, where that intruder downloaded the account owner's relatives list which included my information.

When I chose to share my data with 1500 strangers I was pretty much conceding that I didn't really care who got it.