MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kyledrake | 2025-12-19 17:33:50+00:00
> TikTok causes chemical release in the brain and can cause other self psychological damage.

You're literally describing any activity that someone enjoys generating natural dopamine, and then comparing it to a drug that crosses your blood-brain barrier and mimicks your brain's chemistry to give you a super-charged chemical version of that. The difference in dopamine levels is orders of magnitude. Your brain re-wires itself to handle the level of dopamine produced and you start only feeling normal if you're constantly using the drug. I would be surprised if Tiktok generated even 1/10th the dopamine level of using methamphetamine. It all honestly sounds quite fun, but my awareness of the consequences will prevent me from ever trying them.

Eating a good meal, having sex, finishing writing your first novel, winning a race, doing breath work, doing yoga, rock climbing, and an unlimited supply of examples generate dopamine in our brains the same way that Tiktok does. They can all ruin your life just as much, if you allow them to.

A much better comparison would be to describe Tiktok as a "digital slot machine", and indeed slot machine mechanics have been heavily studied by social media platforms to make usage more habitual. Nir Eyal's Hooked was an interesting and informative read on this topic. If he describes social media as heroin in the book I'll happily take the self-own.
by afavour | 2025-12-19 17:34:42+00:00
I don’t know. In a way I don’t think it matters if China are currently actively engaged in altering the opinions of Americans, what matters is whether they can. And an unknowable algorithm absolutely gives them the power to.

IMO the bigger problem is that national security is only part of the problem. An unknowable algorithm controlled by the Ellisons is not necessarily less dangerous than one controlled by China, the motivations are just different.
by tsazan | 2025-12-19 17:35:05+00:00
You are right. Standardization often drifts from reality. That is why we built Section 9: Cross-Verification. The HTML remains the audit layer. The Agent does not trust blindly. It spot-checks. If commerce.txt says $50 but the HTML says $100, the merchant gets a Trust Score penalty. We do not replace the ground truth. We cache it, and we audit the cache to ensure it matches.
by port11 | 2025-12-19 17:35:14+00:00
Yup, and this is the thing Apple really doesn't have to do because they make plenty of money. Enough that they never need to run ads; but certainly enough that you should never be allowed to pay to be at the top of app searches. It forces the actual best hit to pay to be a hit. I just searched for ‘Jellyfin’ and got an ad for an app that tells you your Spotify stats.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-12-19 17:36:02+00:00
lol I also had all sorts of commands memorized for k8s and pandas I don't remember at all. But let's all be honest, was it valuable to constantly lookup how to make a command do what you want?

I wasted so much time on dumbass pandas documentation search when I should have been building. AI is literally the internet all you are doing is querying the internet 2.0.

I often kept vast ugly text documents filled with random commands because I always forgot them.
by scottyah | 2025-12-19 17:36:32+00:00
I sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages).

Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).

The online world is a wild place.
by moffkalast | 2025-12-19 17:36:53+00:00
That's not something you can do reliably in software, datacenter grade NVMe drives come with power loss protection and additional capacitors to handle that gracefully. If power is cut at the wrong moment the partition may not be mountable afterwards otherwise.

If you really live somewhere with frequent outages, buy an industrial drive that has a PLP rating. Or get a UPS, they tend to be cheaper.
by xp84 | 2025-12-19 17:37:01+00:00
Regardless of where you stand on American politics, it is just plain bad for all Americans for China to advance its geopolitical ambitions.

This is not a left versus right thing. China being unchallenged in the world will spell a quality of life decrease for us in the West. They are not “the good guys.” You’re free to see both parties as ‘neutral’ in alignment, but you still don’t want to have to be the losing party when they come into conflict. My point is China is not going to be sharing any of what they gain with Americans, even the ones who cheer for them - it’ll in fact be coming at your expense.

The CPC having a direct feed into the brains of every Gen Z and younger American is trivially easy to exploit - and there is a 0% chance that they won’t do so next year when they will likely invade Taiwan. If China is in control of TikTok, they’ll boost a ton of propaganda, supposedly people “from Taiwan” who greet the PLA as liberators, explaining how Taiwan being independent is actually oppression, and how they’ve always considered themselves part of the PRC, only evil politicians were keeping them apart. And they’ll make sure to suppress all media that exposes the violence on the ground. Finally, they’ll boost content urging Americans to protest US involvement and to sabotage the military, such as by chaining themselves to ships, etc.

Ryan McBeth has made a ton of videos laying out how this will work, and he does a better job than I have of explaining this.

TikTok is a cyberweapon.
by abraae | 2025-12-19 17:37:24+00:00
As a non-American, but one who worked in US companies for decades, I feel Americans are influenced by economic gigantism.

The American experience is of triumphing with audacious, go big or go home schemes that others wouldn't or couldn't attempt.

To cherry pick one example, during WWII the US created airstrips on tiny pacific islands to fight the Japanese. Few people imagined it was possible to freight in the bulldozers, machines and materials to accomplish this, and it was game changing.

And of course we have the Manhattan project. Railroads. Gigantic IT companies like Oracle, IBM, Apple and more lately Google.

These successes fed into American exceptionalism.

This has its pros and cons.

In a world on the cusp of incredible discoveries, it let audacious American megacorps capture the high ground.

But explosive capitalist success has costs and masks underlying issues. Many people have had the experience of starting work at US Megacorp and being astonished at the waste, ineptitude and back stabbing that happens - yet somehow the corporate continues to thrive and throw off mountains of money.

The experience of that easy money breeds an unhealthy version of American exceptionalism where people start to believe they will and should succeed - just because American.

Things are different elsewhere in the world.

Up and comers make do with what they have and struggle upwards while the USA cruises.

Just one example are the thriving Chinese fabbing companies like JLCPCB. Every tech product contains a PCB. It's pretty obvious now that PCB manufacture is an absolute core competency in tech going forward.

Any two man upstart tech company can use JLCPCB's free online tools to design a PCB, then click to have the factory fabricate the board, solder on all the components and connectors, and have it in the customer's hands a few days later. True on demand manufacturing.

What would have cost thousands of dollars, taken months and required a team of experts a few years ago now takes days and costs a few bucks.

The US is nowhere in this relatively new but critical industry. The only US competitors are stuck in a local minimum where they get assured business at generous prices from security-sensitive govt agencies who can't outsource to China, but they can't remotely compete on price with their Chinese competitors on price or even quality and timeliness.
by derektank | 2025-12-19 17:37:28+00:00
I’m curious, has the author seen or read any of Joanna Stern’s other reporting before? Her stories are often silly frames that explore the experience of using consumer technology. She’s not an aggressive industry reporter, her purpose is to explain or reveal what the user experience of new technology is, often for an unsophisticated audience. See for example her story about using conversational chatbots while out camping[1] or how to use tech to unplug from tech[2]. This seems like a perfectly fine niche for a writer and the vending machine story is of a piece with her past work.

[1] https://youtu.be/hUyj3d-BSh8

[2] https://youtu.be/POl7UYwBpWw
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-12-19 17:38:04+00:00
> you'll encounter a box running a distro version from before /etc/os-release became the standard

Do those boxes really still exist? Debian, which isn't really known to be the pinacle of bleeding edge, has had /etc/os-release since Debian 7, released in May 2013. RHEL 7, the oldest Red Hat still in extended support, also has it.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-12-19 17:38:07+00:00
> so if it doesn't work then I have to figure out why.

But it's built on top of things that are understood. If it doesn't work, then either:

• You didn't understand the problem fully, so the approach you were using is wrong.

• You didn't understand the language (library, etc) correctly, so the computer didn't grasp your meaning.

• The code you wrote isn't the code you intended to write.

This is a much more tractable situation to be in than "nobody knows what the code means, or has a mental model for how it's supposed to operate", which is the norm for a sufficiently-large LLM-produced codebase.

> My series of accidental successes

That somewhat misses the point. To write working code, you must have some understanding of the relationship between your intention and your output. LLMs have a poor-to-nonexistent understanding of this relationship, which they cover up with the ability to regurgitate (permutations of) a large corpus of examples – but this does not grant them the ability to operate outside the domain of those examples.

LLM-generated codebases very much do not lie within that domain: they lack the clues and signs of underlying understanding that human readers and (to an extent) LLMs rely on. Worse, the LLMs do replicate those signals, but they don't encode anything coherent in the signal. Unless you are very used to critically analysing LLM output, this can be highly misleading. (It reminds me of how chess grandmasters blunder, and struggle to even remember, unreachable board positions.)

Believing you know how LLM-generated code works, and why it works, is not the same as that actually being the case – in a very real sense that is different to that of code with human authors.
by tsazan | 2025-12-19 17:38:30+00:00
APIs are toll roads. If you need an API key just to read a price, it is not the Open Web. It is a walled garden. We designed this to be permissionless. A text file has no gatekeeper. It bypasses the rent seekers entirely. The standard must belong to the commons, or it becomes just another extraction layer. Keep fighting the good fight.
by retrac | 2025-12-19 17:38:39+00:00
The leaked US National Security Strategy docs outline a plan to break up the EU:

> However, a longer, unpublished draft of the document was circulated prior to the official, public strategy. It reportedly goes into more detail about the plans the US has in store for Europe. According to the Washington-based digital media platform Defense One, which claims to have seen the draft, it lists Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary as countries that the US should "work more with … with the goal of pulling them away" from the European Union.The White House has denied the existence of any such draft.

https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...

Despite the WH claims it seems to have been generally accepted as true already in Europe; Germany's chancellor has commented publicly on it.
by jorvi | 2025-12-19 17:38:56+00:00
The UK, Australia and the EU also seem hell-bent on this. China already has aggressive user controls in place.

I am not a conspiracy nut at all but it feels off that so many states are all simultaneously pushing for stuff like this and message scanning.

Together with more and more services requiring hardware attestation (think banking, medical, streaming, games) it seems like we're gliding towards a future of tight digital control by states+corporations.

Honestly all it would really take is Meta deciding their messaging apps require your account to be verified by some state system and your device to be in a verified state. WhatsApp + Instagram + FB Messenger have over 5 billion active users. They're not gonna move to Signal and Telegram en masse. Plus who says their CEOs won't get arrested (again) on some phony charge to pressure them into requiring verification.

Blech.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-19 17:39:06+00:00
I am fine with the current layout, but I also have to say that I preferred old.reddit.com as a layout base (the new reddit UI is horrible, and reddit overall succumbed to willy-nilly tyranny of moderators on power-trips). I am not saying HN should change to become like old.reddit.com in the UI, mind you, but a few things could perhaps be considered. Using old.reddit.com was much more efficient to me than the default UI here. It is not the end of the world, but I would not mind small, slight, modest improvements to the UI (not only the front page, but all of HN).

Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions and changes and people could vote. It should be as conservative as possible, though, because while I preferred old.reddit.com, I also think that not everyone may prefer changes. So one should aim for the highest acceptance value possible, before making any change.
by xp84 | 2025-12-19 17:39:12+00:00
“Your information” was never the important thing. That’s a sideshow. The important thing is that controlling an algorithmic feed that is wildly popular amongst multiple generations of Americans means the CPC can control American public opinion at the touch of a button. Literally no country would allow a sworn adversary to do that. Why do you think China doesn’t allow Facebook or Twitter? And those aren’t even government-controlled American companies (sure, they’re subject to coercion, but not to the extent Chinese companies are).
by kvemkon | 2025-12-19 17:39:23+00:00
> DDR6 will double the memory bandwidth over DDR5

Considering PC desktops. DDR4 is 3200 MT/s max JEDEC. DDR5 is available on AMD since 3 years and is 5600. DDR6 specification is almost finished. It looks like DDR5 will double performance just right before new DDR6 DIMMs appear. Thus I'd expect DDR6 to double the bandwidth just as late when the new memory standard arrives.
by diydsp | 2025-12-19 17:39:36+00:00
Router designers hate him...

Srsly... the ram inside a core router is some of the most precious resources around... this is an ooold idea.. people were doing at least as far back as the 2000s.. i showed them how our router (Avici TSR) worked and said "please don't use the super fancy fabric temporary store for this."

This kills the router designer.
by lesny_ludek | 2025-12-19 17:39:51+00:00
I built a simple, privacy-first iOS app to bring Garmin HRV data into Apple Health.

- One-tap sync for any date range - Full HRV history import (weeks or months at once) - No servers, no tracking, no analytics - Free download, no ads, no subscription

Only night HRV is synced but Garmin doesn't record HRV during the day but it's good enough for seeing the trend.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-19 17:40:05+00:00
Although I enjoy the public key/private key ideas, If you wish to talk encrypted, one of the best ways to do such could be having signal if you don't mind centralization

But if you want decentralization some options i can recommend are matrix,simplex,session etc.

But to be honest, there is a good point that you raise about how to talk decentralized on bluesky

well, one of the ideas that I can think of right now, is that someone can use https://keyoxide.org/ and paste in their public key and also connect both bluesky and matrix and then have the keyoxide as part of something public like a comment

The problem in this is that it becomes tedious and does add more friction to the whole thing but definitely possible.
by vouwfietsman | 2025-12-19 17:40:32+00:00
Ok, I'm not an expert here, you most likely are, but just my 2 cents on your response: I would very much argue to not make this magic. e.g:

> take memory snapshots after each step in a workflow

Don't do this. Just give people explicit boundaries of where their snapshots occur, and what is snapshotted, so they have control both over durability and performance. Make it clear to people that everything should be in the chain of command of the snapshotting framework: e.g no file-local or global variables. This is already how people program web services but somehow nobody leans into it.

The thing is, if you want people to understand durability but you also hide it from them, it will actually be much more complicated to understand and work with a framework.

The real golden ticket I think is to make readable intuitive abstractions around durability, not hide it behind normal-looking code.

Please steal my startup.
by tomku | 2025-12-19 17:40:33+00:00
It's using "Fortnite" as a synecdoche for Epic Games, because "I have to give an age verification company owned by Epic Games my passport to use Bluesky" isn't quite as effective at revving the outrage engines, even if it has the benefit of being true. Personally, I don't think people who are willing to do that are showing themselves to be trustworthy but you might feel differently.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-19 17:40:38+00:00
The TikTok deal seems to be more about empowering US corporations than anything else. It seems as if they hate all forms of competition under the orange man ruling the USA right now, so of course TikTok must be crushed (not that I use any of those antisocial media, it is just an observation made).

We see something similar in Europe in that Musk burps out the EU must disband after they fined his company for breaking local laws. It's like a really stupid variant of corporatocracy dominating the USA right now; at the least in the past it was a bit more subtle. Now it is like barbarian posing as oligarchs are having crazy fits. I think 99.9% of their wealth must be confiscated and given to The People - too much wealth makes the mind weak and leads them to act as tyrannical parasites.
Show HN: Starthub – Deploy horizontal n8n to Digital Ocean with one command
by tgirotto | 2025-12-19 17:41:13+00:00
Hello, I’ve been experimenting with Starthub, an npm-like CLI tool that chains Docker and WASM units to perform arbitrary workflows. Deploying open-source stacks horizontally across multiple nodes is often tedious and error-prone, so this is an attempt to make that kind of task reproducible and composable.

As an example, the command below deploys a horizontal n8n stack (postgres + redis + droplets + ssl) to DigitalOcean.

npx @starthub/cli@latest run starthubhq/n8n-horizontal-do:0.0.1

It’s just a rough MVP (the CLI needs A LOT of work still), but I’d love feedback on: - The approach for composable, stateless deployment actions - Multi-cloud or multi-target deployment ideas

Github repo: https://github.com/starthubhq/cli

Thank you for your time!
by jonathannorris | 2025-12-19 17:41:14+00:00
Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.

I was pretty worried about Cursor's business until they launched their Composer 1 model, which is fine-tuned to work amazingly well in their IDE. It's significantly faster than using any other model, and it's clearly fine-tuned for the type of work people use Cursor for. They are also clearly charging a premium for it and making a healthy margin on it, but for how fast + good it's totally worth it.

Composer 1 + now eventually creating an AI native version of GitHub with Graphite, that's a serious business, with a much clearer picture to me how Cursor gets to serious profitability vs the AI labs.
by 0xedd | 2025-12-19 17:41:14+00:00
We have coding agents heavily coupled with many aspects of the company's RnD cycle. About 1k devs.

Yes, you definitely need the project's context to have valuable generations. Different teams here have different context and model steering, according to their needs. For example, specific aspects of the company's architecture is supplied in the context. While much of the rest (architecture, codebases, internal docs, quarterly goals) are available as RAG.

It can become noisy and create more needless review work. Also, only experts in their field find value in the generations. If a junior relies on it blindly, the result is subpar and doesn't work.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-19 17:41:27+00:00
Is there some provision that enabled the executive branch to keep extending the purchase deadline?

If not, the sale is illegal. Congress passed a law saying that TikTok was to be banned. Not "can be sold after a bunch of backroom deals by tech aristocracy that happens to be friends with an incredibly corrupt President", but banned. SCOTUS agreed that the law held up to scrutiny.
by jerf | 2025-12-19 17:42:24+00:00
You can still find things like an Arduino Micro that has less ROM & RAM than the lunar lander.

But finding something new slower than a 2MHz CPU is probably a challenge nowadays; even the Micro is 16MHz and can probably be overclocked a ways above that without much work or risk.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AFY2S56 - not that that is necessarily the best way to buy such a system, just showing they exist.
by momojo | 2025-12-19 17:42:26+00:00
I'm surprised at the lukewarm reception. Admittedly I don't follow the image-to-3D space as much, but last time I checked in, the gloopy fuzzy outputs did not impress me.

I want to highlight what I believe is the coolest innovation: their novel O-Voxel data structure. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how they figured out the conversion from voxel-space to mesh-space. Those two worlds don't work well together.

A 2D analogy is that they figured out an efficient, bidirectional, one-shot method of converting PNG's into SVG's, without iteration. Crazy.
by jcamlin | 2025-12-19 17:42:35+00:00
Sigmoid controller allocates timesteps by solution stiffness—same idea as Adam for gradients. Fixed hyperparameters across 5 orders of magnitude in Reynolds number. Matches NASA benchmark (Rε = 1.000) at 1/8th resolution on laptop. Code + data public - see zenodo and github repo link in paper (link)
by tsazan | 2025-12-19 17:42:49+00:00
I respect that orthodoxy. It is the bedrock that allows the Internet to function. But we are optimizing for different variables. You optimize for architectural purity on a timeline of decades. You protect the namespace from temporary corporate flaws. I optimize for utility on a timeline of now. I want the flower shop owner to be visible to AI today, even if their platform is rigid. We have different North Stars. That is okay. You guard the temple. I will help the merchants outside. No leg-gnawing required. Thank you for the perspective.