MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2025-12-04 14:01:01+00:00
Transit should accept lots of options. Your credit card, a phone, or a pass. Modern e-readers can read all of the above and are very cheap so there is no reason to refuse any (unless they charge too high of a fee)

If you want to remove friction set a way such that a family has a maximum monthly charge they will pay. It does mean you need to track people, but if you a careful in how this is done it is worth it since cost for frequent travelers could be an objection and you want this peace of mind that your max cost is known.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-12-04 14:01:06+00:00
This is absolutely delusional, but Putin thanks you for serving his cause.

Regarding your claim that Putin flooded the lower classes with money, this is simply false. What percent of the population do you think signed up for war? Do you really think that 0.5% (optimistic estimate) that did sign up had spread their wealth with anyone else?

Just last week I stayed in the hospital with 2 men, 72y.o and 64y.o. One has pension of 19k RUB, another one 23k RUB. That's fewer than $300. Showered with money, Yay!
by NickC25 | 2025-12-04 14:01:19+00:00
Our first two presidents, Washington and Adams, both envisioned a system that could really only work if we had a large plurality of parties.

Washington in particular despised political parties and called them inherently self-serving.

Adams said that a two party system would destroy democracy, because such a system encourages despotic tribalism, in which party dissension inevitably focuses around revenge politics.

I think they had some foresight.
by wccrawford | 2025-12-04 14:02:02+00:00
I'm disappointed that you said "2400bps" instead of "2400 baud". :/

It's always surprising to me when I see people being nostalgic for the old days. Yes, things seemed simpler, but it was because there was less you could do.

I'll always fondly remember my attempt to get on GeoLink with a 300 baud modem, and then my parents realizing that the long distance calls made it far, far too expensive to use, and returning it. Sure, I was disappointed at the time, but it wasn't too much later that 56k modems existed and we had a local unlimited internet provider. And now it's a fun story.

But I was actually just as frustrated at the time as I am now, but for different reasons. Change exists, and that's good.

I agree that it feels harder to make your mark today. But I don't think it's actually harder. There's plenty of fun things that people would love to see people do. Just yesterday, I found out about the Strudel musical programming language and watched an amazing video of someone making Trance with it. And those kind of discoveries happen constantly now, where they were pretty seldom back 30 years ago.

We're at the point that anyone can make a game, app, webpage, etc if they put enough effort into it. The tools are so easy and the tutorials are so plentiful and free that it's really just about effort, instead of being blocked from it.

I've been saying "we live in the future" about once a month for years now. It's amazing what we have today.
by edgineer | 2025-12-04 14:02:29+00:00
On the topic of biology specifically, you might like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

He argues/explains how evolutionary forces become dominant, with much more focus on the why. Why it has come to be that living things grow, multiply, and over time changed in ways that out-succeeded the prior ones, down to the level of DNA--and that these driving forces are manifested by individual genes.
by OisinMoran | 2025-12-04 14:02:32+00:00
Neat! Weirdly sending this article from my phone (Pixel 8) to my browser (Arc) via Pushbullet resulted in an incredibly strange bug that it loads this site instead:

https://www.lindelystables.dk/en/posts/functional-quadtree-c...

Got very confused! I challenge the HN hivemind to figure out what's going on.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-04 14:02:35+00:00
> A steel man argument for why winter might be coming is all the dumb stuff companies are pushing AI for.

Yep, it's like if we invented the combustion engine today and suddenly EVERYONE was putting them EVERYWHERE.

Your fridge? Combustion powered! Your toilet will now flush faster with INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES! Who needs a normal fireplace, you can have a COMBUSTIONATOR FIREPLACE!

But for bikes and cars... hmm, maybe this engine is actually a good idea.

Some shitty AI ideas will die eventually as they're just stupid from the start or untenable. But some will stay and change the way we work.
by lisajaloza | 2025-12-04 14:03:16+00:00
Developers can start accessing the camera and audio functionality of our growing portfolio of AI glasses to expand their mobile app’s potential. Developers in the preview will have early access to the SDK and tools for prototyping. They will be able to share what they’ve built to testers within their organizations and teams, but only select partners will be able to publish their integrations to the general public.
by curioussquirrel | 2025-12-04 14:03:39+00:00
In our previous tests, when it was 1.5 Pro against GPT 4o and Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini wasn't winning in the multilingual race, but it was definitely competitive. 2.5 and 3.0 seems to be big leaps from the 1.5 days. That said, it also depends on the testing methodology; we tested a bunch of use cases mostly to test core linguistic proficiency. Not as much complex tasks in language or cultural knowledge.
by jsheard | 2025-12-04 14:04:12+00:00
To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same device.
by psychoslave | 2025-12-04 14:04:45+00:00
That’s not retrocompatible with all the .js files out there though.

One possibility is thus just make some vocalic derivation, which align with well known spontaneous evolution of languages like ablaut[1]. Following that, and keeping the dance connotation, jive[2] is an option. Or closer on phonetic distance to java (/ˈd͡ʒɑː.və/), there is jovial (/ˈd͡ʒəʊ.vɪ.əl/ or /ˈd͡ʒoʊ.vɪ.əl/ or /ˈd͡ʒoʊ.vəl/)[3].

Might our jovial·script enjoy our life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jive

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jovial
by lalitmaganti | 2025-12-04 14:06:01+00:00
My goal with this post was not to claim this is a universal template to success for everyone but simply sharing an approach that worked for me.

I tried to point out several times that, yes there are places where a "move fast with leadership" approach works better. And yes this only works in the biggest companies capable of sustaining an infra team for a long period of time.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-04 14:06:20+00:00
If you think “Sanders and the Squad” are powerful you’ve been watching far too much Fox News.

> People who are obsessed with tearing down cultural and social institutions and replacing them with performative identity politics and fabricated narratives are given platforms way bigger then they deserve.

Like the Kennedy Center, USAID, and the Department of Education? The immigrants eating cats story? Cutting off all refugees except white South Africans?

And your next line says this is the problem with Democrats?
by mghackerlady | 2025-12-04 14:06:30+00:00
I always feel weird thanking IBM. On one hand, they've funded numerous FOSS projects, and made the thinkpad, an amazing CPU architecture (PPC), and seem to be the only ones actually innovating in the tech space sometimes. On the other hand, they bought Redhat and seem actively hostile to any FOSS projects that don't make them money
by techjamie | 2025-12-04 14:06:54+00:00
I saw an excellent video[1] a few weeks ago that outlined this issue perfectly in the context of Tor's anti-censorship methodologies by hiding its traffic as other kinds of traffic. The endgame is basically to cut the cables and have a countrywide intranet, or just accept that people will bypass it. Even the Great Firewall isn't perfect, and Chinese frequently VPN out of it all the time.

They're still going to try anyway though. Wisconsin is already putting up a hilariously bad anti-VPN bill[2], and I'm curious if they don't just end up trying to ban every server provider out there in the process of enforcing it.

[1] https://youtu.be/i9Jh3egGaNk

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46113232
by klaussilveira | 2025-12-04 14:07:33+00:00
If you are like me and like to toy around with ancient game engines, for the sake of simply modding or trying things out, I made this tiny clean fork: https://github.com/klaussilveira/clean-quake

The idea is that it builds on 64-bit Linux with a very simple Makefile and SDL2, so you can start from there as your ground truth, and then have fun. It also removes a lot of cruft, like all the DOS and Windows 95 stuff mentioned in the article.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-12-04 14:07:43+00:00
>There is this odd conspiracy to claim that Biden (81 at time of election) was too old and Trump (77) wasn't

I try to base my opinions on facts as much as possible. Trump is old but he's clearly full of energy, like some old people can be. Biden sadly is not. Look at the videos, it's painful to see. In his defence he was probably much more active then most 80 year olds but in no way was he fit to lead a country.

At least in the UK despite the recent lamentable state of our political system our politicians are relatively young. You won't see octogenarians like pelosi and Biden in charge.
Show HN: TypMo – Markdown for Wireframing
by aditgupta | 2025-12-04 14:08:19+00:00
Hello HN! I’ve been working on a small tool that helps you move from quick wireframe experiments to solid, production-ready prompts. As a designer, I’ve always felt that getting the structure right early saves a ton of pain later. TypMo leans into that idea by grounding everything in IA-style wireframes- fast to create, easy to iterate, and perfect for figuring out what you actually mean before throwing prompts at AI.

I’m now pushing it a step further with a lightweight DSL. Still early, still rough around the edges, but with some AI help it’s starting to feel real. Would love to hear what you think!
by jacquesm | 2025-12-04 14:08:25+00:00
Why is this downvoted, this is not the first time I've heard that opinion expressed and every time it happens there is more evidence that maybe there is something to it. I've been following the DRAM market since the 4164 was the hot new thing and it cost - not kidding - $300 for 8 of these which would give you all of 64K RAM. Over the years I've seen the price surge multiple times and usually there was some kind of hard to verify reason attached to it. From flooded factories to problems with new nodes and a whole slew of other issues.

RAM being a staple of the computing industry you have to wonder if there aren't people cleaning up on this, it would be super easy to create an artificial shortage given the low number of players in this market. In contrast, say the price of gasoline, has been remarkably steady with one notable outlier with a very easy to verify and direct cause.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-04 14:08:49+00:00
I find “it’s not X, it’s Y” to be a pretty annoying rhetorical phrase. I might even agree with the person that Y is fundamentally more important, but we’re talking about X already. Let’s say what we have to say about X before moving on to Y.

Constantly changing the topic to something more important produces conversations that get broader, with higher partisan lean, and are further from closing. I’d consider it some kind of (often well intentioned) thought terminating cliche, in the sense that it stops the exploration of X.
by quesera | 2025-12-04 14:09:34+00:00
There are many aspects of what we call "history" that are guesses, best guesses, biased guesses, ignorant assumptions, intent-driven narratives, or uncontested acceptance of plausible but currently-uncorroborated narrative.

It's a mistake to pretend that any "historical record" is not littered with these things. More so as the years tick by, more so if there's any contention around influence or meaning of the person/story. (Aside: This is why I will not watch Oliver Stone movies.)

There is (usually) a bright line between truth and falsehood. We almost never know where that line is.

Sure, some details are documented and plausible. These are probably true, unless there are details that are very important or useful to some group.

And some details are incredible and fanciful. Probably "false" although possibly derived from some kernel of truth or substantively true but simplified/embellished for audiences over time.

The deeper you dig, the more you realize that all stories are incomplete at best, and likely several layers deep in manipulation or at least imperfect interpretation. We are all imperfect interpreters.

Do I believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC? Yes -- with very high certainty.

Do I believe that he uttered Iacta Alea Est just before doing so? Maybe -- it's romantic and flatteringly displays his executive strength, and IIRC he wrote that he did.

If you want to delineate "history" from "myth" on the "truthy-falsy" spectrum, you may choose to do so with that example. But this history and mythology are inseparable, so the distinction is untrustworthy and often not useful anyway.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-04 14:10:40+00:00
AI companies must compensate us for this outrage.

A few hours ago I looked at the RAM prices. I bought some DDR4, 32GB only, about a year or two ago. I kid you not - the local price here is now 2.5 times as it was back in 2023 or so, give or take.

I want my money back, OpenAI!
by techjamie | 2025-12-04 14:11:07+00:00
> You'd have to stop people owning general purpose computing devices for that to be fully effective.

That's been the corporate and probably governmental wet dream since the iPhone released. I think the only thing keeping the x86_64 scene from doing the same thing is legacy software support, and open alternatives existing. If Microsoft could've viably banned getting software from anywhere outside their store, they would have.

I would argue with all the computers they sold in "S mode" a few years ago, they earnestly tried it in the home market.
by nickjj | 2025-12-04 14:11:40+00:00
I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700.

I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade.

I don't know how but the box is still great for every day web development with heavy Docker usage, video recording / editing with a 4k monitor and 2nd 1440p monitor hooked up. Minor gaming is ok too, for example I picked up Silksong last week, it runs very well at 2560x1440.

For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.
by zwnow | 2025-12-04 14:11:42+00:00
As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure. If I get a bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work as possible it is.
Ask HN: Glasses with lights that flash whenever they detect cigarette smoke?
by amichail | 2025-12-04 14:12:17+00:00
I’ve been thinking about a wearable that could make cigarette smoke more visible in public settings. Imagine glasses that flash lights whenever they detect cigarette smoke.

The goal isn’t for the wearer to detect cigarette smoke—they can already smell it—but to:

* Alert others that there’s secondhand smoke in the area.

* Show smokers how far their smoke travels, making the invisible visible.

What do you think of this idea?
by bluGill | 2025-12-04 14:13:11+00:00
There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you used up.

Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service - thus bug free releases are important since upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.
by stlattack | 2025-12-04 14:13:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted to answer the "Will we have a White Christmas?" question without wading through ad-heavy weather sites, so I built a dedicated SPA to visualize the data on a 3D globe.

The Stack:

Frontend: React + Mapbox GL JS (using the globe projection).

Data: Open-Meteo API (fetching 20 years of historical daily snow depth + live forecasts).

Visuals: HTML5 Canvas for the snow particle engine (optimized for mobile) and a Glassmorphism UI overlay.

The Logic: The probability score isn't just a static historical average. It uses a weighted "blended" model. Right now (early Dec), it leans heavily on 20 years of climatology data. As we get within the 16-day forecast window, the app dynamically shifts weight toward the live deterministic forecast. By Dec 21st, it switches entirely to live radar models.

Challenges: Handling the API rate limits was tricky. I had to implement a split-routing strategy where historical data hits the public archive (to avoid auth errors) while forecasts use a commercial key, all cached in-memory to prevent re-fetching the same city twice.

It’s live at https://whitexmas.app

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the UX or the probability logic!
by oamaok | 2025-12-04 14:13:56+00:00
At work we started building a new internal service and decided to try this out for the test setup. We built a small wrapper which seamlessly uses PGLite when running tests and actual Postgres instance otherwise. Great success!

The ability to .clone() the database to create "checkpoints" is also great for tests, as we can run all of the migrations and return to that clean state between each test. Running 50 test suites in parallel is also so easy with this setup.
by triceratops | 2025-12-04 14:14:00+00:00
> By the way, Bangladeshi Americans are poorer than the average American

The Wikipedia article is inaccurate. It claims that Bangladesh-Americans have a median household income of ~$59k. The actual sources cited by the article both say it's $78k:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/01/key-facts.... https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/asian-a...

I don't know what's up with that. $20k is obviously a big difference.
by dgacmu | 2025-12-04 14:14:46+00:00
In their defense, how many $20 billion fabs do you want to build in response to the AI ... (revolution|bubble|other words)? It seems very, very difficult to predict how long DRAM demand will remain this elevated.

It's dangerous for them in both directions: Overbuilding capacity if the boom busts vs. leaving themselves vulnerable to a competitor who builds out if the boom is sustained. Glad I don't have to make that decision. :)
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-04 14:15:15+00:00
The enterprise equivalent of COBOL today is Java and to a much lesser extent C#. Those were both championed by large corporations - Sun and Microsoft.

The move to VMs at first and then to the cloud were also marketed by existing companies with huge budgets where people who made decisions had the “No one ever got fired for choosing $LargeWellknownCompany that is in the upper right corner of Gartner’s Magic Square”.

I love Docker. I think everyone going to EKS before they need to is dumb. There are dozens of services out there that let you give it a Docker container and just run it.

And I think that spending energy avoiding “cloud lock-in” is dumb. Choose your infrastructure and build. Migrations are going to be a pain at any decent scale anyway and you are optimizing for the wrong thing if you are worried about lock in.

As an individual especially in today’s market, it’s foolish (not referring to you - any developer or adjacent) not to always be thinking of what keeps you the most employable if the rug gets pulled from under you.

As a decision maker who is held accountable for architecture and when things go wrong they look at or when the next person has to come along to maintain it, they are going to look at me like I am crazy if I choose a non industry standard solution just because I was too lazy to choose the industry standard.

Again I don’t mean that you are being “lazy”. That’s how people think.

But if I were hiring someone - and I’m often interviewing people for cloudy/devOps type roles. Why would I hire someone with experience with a Docker orchestration framework I never heard of over someone who knew K8s?

And the final question you should ask yourself is why are you really doing this?

Is it to scratch an itch out of passion and it’s something that you feel the world should have? If so in all sincerity, I wish you luck on your endeavor. You might get lucky like Bun just did. I had effusive praise for them doing something out of passion instead of as VC bait.

Are you doing it for financial gain? If so, you have to come up with a strategy to overcome resistance from people like Ive outlined.
by bokohut | 2025-12-04 14:15:18+00:00
The only thing one needs to understand for the future direction of power is contained within a single sentence in this document that many will glance over. Future generation plants will be built different as version one of the grid has proven to not work but this version one is so critical no one has yet attempted version two. The new design will be generate>store>consume albeit at a loss of some power in conversion but persistent availability will quickly overcome those losses as acceptable. This has already begun in some consumer markets as those fortunate enough to have solar with batteries comprehend my words exactly. Everything will have a battery to store energy, even things producing it.
by stackdiver | 2025-12-04 14:15:20+00:00
> When you ask an AI to solve a problem top-down, it starts "easy" as it generates the code that "just works". As the code evolves, it becomes interleaved with the process in which you arrived at the final solution. It patches logic based on immediate constraints. It carries the scar tissue of every "no, not like that" instruction you gave it. The code eventually represents the history of your struggle to articulate what you wanted.

Agentic planning is supposed to address the short term bias. But yes, I feel the coding AIs are missing something that experienced developers bring. Maybe an intuition and anticipation for change?
by dpflan | 2025-12-04 14:15:34+00:00
With "servant leadership" in its current form being attributed to Greenleaf, here is the "source of truth" on servant leadership: https://greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/

"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.

Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?