MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Google ignores English searches and forces localized results
by jeanlucas | 2025-12-28 18:41:25+00:00
Google Search change in a way that I can’t seem to opt out of.

I’m based in a non-English-speaking country, but I regularly search in English, especially for technical topics.

My Google account, my laptop, my phone, my interface language, and preferences are all set to English; only my physical location and payment methods are local.

What happens is that Google increasingly returns localized results in my native language and aggressively applies automatic translation.

Some concrete behaviors I’m seeing:

- Queries written in English still prioritize pages in Portuguese, even when equivalent English sources exist.

- Reddit results are often force-translated instead of linking to the original English content.

- “AI mode” responses are always in Portuguese, even when the prompt is clearly in English, with no visible way to force output language.

- The UI offers a choice between “Portuguese” and “All web,” but selecting “All web” doesn’t reliably return English results nor disable translation.

- In practice, explicit query language seems to be overridden by inferred user preferences (location / account language).

I’m curious whether others are seeing the same behavior, and whether there’s any way to restore search to become 100% useful again; or what are you using since this really limits search results, especially for technical things.
by varenc | 2025-12-28 18:41:59+00:00
Besides what others have said, it's just fascinating to know what's happening on your computer! Occasionally being aware of thermal throttling can be useful, like understanding why something is running slow than before, but it's also just interesting info.

Similarly, about 90% of my iStat Menus usage is just pure curiosity, and occasionally it's actually useful for managing the system.
by zephen | 2025-12-28 18:43:06+00:00
The second paper shown above is firewalled.

The first paper shown above was presented at ICPC, which has a history of bias in reviewing, and typically only assigns one or two reviewers in any case.

Which makes it not surprising that the paper itself doesn't really prove anything, except that the authors themselves are good at creating dissimilar situations.

Subjects had to modify existing systems, which were provided by the experimenters.

The experimenters deliberately removed any semblance of anything that might hint at types (comments, variable names, etc.) and did who the fuck knows what else to the dynamically typed code to make it difficult to work with.

They also provided their own IDE and full environment which the participants had to use.

Now, of course, we've all seen the graphs which show that for simple problems, dynamic is better, and there's a crossover point, and, of course Cooley's experiment is on the far left of that graph, so it certainly doesn't prove that strict static typing isn't better for large programs, but it's at least honest in its approach and results, using self-selected working practitioners using their own tools and environments (and there was never any shortage of working practioners swearing by how much better VHDL is).

https://danluu.com/verilog-vs-vhdl/
by Zigurd | 2025-12-28 18:43:13+00:00
Two frequently mentioned destinations are Florida and Texas. Both are terrible on women's rights and having misogynist political leaders. Threads like this are such a tech bro sausage fest I'm un surprised that women are not mentioned once in the first 36 comments posted here. Women are over half of four year degree earners. Good luck staffing your technology company in a place where most politicians' knuckles drag on the ground.
by mindslight | 2025-12-28 18:43:40+00:00
It is a pity we never regulated the consumer surveillance industry out of existence.

See, the original question isn't really about the technology per se. Rather it's about how it will be used. Do you have confidence in the track record (and trajectory) of our current regulatory approach when it comes to reigning in the scaling up of novel types of harm?

The way I see it, the American approach has been to simply write off those who end up on the business end of the technological chainsaws as "losers". So why would we think "AI" will be any different?
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-12-28 18:43:47+00:00
I don't know if you will be reading this, but I am just back from that museum. Thank you very much for the information.

I spent 4 hours to there and was surprised to see so many tourists, this is not a place I expected people visiting Paris to go to. There were no crowds though.

The top part is really great, you get to see how much people did with so little. So is the chemistry part.

I found the steel replica of the kilogramme and the meter, and of course the Foucault pendulum (in the neighboring refurbished church).

This is truly an interesting museum, on part with the museum of discoveries (musée de la découverte) which is unfortunately close now for a few years for renovations (or at lest was recently planned to be closed). Much better than La Vilette.

So thank you again!
by jaredsohn | 2025-12-28 18:43:56+00:00
>(my understanding of claude code is that it's a non-interactive agent, which is worse for what i have in mind. iteration and _changing my mind_ are a big part of my process, so even if I let the computer do its own thing for an hour and work on something else, that's less productive than spending even 10 minutes of focused time on the same thing.)

Just use 'plan mode'; it will ask clarifying questions.
by riskable | 2025-12-28 18:44:20+00:00
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.

It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.

They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.

The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
by brabel | 2025-12-28 18:44:31+00:00
Static types and ADTs are orthogonal to being FP, as Rust clearly shows. But to speak in terms of FP when those are the important things for you is just wrong since even non FP languages now have ADT, including also mainstream languages like Java, Kotlin, Dart, C# and more.

Even purity is not something exclusive to FP, D and Nim also support separating pure from impure functions. And if you ask me, the reason not many other languages have support for that is that in practice, it has been demonstrated again and again that it’s just not nearly as useful as you may think. Effects, as in Unison and Flix, generalizes the concept to include many more concepts than just purity and may perhaps prove more useful in general purpose programming, but the jury is still out on this.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-12-28 18:44:50+00:00
Grandparents also said it about a lot of technologies that actually were worse and didn’t survive. Those are just not around anymore to be the subject of survivorship bias.

I’m not sure when we’re started dismissing the elderly’s advice as “just complaining because they’re old” but it seems we’re hell bent on reinventing the wheel of misfortune with every generation.

If old people complain about something, maybe they have a point?
by LucidLynx | 2025-12-28 18:45:31+00:00
Not gonna lie, this year has been exceptionnaly disappointing for every product and every OS (more generally: software) from Apple.

The battery life first: I lost 6 to 8h of battery life EVERY DAY because of iOS 26. The battery life of my macbook is worst too, even after all the updates and a fresh install of macOS 26.2.
The interface is very ugly, and not easy to use at all. I am oftenly loston both systems (iOS 26 and macOS 26) because of all those glass interfaces on top of each other.
The performance did not improved either, and the gaming ecosystem that I was very optimistic is becoming a mess. Again.
To finish, an exceptional high number of annoying bugs that are not solved yet, despite my feedbacks since the first Beta versions. It seems nobody care.

It’s infuriating that I can’t downgrade the OS on both devices. Especially on my mac.

This pushed me to re-try a Linux distro on my old laptop, and re-try Android on an old Google Pixel phone. Both are great for my needs, and the phone has way more battery life than the iPhone (despite the phone has already 5yo).

I did not expected at all that 2025 would be the year of Apple pushing me out of it ecosystem... Very nice job guys.
by miroljub | 2025-12-28 18:45:35+00:00
Overrepresentation is when something appears in media way more often than in the real life.

Gay behaviour is overrepresented in the media.

You can frame it with Soviet union, freedom of any kind, human right, democracy, religion, right to consume or not. You can try to make it about me or you and call me whatever.

What you can't do is deny overrepresentation. Because it's the fact, whether you like it or not. And that's the only thing I said, everything else is your projection and false accusation.
by Robertjeffrey12 | 2025-12-28 18:45:49+00:00
I’ve been building an open-source Python simulation that places a full human (body, senses, brain chemistry, energy systems) inside a Poincaré hyperbolic disk — using golden-ratio spirals as the fundamental patterning principle.
It started as a geometric toy but kept growing into something deeper:
Observer-dependent perception (drag eyes/ears/hand — reality renders around focus)
Breath/heart/brain coherence → golden binding light (love as phase-locked resonance)
Kundalini rising animation
Ego-dissolution psychedelic mode
Double-slit + quantum eraser experiments
Brain chemistry (dopamine, serotonin, endorphins)
Dreamstate inspired by LSD: Dream Emulator
And many more layers (chakras, meridians, ATP synthase rotation, etc.)
Everything is modular — new experiments just drop into /experiments/.
It’s not trying to “solve” consciousness, but it’s become an interactive playground for exploring how perception, coherence, and intention shape a simulated reality from the inside.
Would love feedback from the HN community — especially on where to take it next (multi-human society? VR export? more physics?).
Code: https://github.com/robertjeffrey1236/Radial-Hyperbolic-Archi...
Try running any file in /experiments/ — most are self-contained and mind-bending.
Thanks for looking.
by alexjplant | 2025-12-28 18:46:52+00:00
> Driven by 1,024 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processors, the new system will generate 13.1 TFLOPs (Teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second) of compute power.

This is equal to the combined single precision GPU and CPU horsepower of a modern MacBook [1]. Really makes you think about how resource-intensive even the simplest of modern software is...

[1] https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/igpu-apple_m4_10_core
by alright2565 | 2025-12-28 18:47:03+00:00
The Flameshot screenshot tool uses an interesting variant of pixelation that does protect the text from unredaction: https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/commit/533a1b7d55...

> Since pixelation does not protect the contents of the pixelated area (see e.g. https://github.com/bishopfox/unredacter), _pseudo-pixelation_ is used:

> Only colors from the fringe of the selected area are used to generate a pixelation-like effect. The interior of the selected area is not used as an input at all and hence can not be recovered.

The edges of the pixelated area are used the generate a color palette, and then each pixel is generated by randomly sampling from that pallete's gradient.
by pbalau | 2025-12-28 18:47:04+00:00
In my new domain, photography, the most common "advice" for beginners is to learn the exposure triangle, shoot manual and get everything done in camera. This kind of advice comes from beginners, quite close to take a fall from the Dunning-Kruger scale. I'm working towards a distinction from one of the most respected photography organizations in the world and nobody involved with it that gave me guidance ever asked how I took the images.

Maybe or, most likely this is the same for writing: there are people that think correct grammar and punctuation and no help on achieving this, means writing.
by viccis | 2025-12-28 18:48:02+00:00
>I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.

I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.
Show HN: Pixels.style – a tiny watercolor-style pixel art maker
by petersonh | 2025-12-28 18:48:44+00:00
I built this over my Christmas break: pixels.style, a simple browser-based pixel art tool that gives your drawings a soft, watercolor vibe instead of sharp pixels. No signup, just open and draw. Installable as a PWA.

Try it: https://pixels.style

Would love feedback on whether it feels fun/useful and what you’d want next!
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-28 18:49:39+00:00
I recently upgraded (downgraded?) from an iPhone 15PM to a smaller iPhone 17P, and I have found myself wondering if I got a glitchy piece of hardware or if it's just iOS 26 bugs. I hardly had any problems with the previous phone, but on the 17 it's pretty routine that I have to close apps (including native Apple ones) which have become non-responsive. Frustrating, for sure.
by roughly | 2025-12-28 18:50:13+00:00
I’ve been a fan of The Ezra Klein Show for years - whatever your thoughts of his personal politics, he’s a fantastic interviewer, and I think he does a great job at both helping define and then interrogating the strongest construction of his guest’s beliefs. He’s not a soft interviewer, but he’s genuinely trying to understand his guest, and I’ve learned a ton about how people who I disagree with view the world.
by gnabgib | 2025-12-28 18:50:19+00:00
Related:

A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine (177 points, 19 days ago, 297 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46206277

ProEnergy repurposes jet engines to power data centers (33 points, 2 months ago, 41 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706534
by jedberg | 2025-12-28 18:50:42+00:00
Or, you do the equivalent of adding a hash, and apply mosaic to it twice, with two slightly different size regions. Or apply both mosaic and swirl in random order. Or put a piece of random text over it before you mosaic it.

The main point here stands -- using something with a fixed algorithm for hashing and a knowable starting text is not secure. But there are a ton of easy fixes to add randomness to make it secure.
by zephen | 2025-12-28 18:51:04+00:00
Maybe?

To the extent that that could work, I would imagine that I, personally, would be happy reading the textual description instead of watching the video, and for me, we'd now be even closer to text wins 100% of the time.

In other words, it's not that you _can't_ give excellent descriptions that would obviate the need for video, it's just that people _don't_, even, or perhaps even especially, when they think they do.

If someone writes text that creates a video that shows exactly how to get something apart, then _presumably_ they also watch the video to make sure it works.

So the video becomes a debugging tool for their instructions. Perhaps not as good as watching 100 people do it, but maybe even better in some ways.

So the video codec you describe could be a useful tool to help create more programmers.

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-28 18:51:15+00:00
Dwarkesh, Lenny, Latent Space, A16Z, BG2Pod and 'Founders in Arms' have all had some good episodes this year.

Some other episodes I've bookmarked are in this feed:
https://feeds.listennotes.com/listen/rahim-nathwanis-listen-...

Felipe, the founder of Quest Learning (joinquest.com) started a podcast series about the future of learning. I was his first guest:

https://youtu.be/t_Y6wtdcnpc

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2CjsPEKYwx8eirYlBYjxwp

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-learning...
by like_any_other | 2025-12-28 18:51:49+00:00
Proposition nation: A nation founded on certain creeds or ideals [1].

You probably heard it called "civic nationalism", which uses different words to say the same. From wikipedia [2]: a "civic nation" defines itself not by culture but by political institutions and liberal principles, which its citizens pledge to uphold. Membership in the civic nation is open to every person by citizenship, regardless of culture or ethnicity. Those who share these values are considered members of the nation [emphasis mine]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proposition_nation - Barbara Perry, 'Hate Crimes' (volume 3, page 117): Because they view the world through a racial lens, white nationalists do not agree with the notion that America is a creedal or 'proposition nation', meaning one whose societal and cultural norms are based on acceptance of the Declaration of Independence and the other founding documents...."

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_nationalism
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-28 18:52:35+00:00
He sees an opportunity to let others do the work and investment to build platforms^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H apps, then selectively swoop in to compete once the risk and investment pay off.

If that's not a flawless description of a walled-garden app store, I can't imagine what would be.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-28 18:53:15+00:00
>don't value regrets packaged as advice, especially from people who never acted on their advice

>Better advice comes from things people actually did.

What happens when it takes quite a bit more focused effort to do something like not be on "social" media than it does to idle along with the mainstream?

The line is pretty blurry to begin with, and can be a moving target making it hard to know for sure whether you are doing, not doing, or being done :)
by brightball | 2025-12-28 18:53:44+00:00
I know when I spent a lot of time dealing with fraud in a different market, the most effective tool was to catch and shadowban the accounts rather than banning them.

If we banned them, they just created a new account and kept doing the same things.

When we detected them and the isolated them from all other good standing accounts, only allowing them to interact with other shadowbanned users, it virtually solved the problem. Normal users went about their day and the cheaters/fraudsters wasted a lot of time never getting through to anyone.

In gaming it seems like creating a cheaters purgatory where they are stuck competing against other cheaters forever would probably end up being its own special league after a while. Like when people suggested steroids in pro-baseball should be legal.
by _sinelaw_ | 2025-12-28 18:54:13+00:00
For a long time I watched TypeScript take over the JavaScript ecosystem as a reasonable way to add structure and safety. But even before TypeScript existed I was thinking about how to approach this differently, ripping out the "bad parts" of JavaScript instead of accommodating them with a complex and partially strict type system.

Also, recently I found out just how expensive (runtime-wise) it is to host a full-blown TypeScript host, such as Deno. This is very cool tech but kind of bloated when all you want is to run some JavaScript, e.g. as a plugin system. It's possible to just pre-compile (transpile) your .ts files and then ship only the JavaScript output and use a lightweight runtime (QuickJS or even the new Micro QuickJS), but then compilation becomes a neccessary step for what could've been purely dynamic, ad-hoc and quick plugins (think elisp in emacs).

minfern is my second shot at this, and I'm exploring just how much JavaScript idioms are "must have" for it to be useful.
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-28 18:54:40+00:00
> NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iPhone though

I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS.

RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-28 18:55:36+00:00
So think of it this way: you want to avoid calling malloc() to increase performance. JavaScript does not have the semantics to avoid this. You also want to avoid looping. JavaScript does not have the semantics to avoid it.

If you haven’t had experience with actual performant code JS can seem fast. But it’s is a Huffy bike compared to a Kawasaki H2. Sure it is better than a kid’s trike but it is not a performance system by any stretch of the imagination. You use JS for convenience, not performance.
by Tade0 | 2025-12-28 18:55:38+00:00
This is lovely, but in certain life circumstances I've found it more useful to have a to-dont-list, as in: list of things I would really like to do, but shouldn't because there are more pressing matters to attend to and I need to pace myself, otherwise things will turn ugly really quick.

Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day.

I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
by sersi | 2025-12-28 18:55:53+00:00
To be fair, my father in law who is Chinese and had to exile himself during the cultural revolution would pretty much say the same thing about the Cultural Revolution. Educated people in China who lived through it will certainly criticise the Cultural Revolution (or The Great Leap Forward for that matter) if they are in a situation when they can be honest about it.

So I'm not sure that specific comment would be considered to be a "dominant western narrative" unless you're going to tell me that older (and so who have lived through it) educated people in China who don't speak a word of English have a western mindset because they're educated.
by amluto | 2025-12-28 18:57:01+00:00
If you switch Safari’s tab bar mode to bottom (i.e. restoring the sort-of-one-touch controls that existed before iOS 26), textareas become utterly and completely broken. It’s almost impossible to reply to an HN message, for example.

This bug is so blatant that I assumed my would have been fixed by now, but no.
by riskable | 2025-12-28 18:57:02+00:00
Deathbed regrets aren't fun at all. Deathbed wishes for their next life are much more interesting!

For example, Gil Amelio—former CEO of Apple—once expressed that he wanted to be reborn as a woman owning/working a vineyard in Southern France. That was so specific and interesting, I still remember it.

Wishing you used social media less doesn't exactly spark the imagination.

BTW: Yes, I know he's still alive :)