MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hresvelgr | 2025-12-07 14:00:19+00:00
> Congratulations, you have now increased the cognitive load to be productive on your team and increased the SQL injection attack surface for your apps!

Maybe I am speaking from too much experience but writing SQL is second-nature to me and I would wager my team feels similarly. Perhaps we are an anomaly. Secondly, most if not all SQL connector libraries have a query interface with all the usual injection vectors mitigated. Not saying it's impossible to break through but these are the same connector libraries even the ORMs use.

> ORMs exist for a reason. And if I were a new senior or principal on your team I’d be worried that there was now an expectation for a junior to be a wizard at anything

ORMs exist to hide the complexity of the RDBMS. Why would any engineer want to make arguably the most critical aspect of every single IT business opaque? ORMs may imply safety and ease, but in my experience they foster a culture with a tacit fear of SQL. Sounds a bit dramatic, but this has been a surprisingly consistent experience.
by woooooo | 2025-12-07 14:01:38+00:00
Once they were in-country, it doesn't sound like it was voluntary. Guy thought he was getting a chill security job at an unrealistic pay point. Clearly not the smartest, but he didn't move to Russia to join the army. Just like Pakistanis don't move to Saudi Arabia to be enslaved.

In both cases, the word is out and these people should have known better, but maybe they were desperate, or naive, I think we can have a little human empathy.
by SonOfKyuss | 2025-12-07 14:01:59+00:00
I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not but at least it is an idea based on exerting market pressure instead of terror and fear. I don’t have nearly as much of a problem with this as masked agents rounding innocent people off of the streets. The biggest flaw seems to be the very likely scenario of it being used to give preferential treatment based on political views or straight up bribery
by nntwozz | 2025-12-07 14:01:59+00:00
Look at this astonishing graph:

https://kottke.org/25/12/an-astonishing-graph

For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-07 14:02:23+00:00
You could run (10) of these 9kW 480V three-phase immersion heaters [0] in place of your 85 HP motor, assuming ~110A FLA @ 480V = 91.5kW. The 9kW immersion heaters are 10.8A each at 480V three-phase (would be 75A if it was 120V single-phase!)

Just make sure you have somewhere for the steam to go, it takes up a bit more room than water ;)

Is your three-phase a corner-grounded delta service? I’ve never seen one in the wild but I hear they’re used for three-phase ag service drops that are strictly used to run motors. A and C are tapped normally on the secondary but the B phase is bonded to ground and also a line conductor, conductor color is white for B phase instead of orange.

[0] https://iseinc.com/_shop/480v-3ph-9kw-immersion-heater-47-14...
by cbeach | 2025-12-07 14:03:19+00:00
Some casual unscientific research - a question to my fellow autistic HN contributors:

Do you have a "mind's eye" - that is, can you close your eyes, and voluntarily visualise mental images?

If you can't, you have a condition called "Aphantasia"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

When I found out about aphantasia, I was fascinated. I'd always imagined that "mind's eye" was a metaphor. I never knew it was literal, and that most of the population are able to visualise imagery in their head.

Could there be a link beteen aphantasia and autism?

Since I'm unable to visualise the faces (and thus expressions) of people, maybe this contributes to my lack of empathy and ability to predict other people's emotional state.

If you have autism, do you also have aphantasia?
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-12-07 14:03:27+00:00
I always wondered what "clever" people expected from crypto, apart from getting rich quick schemes. Boring.

We had such know-it-alls still with their pimples from Frauenhofer and Max Planck giving presentations. Even back then, 99% percent of the audience were skeptical, but sadly too many decision makers are just emperors with no clothing. There were so many immature, useless loud speakers given a junior professorship because old morons have FOMO too. That must have sucked for the valid academics with proven achievements. I'm glad I'm not one of the ones waiting in queue. There no single project having any sign of impact, naturally. While that can be said of a lot of academic work, crypto: more buzzwords, even less delivered.
by roxolotl | 2025-12-07 14:04:13+00:00
It’s a longer read, and the tangent on copyright while interesting and something Cory is passionate about is slightly off topic, but it’s the rare piece bringing up the key issue with AI. The argument goes like:

- The valuations are only reasonable if they are going to enable mass worker replacement. Yes there is the machine god argument, Wall Street doesn’t buy that.

- The tooling doesn’t have to be capable of replacing workers. The sales people just have to be able to convince execs it is.

- Even ignoring to fact that lots of people would lose their jobs this replacement would make everything worse because AI isn’t capable of replacing jobs.

- The bubble is based on the assumption everything will get better.

- We need to convince people things will get worse before they actually do.

These tools aren’t useless. They are remarkable. But that doesn’t mean they will meet the hype nor the valuations. In order to avoid an economic cataclysm it’s important for a realistic and measured narrative to take hold fast.
by rs186 | 2025-12-07 14:05:19+00:00
CMU's database courses are a famous example: https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025/

Princeton used to offer algorithm courses on Coursera with full assignments including auto grading, I don't know if that's still the case.

I don't know enough about (or have time to learn) other offerings, but I am sure there are a few more out there. Class central should be a good place to discover those courses.
by simonw | 2025-12-07 14:05:23+00:00
There's a note about that:

> Snowboard Kids 2 was written in C and compiled to MIPS machine code. The compiler was likely GCC 2.7.2 based on the instruction patterns [3]

The footnote is interesting: https://blog.chrislewis.au/using-coding-agents-to-decompile-...

> This is mostly just guesswork and trying different variations of compiler versions and configuration options. But it isn’t as bad as it sounds since the time period limits which compilers were plausibly used. The compiler arguments used in other, similar, games also provide a useful reference.
by lapcat | 2025-12-07 14:05:35+00:00
> everyone should have chance at redeeming themselves even if they did harm.

You're changing the subject. Nobody is arguing that the author is irredeemable. On the contrary, the author seems to have recognized his own mistake and changed his course, at least to an extent. The question is whether the author's years in crypto were a waste, and I would say that it's indeed a waste to spend 8 years on something just to "learn" that one shouldn't have done that thing.

> Everyone makes mistakes

This is also changing the subject. Everyone does not spend 8 years in crypto.

I've made some big mistakes, and I think I've also wasted a lot of time. The wasted time was not "valuable" by learning that I wasted my time. It was simply regrettable.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society. I don't need to do that in order to learn that I shouldn't do that. Some things are just blatantly obvious in advance, or should be. You shouldn't need to dedicate your life to crypto to realize it's all a big casino.
Show HN: An Open-Source Windows Cleaner. Fast, Secure, Bloat Free
by Drimiteros | 2025-12-07 14:06:25+00:00
Hello everyone,

All of us who can't stand having our drives filled with junk have our own ways and tools to identify and manage this problem. I enjoy building small utilities that solve everyday PC problems like this (even though sometimes others might exist already), so I’ve been working on my own take on a cleaner — something fast, safe, and lightweight that anyone can use.

It’s called Cleanse, and it’s a free, open-source tool for Windows, focused on clearing leftover files from the directories that tend to silently bloat over time. Cleanse also includes detailed stats and graphs so you can see exactly what was cleaned and how your disk usage changes over time. I’m building it as a minimal, ad-free, bloat-free alternative driven entirely by community feedback. Anyone can suggest features, report issues, or even modify the code themselves — the project is licensed under GNU GPLv3, so the whole thing stays open and transparent.

Right now, Cleanse is in a working but bare-bones state. It can already: * estimate junk on your system * clean it instantly * run scheduled automatic cleanups * update itself automatically.

Planned features include: * emergency file restore (a safe rollback) * deeper-clean (filter by file size/type/folder) * advanced logs * and possibly a system for detecting leftover files from uninstalled apps

I’d love for people to try it out, break it, give feedback, and help shape where it goes. The idea of a small community improving this tool together is the part that motivates me most!

Thanks in advance to anyone who checks it out!
Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?
by shubhamjain | 2025-12-07 14:06:47+00:00
I see people all around me who have this bleak, pessimistic view of where everything is going. That art/originality is fading, that technology is causing more harm than good, and that most jobs now exist to feed some mindless machine where sole goal is to get people addicted. Tech roles feel drained of purpose, and non-tech roles are being eaten away.

This outlook is a stark contrast to the era I grew up in. From 2010 to 2020, tech optimism was at its peak. Despite the flaws, companies like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things—breaking old monopolies and building better systems.

Now we have AI, arguably the most transformative technology of our lifetime, yet a lot of times the reaction seems to be exhaustion rather than excitement. Sure, people love using it, but unlike the early Internet, AI doesn't seem like a medium for creativity. The core value feels just about compressing the time it takes to do what we were already doing.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s just me. And maybe I am bitten by false nostalgia. But I’m curious: how are others seeing this shift?
by glimshe | 2025-12-07 14:08:09+00:00
We've been seeing variations of the same article every week. The answer has been the same for a long time: this is great but unfortunately there are advantages in using Office and that's the reason we shouldn't expect mass migration anytime soon.

Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in investments from competitors over the years. Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.
by lachiflippi | 2025-12-07 14:09:18+00:00
Here's an exhaustive list of why I, personally, have been using Brave for years:

- vertical tabs

- maintained by more than a single person

- support for extensions

- not owned by China

- not Firefox

- not Edge*

All the AI and crypto slop can be turned off completely, so I don't care at all about features I never see after initial install.

*Edge is fine if properly configured via GPO, which I can neither be bothered to figure out how to do under Linux nor have the patience to do on my private Windows machines. Works great at work though.
by wtcactus | 2025-12-07 14:10:02+00:00
“The form will be mandatory for men and voluntary for women.”

This is highly misandrist. I can’t believe that we are in 2025 and a - so called - democratic government is still denying women the opportunity to potentially go and die miserably in the front lines on equal footing with men.

We can surely do better. Women and girls deserve more.
by cl3misch | 2025-12-07 14:10:25+00:00
I find Onlyoffice to be the closest alternative. It presents itself as a hosted office platform but you can actually install it locally and it feels just like an office program.

It's not the most efficient, being effectively a webview. But its UI and compatibility is imho much better than LibreOffice.

https://www.onlyoffice.com/
by chaoskanzlerin | 2025-12-07 14:10:31+00:00
There's a history of German public administrations using Linux and other open-source software. In particular, the City of Munich has pioneered this with their 2006-2019 LiMux [0] project, which was ultimately cancelled in exchange for Microsoft moving their German offices to Munich proper.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux / Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661372
by cb321 | 2025-12-07 14:11:57+00:00
I'm not sure this opt-in/out "philosophical razor" is as sharp as one would like it to be. I think "optionality" alone oversimplifies and a person trying to adopt that rule for taxonomy would just have a really hard time and that might be telling us something.

For example, in Nim, at the compiler CLI tool level, there is opt-in/opt-out via the `--mm=whatever` flag, but, at the syntax level, Nim has both `ref T` and `ptr T` on equal syntactic footing . But then in the stdlib, `ref` types (really things derived from `seq[T]`) are used much more (since it's so convenient). Meanwhile, runtimes are often deployment properties. If every Linux distro had their libc link against -lgc for Boehm, people might say "C is a GC'd language on Linux". Minimal CRTs vary across userspaces and OS kernel/userspace deployment.. "What you can rely on/assume", I suspect the thrust behind "optionality", just varies with context.

Similar binding vagueness between properties (good, bad, ugly) of a language's '"main" compiler' and a 'language itself' and 'its "std"lib' and "common" runtimes/usage happen all the time (e.g. "object-oriented", often diluted by the vagueness of "oriented"). That doesn't even bring in "use by common dependencies" which is an almost independent axis/dimension and starts to relate to coordination problems of "What should even be in a 'std'-lib or any lib, anyway?".

I suspect this rule is trying to make the adjective "GC'd" do more work in an absolute sense than it realistically can given the diversity of PLangs (sometimes not so visible considering only workaday corporate PLangs). It's not always easy to define things!
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-07 14:12:20+00:00
Yeah, I thought of this first as well. There is nothing that hammers home the point that the past was a horrible place better than childhood mortality statistics. I’m surprised the author of the article didn’t mention it, given all her focus on families - I mean, good for her for realizing she didn’t understand what life in the past was really like, but she still seems a little focused on “it wasn’t cute” rather than the really big differences.

Related recent HN thread on the Bills of Mortality from early modern London: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46045061

The tldr of my post there is that life before the mass availability of antibiotics after WWII was pretty terrifying.
by zzzeek | 2025-12-07 14:13:00+00:00
> I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts.

Hey me too exactly! I wrote the CMS for mlb.com in 2003 entirely in mod_perl.

This post is indeed a little walk down memory lane of the Perliness of the 1990s. I spent most of the 1990s enforcing everyone in my team (yes, by 1998 they made me in charge, totally inappropriately) use Perl on awkward environments like Windows NT because giving in to horrendous systems like Active Server Pages or...shudder...Cold Fusion represented the heat death of the profession. Microsoft was determined to to murder the whole "RTFM / TMTOWTDI" culture and replace it with their own brand of corporate mediocrity (remember, there was no XBox at this time. Github? no, source control was in Visual Source Safe [narrator: your source code was, in fact, not very safe!]. MSFT was 1000% uncool and evil).

But ultimately mod_perl's decline was technical! It's syntax, organization and operation were enough to get us through the 90's but were at the same time doing violence to one's cognitive facilities. Python came along and fixed everything that was wrong with Perl. I started in Python porting things from Perl, like HTML::Mason, because I was not yet enlightened enough. But I got there eventually.
by bthallplz | 2025-12-07 14:13:24+00:00
You could open source it and continue to work on it as a side project and main thing in your portfolio to demonstrate your skills.

And over time you could even offer a hosted/paid SaaS option, if there seems be interest in that and you have more time and resources available to sustain that.

From the perspective that you'd refine this project over time (as you already have), I don't think you should worry too much about how the code and architecture look and are right now or people's reactions to their current state. It'll grow, change, and improve as you do. And others' reactions can help you grow.

> I spent the last 6 months rewriting the architecture for multi-tenancy, overhauling the UI/UX, and adding productivity and compliance algorithms.

Separately, I think it could be really good for you and your career to document somewhere online (even just a blog) some of your thinking/decisions regarding these spaces. And it doesn't need to be too formal, just lay out your thinking.

Your post here is pretty great as an example of your communication skills - which I've heard are highly appreciated/valued in CS -, so you've got the skills, and it'd be great for you to have more public proof of that.
by kakacik | 2025-12-07 14:13:30+00:00
> Europa wants to go to war against Russia's hypersonic missiles.

Not true, Europe (as in EU or Schengen or similar group) wants to be left alone by some hyper aggressive undeveloped dictatorship in the east with massive inferiority complex. But if we keep hearing every week how we will be annihilated in nuclear holocaust or just murdered in millions in conventional warfare, at one point you stop ignoring a mad dog barking at our door.

We wanted peaceful mutually beneficial economical cooperation but Ukraine's huge gas&oil fields in the east plus all the heavy industry from soviet era also there was I guess too much to ignore for them, greed is always a strong emotion. Lets not forget who started the war in 2014 and massively escalated in 2022 in their brilliant 3-day 'special operation'.

But its fine I guess, russian incompetence created the strongest army in Europe since WWII, extremely motivated personnel literally defending their homes and loved ones from mass murder, theft, subjugation and erasure of identity (all this is provably happening on conquered territories so there is 0 room for doubts). They will bleed dry their economy and military there and real problems and misery for russia will start then. Self-harm in front of whole world, no tear will be shed for what was once pretty advanced society (at least compared to now, comparison with say US was always rather to be avoided due to inevitable hurt feelings and egos).
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-07 14:13:32+00:00
Well, top performance electronics is usually going to be more expensive than the more nominal options.

And if there's not enough to go around to begin with, it might as well be a niche of some kind, you can't expect everyone to choose the most expensive option by any means.

Now if the user base is nowhere near the majority, and you're already in a high-dollar niche anyway because of the desired performance level, might as well escalate from the merely expensive, to the glaringly overpriced in addition. That's a well-worn playbook.

When the sweet spot is hit with loads of customers striving to afford the top-shelf items, while in actuality everyone is settling for a shadow of what should be offered by the biggest business machines companies, it's not the hardware that's the problem. Too few people are grumbling and accept they just have to make do with what they have.

Most buyers do not use consumer electronics as money-making machines, the genres and cost-structures have undergone generations of evolution to be optimized for consumption of the electronics, as actually opposed to the business machines they once were.

If you want to use yours as a money-making machine, it will probably pay for itself even if the purchase price is a small multiple of the popular budget consumer version. But way more money is being put into making it difficult to tell the difference, more money than most small companies are even worth.

>supported by a company that is user aligned.

Interestingly, you can't buy that with money, even from the most financially-oriented of companies.
by franga2000 | 2025-12-07 14:14:15+00:00
> After a year or two, I’m happy to throw it out and buy a new one.

Sincerely, fuck you.

Nobody with this mentality should be designing anything. I know many people at most hardware companies think like that and they can go fuck themselves too. But at least they have the excuse of getting fired if they make things too good. You don't.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 14:14:19+00:00
It's not about "learning to not do that single thing" but learning from everything you picked up during that period, good or bad. And even if what you did had the net-effect of being negative to society, you can learn from the things you experienced during that time, meaning it wouldn't be a waste, at least in my mind.

> I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society

Me neither. I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society, so seems we're more or less the same on that point.

But everyone's frame of reference and reality is difference, there is no absolute truth here, trying to paint it as such is actively doing a disservice to any sort of discourse we could have about the subject.

One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front? Seems inhumane if so.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-07 14:14:50+00:00
A larger heating element is very slightly more efficient due to less heat escaping as the liquid is heated more quickly. Resistive electric heating is always 100% efficient no matter the size of the heating element.

Keep in mind that heat is constantly being transferred between things that are different temperatures, the faster something reaches the set point temperature, the less time there is to lose heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation
by yesitcan | 2025-12-07 14:14:55+00:00
This is a long shot but have any of you had issues with noise and light sensitivity?

It’s something new that started happening to me in my early 30s. I can’t seem to get a diagnosis. Wondering if it’s autism related.

I’ve been to a bunch of specialists and they say it’s all in my head. But car headlights look 10x brighter than they should. And cutlery sounds 10x louder.
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-07 14:15:35+00:00
It doesn't sit right with me that a government body has an ad account in a centralized for-profit service in the first place.

Even having a free account seems wrong to me. The European Commission could post news, updates on its work and polls on the official European Commission site. I don't think the government should favor corporate social media sites or have anything to do with them in the first place. If they feel like posting on their own site is not enough, why not use a free social media outlet? Something self-hosted, using ActivityPub, for example?