MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw58903 | 2025-12-08 20:12:04+00:00
I have misguided friends working with payment processors (think companies like VISA, mastercard, etc.) to build models that run across all transactions to extract the purchasing behaviors of individuals, uncover correlations between accounts for marketing purposes, and predictively model future purchases and life events. Surveillance is inescapable at this point. How long until AI shops for us based on past purchases or we live in a world where mass individualized price discrimination is the norm? How to avoid that future? Sometimes I forget privacy is a basic right, as society often requires that we sign it away.
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-12-08 20:12:06+00:00
Though a smaller array (just covering the deck of a current ship) could provide some boost - 25% isn't nothing, though you need clear skies to net that, I suppose we could consider a system when the ship would make a journey more slowly, stopping to charge for four days, sailing for one (though I assume drifting means you can't really "stop" entirely so that's not entirely practical).
by colonCapitalDee | 2025-12-08 20:12:22+00:00
Blind leading the blind, but my thinking is this:

1. Use the tools to their fullest extend, push boundaries and figure out what works and what doesn't

2. Be more than your tools

As long as you + LLM is significantly more valuable than just an LLM, you'll be employed. I don't know how "practical" this advice is, because it's basically what you're already doing, but it's how I'm thinking about it.
by BigHatLogan | 2025-12-08 20:12:32+00:00
I think you're right about trying to stay one step ahead of product requirements. Maybe my issue here is that I'm looking for another "path" where one might not exist, at least not a concretely defined one. From childhood to now, things were set in front of me and I just sort of did them, but now it feels like we're entering a real fog of war.

It would be helpful, as you suggest, to start shifting away from "I code based on concrete specs" to "I discover solutions for the business."

Thanks for the reply (and for the original essay). It has given me a lot to chew on.
by darepublic | 2025-12-08 20:12:47+00:00
In community college our perl professor was often late. One time he just didn't show up. I remember him once saying something like job security involved writing indecipherable code so none of your coworkers could understand it. There was a tinge of bitterness in his remark. Our exams were essentially obscure perl puzzles where we had to read the code and determine the output, some kind of coded phrase.
by johnfn | 2025-12-08 20:12:51+00:00
If three of my friends that have never played basketball take a shot and they all miss, that doesn't say anything about my ability to make a shot. Obviously, my friends are inexperienced with basketball. There is nothing wrong with that, but it's not a fair or just argument to tell people who do have experience that "your success not a true one-shot because other, inexperienced people, failed".

You appear to be extending the definition of "one-shot" to "an LLM should be able to accomplish anything no matter how poorly it was prompted", which is, I hope you can agree, not very reasonable. It's certainly not something I would be arguing in favor of.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-08 20:13:18+00:00
> I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Consider what will happen every time there is a trade-off to be made between making/keeping the data more useful to the companies involved, and actually upholding the anonymity of the data subjects.

Anonymization is nearly impossible to get right even when you're trying really hard, and this is more likely to be a fig leaf to be able to do things that are illegal by sufficiently obfuscating them.

I hope that if EU customer data is included in this, the EU will have the balls to actually enforce GDPR. Uber is one of the few tech company cases where 2-4% of overall revenue would actually hurt, rather than being a small "tax" on the extra profit made through the illegal use of data.
Show HN: DataKit, your all in browser data studio is open source now
by aminkhorrami | 2025-12-08 20:15:13+00:00
Hey HN! I'm open-sourcing DataKit today.

GitHub: https://github.com/datakitpage/datakit Live demo: https://datakit.page

DataKit is a browser-based data analysis platform that processes multi-gigabyte files (CSV, Parquet, JSON, Excel) entirely client-side using DuckDB-WASM. Your data never leaves your browser.

What it does: • Process large files (tested up to 20GB) without any server • Full SQL interface powered by DuckDB compiled to WebAssembly • Python notebooks via Pyodide for data science workflows • Connect to remote sources (PostgreSQL, MotherDuck, S3) with optional proxy • AI assistant that only sees column schemas, not actual data

I was done with having to choose between cloud tools and heavy local installations. I wanted something that just works in a browser tab but has real power.

It's AGPL licensed with commercial licenses available for enterprises.

I've been building this solo as a side project for the past few months. Would love your feedback on: - Performance bottlenecks you encounter - Features you'd need for your workflows - The architecture decisions (all client-side vs hybrid)
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-08 20:15:14+00:00
People being able to organise their lives with their computers has been a thing since the beginning of the personal computer. The filesystems we have were never really the 'best' - just the most viable.

The filesystem UI has been abandoned in favour of newer, better abstractions, such as 'just throw it all at the Cloud and let our analysis software give you a front-end to it, eventually..'

I think users not understanding filesystems isn't really a computing problem, but a literacy one. In some senses, computing becomes the victim of itself.
by tonyarkles | 2025-12-08 20:15:29+00:00
Counterpoint: if a small part of the process is getting tweaked, how responsive can the team responsible for these apps be? That’s the killer feature of spreadsheets for business processes: the accountants can change the accounting spreadsheets, the shipping and receiving people can change theirs, and there’s no team in the way to act as a bottleneck.

That’s also the reason that so-called “Shadow IT” exists. Teams will do whatever they need to do to get their jobs done, whether or not IT is going to be helpful in that effort.
by clemvonstengel | 2025-12-08 20:15:42+00:00
Yeah we do both text and voice (roughly 70% of data collection is typed, 30% spoken). Partly this is to make sure the model is learning to decode semantic intent (rather than just planned motor movements). Right now, it's doing better on the typed part, but I expect that's just because we have more data of that kind.

It does generalize between typed and spoken, i.e. it does much better on spoken decoding if we've also trained on the typing data, which is what we were hoping to see.
by nine_k | 2025-12-08 20:15:59+00:00
Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players.

From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.

This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-08 20:16:07+00:00
Paramount sold themselves to Skydance who now get referred to as Paramount because Paramount is the older, stabler brand. That sale is generally considered to have pulled Paramount out of survival mode, though it will probably be at least a few more quarters before it the results are seen.

(Arguably, Skydance's ideas for Paramount are too similar to the weird Paramount and CBS divorce era, that I find it hard to believe Skydance is less wrong of a steward for Paramount than Paramount was before the consolidation. But a lot of that opinion comes from bias as a Star Trek fan and Skydance's approach seems to return to the semi-broken idea that Star Trek seems to be better as a film franchise than a TV franchise.)

Skydance owning both Paramount and Warner Brothers might be very concerning in terms of IP consolidation alone.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-08 20:16:10+00:00
> By default, NATS only flushes data to disk every two minutes, but acknowledges operations immediately. This approach can lead to the loss of committed writes when several nodes experience a power failure, kernel crash, or hardware fault concurrently—or in rapid succession (#7564).

I am getting strong early MongoDB vibes. "Look how fast it is, it's web-scale!". Well, if you don't fsync, you'll go fast, but you'll go even faster piping customer data to /dev/null, too.

Coordinated failures shouldn't be a novelty or a surprise any longer these days.

I wouldn't trust a product that doesn't default to safest options. It's fine to provide relaxed modes of consistency and durability but just don't make them default. Let the user configure those themselves.
by Maxatar | 2025-12-08 20:17:26+00:00
I just think you are the other person who replied to me are making the same mistake, which is mixing the means of accomplishing a goal with the goal itself. This is a mistake I see a lot (especially in software development), where people get too attached to a specific means or method that they end up confusing the method itself with the actual thing that needs to be accomplished.

The goal for an investor is captured in the stock price itself. In programming terms, a corporation is a function whose output is its stock price/market cap, and revenue is but one of a host of inputs into that corporation that determines what the stock price is. Other inputs can be operating expenses, whether dividends are issued, future prospects for the company such as entering new markets etc etc... and you can have beliefs about how those various inputs affect the output or how these inputs change the output over time (short term vs. long term), that's perfectly fine... but when push comes to shove, the goal is not the revenue, it's not entering a new market, it's not reducing operating expenses... the goal is increasing the stock price (well technically the market cap).
by Ukv | 2025-12-08 20:17:40+00:00
index_tiled.html is what justifies the title IMO - it's not using a screenshot as the background like index.html, and is as close as you can get using the original assets given the screenshot's scaling and compression artifacts (minus the red text being off).

But I feel it'd make more sense to just retake the screenshot properly and see if it can create a pixel-perfect replica.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-08 20:18:01+00:00
> the guys and gals that build this stuff may very well be imbibing these products with the kind of attitude that they like to see in their subordinates

Or that the individual developers see in themselves. Every team I've worked with in my career had one or two of these guys: When the Director or VP came in to town, they'd instantly launch into brown-nose mode. One guy was overt about it and would say things like "So-and-so is visiting the office tomorrow--time to do some petting!" Both the executive and the subordinate have normalized the "royal treatment" on the giving and receiving end.
by civeng | 2025-12-08 20:18:07+00:00
This is part of the false dichotomy you are not understanding. It's not actually a valid choice if there are no options. And that is what this is actually about, understanding how we have no good options, and what to do about it. I recommend start digging in and we all question or own understanding and acceptance of the system. Is it actually working with even a simple majority in the best position we can be?

Currently employing 130 wage slaves and unduly profiting from their margins, and not satisfied with the overall system at all.
by pfdietz | 2025-12-08 20:18:20+00:00
We were talking about a 180 hour battery (7.5 days), not a 30 day battery.

But back of the envelope: 2.7 GWh of heat in LiH at 4 MJ/kg and 820 kg/m^3 is a sphere 9m in radius. If we put a 1m layer of microporous silica insulation (conductivity ~0.03 W/mK) this gives a thermal time constant of 300 days.
by wrs | 2025-12-08 20:18:34+00:00
I honestly don’t understand how that’s offensive. It’s just a metaphor, and a pretty good one. Why are you taking it as some kind of value judgement? Do you feel like people who don’t know something are lesser beings?

The book was originally written as a metaphor for understanding a fourth spatial dimension, and as far as I know the metaphor is generally taken as helpful, not demeaning. The flatlanders are never described in an unflattering way.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-08 20:18:42+00:00
Yeah, I appreciate the separation as well actually, even though I'm not a fan of the langauges involved (no issue with QML, dislike JS and C++). I've made a few things with Qt and despite my feelings on the languages, found it to be pretty useful and capable, and the learning curve wasn't that bad imo. I can't recall using much JS to be honest, but it's been a hot minute since I worked with that.

That said there's simplicity to Iced being pure rust managed through cargo that I enjoy. Though it should be said that my "learning curve" for Iced was much lower than it might be for others as I discovered it well after I'd adopted Elm (which inspired Iced) and - independently - Rust, so Iced was pretty easy for me to grok.

I don't think there's a right/wrong way there to be honest, both approaches have their pro's/con's, and my main issues with Iced vs Qt is largely a matter of maturity/prevalence than any specifics with the implementations/workflow themselves.
by igouy | 2025-12-08 20:19:03+00:00
The writers took the photo story and changed the words into a pottery story, to add some variety.

The photo story isn't the whole story.

Did the students know that the professor would also choose which were the best photos ?

The "quality" group were only required to produce one photo, but were they allowed to produce 100 photos?

If so, did the professor include all those photos when they chose which were the best photos ?

If not, did the professor look at a much larger sample of photos from the "quantity" group than the "quality" group to decide which were the best photos?
by cyanydeez | 2025-12-08 20:19:06+00:00
Only when using non aligned intwrests, like government funding roads.

When interests directly align and parties are largely owned by the same people, its wash trading.

The point of wash trading is to make activity increase the value of an asset via a netzero activity. Since nothing is generated from the activity its circular, eg, nothing physical changes hands.

Crypto trading is the golden child of wash trading as the primary mode of increasing the value of an asset.

Its unsurprising then that the company that got rich on crypto wash trading is doing its own attempts to drive artificial demand.
by bdavid21wnec | 2025-12-08 20:19:15+00:00
I keep seeing articles like these popup. I am in the industry but not in the “AI” industry. What I have no concept of, is the current subsidized, VC funded, anywhere close to what the final product will be? I always fall back to the Uber paradox. Yes it was great at first, now it’s 3x what it cost and has only given cabs pricing power. This was good for consumers to start but now it’s just another part of the k shaped economy. So is that ultimately where AI goes? Top percent can afford a high monthly subscription and the not so fortunate get there free 5 minutes per month
by calvinmorrison | 2025-12-08 20:19:47+00:00
> Here I'm talking about the bitcoin mining hardware when the said hardware first appeared.

even better, we take preorders, while we delay for 1 year, we run the ASICs ourselves with way outsized TH/s power compared to the world. Once we develop the next one, we release the 'new' one to the public with 1/10th of the power.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-08 20:20:01+00:00
i've seen many attempts to turn a widely used spreadsheet into a webapp. Eventually, it becomes an attempt to re-implement spreadsheets. The first time something changes and the user says "well in Excel i would just do this..." the dev team is off chasing existing features of excel for eternity and the users are pissed because it takes so long and is buggy, meanwhile, excel is right there ready and waiting.
by robotresearcher | 2025-12-08 20:20:05+00:00
Spreadsheets are an incredible tool. They were a key innovation in the history of applications. I love them and use them.

But it's very hard to have a large conventional cell-formula spreadsheet that is correct. The programming model / UI are closely coupled, so it's hard to see what's going on once your sheet is above some fairly low complexity. And many workplaces have monstrous sheets that run important things, curated lovingly (?) for many years. I bet many or most of them have significant errors.
by maxmcd | 2025-12-08 20:20:30+00:00
> > You can force an fsync after each messsage [sic] with always, this will slow down the throughput to a few hundred msg/s.

Is the performance warning in the NATS possible to improve on? Couldn't you still run fsync on an interval and queue up a certain number of writes to be flushed at once? I could imagine latency suffering, but batches throughput could be preserved to some extent?
by martinald | 2025-12-08 20:20:46+00:00
It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level.

Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations.

For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features.

Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.
by Ylpertnodi | 2025-12-08 20:21:23+00:00
> The most stringent ones seems to be that RU has a lot of fiul, gaz and coal and an industrial network spread accross a vast land that's not easy to target,

Very recent Ukrainian drone self-defences prove otherwise - far away russian refineries are not so far away anymore. And, are very difficult to defend. Throw in an additional few partisans to mess up the railway system (russian lifeline) and I rather suspect a coup to happen soon.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-12-08 20:21:25+00:00
I read these sort of comments every so often and I do not understand them. You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes. I understand that for some reason this isn't the case for your work flow, but obviously it has a lot more value for others.

If you are a chairmaker and everyone gains access to a machine that can spit out all the chair components but sometimes only spits out 3 legs or makes a mistake on the backs, you might find it pointless. Maybe it can't do all the nice artisan styles you can do. But you can be confident others will take advantage of this chair machine, work around the issues and drive the price down from $20 per chair to $2 per chair. In 24 months, you won't be able to sell enough of your chairs any more.
by adventured | 2025-12-08 20:21:33+00:00
It's from a dramatic rise in inactive lifestyles by younger people and a lot of sitting, with the predictable consequences. Behavior which would have been far less common before mass adoption of video games and personal computing in the home, and then everybody sitting/laying around their homes with their smartphones. Young people go out less, they have a lot less sex, they're far less social in-person. It all goes together.

These people under 50 were the first generation to sit around at home for long periods of time playing video games. The NES came out in 1985-86 in the US and home video gaming has been mass adopted since. From there add on the full adoption of sitting down at a computer for work in offices across the 1980s and 1990s. Then throw in the full adoption of home computing in the 1990s with Win3 & Win95 + GUI. And for the past 20 years, throw in the smartphone.

It's the sitting primarily, hours and hours of it every day.
by tptacek | 2025-12-08 20:21:39+00:00
I think it's pretty funny that no matter how straightforward the methodological critiques of 90s-vintage twin studies are, they always elicit responses as if the critiques were metaphysical, rather than (for instance) deliberately excluding the dizygotic twin control group from MISTRA because it revealed the studies findings were just noise.

The truth is, for these kinds of studies, the whole enterprise might as well be metaphysical; people saying these kinds of things have formed a religious conviction about the heritability of behavioral traits, and their real objection is that science continues to be done on the topic at all. Ironic, given the frequency with which they complain that this science is suppressed.

(I too have a near-religious conviction about this subject, though in a different direction; I do not, however, pretend that conviction is itself a methodological critique!)
by e10jc | 2025-12-08 20:22:37+00:00
I totally agree with you. I am working on a new platform right now for a niche industry. Maybe theres $10m ARR to make total in the industry. Last year, it wouldn’t be worth the effort to raise, hire a PM, a few devs, QA, etc. But for a solo dev like myself with AI, it definitely is worth it now.
by jofla_net | 2025-12-08 20:22:46+00:00
https://grahamcluley.com/shouldnt-gmail-zip-files-password-i...

Its been a while so i had trouble finding it (but Grok obliged)

Moreover its always the edge cases that people are 'OK' with, but again if they can do it (setup the infrastructure) for one thing they can do it for anything, and it makes 'trusting' them seem naive. Since trusting was the original statement.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 20:23:15+00:00
Indeed. But I get why people are confused because it is a subtle difference between 'stress relieved through small earthquakes is stress expended' vs 'stress relieved through small earth quakes is not indicative of the magnitude of future events'.

The long term absence of stress relief small quakes on a known fault line might be bad news, or no news at all, statistics are where the difference is here, not in particular events. See also, 'the big one' and various theories around it.
by wmf | 2025-12-08 20:23:18+00:00
Since SRAM is typically built in logic fabs (like TSMC) alongside the processors themselves, it theoretically shouldn't face the same supply chain crunch as HBM.

DRAM and logic fabs are both sold out so replacing one with the other doesn't really help. And SRAM uses ~6x more silicon area than DRAM.

Groq may be undervalued but not for supply chain reasons.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-08 20:23:28+00:00
> the ability to both afford next week’s food this week

At minimum that's everyone on a normal paycheck, paid every two weeks. There are situations where someone couldn't get together a few days' pay at once, but that's a tiny fraction of situations.

And the means to store most food is a two foot square of space in a room somewhere. And then most of the rest fits in the empty fridge space you already have.

And there are deals there that can be useful for your wallet right away. This isn't something where you have to put up a ton of money for months before you benefit.

The biggest issue is probably that costco isn't easy to get to.
by daveguy | 2025-12-08 20:23:41+00:00
Hey, original a-hole here.

Just wanted to chime in (even though you probably don't want advice from me after that a-holery). I don't think LLMs are good for editing at all. They make things more wordy and obtuse. But editing is supposed to add clarity, especially in technical writing. Generally, the more you can remove while conveying the ideas the better. Honestly, I expect your original writing was better before using Claude.

Sorry again for being so harsh in the first place.