MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-07 13:15:34+00:00
> about the cruel trials people had to endure who wanted to do alternative national service

Tbf, at least in West Germany people had a choice. In East Germany you ended up as 'Bausoldat': https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bausoldat, and you could forget about any 'carreer opportunities' for the rest of your life.

And as former East German who then went the 'Kriegsdienstverweigerer' path in unified Germany during the 90's I cannot complain about any discrimination or incorrect behaviour, all communication was perfectly correct and respectful and I didn't even have to show up anywhere in person (in hindsight it was a silly decision - but in the 90s it really looked for a little while like the Cold War might be over and armies would no longer be needed in Europe).
Ask HN: Failed launching my SaaS as a Student. Should I open source "bad" code?
by mohammede | 2025-12-07 13:16:00+00:00
I am a senior CS student. For 20 months, I worked as a solo Software Engineer at an outsourcing firm. During that time, I built several internal tools for them (never got paid for them cause they suck like that), including a clocking/activity tracking system.

I saw potential in the tool, particularly for BPOs in the MENA region (I am there). I spent the last 6 months rewriting the architecture for multi-tenancy, overhauling the UI/UX, and adding productivity and compliance algorithms.

I recently attempted a launch. It was silent, and frankly, a failure. I realized two things:

- My market research was too reliant on LLMs and lacked real-world validation.

- I do not have the resources (time, capital, or connections) to compete in the saturated "Time Tracking" market while finishing my degree or learning some actually useful job skills.

Now I am faced with two options, holding on for it longer and just shelving it with the excuse that maybe I get to build something around it which brings it back to life, or, Open Source it and share the code (definitely not sure about the quality of code and architecture and didn't care for the most part because I was trying to accelerate the launch) and try and get probably brutally roasted for it.

The whole Idea is to fail forward, so I am asking for both feedback and advice from more experienced peers.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-07 13:16:04+00:00
When you go looking for a car will you buy the Peugeot 3008 because it has a higher number than the 208 ? Or will you do research, go to the company site and look at the product description, compare the specs and make your opinion about what best fits your needs ?

Right now there's about 5 lines of Surface devices with each their very specific purpose and tradeoffs. I'd be shocked at someone buying one solely based on the how the name sounds or what they assume it means without looking at the actual product pages.
Study Friend – One AI conversation for flashcards, quizzes, graphs and more
by ganeshspeaks | 2025-12-07 13:17:05+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Ganesh, founder of Study Friend.

After 3 years in edtech, I kept seeing students juggle 5+ apps just to study one topic. ChatGPT for explanations, Quizlet for flashcards, Kahoot for quizzes, etc.

Study Friend lets you do all of that in one conversation. Ask "what is photosynthesis?" - get explanation. Say "make flashcards" - done. "Test me" - quiz appears. "Show me a graph" - renders inline.

We're at 1,200 students, 40% WoW growth, zero marketing.

Try it: studyfriend.me

Happy to answer questions about the technical implementation, AI optimization for educational content, or the edtech space generally.
by artyom | 2025-12-07 13:17:24+00:00
Perl was aimed at intelligent people that considered obfuscated code challenges a sport and had a tendency for masochism.

Its main achievement is being there first, before everyone else, to run server-side code in a scripting/interpreted language.

The rest wasn't neither cultural nor technical. From a purely business perspective, having to fight against an idiosyncratic tool half the time doesn't really make much sense.
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-07 13:17:29+00:00
> However, in general, most of the past really was terrible.

How are you and everybody else here so sure about that? Maybe you are forgetting parts of the population with different lifestyles and conditions? And I don't mean only the rich.

When people are though, they don't suffer from a though life as much as somebody who is soft. You can notice that with yourself if you do uncomfortable things, like going on outdoor adventures or staying in a more primitive cottage.

Old people have a tendency to only talk about the hard times, and paint themselves as hard working martyrs. And of course it is in their interest to convince the younger generations that the system the olds are in control of is a vanguard against endless suffering, starvation and disease. Hmm, now it starts to sound familiar. Don't we need to sacrifice an oxen or a virgin to keep away that suffering from the past? Don't we need the young generations to obey and pay us juicy, juicy monetary tributes so that we keep the blight from the past away from them? The horror we have had to tell them about, because they weren't alive to verify if it was lies or truth.
by layer8 | 2025-12-07 13:17:59+00:00
I’m lucky to have flexible working hours, so I can take breaks during the day and go out for errands, for a walk or bike ride.

Working outside in the sun sounds nice, but display/glasses technology isn’t quite there yet for that, and I’d still want an ergonomic chair and proper ergonomic keyboard on a stable surface (table), for any extended work.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-07 13:18:54+00:00
I think we might be using "emergence" differently, possibly due to different philosophical traditions muddying the waters.

I'm going to stick purely to a workable definition of emergence for now.

Also, let me try a purely empirical approach:

You said the car "never possesses any properties that can't be explained as a collection of parts." But consider: can that pile of parts on the workshop floor transport me over the Autobahn to Munich at 200 km/h?

We can try sitting on top of the pile while holding the loose steering wheel up in the air, making "vroom vroom, beep beep" noises, but I don't think we'll get very far.

On the other hand, once it's put (back) together, the assembled car most certainly can! That's a measurable, testable difference.

That (the ability of the assembled car to move and go places) is what I call an emergent property. Not because it's inexplicable or magical, but simply because it exists at one level of organization and not another. The capability is fully reducible to physics, yet it's not present in the pile.

parts × organization → new properties

That's all I mean by emergence. No magic, no strong metaphysical claims. Just the observation that organization matters and creates new causal powers.

Or, here's another way to see it: Compare Differentiation and Integration. When you differentiate a formula, you lose terms on the right hand side. Integration brings them back in the form of integration constants. No one considers integration constants to be magical. It was merely information that was lost when we differentiated.
by endofreach | 2025-12-07 13:19:24+00:00
I mean what does anyone expect from a future where images like this can be generated by any moron for any place, in thousands of variations, with just a few clicks? And then video?

I am surprised headlines like this are only coming out now. I've been saying it for a long time, but people said i am crazy. The web as we know it will be unusable. And a new one will not solve all issues, as we have already made ourselves too dependent on the current web and tech. So the impact on the real world is gonna turn a lot if things upside down. It's gonna be a lot of fun. But sure, let's keep pretending AI can either be nothing but bullshit OR we should only fear losing jobs to robots... i don't get why no one every thinks about the societal impact... it's so obvious, still... i am baffled...
by nl | 2025-12-07 13:19:39+00:00
> But the end state in my mind is telling an AI "build me XYZ", having it ask all the important questions over the course of a 30-minute chat while making reasonable decisions on all lower-level issues, then waking up the next morning to a live cloud-hosted test environment at a subdomain of the domain it said it would buy along with test builds of native apps for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, all with near-100% automated test coverage and passing tests. Coding agents feel like magic, but we're clearly not there yet.

If you take out the native builds we are there now. V0, Lovable, etc really do a great job of this. If you want an IDE-like environment Antigravity is pretty good too.

The native builds thing is completely doable too. I've built cross platform apps in 30 minutes of my time using Codex+Flutter. It really does work.
by wcoenen | 2025-12-07 13:19:40+00:00
Meanwhile it feels like half my colleagues don't understand the difference between starting a new Teams conversation ("thread" in Slack), or replying to an existing one. And there's no way to move a message that was posted in the wrong conversation. AFAIK it's the same with Slack threads.

Getting people to post in the "correct" channel faces similar challenges.

Imagine the chaos that would result if we ran everything through Teams.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 13:19:47+00:00
> At least they, you know, die soon.

They may very well live another 20 years and you have to pay their demise, too. Their generation smoked more, drank more alcohol, had a life full of asbestos, PCB and lead. It's gonna be expensive for us.

We had our chance in 2020, but blew it because of silly ethics. I see little gratitude for the gigantic sacrifice the young generation made for boomer life. I hope the kidz won't forget next time someone eats a bat.
by signal11 | 2025-12-07 13:20:06+00:00
I agree. Perl made sense as a “step up” in the world of *sh and awk.

Also the culture wasn’t hostile to me as a newcomer. The Perl books I read encouraged not writing overly terse, cryptic code, and I got helpful answers via mailing lists.

I still use Perl sometimes if my command pipeline gets too complicated.
by chistev | 2025-12-07 13:21:14+00:00
Animal Farm by George Orwell. It was a re-read.

Here's an excerpt from my blog about my thoughts on the book -

It is terrifyingly easy for propaganda to replace reality. Orwell shows this through Squealer, the pig who acts as the farm’s official spokesperson. He doesn’t use force — he uses language. Whenever something goes wrong, he simply explains it again, louder and with more confidence, until the animals doubt their own memories. Rules are rewritten, past events are altered, and inconvenient truths are wiped away, all through the steady drip of confident lies. Before long, the animals aren’t living in the world as it is, but in the world they’ve been told to believe in.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, used speeches, newspapers, and films to reshape public perception, presenting lies as facts.

Jews, political opponents, and other targeted groups were demonized through repeated messaging, making the population accept policies that were morally outrageous.

In North Korea, the government controls all media and education, rewriting history to glorify the Kim dynasty.

Contradictory evidence is inaccessible, so the official narrative becomes the “reality” for most citizens. . . . If you want a non re-read, I'd say Night by Elie Wiesel.
by Loocid | 2025-12-07 13:21:27+00:00
The second line. The video description for me says the following:

"HAWAIʻI VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK - An incredible sight at the summit of Kilauea volcano on Saturday morning, as Episode 38 erupted enormous lava fountains across the caldera, destroying one of the webcams that was live streaming the event.

All images and video are courtesy the U.S. Geological Survey. A synthesized text-to-video voiceover was used in the narration for this story."
by JonChesterfield | 2025-12-07 13:21:42+00:00
I'm sure there was a period where one couldn't find a 3kW kettle in the UK on power efficiency grounds, one was supposed to run a 2kW one instead to save the planet. But now when I search I find 3kW models again. So either that was a nightmare of some sort or sanity has prevailed.

Chatgpt thinks this was threatened in 2010 then postponed in 2016 then cancelled, which vaguely aligns with my timeline of interest in tea.
by cpuXguy | 2025-12-07 13:22:59+00:00
If you’re not into number theory, this spiral probably won’t fascinate you much. But if you are, I hope you have fun exploring it — and don’t forget to play with the URL parameters after /?, where you can, among other things, set the real part to values below or above 1/2.

The graph is powered by a special JavaScript function called vanilla_zeta(). This function implements the Riemann zeta function and provides the numerical values used in the visualization. You might find vanilla_zeta() useful for your own experiments as well. You can learn more about it at: https://zeta-calculator.com
by nl | 2025-12-07 13:23:56+00:00
Have you tried Loveable, Replit, V0 etc?

Outside of purchasing the domain and native apps for you they cover a very significant amount of this.

If you insist on Native Apps, it's possible Google Jules could do it. With Gemini 2.5 it wasn't strong enough but I think it has Gemini 3 now which can definitely do native apps just fine.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-07 13:24:05+00:00
You missed the point. The whole town aesthetic changed. No we really can’t do it anymore, because the way we design cities and towns is changing. Wealthy area used to be more open to everyone, now it’s all gated communities and walled compounds. You can’t even drive around the lake and enjoy the nature of it because all you see are the walls of McMansions, that’s what’s not “cute”
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-07 13:24:46+00:00
Can I confirm that you need to write your content as valid JSON? Because if that's the case I can't think of anything worse.

I can't really get a feel for what this actually is/does from the landing page. Terms like "Growth Engineers" and "Automate lead magnet generation." Don't help. I've no idea what a growth engineer is or what those 4 random words combined into a sentence means, or how it relates to growth engineer.

I don't see anything here that would make me move away from pandoc/quarto...
by pmyteh | 2025-12-07 13:25:41+00:00
There is technology that could detect rail breaks, in the form of track circuits: feed a current into a rail, detect whether it gets to the other end (or bridge the two rails at the other end of the circuit and see if it gets back to the start of the other rail). A variation of this is commonly used in signalling systems to verify that the track is clear: if a pair of wheels is in the track section then the signal will short across the rails and make the circuit show 'occupied'.

Ultimately, though, this kind of stuff is expensive (semi-bespoke safety-critical equipment every few miles across an enormous network) and doesn't reduce all risks. Landslides don't necessarily break rails (but can cause derailments), embankments and bridges can get washed out but the track remains hanging, and lots of other failure modes.

There are definitely also systems to confirm that the power lines aren't down, but unfortunately the wires can stay up and the track be damaged or vice versa, so proving one doesn't prove the other. CCTV is probably a better bet, but that's still a truly enormous number of cameras, plus running power supplies all along the railway and ensuring a data link, plus monitoring.
by andrybak | 2025-12-07 13:26:17+00:00
A 2022 Technology Connections video explores various ways to boil water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c

And a 2020 video about different voltages in the US electrical systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4
by amiga386 | 2025-12-07 13:26:37+00:00
suse 11.1 includes perl 5.10: https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/...

perl 5.8 was released in 2002. perl 5.000 (there is no perl 5.0) was released in 1994. I have difficulty accepting you have perl "5.0" installed.
by torginus | 2025-12-07 13:26:55+00:00
There are many kinds of IRs in compilers - I'm not familiar with how Rust works, but for example GCC has an intermediate representation called GENERIC, which is a C-like language that preserves the scoping and loops and branches of the inputted C code.

Lower level representations also exist - since C has goto, you can pretty much turn any SSA IR to C, but the end result won't be readable.
Show HN: I was frustrated of 85% of my technical interviews, I built SharpSkill
by Enjoyooor | 2025-12-07 13:26:57+00:00
Hey,

My name is Benjamin and as many developers, I was tired to not succeed my technical interviews, for any reasons.

I made SharpSkill in order to change that.

Real Use Case, flashcards & interview simulators.

One goal : Destroy the next technical interviews.
by mmsimanga | 2025-12-07 13:27:39+00:00
You could be right but I would like to put forward another possible reason. They could be telling the truth. I studied computer science late 90s and to this day I cannot use MS Excel beyond summing a column of numbers. To make matters worse I work in data engineering space. So people often assume I do not want to help them when I tell them I cannot help them with their fancy spreadsheets. I have never owned a Mac book and sometimes I get asked for help and I haven't a clue how to help. The answer is how come but you have been working with computers for all these years.
by michaelmrose | 2025-12-07 13:28:24+00:00
The first subject of the article literally had has mom warn him of the dangers and about half of Kenyans his age and demographics use the internet. Many of them said hell no to this posting.

https://statskenya.co.ke/at-stats-kenya/about/number-of-peop...

The rest are not completely uninformed nor stupid. News does still tend to trickle out over 11 years. They could also have insisted on someone to read what they are signing or refused the job change when they found out they would be murdering people even if it meant rotting in prison. Instead he said.

"Mum, the job we were told we came to do has been changed, but even this one is not bad"
by unleaded | 2025-12-07 13:28:24+00:00
remember when JLCPCB became popular a few years ago and completely flipped hobby electronics upside down? I don't know how possible it is but it would be really cool if that happens in a few years with semiconductors. it's kind of mad that they've dominated our lives since the 1970s but you can only make them if you're a large company with millions of dollars (or several years, a big garage and lots of equipment as seen here). or tiny tapeout.
by spicyusername | 2025-12-07 13:28:32+00:00
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.

Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.
by crote | 2025-12-07 13:29:12+00:00
> BEGIN? Take 60 seconds to read what it means.

Yes, that's exactly the problem: it's additional mental load you have to read up on.

Have 60 of those small oddities in a file, and suddenly you're spending an hour dealing with Perl quirks rather than actually debugging that obscure script a retired coworker wrote a decade ago. A 5-minute fix turned into a 65-minute fix, solely because of Perl.

Most programming languages use more-or-less the same constructs, and the few per-language oddities are usually fairly obvious from context. In practice this means someone familiar with any programming language will to a certain extent be able to read, debug, and patch small issues in code written in any other programming language. Perl's obscure and dense syntax makes this virtually impossible. Give a buggy Python script to a developer who daily-drives Javascript and they can probably fix it. Give a buggy Perl script to that same Javascript developer, and they probably have absolutely no clue what's going on.

In practice this turns Perl into technical debt. It has very few natural niches where it is genuinely the best, so experienced Perl developers are quite rare to have around. Any script written in Perl will most likely have to be read by someone who isn't an experienced Perl developer - which is significantly harder than a script written in just about any other language. The result is that any Perl scripts you have lying around are basically a grenade waiting to go off: they can't be maintained, so they should probably be replaced.
by latexr | 2025-12-07 13:29:19+00:00
He’s also fairly arrogant and unreasonable in various interactions¹, forcing people to bend over backwards to accommodate his requests. He puts off a lot of people and severely harms his own movement by making people who are not part of it think he’s gross, both physically (the infamous picking something of his feet and eating it) and intellectually (I have examples in mind but don’t wish to start a flame war).

What good is it being a visionary if people ignore or actively reject the message because they are put off by the messenger? It’s not useful being a harbinger of doom if nothing changes anyway.

Stallman should be commended and recognised for starting the free software movement, but he should’ve stepped aside long long ago and let someone more charismatic be its figurehead.

¹ I’m sure someone reading this has had a different experience, but please do a cursory web search and recognise people’s negative interactions with Stallman are not rare.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-07 13:30:06+00:00
curl's approach will lead to partial and failed downloads. When a client stops accepting new data, servers tend to close the connection after a while.

There are smoother ways to deal with this (i.e. reduce download rate by faking dropped packets to output speed), but if you just want a simple download command, I think both simple solutions are fine.

If the download doesn't fit in RAM, it'll end up swapped out and effectively cached to disk anyway.
by RealCodingOtaku | 2025-12-07 13:30:19+00:00
Unsure why this is a reply to the OP, the only thing common is RMS and nothing else.

But, RMS is known to be socially awkward, the same goes for many autistic individuals. It's just that he doesn't mask and comes out as “rude”. If send an e-mail, he will usually take his time to write down a succinct response.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-12-07 13:32:00+00:00
> Given the number of cctv cameras that operate in the UK, and their continued growth,

CCTV cameras are mostly in private ownership, those in public ownership are owned by a mass of radically different bodies who will not share access without a minimum of police involvement. Oh and of course - we rarely point the cameras at the bridges (we have so many bridges).

> Where I live it is not uncommon for rail to have detection for people walking on the rail, and bridges to have extra protection against jumpers. I wouldn't be that surprised if the same system can be used to verify damage.

This bridge just carries trains. There is no path for walking on it. Additionally jumping would be very unusual on this kind of bridge; the big suspension bridges attract that behaviour.

You mentioned twice that you are surprised by things which are quite common in the UK. I don't know where you're from, but it's worth noting that the UK has long been used as a bogeyman by American media, and this has intensified recently. You should come and visit, the pound is not so strong at the moment so you'll get a great deal to see our country.