MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisislife2 | 2025-12-18 10:17:31+00:00
GP has a point. Privacy rights aren't just about hiding stuffs that you may be embarrassed about. It is about safeguarding your personal identity, to protect yourself politically. Due to our tribal nature, we are always constantly judging each other whenever we form a social connection. And political exposure (from whatever source - be it our own parents, our society, our nation, the internet etc.) has created conscious / unconscious biases where some part of a person's personal identity can be a "trigger" for someone to be politically outraged, and even act on those urges. For example, some westerners get triggered when they see a burqa clad women in their streets, and some (especially in the middle-east and Asia) get triggered when they see a woman scantily clad and not "properly" attired. A muslim woman in Dubai may have no problems in wearing a burqa (or, more realistically, in covering her head as culturally required) in her office or a family function, but may like to wear a "sexier" outfits when out in pubs or discotheques. That is her multi-cultural identity and experiments in developing her own personality and identity. But if someone where to violate her privacy, by sharing a photo or video of her in a pub, expressing her sexuality through her style of dress, it could lead to an attack on her based on part of her identity. Take that at a larger scale - a lay Jew or a Muslim may prefer to appear religious amongst conservatives of his own group, even if being a Jew or a Muslim isn't a large part of their identity (i.e. they don't really define themselves through it). Or they may try to hide their religious identity amongst strangers, even they are religious - such acts may be prudent to do so, for example, in a society where antisemitism or Islamophobia is prevalent, where people do get triggered simply because you are a Jew or a Muslim.

In other words, privacy rights isn't about hiding secrets but safeguarding your own personal identity. You are of course right that if we change our own perspective about our own personal identity and behaviour, we can certainly become more comfortable with ourselves. And that can foster political changes too.
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-12-18 10:18:31+00:00
More students _per course_ than a MOOC cohort? -- doubt. If you add up all courses of a while discipline, edu portals still serve way more students.

In our department, about 20% reach a master. Sure that's more well rounded than a random bunch of courses, but it should be possible to even surpass the rigid choices of a lot of universities. I have no numbers for MOOCs at hand. If I had to guess: more like a gym: a lot of members, an order of magnitude less finishers?

I personally prefer the interaction on campus. But I dislike the outdated content of a lot of professors -- I'm not arguing about basics that are still relevant, I mean their /SoTA/ from 5-15y ago.
by soVeryTired | 2025-12-18 10:18:42+00:00
Anyone have a good explanation for why elliptic curves have a 'natural' group law? I've seen the definition of the group law in R before, where you draw a line through two points, find the third point, and mirror-image. I feel like there's something deeper going on though.

As far as I've seen, the group law is what makes elliptic curves special. Are they the _only_ flavour of curve that has a nice geometric group law? (let's say aside from really simple cases like lines through the origin, where you can just port over the additive group from R)
by janandonly | 2025-12-18 10:19:10+00:00
This is why I have a problem with so many altcoin projects:

> Many of these projects promise faster transactions, cheaper fees, better privacy, or easier scaling. And on the surface, that can sound very attractive, especially to users who feel slowed down by Bitcoin. But Aaron cautions that it is worth looking past the headline features and asking what is being traded away to make those improvements possible.

> When altcoins optimize for speed or cost, they often sacrifice decentralization or long-term economic incentives. Some rely on small validator sets. Others depend on foundations or companies that quietly reintroduce trust. These trade-offs shape the future of crypto competition far more than marketing narratives or short-term price action.
Ask HN: What are some interesting papers I could read during vacations?
by znpy | 2025-12-18 10:19:17+00:00
Hello there!

I've got a couple more days where the office is open and I can print stuff for free before it closes for end-of-year vacation.

What are some interesting CS papers I could print and read during vacations?

To add some context: I am a cloud engineer and I write code either as a hobby or to glue together pieces of infrastructure. I have an engineering background. I like low-level stuff.

As an example of papers I liked in the past I can bring up "sendmsg copy avoidance with MSG_ZEROCOPY" (https://netdevconf.org/2.1/papers/debruijn-msgzerocopy-talk.pdf). I did read that and try and replicate some of the results.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-18 10:19:21+00:00
> There are no "levers".

I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.

> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.

That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.

At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.
by random9749832 | 2025-12-18 10:20:09+00:00
I got feedback from FAANG+ once after multiple rounds with director / manager etc.

I just got told I didn't seem "motivated" enough despite spending several rounds / days / hours interviewing and bunch of leetcode questions. Not even that I wasn't skilled or good enough or didn't pass the questions. Pretty sure the last guy just didn't like me for whatever reason.
by komali2 | 2025-12-18 10:20:18+00:00
> Why would they go along with it?

It's not a relevant question, in the same way the desires of the Confederacy for independence were irrelevant when they lost the Civil War.

But also, I did answer it: Some would probably go along with it because of the obvious overall improvement to society that would result, which they would enjoy just as much as anyone else. After all, they already pay taxes so that roads exist and homeless are at least fed (and thus not harassing people as much). I said this in my previous comment.
by axegon_ | 2025-12-18 10:21:30+00:00
I've had mixed feelings about HN in terms of how people perceive a product over the last few years. I used to have an overwhelmingly positive opinions about the community up until COVID: everyone started making the "solution that will help researchers find a cure", which, in all instances, ended up being tons of people independently loading up papers into elasticsearch. And when I pointed out that they are all solving a problem no one has, I got jumped by a ton of people going "nooooo you just don't understand how powerful what these systems are". At the end, none of those turned out to be the silver bullet, or a bullet for that matter.

Recently it's the AI craze: you have a complex problem to solve: "AI can easily do that". You have infrastructure issues: "AI can easily do that". You have issues processing petabytes of data fast and efficiently: "AI can easily solve that". I am getting a ton of bots trying to access my home network: "AI can easily solve that". I am having a hard time falling asleep: "AI". I have a flu: "AI".

In a nutshell, the shiny new toy syndrome is very common so the reception of a product is not a guarantee for success. To give you an example: recently some people(pretty active on here) got in touch with me with regards to an initiative I am a part of: they claimed that they wanted some expertise on the subject I agreed to schedule a call. It turned out to be a sales pitch for yet another product which tries to solve a problem but it does not because the people who built it fundamentally do not understand the problem. Forget the fact that I am not interested in being their client, given that it's a volunteer project and none of the people involved are paid to do it(if anything, we are paying from our own pockets to keep it alive), it was yet another techbro product which tries to build a skyscraper starting from the roof. Except the ground underneath is partially lava, partially a swamp.

I think it is all related to the impostor syndrome: young people have it, they get a bit older and gain confidence. By the time people hit their early to mid 30s, they start realizing that most of the world operates on patches over patches and 2 layers down, no one has a clue what is going on.
by MTarver | 2025-12-18 10:21:47+00:00
I'm pleased people have gt something out of the opening cahoter of TBoS. But the book was never designed to be read online, except as a preview and a quick lookup/reminder of features. For intensive prolonged reading, the route to purchasing the hardcopy is linked to the front page.

Anybody discouraged from buying by the very limited hurdle getting the book will completely fail at the more substantial hurdle of understanding it.

Expecting everything for free, and creators giving in to that demand shapes character. Systems which reward minimal effort, maximal demand, and zero reciprocity end up selecting for the worst traits in both readers and communities.
by wahern | 2025-12-18 10:22:01+00:00
Sure, as long as the solution isn't to just bolt on another distinct DNS monolith. The root of the problem IMO is that no libc, AFAIK, exports an API for parsing, let alone composing or manipulating, resolv.conf formatted data. The solutions have either been the same as FreeBSD (openresolv, a portable implementation of Debian's resolvconf tool), or just freezing resolv.conf (notwithstanding occassional new libc features) and bolting atop (i.e. keeping in place) the existing infrastructure a monolithic resolver service with their own bespoke configs, such as macOS and Linux/systemd have done. But resolv.conf can never go away, because it's the only sane and portable way for your average userland program to load DNS configuration, especially async resolver libraries.

It's a coordination problem. Note that the original notion of resolvconf, IIUC, was it was only stitching together trusted configuration data. That's no excuse, of course, for not rigorously isolating data from execution, which is more difficult in shell scripts--at least, if you're not treating the data as untrusted from the get go. It's not that difficult to write shell code to handle untrusted data, you just can't hack it together without keeping this is mind. And it would be much easier if the resolver infrastructure in libc had a proper API for dealing with resolv.conf (and others), which could be exported by a small utility which in turn could be used to slice and dice configurations from shell scripts.

The problem with the new, alternative monoliths is they very quickly run off into the weeds with their crazy features and configuration in ways that create barriers for userland applications and libraries to rely upon, beyond bootstrapping them to query 127.0.0.1:53. At the end of the day, resolv.conf can never really go away. So the proper solution, IMO, is to begin to carefully build layers around the one part that we know for a fact won't go away, rather than walking away with your ball to build a new playground. But that requires some motivated coordination and cooperation with libc developers.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-18 10:22:30+00:00
> If you have a GPU capable of cutting edge graphics, you have to have a top notch driver stack. Nobody gets this right except AMD and NVIDIA (and both have their flaws). Apple doesn't even come close, and they are ahead of everyone else except AMD/NVIDIA. AMD seems to do it the best, NVIDIA, a distant second, Apple 3rd, and everyone else 10th.

What about Intel?
by pjc50 | 2025-12-18 10:23:09+00:00
America has no data protection law, apart from some hyper-specific ones: healthcare, video rental records. That makes all of this data sharing completely legal. As well as that, it is widely agreed there that lying is free speech.

It is not wire fraud because you do not pay to apply. (In general; places that charge applicants are even more scammy.)
by charcircuit | 2025-12-18 10:23:29+00:00
They are clearly committing copyright infringement, but plenty of a copyright infringement happens in practice and it is tolerated by the copyright owners. This is not what I am objecting to though. I am objecting to the idea that Vizio has a contract with a user to give them the source code of their proprietary software. If Vizio ignore a license, in my mind there is no way for that license to establish a contract between Vizio and a user. How can there be a meeting of minds when Vizio's mind disagrees with the contract.
by geraldwhen | 2025-12-18 10:23:43+00:00
I suspect that CVE inflation has poisoned the minds of many developers.

A db driver may have an issue with unsanitized user input when run against SQLite, but you only use it with oracle and sanitize input anyway, but that shows up as a 9.1 critical deployment blocker for corporate employees.

Unexploitable CVEs with inflated ratings make using any open source software a pain in the butt at BigCo.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 10:24:11+00:00
I wonder if Microsoft will ever get that asking users before making changes can help them avoid looking bad in public.

Maybe half of all clients I work with use GitHub Actions for CI (the rest basically all use Jenkins), most of those using Actions use self-hosted runners for performance and security reasons, almost all of them reached out to me asking how difficult it would be to move away from GitHub Actions yet continue using GitHub.

Do you think these companies now suddenly stop wanting to move away from GitHub Actions because Microsoft suddenly changed their mind? I don't think so, probably less priority, but it will happen, because now the cat is out of the bag.

If they'd just do user research before announcing changes and not use announcements as "testing the waters", I'm sure they'd see a lot less churn. But I guess some number counting team somewhere in Microsoft figured out they'd make more money by charging people to run software on their own hardware, so maybe I'm just dreaming.
by dxdm | 2025-12-18 10:24:32+00:00
> Honest question: was an LLM involved in writing this comment? The em-dash style stood out to me

The use of em dashes looks pretty natural to me. This is how they were used before LLMs, and what LLMs learned from.

Em dashes have a useful place in written language. I hope we will not lose their utility because people treat them as enough of a signal on their own to automatically question the authenticity of absolutely well-written pieces of text, without giving the matter any further consideration.
by csomar | 2025-12-18 10:25:29+00:00
No. There is real serious money involved here. Usually, the people who self-host are maxing their runners (otherwise it makes more sense to use minute billing). So this will affect them by roughly doubling their servers cost. Think if some company had a $15K/month bill in self-runners, they'll now also get a $15k/month additional bill from GitHub.

Many people will switch for that kind of money.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 10:25:29+00:00
The most obvious "all-in-one" package is GitLab, if you have the hardware for it and don't mind bit of bloat but all the needed features in one package.

Personally, for smaller scale projects that still require collaboration over the web, Gitea/Forgejo + Woodpecker CI has been a really simple, lightweight and easy to maintain solution.
by Lio | 2025-12-18 10:25:36+00:00
And you're conviently forgetting that the British wanted to have full democracy in Hong Kong as they had in places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand but couldn't for fear of upsetting the balance with China.

It was the same thing with British Overseas passports. Britain wanted to issue full passports to Hong Kong citiezens but couldn't because China was heavily against it and so a compromise was sort.

Britain wouldn't make Hong Kong a full democracy and China would stick to one country two systems. That worked well until one side broke its promise.
by GeneralMaximus | 2025-12-18 10:25:50+00:00
I live in India and a surprising number of people here are using AI.

A lot of public religious imagery is very clearly AI generated, and you can find a lot of it on social media too. "I asked ChatGPT" is a common refrain at family gatherings. A lot of regular non-techie folks (local shopkeepers, the clerk at the gas station, the guy at the vegetable stand) have been editing their WhatsApp profile pictures using generative AI tools.

Some of my lawyer and journalist friends are using ChatGPT heavily, which is concerning. College students too. Bangalore is plastered with ChatGPT ads.

There's even a low-cost ChatGPT plan called ChatGPT Go you can get if you're in India (not sure if this is available in the rest of the world). It costs ₹399/mo or $4.41/mo, but it's completely free for the first year of use.

So yes, I'd say many people outside of tech circles are using AI tools. Even outside of wealthy first-world countries.
by 47282847 | 2025-12-18 10:25:51+00:00
1. I am not in the USA.

2. You’re pointing at the legal code that is about exceptions for library liability. 17 U.S.C. § 108 doesn’t say anything about me making a personal copy.

I don’t yet understand your one-link argument about privacy and how it relates to this discussion. I read that you would prefer if I were to directly download a copy from a shadow library instead of lending it from my local library.
by saaaaaam | 2025-12-18 10:25:54+00:00
Not everything has to have an explicit purpose beyond “this is a good and valuable thing”.

Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result.

She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an unexpected bonus.

“To promote ycombinator” only works if there’s an audience worth promoting to. Building something great that brings people back day after day maybe has the result that it can also serve as a promotional tool - but that’s a bonus, not necessarily a purpose.

I’m not the person you asked the question of - but I think the purpose of ycombinator is to give relevant people a place to discuss things aligned with the ecosystem in which ycombinator operates, to help strengthen and champion that ecosystem. Does it have a payoff for ycombinator? Almost certainly. Was it created with that explicit purpose in mind? I doubt it. There are easier ways to make money.
by egwor | 2025-12-18 10:26:03+00:00
Your point was thought provoking. In problem solving the "what" and the "how" are orthogonal since the method doesn't dictate the goal. However, if it takes a long time to do something (how: working slowly eg. because you're coding on a very slow, old machine) it tends to predict that there's less accomplished (what). That suggests that this isn't 'fully' orthogonal.

Someone else raised a good point that if we're working on the wrong thing, it doesn't matter how fast we are. However, I think a more subtle interpretation is more helpful here. I think that we need to be clearer about the consequences of the outcomes: what's the value add. The way I often reason about that is whether the outcome is 'Long-term greedy' or whether the outcome is going to make us a million dollars now. I find the latter really helpful, because if we're going to make a million dollars now but it costs us 100K in tech debt, then (provided there's not a better use of the resources) that is likely a good cost-benefit outcome.
by kx0101 | 2025-12-18 10:26:07+00:00
Disclaimer: I haven't make any money, YET.

I recently open-sourced my first ever tool! and I'm super excited about it guys

It's an HTTP request replay and comparison tool in Go. You can replay real traffic, compare multiple environments, detect broken endpoints, generate HTML/JSON reports, and analyze latency

It’s currently at v0.4, so I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for improvements. (Be gentle, I haven’t used Go professionally, however it’s my main language for personal projects )

https://github.com/kx0101/replayer

Here's the landing page too: https://www.replayer.online/
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-18 10:26:08+00:00
It does! So far I can see the following:

- uBlock Origin included

- mullvad extension to force DNS (disabled if you don't grant it permissions)

- button for "new identity" that clears all cookies and restarts

- NoScript included, but some JS permitted.

- Fewer customization options than firefox to resist fingerprinting

- Bucketed/discretized screen size to resist fingerprinting

EDIT: hard facts: https://mullvad.net/en/browser/hard-facts
by hilbert42 | 2025-12-18 10:26:28+00:00
"It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any) words that begin with the same phoneme."

True, but I reckon it's more than that—read my reply to numpad0.

"Japanese loaned "Arbeit" (アルバイト) from German and they also pronounce it "wrong"."

Question: is that because of structural diffences between the languages (as I mentioned above) that make some foreign phonemes difficult to pronounce? If so, that's different to English speakers who can pronounce Tsu.
by techcode | 2025-12-18 10:26:45+00:00
Any idea if some (perhaps many) of those enrolled students were from Udemy's corporate clients?

When we used to have access to (not all, but a lot of) Udemy through work - I could enroll into seemingly unlimited number of courses. And IIRC there was no (or no good) playlist/favorites mechanism - so I would just enroll in courses as a "playlist".
by krapp | 2025-12-18 10:26:59+00:00
Yes. HN was created as "Startup News" by a Silicon Valley startup incubator and plenty of people here make gaming visibility a central part of their strategy for promoting their startup or promoting themselves as thought leaders to YC. I think the young'uns call it "aura farming."

A lot of the rest are people who work in SV or are startup entrepreneurs who want HN to be nothing more than a tech news and startup forum. These are the people who downvote anything they consider "nontechnical."

HN has a lot of good content and discussion, but it would be naive to pretend there aren't business interests at play on HN, and that everyone here is operating in good faith. Even though the guidelines require it.
by mlitwiniuk | 2025-12-18 10:27:23+00:00
Honestly, Delve is great. Them and Compai are leading the front of modern AI-assisted compliance right now. I'm chasing them.

What I'm trying to do differently is depth of context. Humadroid learns about your company first - how you operate, your stack, your processes. From there it generates control descriptions that are actually actionable for your setup, and policies that need minimal review rather than a full rewrite.

Whether that's enough differentiation? Ask me in a year.