MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-22 14:36:39+00:00
Development of selfobject images I've been chewing on it and think the best thing is the "emotional preparation" used in the Meisner techniques of acting. Images that really activate the real self are very personal and archaic and could be embarrassing. It would not work if I were to give you one as a guru [3], and if were to have you describe them as a guru you I would be inclined to judge them and you'd be inclined to be dishonest because you'd be afraid of being judged.

In the case of Meisner you go into the repetition exercise having done an emotional prep and your "guru" observes how it affects your behavior and can tell you "that was amazing, that really worked for you" or "that fell flat" and the one thing they'll tell you is that you have to imagine something rather than recall an experience. You aren't expected to talk about what you used, you're getting feedback about the effects.

The other thing I want to suggest is the Bandler/Grinder kind of content-free exercise where you are told to evoke an image but not expected to describe it, I think that's less effective than the Meisner training because it is presented as something you can do out of a book or in a large group and you don't have the closed loop that monitors behavior and physiology.
by sixtyj | 2025-12-22 14:36:45+00:00
Absolutely. So much noise.

"There’s an AI for that" lists
44,172 AI tools for 11,349 tasks. Most of them are probably just wrappers…

As Cory Doctorow uses enshittification for the internet, for AI/LLM there should be something like a dumbaification.

It reminds me late 90s when everything was "World Wide Web". :)

Gold rush it is.
by nucleardog | 2025-12-22 14:37:00+00:00
Yeah, this is where I landed a while ago. What problem am I _really_ trying to solve?

For some people it's an ideological one--we don't want AI vacuuming up all of our content. For those, "is this an AI user?" is a useful question to answer. However it's a hard one.

For many the problem is simply "there are a class of users that are putting way too much load on the system and it's causing problems". Initially I was playing wack-a-mole with this and dealing with alerts firing on a regular basis because of Meta crawling our site very aggressively, not backing off when errors were returned, etc.

I looked at rate limiting but the work involved in distributed rate limiting versus the number of offenders involved made the effort look a little silly, so I moved towards a "nuke it from orbit" strategy:

Requests are bucketed by class C subnet (31.13.80.36 -> 31.13.80.x) and request rate is tracked over 30 minute windows. If the request rate over that window exceeds a very generous threshold I've only seen a few very obvious and poorly behaved crawlers exceed it fires an alert.

The alert kicks off a flow where we look up the ASN covering every IP in that range, look up every range associated with those ASNs, and throw an alert in Slack with a big red "Block" button attached. When approved, the entire ASN is blocked at the edge.

It's never triggered on anything we weren't willing to block (e.g., a local consumer ISP). We've dropped a handful of foreign providers, some "budget" VPS providers, some more reputable cloud providers, and Facebook. It didn't take long before the alerts stopped--both for high request rates and our application monitoring seeing excessive loads.

If anyone's interested in trying to implement something similar, there's a regularly updated database of ASN <-> IP ranges announced here: https://github.com/ipverse/asn-ip
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-22 14:37:52+00:00
> Yes but but does the process have to read from a file system dotfile, instead of some data fetched over a ssh connection?

Well, no. But if you didn't write that program (e.g. bash or vim), you're stuck with what their actual logic is. Which is "read a file from the filesystem". You can, of course, do something like mounting your local home directory onto the remote's filesystem (hopefully, read-only)... But in the end of the day, there are still two separate machines, and you have to mend the divide somehow, and it'll never be completely pretty, I'm afraid.

> How about a special shell only provides sys calls and process substitution on remote.

Again, as I said, lots of RATs exist, not all of them malicious. But to make "the rest runs on local client" you need to write what essentially will end up a "purely remote-only shell". Essentially, all the parts of bash that manage parsing, user interaction and internal state tracking but without actual process management. Perhaps it's a good idea, actually; but untangling the mess of bash source is not going to be easy.

The current solution of "have a completely normal, standard shell run on the remote and stretch the terminal connection to it over the network" is Good Enough for most of people. Which is not surprising given that that's the environment in which UNIX and its shell were originally implemented.
by everdrive | 2025-12-22 14:37:53+00:00
Thanks for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense. I'll bet that when it's not a sensitive topic, this totally goes unnoticed by a lot of users. Frustratingly, I would imagine that the response from most people would just be that the LLM summarizations / metadata tagging should be censored in "sensitive cases," but will otherwise be accepted by the user base.
by TomasBM | 2025-12-22 14:38:25+00:00
Your experience sounds rough.

My experience: I often thought that I didn't have the time to learn (hard) things, only to find out sooner or later that I actually did, and still do.

At work, this usually meant that I was giving myself tighter deadlines than they needed to be, or that I was putting too much effort into tasks nobody cared that much about. Over time, I learned that it's OK not to put 100% of energy into the assigned task. Sometimes, it's even encouraged to use that extra energy to learn.

Arguably, I did have the privilege of starting out in salaried European office jobs, where there are more robust boundaries and opportunities. It's obvious how precarious physical work discourages this kind of learning. And reading comments like yours, it's clear how lucky I was to have managers and environments that didn't exploit my eagerness to put pressure on myself.

But if you do have an opportunity to make adjustments, I'd suggest putting less pressure on performing like an athlete, and channeling that energy into learning opportunities instead. Rarely will anyone carve out time for your learning, but they may be responsive to your request or boundaries.
by raveren | 2025-12-22 14:38:28+00:00
> even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.

Not to demean your experience, but for me (5+ years now of daily grind for one purpose) that statement is very VERY real.

My thinking is - it's just another one of the struggles of doing real meaningful change - there's recurring, long and arduous timespans where no observable/exciting results manifest and one has to trudge forward.

If you know how to ease THAT part, please share (I'm begging you lol).
by anbotero | 2025-12-22 14:38:33+00:00
My situation is: I've visited doctors and they encourage me to try new things, "to keep coming out" of my comfort zone, but I can't seem to really feel excitement (passion, rather) anymore. The closest thing is my girlfriend.

I don't complain about mornings, about working, about any activity: I dig most of them, I really like some, but I just can't seem to feel alignment with this "purpose" thing. In my mind, my purpose is to live with health, enjoy life. For that I do the usual: travel, meet new people, practice a different sport or physical activity, hike, dive, go out to restaurants, play video games, watch films, go to theater, cook, draw, paint figurines, I help people (I'm no volunteer, though). I'm only missing woodworking because I live in an apartment and I can't fit any of that here, haha.

Am I cooked? Do I have depression and psychologists can't seem to adequately name it? Or can I simply go on with my life like this without feeling weird that every one else has/perceives all these issues that I don't?
Show HN: WindCtrl – Advanced Variant API for Tailwind CSS
by morishxt | 2025-12-22 14:39:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I built WindCtrl (v0.1), a small variant API for Tailwind CSS inspired by cva.

Main additions:
- Stackable traits: non-exclusive state layers (loading + glass + etc.) to avoid compoundVariants explosion
- Unified dynamic props: same prop can resolve to static class or inline style (JIT-friendly for unbounded values)
- Bonus: data-* scopes for context-aware styling (no Context needed, RSC-compatible)

Repo: https://github.com/morishxt/windctrl

Early release — would love any feedback or thoughts!

Thanks,
morishxt
by alnwlsn | 2025-12-22 14:39:31+00:00
Not true, you can make one yourself by hand if you want to, it just won't be very high quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PzoAReMXOE

If you want a good one, you'll need the materials, machines and skills to make good ones. Probably not too likely unless you like building factories for fun and no profit.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-12-22 14:39:43+00:00
These are all bad-faith takes. What are you doing?

24 years ago, some people wrote on Wikipedia instead of elsewhere. So the wiki page itself became a primary source.

"The page shouldn't have been submitted..." This was a Wiki! If you're unfamiliar with the origin of the term, it was a site mechanism designed to lean in to quick capture and interweaving of documents. Volunteers wrote; the organization of the text arose through thousands of hands shaping it. Most of them were software developers at the time. At a minimum, the software-oriented pages should get special treatment for that alone.

You're acting as though this is producing the next edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, held to a pale imitation of its standards circa the 1980s. The thing is, Britannica employed people to go do research for its articles.

Wikipedia is not Britannica, and this retroactive "shame on them" is unbelievable nonsense.
by Tmpod | 2025-12-22 14:41:21+00:00
+1 for Slint! I worked with it for a while and enjoyed it quite a lot. Florian was working on a more glossy compinent library, not sure what has been made of it.

The DSL was pleasant but still had some rough edges. I think they made some nice QoL improvements in the latest releases, but I've not kept up with it. The compile times were quite something, though you can use the previewer tool to prototype faster.

Definitely worth giving Slint a shot, they learnt a lot from QML imo
by tim333 | 2025-12-22 14:41:23+00:00
I'd say similar stuff, maybe The Moral Animal more for me, how things like morality also come from evolution.

Also the Singularity stuff though I'm not sure how to pick an individual book - maybe Singularity Is Near by Kurzweil and Robot by Moravec. About the future after we get past the propagation vector stuff.
by ckastner | 2025-12-22 14:41:40+00:00
There is some nuance to this. Adding comments to the stated goal "Everyone who interacts with Debian source code (1) should be able to do so (2) entirely in git:

(1) should be able does not imply must, people are free to continue to use whatever tools they see fit

(2) Most of Debian work is of course already git-based, via Salsa [1], Debian's self-hosted GitLab instance. This is more about what is stored in git, how it relates to a source package (= what .debs are built from). For example, currently most Debian git repositories base their work in "pristine-tar" branches built from upstream tarball releases, rather than using upstream branches directly.

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org
by arethuza | 2025-12-22 14:42:39+00:00
I suspect most local councils in the UK have an archaeology team and failing that there are a lot of professional consulting archaeologists - a lot (all?) large scale building works often include the need for archaeological surveys and/or remediation.

e.g. Work for what is now the Queensferry Crossing bridge uncovered a 10,000 year old home:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-2...
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-22 14:44:42+00:00
"object relations" is the ability to express love.

In higher ed we are already facing a crisis because people slowed down having kids 20 years ago. The hysterical right is talking about the crisis, the left cares about the welfare state which needs working-age people to fund it but it still fantasizes that billionaires can pay for it all without the recognition that billionaires need working-age people and an expanding economy to be billionaires.

Young men immediately around me are desperately struggling in various ways, which makes the problem intensely personal to me.

20-30 years from now though the hysterical right will seem prophetic, but for now the responsible right and the literate left share in the "individual uber alles" ideology that problematizes everything.
by agentultra | 2025-12-22 14:44:55+00:00
Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position. He was able to work at Bell Labs for the majority of his career. That just doesn’t exist today.

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is a great book but it needs context. The last edition was released in 1994. Programmers had a lot of labour power back then.

Today though? The median house costs more than a third of the median income. Inflation has raised costs of living to unsustainable levels. And for programmers there have been hundreds of thousands of layoffs since 2023 and a low number of job openings.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take what job you can get or stay in a job you don’t care for until the trade winds return.
by jonpurdy | 2025-12-22 14:45:06+00:00
> I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?

I'm 41 now, started working in education but pivoted back to tech quickly (DevOps specifically) since tech is a better match for me.

After a few years, fell upwards into management then pivoted into Technical Program Management roles where I've remained since. Love this since I get to interact with teams of people working in my program(s) but don't have the responsibilities of a people manager.

Personally, my roles focus on infrastructure and things at least loosely related to my DevOps background. Worked at two blockchain companies (I've been into blockchain tech since 2012) but considering moving into green energy somehow.

I think in most cases including yours: choose roles based both on interest and total compensation. And it's a lot easier to get roles (especially TPM roles) if you're already technically competent in that particular field (in your case FinTech and crypto).
Show HN: Skyler – AI email organizer, shut down due to OAuth compliance
by sanjaykumar584 | 2025-12-22 14:45:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Skyler (https://github.com/05sanjaykumar/Skyler-AI), an AI-powered email organizer focused on privacy and semantic search. It was live at skylerinbox.com for a few months before I shut it down due to Google's CASA compliance requirements (100-user OAuth limit without expensive third-party certification).

Built in 42 days solo as a 3rd-year CS student in India.

Tech stack:
- Frontend: Next.js, NextAuth, Tailwind, shadcn/ui
- Backend: Express (TypeScript), Prisma, Supabase
- AI/ML: distilbert (sentiment), all-MiniLM-L6-v2 (semantic search), Groq Llama for summarization
- Infrastructure: Docker, Nginx, Hetzner VPS
- Privacy-first: Client-side caching with Dexie, minimal server storage

Key challenges:
- Gmail OAuth token refresh issues and rate limiting
- CASA compliance wall at 100 users (would cost thousands for certification)
- Building privacy-first architecture (harder than standard SaaS)
- Payment integration (PayPal + Cashfree for India)

Why I shut it down:
The compliance overhead (CASA certification, legal costs, ongoing OAuth verification) didn't make sense for a solo MVP. The infrastructure worked great, but the business constraints were brutal.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/ATNYoNt6oBE

All code is open source as a learning resource. Happy to answer questions about the technical decisions or compliance issues I hit!
by markstock | 2025-12-22 14:45:18+00:00
The general algorithm used here (of computing attraction and repulsion forces between pairs of particles) is very similar to that used in simulations of many interesting phenomena in physics. Start with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothed-particle_hydrodynamic...) and then check out Lagrangian Vortex Particle Methods and other N-Body problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem).

And the algorithms to solve these quickly is another deep area of research.
by kevinbaur | 2025-12-22 14:45:57+00:00
Hi and thanks for the feedback, this is exactly the kind of “state of play” snapshot we had in mind initially. We also think there’s a lot of potential if key people from different teams each create one of these and make it available across the company.

Regarding the AI: at the moment SkillPass Pro is still using OpenAI, mainly because we’re in very early development and want to iterate quickly. Longer term, the plan is to move toward self-hosting and reduce external dependencies.

According to OpenAI’s API policies, data sent via the API is not used to train their models. The data is only retained for a short period and solely for service operation and abuse monitoring purposes, after which it is deleted. This was an important consideration for us when choosing this setup for the early stage.

Thanks again,
Kevin
by the_af | 2025-12-22 14:46:25+00:00
How about close friends who live on the other side of the world?

Telegram and Signal are, to me, about as trustworthy as WhatsApp. Well, actually, nobody really uses Signal, and Telegram is about the same as WhatsApp so who cares.

Waiting to meet my friends once every 1-2 years is not enough. I want to chat daily with them, because they are my close friends.

Daily telephone conversations with a group of them? Nope. Snail mail? It doesn't work for daily conversation.

So WhatsApp it is!
by RamblingCTO | 2025-12-22 14:46:40+00:00
And burn out isn't "I hate my job and don't enjoy it more". It's fatigue so hard that you feel like you haven't slept after waking up. I hate that burnout is thrown around so easily. It's something that should be moved to therapy and a long time off, not "switch jobs". If that fixes your burnout, it's early stages or not burnout.

I had burnout this year and was too dumbfounded in the supermarket to buy what I always buy or drive a car. I didn't have any mental capacity anymore. Like an IQ of 20 and the physical energy of a 100 year old.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-22 14:46:55+00:00
RooCode and KiloCode also have an Orchestrator mode that can create sub-tasks and you can specify which model to use for what - and since they report their results back after finishing a task (implement X, fix Y), the context of the more expensive model doesn’t get as polluted. Probably one of the most user friendly ways to do that.

A simpler approach without subtasks would be to just use the smart model for Ask/Plan/whatever mode and the dumb but cheap one for the Code one, so the smart model can review the results as well and suggest improvements or fixes.
by MBCook | 2025-12-22 14:47:50+00:00
I define “self driving car” as level 5. Or at least 4. It should’ve able to drive itself under almost all circumstances. And well.

Tesla isn’t that. Nor Ford. Nor GM. Nor anyone else. Waymo is closest, but they limit the domain and clearly still have issues. Stick a Waymo in snow on rural roads is it good to go? Doubt it.
by staticman2 | 2025-12-22 14:47:58+00:00
Why is that cool?

Imagine you are a billionaire so money is no object and really interested in the Dhali Llama?

Would you read the book then hire someone to pretend to be the author and ask questions that are not covered by the book? Then be enraptured by whatever the roleplayer invents?

Probably not? At least this isn't a phenomenon I've heard of?
by kotaKat | 2025-12-22 14:48:29+00:00
I’m suddenly reminded of a fairly large channel error from one of CN’s competitors.

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

When Nick GAS shut down, somehow, Dish Network had an automated loop of the channel that they themselves kept running for about 15 months after the channel’s demise. I’m curious what systems at Dish Network were still running a ghost channel by itself like that. Did they just get delivered loops of programming to shove on the air from Nick directly and just leave it up? I would have figured Dish would have been getting a feed from Viacom that would have dropped at the same time as GAS itself.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-22 14:49:14+00:00
Yes, precisely, take a look at the summary document [1] at the bottom of the article.

> xii. As a matter of fact, revenues from App Store services increased, in terms of higher
commissions collected from developers through the platform; likewise, Apple’s advertising division, which is not subject to the same stringent rules, ultimately benefited from increased revenues and higher volumes of intermediated ads

> xiii. Therefore, considering that Apple holds an absolute dominant position in the market for the supply to developers of platforms for the online distribution of apps to users of the iOS operating system, the Authority established that Apple’s conduct amounts to an exploitative abuse, in breach of Article 102 TFEU, that started in April 2021 and is still ongoing.

[1] https://en.agcm.it/dotcmsdoc/pressrelease/A561_SUMMARY.pdf
by QuiEgo | 2025-12-22 14:50:37+00:00
When I travel for work, I take my work laptop and an iPad in a keyboard case. It’s under 2lbs (0.9kg), it can charge off the same brick as my phone or even pass through charge off my work laptop itself, and keeps me connected to my personal digital life without having to put anything personal on the work machine. It also never raises an eye with security if you have a laptop + iPad.

Usually, the iPad apps are "good enough" (in some ways, they are actually better for travel, as they are designed with features like offline downloads), but if they are not a "real" computer is only a tailscale connection to my home network away over VNC.

Edit: specifically, the iPad + Laptop combo never raises an eye at customs houses. Inside the USA, I've taken as many as 3 laptops for a work trip before, and I can not express how much the TSA does not care. On the other hand, when you go through customs in another country, they can be bit ornery (i.e. suspect you of trying to avoid import tax), so I never want to take more than one laptop through a customs barrier.

p.s. if you want to game in your downtime, such trips are an awesome time to break out the emulator and retro game, an iPad has more than enough power for this, and SNES / d-pad type games work great with a keyboard case as a controller (or, you can just bring a real controller).
by lesuorac | 2025-12-22 14:51:04+00:00
Traceability and Anonymity aren't antonyms.

This fact comes up with Bitcoin a lot. I and everybody else doesn't know who a random hash is but all the activity involving that address is highly traceable. So all you need is an oracle (like a cryptoexchange) that can convert a hash into a person to enforce any penalties against a person.

Same could be true of the internet. You notice illegal activity from a specific IP; that source is responsible for that activity (they did it!). In general that IP is going to be some intermediary (like an ISP) who was relying a packet from a different IP so it'll be on them to provide the next person who is accountable and do you do this chain until you get to an end subscriber. Everybody is anonymous by default but can be traced back to an actual person.
by aworks | 2025-12-22 14:51:31+00:00
With your app, it seems daylight today in Chicago is the same length as yesterday's solstice, although it starts and ends 30 seconds later.

today - 07:18:59 → 16:24:29 = 9:5:30. yesterday - 7:18:23 → 16:23:53 = 9:5:30