MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coldtea | 2025-12-07 18:13:38+00:00
>This wealth isn’t confined to only the top percent, today’s middle class and working class live lives that past nobility would be astounded by.

Only based on "access to various products and crap" criterium. Based on quality of life metrics, safety, job prospects, food quality, urban design, it often is worse than way lower in GDP countries - and let's not even get into non-tangible stuff...
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-07 18:14:02+00:00
> Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying “to take advantage of an exploit in our Ad Composer.”

For those that haven’t followed Nikita Bier (head of X product) on Twitter, he’s a childish and immature person. The way he talks about changes at X is completely unprofessional. So this type of deceptive revenge action is completely in character. I guess Elon hired him for that reason.
by rectang | 2025-12-07 18:14:23+00:00
I’m not advocating, I’m making a high-level observation: Industry forever pushes for nil regulation and blames bad actors for damaging use.

But we always have some regulation in the end. Even if certain firearms are legal to own, howitzers are not — although it still takes a “bad actor” to rain down death on City Hall.

The same dynamic is at play with LLMs: “Don’t regulate us, punish bad actors! If you still have a problem, punish them harder!” Well yes, we will punish bad actors, but we will also go through a negotiation of how heavily to constrain the use of your technology.
Sitekick – simple AI-driven web chat and lead-capture for any website
by nagendraallam | 2025-12-07 18:14:49+00:00
Hi HN — we built Sitekick to make it insanely easy for any website to get real-time chat, lead capture, and basic user support. In one line: install a couple of lines of code, and Sitekick gives you a chat widget + backend logic.

What it does:

Turns your site into a chat-ready platform: handle FAQs, answer visitor questions, capture leads, coordinate bookings or contact forms — automatically.

Works across web and messaging/social channels (depending on integration) — so visitors get support wherever they prefer.

Includes logic for qualifying leads and handing over to humans if needed.

Why we built it: We’d seen too many sites lose visitors or leads because chat/support was too complex to set up or sporadic. Sitekick was built to close that gap: simple setup, always available, no dev-heavy integration required.

We’d love feedback from the HN community — thoughts on use-cases, missing features, or ways to make it more open / developer-friendly. Thank you!
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-07 18:14:53+00:00
> Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying “to take advantage of an exploit in our Ad Composer.”

For those that haven’t followed Nikita Bier on Twitter, he’s a childish and immature person. The way he talks about changes at X is completely unprofessional. So this type of deceptive revenge action is completely in character. I guess Elon hired him for that reason.
by 9rx | 2025-12-07 18:15:55+00:00
> governance by elected officials is not democratic.

Correct. In a (representative) democracy, one does not elect officials. They elect representatives. The representative is not an authority like an official is. They are merely messengers who take the constituent direction established at the local level and travel with that message to deliver it in a country/state/etc.'s central gathering place.

> Then we need to decide if we actually want democracy or not.

We (meaning most people) do not. Democracy is a lot of work. An incredible amount of work. It requires active participation on a near-daily basis. Most people would rather do things like go to their job to put food on the table or spend time with their hobbies or other pleasure activities. Which is why most people seek — by your own admission — officials to lord over them instead.

> Personally, I’d like this decision to be… err… you know, it would be nice if everyone had a say?

It is nice when you are independently wealthy and no longer have to worry about things like giving up an enormous amount of your day to keep a roof over your head. But most people are not so fortunate, so they do not find it fair that, for all realistic purposes, only some people get to participate in democracy to their own advantage. Hence why democracies devolve into a system of officials instead, with most people believing it offers a better balance for all involved, albeit at the cost of losing say.
by thebigspacefuck | 2025-12-07 18:16:40+00:00
> I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels Apple’s quality is degrading.

Tbh I don’t really feel this way. We all agree hands down that Macbook has the best hardware. Apple Silicon has been a huge success for speed and power consumption. I haven’t used the newest macOS but like the butterfly keyboard and touch bar I assume they’ll work out (or fix by reverting) the issues. It’s probably not even that bad. Sonoma is still receiving security updates so I’m good for now.

And most of the things that people want in a non-MacBook laptop are still a few years before falling off patent.

I’m fine waiting and playing around with Framework or Steam machines until then if I need another hobby.
by AstroNutt | 2025-12-07 18:17:00+00:00
A couple had just moved in a house and called me to replace the ceiling fan in the living room. I pulled the flush mount cover down to start unhooking the wire nuts and noticed RG58 (coax cable). Someone had used the center conductor as the hot wire! I ended up running 12/2 Romex from the switch. There was no way in hell I could have hooked it back up the way it was. This is just one example I've come across.
by dtech | 2025-12-07 18:17:03+00:00
Sort of true, but I often hear this take from Java programmers and it feels like "Blub" [1]/Stockholm syndrome to me.

Personally, I'm extremely glad to not have had to write .toStream().map(...).collect(Collectors.list()) or whatever in years for what could be a map. Similar with async code and exception handling.

For me one of the main advantages of Kotlin is that is decreases verbosity so much that the interesting business logic is actually much easier to follow. Even if you disregard all the things it has Java doesn't the syntax is just so much better.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
by jiehong | 2025-12-07 18:17:55+00:00
> After upgrading the library, performance and CPU characteristics on Scala 3 became indistinguishable from Scala 2.13.

Checking the bug mentioned, it was fixed in 2022.

So, I’m wondering how one would upgrade to scala 3, while keeping old version of libraries?

Keeping updated libraries is a good practice (even mandatory if you get audits like PCI-DSS).

That part puzzled me more than the rest.
by coldtea | 2025-12-07 18:17:56+00:00
>In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.

On the plus side, they also didn't have to do the hard dangerous jobs like mining coal, building houses, and the like, nor did they have to go to the army, fight to defend their country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things.

Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume "all waking hours until the day she died".
by marssaxman | 2025-12-07 18:17:56+00:00
> Literally nothing is stopping anyone

Nothing but the power of the state, which has claimed sovereignty over all the land, regulates what you can and cannot do with it, and will use deadly force against you if you fail to comply.

I once added up the total calorie content of all the yearly hunting it is legal to do where I live, if a hunter were maximally successful, and it would get one person through May.

All the land one could reasonably sustain a living on has long since been claimed, those claims being backed up by (you guessed it) the power of the state. The only land left that one can just walk off into is the land nobody wanted during the settlement period, because they could not find any way to live on it.
by kittikitti | 2025-12-07 18:18:02+00:00
I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a piece of cake.

I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined. The people who are entering at this point are woefully unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune, when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.
by vb-8448 | 2025-12-07 18:18:26+00:00
> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance.

The GFC doesn't have anything in common with the .com bubble, maybe we'd have see another tech bubble in the first 2010s if there were not a GFC, but it's fundamentally wrong to place those 2 things nearby.
by alexandrelanda | 2025-12-07 18:18:46+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building A-Lang — a lightweight programming language aimed at being fast, simple to read, easy to embed, and great for small tools and game scripting. It’s inspired by Lua’s minimalism and Rust’s modern syntax style.

I’d love feedback from people who build languages or enjoy dev tools. What should I improve next?
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-12-07 18:18:50+00:00
I would say KLEE is coolest, as it works on LLVM bitcode, so anything you can compile to that, you can verify.

CBMC scales worse (best for smaller modules, not complete systems), but is also very capable.

You can use both as general-purpose solvers for any problem you can formulate in C/LLVM. You assert that there is no solution, run the tool and (unless you run out of time/resources), you get a counter-example refuting the assertion -> which will then be a valid solution.

I’ve used this to find e.g. a sequence of N bytes with a specific (non-cryptographic) checksum etc. They are very powerful tools.
by dpedu | 2025-12-07 18:19:37+00:00
These are great. Some time ago I was tasked with writing installation tooling for a startup's data analysis product, which was built as a distributed system. The system used a SQL database to store metadata, so every host needed the SQL database's connection details. Using an advisory lock to decide which host initializes the database schema made everything so much simpler - just install on all your hosts at once, in parallel, and don't worry about it.

This was MySQL but its advisory locks are pretty similar to Postgres.

It's also nice that the lock is released when the database connection terminates. Really easy to use. If you need exactly one of something running constantly, you can launch however many processes and let all but one spin trying to acquire the lock. When one dies and closes its SQL connection, thus releasing the lock, another will obtain the lock and begin work more or less instantly.

They're infinitely useful!
by jameshart | 2025-12-07 18:20:12+00:00
I mean, if you’re able to take the citation, find the cited work, and definitively state ‘looks like they got the title wrong’ or ‘they attributed the paper to the wrong authors’, that doesn’t sound like what people usually mean when they say a ‘hallucinated’ citation. Work that is lazily or poorly cited but nonetheless attempts to cite real work is not the problem. Work which gives itself false authority by claiming to cite works that simply do not exist is the main concern surely?
by tehologist | 2025-12-07 18:20:18+00:00
Literate programming is alive and well in 2025.

https://leo-editor.github.io/leo-editor/

https://kaleguy.github.io/leovue/#/t/2

https://ganelson.github.io/inweb/inweb/index.html

Inform 7 is arguably one of the largest programs ever written in literate style.
by jameslk | 2025-12-07 18:20:26+00:00
In other words, which companies are default alive or dead? [0]

The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue, covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if there’s not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model materializes, are living on borrowed time

0. https://paulgraham.com/aord.html
by sigseg1v | 2025-12-07 18:20:26+00:00
Curious if you've tested something such as:

- "First, calculate the orbital radius. To do this accurately, measure the average diameter of each planet, p, and the average distance from the center of the image to the outer edge of the planets, x, and calculate the orbital radius r = x - p"

- "Next, write a unit test script that we will run that reads the rendered page and confirms that each planet is on the orbital radius. If a planet is not, output the difference you must shift it by to make the test pass. Use this feedback until all planets are perfectly aligned."
by breve | 2025-12-07 18:20:31+00:00
> What is the political element in Germany that makes these very public walk away from Microsoft viable?

Russia is waging war on Europe. America is increasingly aligned with Russia:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvd01g2kwwo

When the US government has become erratic, unreliable, untrustworthy, and aligned with your enemies then it's necessarily time to de-risk your infrastructure and supply chains by removing America products and services from them.

It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
by GMoromisato | 2025-12-07 18:20:59+00:00
Robust macros allow you to create domain-specific abstractions. That's cool, but there are plenty of other ways. Even functions are a way to create abstractions. And with anonymous functions, you can easily create higher-order abstractions.

The only thing AST-level macros help with is creating custom syntax to cut down on boilerplate. That's very cool, but it comes with a cost: now you have to learn new syntax.

I love Lisp. I've written tiny Lisp interpreters for most of my games (Chron X, Transcendence) and even GridWhale started out with a Lisp-like language.

In my experience, Lisp is great when you have a single programmer who understands and controls the whole source tree. Once a program exceeds the capacity of a single programmer, more conventional languages work better.
by amarcheschi | 2025-12-07 18:22:08+00:00
I honestly find it deceptive at first, given that it is not what is expected by the regular person

Looking at the official EU commission statement, this is it and I agree with it:

X's use of the ‘blue checkmark' for ‘verified accounts' deceives users. This violates the DSA obligation for online platforms to prohibit deceptive design practices on their services. On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with. This deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors. While the DSA does not mandate user verification, it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place.
by lucb1e | 2025-12-07 18:22:09+00:00
Note that this is considered not freely given consent by various data protection authorities, including the Dutch one (quite strongly; could find a source but would be in Dutch) and the European-wide collective of them (more weakly): https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-pa... It's not like GDPR is new or dubiously worded on this aspect. They're willfully ignoring both ethical boundaries and the law

I don't know why people keep sending me / sharing Heise links. There's more than one news website in the world
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-07 18:23:00+00:00
I think.. after reading this article twice that, if it is indeed presented accurately and if the table participants are not just trying to drive a specific agenda, is it applying the wrong metaphor.

It is not a bubble. It is not a fire ( cleansing or otherwise ). It is, however, a piece of technology that is, misguidedly, plopped hard into everything without regard for what it is actually good at. This is why I despair when I see AI in notepad or "ai protects okta'.

I am concerned, because I do see a big change on the horizon coming, but it is not the change that is being presented. It may not be the feared ai/agi/asi ( depending on one's particular bent ),but rather deep re-entrenchment of existing ecosystems in ways that will make things a lot more difficult overall.

Here is what I mean by this:

- the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead - the ones who can ( money-wise and knowledge-wise ) and see the need to, move behind local networks - those that can't ( money-wise, knowledge-wise, or circle-wise ), are forced into locked systems that effectively become AML for... anything ( and if you did not experience it yet, I am assuming you did yet try to buy anything that has -- lets call it -- dual use )

It is bifurcation ( or what some media call k-shaped these days ), but it is not a fire at all. If anything, these are very, very aggressive vines.
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-07 18:23:45+00:00
> If I remember correctly Germany or Austria were ready to put non vaccinated people in jails

Lol wtf, got any source for that except "IIRC"?

"I even heard they wanted to reintroduce the death penalty, just for the unvaccinated!" (see how easy it is to invent and spread lies?)
by Herring | 2025-12-07 18:23:57+00:00
Marx died in 1883. Things have moved on a little since then.

Some parts of the economy are great under state control: monetary policy, military, infrastructure, healthcare, education, safety nets, etc.

Some parts prefer a mix of public and private investment: utilities, rail, airports, R&D.

Others work best with very little direct state control (other than regulations): most retail, consumer goods, IT, etc.
by hibf | 2025-12-07 18:24:12+00:00
Whenever anyone does a search in Flock's database, Flock sends the metadata to the related customers.

I.e., if someone does a statewide lookup in Nebraska, all Nebraska-based Flock customers receive the search metadata. Ostensibly, to be able to track if "their" ALPR data has been queried. Those audit logs are public record.

This is also how IL discovered out-of-state agencies were using data from Illinois for immigration enforcement (after FOIA by a citizen, of course; apparently none of the IL law enforcement agencies audited their data for unlawful activity).
by bossyTeacher | 2025-12-07 18:24:18+00:00
The problem isn't whether they have more or less hallucinations. The problem is that they have them. And as long as they hallucinate, you have to deal with that. It doesn't really matter how you prompt, you can't prevent hallucinations from happening and without manual checking, eventually hallucinations will slip under the radar because the only difference between a real pattern and a hallucinated one is that one exists in the world and the other one doesn't. This is not something you can really counter with more LLMs either as it is a problem intrinsic to LLMs
by geocar | 2025-12-07 18:24:56+00:00
What do you care about?

There are quite a few programmers who say lisp led to early retirement. That was a pretty interesting idea to me. I like going to the beach a lot.

I am not so sure about people who don’t want to get done: if you like doing what the ticket says instead of the other way around lisp probably isn’t going to be something you’re interested in.
by jaredhallen | 2025-12-07 18:24:59+00:00
Absolutely true. I bought a "dumb" Samsung around 2010. It still works to this day. In 2020, I bought a mid-range TV with Android. The computer in it died after 3 years, and I wasn't able to find a replacement at a reasonable cost. I sat on it for 2 years before finally ewasting it, because the wastefulness made me sick. I guess my main point is that it was the "smart" part that failed. If it was just a display, it would almost certainly still be trucking along.
by lenkite | 2025-12-07 18:25:07+00:00
> The trackpad on it is no better or worse than any other trackpad I've used.

Compared to the thinkpad trackpad, it is light-years ahead. It is also more robust - functions with a little bit of dirt/oil/dirt/water. Get some oil on the thinkpad trackpad and you need to spend 10 mins wiping it away for it to work without driving you nuts.

Even hardcore thinkpad fans have grudgingly admitted to the superiority of the Macbook trackpad. Check the thinkpad forums to see their envy.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-07 18:25:10+00:00
> auto_ptr does not exhibit qualities of GC.

OK, so by the definition you're using C++ became a GC language with C++11?

> If one was specific and said "no_std Rust", then you could fairly say that GC is not available, but that isn't applicable here.

I'd imagine whether or not GC capabilities are available in the stdlib is pretty uncontroversial. Is that the criteria you're using for a GC language?

> No. While Fil-C is heavily inspired by C, to the point that it is hard to distinguish between them, it is its own language. You can easily tell they are different languages as not all valid C is valid Fil-C.

OK, fair; perhaps I should have been more abstract, since the precise implementation isn't particularly important to the point I'm trying to get to. I should have asked whether the existence of a fully-compatible garbage collecting implementation of C change anything about whether C is a GC language. Maybe Boehm with -DREDIRECT_MALLOC might have been a better example?