MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neuralkoi | 2025-12-22 15:15:47+00:00
@tom8opot8o This is an excellent idea by the way. I had something similar in mind where people would collaboratively write a letter to someone, say for a friend on their birthday or for a coworker on their promotion or a new-married couple or a family and their newborn, but I could never conceive of how to do it. It seems here you've found the sauce for an app like this. I strongly suggest you revisit this idea and gear it for something like that! There's something similar that already exists, but not quite called kudoboard.com.

You could write who contributed to the letter at the bottom of the letter. Add emojis, stickers, etc. Make it very personalized and filled with love.
by Kirby64 | 2025-12-22 15:15:51+00:00
This wouldn’t hold up in court, to my knowledge. If you have a tool that is solely designed this way for technical reasons, then there isnt trademark infringement. Just make sure to market it as the “B” screwdriver or whatever. The same thing with the Nintendo case for their logo on cartridge protection, I don’t think that ever held up in court.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-12-22 15:15:58+00:00
> One of the first links is leading to MacPaw's website.

Yikes, Google results are bad these days! They seem to focus on Mac applications, not iOS app store alternatives.

> But are there any real 3rd-party AppStores for iOS now?

Yes, the main one I am familiar with is AltStore: https://altstore.io

However, according to Apple's docs, they only allow alternative app stores in the EU and Japan, so you have to be using an iOS account with the region set to one of those two places and be physically located there in order to install the app store. Not something that's easy to experiment with for people in the USA to see how the other half lives.

> Or is EU just trying to milk rich USA tech giants (I think I know the answer).

I don't really see an angle for the EU to do much milking here. Actually I think the AltStore founders are Americans? So they seem to be reaping the benefits of EU and Japanese legislation, remotely.
by RajT88 | 2025-12-22 15:16:05+00:00
I have one of those Sony WEGA CRT TV's, which were widescreen and even had HDMI.

https://www.mediacollege.com/equipment/sony/tv/kd/kd30xs955....

148 pounds! A total nightmare to get into our car and into our house.

WORTH IT.
by salawat | 2025-12-22 15:16:20+00:00
>Perhaps we could just have a 'poor people incinerator' for those whose expected medical expenses exceed their net worth?

Thanks for putting that out there. Give it 10 years, and I'm thinking we'll see the first "bio-repurposing vats". Never mention crap like that on HN. Too many closet psychopaths looking for a big break.

Understand the attempt at shaming. But there are likely a non-trivial number of readers here with such Methuselan inclinations.
by heisenbit | 2025-12-22 15:17:43+00:00
It is not a nuance in an article that focuses on storage from the supposed premier professional association. As an engineer I would expect typical energy content (median/average) of the top 10 hydro pump projects and also some discussion about the availability of suitable sites. I think one should strive for at least high school level physics. There is no need to push out texts that can be easily surpassed by any current llm.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 15:17:48+00:00
> because GPT-OSS frequently gave me “I cannot fulfill this request” responses when I asked it to build features.

This is something that frequently comes up and whenever I ask people to share the full prompts, I'm never able to reproduce this locally. I'm running GPT-OSS-120B with the "native" weights in MXFP4, and I've only seen "I cannot fulfill this request" when I actually expect it, not even once had that happen for a "normal" request you expect to have a proper response for.

Has anyone else come across this when not using the lower quantizations or 20b (So GPT-OSS-120B proper in MXFP4) and could share the exact developer/system/user prompt that they used that triggered this issue?

Just like at launch, from my point of view, this seems to be a myth that keeps propagating, and no one can demonstrate a innocent prompt that actually triggers this issue on the weights OpenAI themselves published. But then the author here seems to actually have hit that issue but again, no examples of actual prompts, so still impossible to reproduce this issue.
by austy69 | 2025-12-22 15:17:58+00:00
Glad you mentioned the veritasium video on these. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k

Before I watched this I would default to thinking about most distributions as normal. It's really fun to think about whatever "game" you are playing - wether you are building a business or trying to win a carnival game - and consider if the results follow a normal distribution or a power law?
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-12-22 15:18:09+00:00
I had the first high-def Sonys in the US market. I worked at a high end audio video store in the mid 90s and they gave it to me cheap as they couldn't get rid of it.

https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-kw-34hd1

Even at 34", the thing weighed 200lbs (plus the stand it came with). I lived in a 3rd floor walk up. I found out who my true friends were the day we brought it back from the store. I left that thing in the apartment when I moved. I bet it is still there to this day.
by Swizec | 2025-12-22 15:18:17+00:00
> Hamming was also writing from a highly privileged position.

Hamming had a lot of career capital. He was the only person in the world with his track record. If you needed his kind of research/output/teaching/etc, he was the person you needed.

Cal Newport talks a lot about this. Great books.

Have something [unique/valuable] to offer and you'll be surprised how many doors it opens. Yes it takes time to stairstep your way there. A fresh grad has less career capital than a seasoned engineer with a track record of building billion dollar companies.
by kubanczyk | 2025-12-22 15:18:33+00:00
An LLM tool that can sit on a CI pipeline to propose what tests should be blocking.

Instead of brute-force method of selecting the appropriate test suites by path or similar, have LLM analyze changes and propose the set of test suites that is relevant to the change.

If there are new complex tests added to the change, estimates how many times to run them to ensure they are not flaky to begin with (hundreds? or thousands?).
by surajrmal | 2025-12-22 15:19:05+00:00
Plenty of people take risks even with obligations. I am risk averse, and like to ascribe much of that to my obligations to keep my family happy, but really I've always been this way, and would act pretty much the same without them. On the other hand, I've seen folks go to the brink of poverty to start businesses even with small children to feed. They are far more successful today than myself.
by qubex | 2025-12-22 15:19:37+00:00
My Graf Castell Tiago fountain pen.
My Barbour Kontiki jacket.
My iPhone Pro Max 17/Apple Watch Ultra 3/Airpods Pro 3 ensemble.
My Lapham’s Quarterly subscription.
My LimeSDR/Raspberry Pi 5 16GB setup.
My Pokit Pro.
My Mathematica 14.3 license.
My Oliver’s People reading glasses.
My tailored suits.
by everdrive | 2025-12-22 15:20:33+00:00
This is very well said and I've found myself on the same page. I've said this before, but when I was younger the internet was an island of sanity in an otherwise pretty crazy world. Now, the internet broadly is much crazier than the real world and much of the time it's best avoided. This is still a lot of great content on the internet, but always right next to it is something addictive, outrageous, manipulative, etc. attempting to steal your attention and waste your time. People with better impulse control might be able to avoid this in an effortless way, but that's not me.

Abstaining is really the only thing that's been working for me, and all I'm going to try to do is abstain more. It's clear that my old refuge has been destroyed by greed and misanthropy, and the only path for me is to abandon the refuge as much as possible.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-22 15:20:53+00:00
> I am not sure if you wanna go into discussing Diesel engines now, especially with all the engine software problems when it comes to AdBlue, and when it comes to Dieselgate, which, by decision of all involved courts, was malice.

I mentioned the ALH TDI from the MKIV Golf/Jetta only, which is a legendary engine, with a ton of them having now reliably reached half a million miles with no major work required. This long predates the dieselgate cars, and adblue was never used on the 4 cylinder VW diesels anyways.

As an aside, yes dieselgate was intentionally criminal, but was sort of the opposite of a quality issue. VW couldn't figure out how to get their engines to work reliability and drive well with current technology at the time and still meet emissions requirements, so they cheated. They had to fix them (I own one) and they are still good, but not as good as they were before the fix- worse fuel economy, less reliable, excessive adblue consumption (in 6cyl models). The ethical thing to do would have been to pull all of the diesels from the market instead, which is what many of their competitors did at the time. Passenger car diesels in the USA are effectively dead because the emissions requirements render them less practical than gasoline cars.

VW had serious quality issues in the 90s that weren't strategic, but were actually causing their company to lose its reputation and nearly collapse. They turned it completely around when Ferdinand Piëch started running things- they were arguably making the highest quality cars at in the world any price point during his tenure as CEO. The quality of current VWs has now fallen back down again, even lower than the 90s cars unfortunately.
by dahart | 2025-12-22 15:20:53+00:00
The source article elaborates on the reasons that dramatically over-reporting homicide and terrorism is bad for the public. One of those reasons is that it obscures the actual changes in our lives, it hides what’s truly ‘new’. In that sense, they are fully agreeing with you: news is supposed to communicate on what changed, not what stayed the same. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re supposed to report on the uncommon, but rather they should report on the delta, i.e. what’s different from yesterday.

If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.

https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
by phba | 2025-12-22 15:21:03+00:00
A good place to start is OSINT (open source intelligence) for your city/municipality because it requires little commitment, is scoped with regards to complexity and amount of information, and usually risk-free. Gather publicly available information about the companies in your area, who owns/runs them, your city council, any ongoing projects, the processes of funding stuff with public money and so on. Don't bother finding the best collection method or way to structure all the data, just start, you will figure things out on the way. Also be aware of your personal bias, which might make you dismiss important information or affect your judgement.

The next steps highly depend on where you live. Your HN profile says Australia, so at least safety-wise you are in a better spot. Connect to people in your area (preferrably offline), for example by organizing a local meetup, maybe there is one already. Activities can range from exchanging ideas to spreading awareness in your community to actively going against corrupt affairs. Make sure you know what and who you are up against, or you will have a very bad time.

Anticorruption is a group effort because it requires a lot of work and often special knowledge (info tech, law, finance, opsec, public relations and propaganda, ...) and, more importantly, a group provides safety from corrupt actors. On your own you will not be able to deal with lawsuits, misinformation, character assassination and worse.
Ask HN: How do you orchestrate ops across tools?
by yusufaytas | 2025-12-22 15:23:13+00:00
Hi HN,

As AI gets more involved in operations, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people are actually handling this in real systems.

Most ops setups I’ve seen are already fragmented: incidents in PagerDuty, metrics in Prometheus or Datadog, logs elsewhere, coordination in Slack, automation in scripts or internal tooling. Introducing AI into that mix usually means either one-off integrations or giving agents fairly broad access to systems that weren’t designed for it.

I’m curious how people here are approaching this in practice:

- Are you letting AI interact directly with ops tools?
- Are you building an internal orchestration layer or control plane?
- Are these workflows still mostly human-driven with AI as a helper?
- Or is this a problem you’re intentionally avoiding for now?

I’ve been exploring this space myself and would really value hearing how others are thinking about it, especially what’s worked and what’s turned out to be more trouble than it’s worth.

Thanks.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-12-22 15:23:25+00:00
LLMs don't "hallucinate" or "lie." They have no intent. They're Weighted Random Word Generator Machines. They're train mathematically to create series of tokens. Whenever they get something "right," it's literally by accident. If you get that rate of accidental rightness up to 80%, and people suddenly thing the random word generator is some kind of oracle. It's not. It's a large model with an embedded space, tokens and a whole series of computationally expensive perceptron and attention blocks that generate output.

The title/introduction is very baited, because it implies some "physical" connection to hallucinations in biological organism, but it's focused on trying to single out certain parts of the model. LLMs are absolutely nothing at all like a biological system, of which our brains are orders of magnitudes more complex than the machines we've built that we no longer fully understand. Believing in these LLMs as being some next stage in understanding intelligence is hubris.
by jltsiren | 2025-12-22 15:23:29+00:00
All laws are inherently vague. Some actions are clearly legal and some are clearly illegal. Between them, there is a gray zone, where it can be impossible to say in advance what's legal and what isn't.

If you are an amoral profit maximizer, like the average publicly traded company, it's often rational to take risks by entering the gray zone. Sometimes nobody cares that you do that. Sometimes you manage to get a favorable court ruling. And sometimes the expected gains outweigh the eventual fines.

It's almost always easy to comply with the laws by playing it safe. But shareholders don't like that.
by cloudyporpoise | 2025-12-22 15:23:34+00:00
Great feedback. Many of us are on auto-pilot and taking a little bit of time to reflect, can shape a better version of that auto-pilot.

Another useful input is what are other people telling you? This shaped my career early on by either taking on the work others didn't want to do, or hearing others mention what they felt was important and focusing on this.
by criticas | 2025-12-22 15:23:36+00:00
Off the top of my head:

Chair

Standing Desk

Redundant Network Connection / VPN / Better Home Network

Noise cancelling headphones / earbuds

Cheap laser printer

Power protection

Thunderbolt dock.

Enough charger ports so everything can charge at the same time overnight.

UPS if needed. Sized to cover your network gear also, unless you're going to tether to your phone during an outage. Personally, if my neighborhood lost power and I had to work, I'd head to a cowork spot or coffee shop.

Sound deadening if you have roommates, young children, or loud pets. It's not just for telemeetings if you are easily distracted.

PC-related:

Mouse, Keyboard, Dual Monitors.
by Sheeny96 | 2025-12-22 15:25:00+00:00
I worked very hard for the first 5 or 6 years of my career - hit senior dev pretty quick, managed to double my pay moving into consultancy, and back on product dev in a smaller company nowadays.

Honestly? I don't feel a massive need to grow beyond where I am. I earn in the top 5% in my country. I live a comfortable and flexible life. I continue to learn like any dev with a passion for technology does - but i'm not constructing my life around an endless climb. If my role naturally transitions upwardly, great. If I stay where I am, steadily taking on more responsibility,that's also totally fine. The diminishing returns of chasing a CTO title or another arbritrarily large sum of money just doesn't seem worth it.
Show HN: CEO Simulator – Run a company. Make decisions. Get fired
by madcash | 2025-12-22 15:25:20+00:00
Hey HN,

I built CEO Simulator over the past few weeks. It's a text-based game where you run a startup as CEO and make quarterly decisions. There are 13 possible endings. Only one is good (IPO). The rest range from getting fired by the board to burning out to becoming a zombie company.

The game was inspired by the gap between how founder life is portrayed (hustle! growth! disruption!) versus how it actually feels (anxiety, impossible tradeoffs, and a board that's never happy).

Technical details:
- Next.js + TypeScript
- Deployed on Vercel
- No backend - everything runs client-side
- Daily mode uses deterministic seeding so everyone gets the same challenge
- Stats stored in localStorage

A few interesting design decisions:
- No tutorials or explanations. You figure out what metrics matter by watching them move.
- The "biggest sin" system tracks narrative debt (Trust Debt, Tech Debt, etc.) and surfaces it at the end.
- Endings are checked in priority order, so more dramatic endings override "survived."

Happy to answer questions about the game design, technical implementation, or the content writing process (there are ~50 unique quote lines).

Would love feedback from anyone who's actually been a startup CEO - curious if it resonates or feels off.
by qubex | 2025-12-22 15:25:24+00:00
Not delighted to read that I’m supposedly 62% through my life.

EDIT: exploring a bit, it’s clearly using a very crude model for lifespan. It’s not using a rigorous “given that a person has lived T time, what is the expected residual lifetime” conditional probability model but a brutal “average life span” calculation. Several of my sprightly relatives are maxed out at 100%.
by ck2 | 2025-12-22 15:25:27+00:00
Was turned onto the the FW900 from hardforum years before LCD was available/reasonable

Now I have a FW900 sitting in a closet for decades because I can't lift it anymore

Also will never forget I was taking a walk in the woods years ago and in the middle of nowhere, no houses/apartments for miles, there was a FW900 just sitting there like someone must have thrown it out of an airplane but of course impossible as it was intact and inexplicable WTF (when got home made sure mine was still in the closet and had not somehow teleported itself)
by phil21 | 2025-12-22 15:25:37+00:00
Perhaps it’s also the definition of meaningful work changes for an individual over time?

What I once found meaningful 20 years ago largely no longer feels that way. Both due to a lack of novelty and personal growth, and seeing how I was so naive regarding the outcomes and future I was supposedly building.

Those daily grinds back then for purpose were great - but sometimes the purpose never materializes since others (customers, business partners, society as a whole, etc) disagree with that purpose.

At least that’s how I tend to feel my life largely went. I thought I was building towards a different goal than what ended up happening, which makes me feel I wasted my life. Now it’s questioning whether or not I will ever find something that gives me that sense of purpose again without it ending up being a lie in the end. Why bring my “whole self” into a given task if it’s not going to end up with any sort of mental payback later?
by jvanderbot | 2025-12-22 15:25:48+00:00
This is a framing issue. You can't control the times, but good advice is applicable in good and bad times. If Hamming was operating from a "good time", it should be true that his policies are also applicable in the "bad times".

His advice to "work on the worlds hardest problems" was spoken to people who had worked their way past the initial difficulties. General advice to "Move towards important problems", which is precisely the same thing, applies in good and bad times, and is very likely to produce in you a valuable expertise.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 15:25:51+00:00
> What happens if Apple just exits the Italian market? They can create their own Apple competitor, I guess.

My guess is that if they want to do that, they'd also need to leave the European market as a whole, as many countries share similar laws and regulations, besides the ones that applied across the entire European Union. And since Europe seems to represent ~25% total revenue in 2025 for Apple, that feels like a highly unlikely choice for them to do, considering they're a public company and have obligations to the shareholders.
by piva00 | 2025-12-22 15:26:29+00:00
> The "stricter" privacy rules of "Accept all" banners that send your data to 1000+ companies? Or "Accept all", but to Refuse you must tap a small grey link and manually uncheck dozens of boxes? Or worse, banners that force you to choose between accepting all tracking or paying a monthly subscription, blatantly illegal in the EU but ubiquitous in Italy even among large companies and news sites?

I don't know, I just stated what is in the decision: Apple makes 3rd party developers have to go through a process their own apps do not have to, hence creating an imbalance in competition since they are also the owners and controllers of the distribution channel.

The blatantly illegal pop-ups also annoy me a lot, it's clear it's not even malicious compliance but a targeted attack against the regulations to make it seem the law is requiring them to make it as annoying as possible. It seems to work since you got incensed by it.
by palmotea | 2025-12-22 15:27:12+00:00
> This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.

I don't think it means that. I think it means that when you are done reading an article about an unusual event, you leave with an understanding of how unusual it is, especially relative to more common comparables.

It's not uncommon for someone to be terrified of violent street crime, terrorism, or school shootings but be totally comfortable with getting in a car and driving long distances. There's something wrong with that outcome.
by Someone1234 | 2025-12-22 15:27:30+00:00
It is a nationalistic thing. When foreign governments fine "American" companies, they get all up in arms, while constantly asking the US Government to provide better consumer protections and promote competition.

This position commonly ignores that these fines are against these companies position within the market for which they're fined. Meaning that the EU will look at the EU profits and fine relative to those, so they aren't fining the "American" side/profits of the company but rather their "EU" (or Italian in this case) balance sheet.
by wrsh07 | 2025-12-22 15:27:56+00:00
To be clear, I don't think we disagree very much

I've seen people only run tests and break things (because the thing they broke wasn't covered by tests), I've seen people try to fix things and not verify that their fix works, etc

Good tests are sufficient in many cases to be confident that your code still works. But in general tests don't cover a lot of fundamental behavior, and if you don't exercise that fundamental behavior in one way or another, then you don't know that your code works