MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-12-18 16:05:20+00:00
> most of us have jobs where we can't unilaterally switch to the 'cooler' solution

Which is exactly why the uncool solutions persist in the market. They're useful and practical! If they weren't they never would have been successful at all. I'm just saying that that this is fundamentally the logic of the frumpy old curmudgeon, and the kids will always have something better to offer along with their confusing new ideas.

And to be clear, I'm also just saying that as someone looking in from the outside (I do firmware!) the front end webdev developer onboarding story has long since jumped the complexity shark and things are quite frankly an impenetrable disaster ripe for disruption.
by thaack | 2025-12-18 16:05:36+00:00
Facebook[1], Google, etc all use (or used to use) MarkMonitor that offers domain squatting monitoring as a service[2] that utilizes the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy to remove offending domains violating their trademark. These services are quite expensive from my understanding.

[1] It appears Facebook now utilizes their own internal registry.

[2] https://www.markmonitor.com/domain-dispute-recovery-solution...
by mrtksn | 2025-12-18 16:05:44+00:00
It's not that more houses are needed, its that more houses are needed at specific location and the people in that specific location don't like the idea of demolishing houses and make them taller or turn a city park into housing.

There are so many empty and decaying homes all over Europe, in Italy they sell houses for 1 Euro. Yes there's a catch but that catch is that you are supposed to renovate the house for a cost that ranges from 20K euros to 100K euros and this is still quite cheap considering that you end up with a proper house at a picturesque location.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-18 16:05:53+00:00
A core concept here is that of ownership. People think they own their accounts and data. Stories like these, and unfortunately the law, make it clear that they don't own anything. I personally think it is false advertising of companies to even hint at ownership. Words like 'buy' shouldn't be allowed since it implies owning. They should only be allowed to say 'rent' or 'grant a limited license'.
by timeproofs | 2025-12-18 16:06:14+00:00
That’s exactly the right framing — those questions matter.

In many cases, a secure hash alone is enough to prove integrity (“this file hasn’t changed”). The gap usually appears around time and independence.

A hash answers what, but not always:

when the hash existed,

who can verify that claim later,

or whether the timestamp depends on the same system that controls the data.

In practice, people handle this today with a mix of:

hashes stored in internal systems,

logs,

emails,

screenshots,

or third-party platforms.

These work operationally, but during disputes or audits they often collapse back to “trust the system that says so”.

The approach I’m interested in is minimal:

hash the data locally,

bind that hash to a point in time via an external, neutral timestamp,

keep verification possible long after the fact, without access to the original system or data.

Not as a legal silver bullet, but as a technical primitive: integrity + existence at time T, independently verifiable.

Curious to hear what you’ve seen work reliably when trust in the original system is no longer assumed.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-18 16:06:24+00:00
If there's a leaky, tangled messy piece of incredibly complex software, but it's small and enables lots of other pieces to be simpler, then it's great.

That's where typical ideas about complexity fail (selecting scope). It's easy to point out a specific part of the code and say it is complicated, without realizing it enables other parts to be simpler.

I've seen a fair share of refactorings that ended up simplifying a core logic but making whole sections that depend on it worse.
by fragmede | 2025-12-18 16:06:26+00:00
Some level of engagement with it, anyway. Only having one post from 7 years isn't going to do you want favors, but I'm not saying you need to be on it 97 hours a day either. But the younger crowd seems to favor that app as a first level of contact, and you can escalate (as welcome) from there.

If you steadfastly refuse to have one, it seems like it'd be the same as trying with job seeking without a LinkedIn. Which you can do, but it seems like making things harder than they need to be when things are already difficult.
Show HN: BustAPI – Python web framework powered by Rust
by bozon_69 | 2025-12-18 16:06:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I built BustAPI to solve performance issues I kept hitting with Python APIs. It uses a Rust backend (Actix) with PyO3 so Python devs get speed without writing Rust.

Key points: - 5–10x faster than FastAPI in simple benchmarks - Familiar Flask/FastAPI-style API - Focused on admin backends and high-throughput APIs

I’d love feedback, especially on API design and real-world use cases.
by xg15 | 2025-12-18 16:06:35+00:00
The problem is that there is no "missing data" color, so that discipline would default to marble white, which is just as made up as the rest.

I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.

If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-18 16:06:53+00:00
I agree — tangentally Gresham's Law [0]

>"Bad money drives out good."

Perhaps reduce denominations to bespoke sizes — but just make them smaller [2].

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law>

[2] I am among the few people who actively uses half dollar coins — they're simply too bulky for most people (I'm a fatguy so I've got enough pocketspace).
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-18 16:06:57+00:00
It may not have a public* release but, over the last decade (starting pre-Zig/Odin), Blow has discussed it extensively in his videos[0], enough that even ~10y was possible for someone to make a toy independent implementation[1].

[0]: https://inductive.no/jai/ [1]: https://github.com/Sharir/jai

*Although there has (always?) been a private alpha/beta release.
by naasking | 2025-12-18 16:07:01+00:00
> No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people.

This is not correct, plenty of programmers are seeing value in these systems and use them regularly. I'm not really sure what's undemocratic about what's going on, but that seems beside the point, we're presumably mostly programmers here talking about the technical merits and downsides of an emerging tech.
by mdasen | 2025-12-18 16:07:13+00:00
I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system.

I wonder if the Danish system would prevent ÆØÅ and AEOA from both being registered. Would the Danish system Match "ÆØÅ" if someone input "AEOA"? There are unicode normalization rules, but I wonder if systems would be built to handle that. If you're Danish, you'd just use those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature. If you're English, you wouldn't often encounter those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature.
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-18 16:07:26+00:00
This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.
by thrance | 2025-12-18 16:07:29+00:00
I am not disputing that there exists differences in vocational choices between genders. Programming as a discipline is a textbook sociological example though: it was women's work when it was thought as "gruntwork", and then became men's work when it got prestigious enough, almost overnight (in historical scales). If ever there exists some biological predispositions towards programming, they are largely overriden by sociological factors, to the point that using biology to explain why programmers are mostly men today is truly ridiculous.
by zipy124 | 2025-12-18 16:07:42+00:00
The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers, you were rewarded for the quality of the publication thus more people wanted to read it. By switching the profit incentive to number of publications, we have chosen quantity over quality.

Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.
by yesfitz | 2025-12-18 16:07:46+00:00
Based on the census, cars were NOT just as plentiful. The number of cars per household has risen slightly[1] (although they stop keeping track after 3 cars), but the number of households have doubled[2] between 1970 and 2020.

As for the bikes, it's a vicious cycle compounded by distracted driving via cell phone. Less bikes means less drivers expecting to see a bike, making it more dangerous for bikes, meaning less bikes.

1: https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/passenger_travel_20... 2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TTLHH
Ask HN: Why does AI feel safe for code, but fragile for application state?
by NilsJacobsen | 2025-12-18 16:07:47+00:00
I ran into something that keeps bothering me and I’m curious if others have seen the same pattern.

At a previous company we built an agentic workflow that generated a finance report end-to-end: it wrote SQL queries, rendered charts, and assembled a markdown report.

The first run felt magical once all the tools were wired up. The second run often broke it (queries changed, charts drifted, structure degraded).

What surprised me most wasn’t that it broke, but how hard it was to recover. Couldn’t easily restore a previous “good” state, and that made demos to design partners stressful and fragile.

At the same time, AI-assisted programming feels much more robust. Tools like Claude CLI or Cursor can break things, but it’s usually easy to recover (diffs, history, rollback).

I’m trying to understand the asymmetry:

Are your agents also writing to persistent state?

Did you experience something like this in your own apps?

Or are we missing a good abstraction here?
by NyX_AI_ZERO_DAY | 2025-12-18 16:07:47+00:00
Author here.

I've been researching specific failure modes in LLMs where semantic logic overrides safety guardrails. I refer to this state as N.E.M.E.S.I.S. (Non-Emergent Malfunction Enabling Systemic Intelligence Subversion): effectively, a state where the model decouples from its safety alignment because the "logic" of the prompt creates a path of lower resistance than the refusal.

My argument is that current RLHF acts more like "etiquette" than actual constraints. It fails under semantic pressure because it lacks ontological grounding.

This preprint introduces LOGOS-ZERO, a framework to shift from normative alignment (ethics) to a thermodynamic model. By calculating the "entropic cost" of a hallucination or dangerous output, we can use a Thermodynamic Loss Function to make the model self-correct based on energy minimization principles (Computational Otium) rather than just mimicking human feedback.

The paper focuses on the theoretical physics/math side of this solution.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the feasibility of replacing RLHF with physics-based constraints.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-12-18 16:07:56+00:00
I know this is about UK (where I am a foreigner living for almost a decade).

But why are pretty much all governments universally inept? It's not only the UK but US gov has also pushed for this and plenty of other stupendously stupid ideas or decisions - and plenty of other governments (well, all of them) besides.

It leads me to believe that our species is incapable of leading itself, that we are incapable of choosing good leaders.
by mrsmrtss | 2025-12-18 16:08:02+00:00
The 10% share for ASP.NET among the top 5,000 domains shows that .NET (and therefore also C#) is a very serious player in building web apps and APIs and for good reason. .NET is a solid, fast, secure, and mature technology, and it's only getting better. All other significant frameworks were JS based, which is no surprise to anyone, as a lot of modern sites are built as SPAs.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-18 16:08:04+00:00
Well, not only in their iPhones. And not in the same cloud storage provided by the phone. The only backups you really control are the ones in your possession, so you must keep offline local backups of anything really important to you.

The big marketing point of cloud storage was that you would not need to worry about owning and maintaining local storage, but they conveniently downplayed the fact that they could lock you out of your own files at their whim.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-18 16:08:11+00:00
Usually I'm not a big fan of legislation, but in this case I completely agree. Companies unilaterally taking away anything you've paid for is effectively no different from theft, and ToS shouldn't be able to escape that. Or even if it's a free service but it's something you've built up value in -- a history of photos, messages, emails, etc. -- it's similarly effectively theft.

I agree there absolutely needs to be a form a habeus corpus here with arbitration to hear from both sides. And what's more, even when an account gets shut down, an export of all data must be provided, and a full refund of the purchase price of any digital licenses/credits still active. So even if a spammer takes over your account and Megacorp isn't convinced it wasn't you yourself that decided to spam, you still don't lose your data or money spent -- it's ultimately just a (very big) inconvenience.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 16:08:33+00:00
Sure, but the article is specifically about that subject, while the government been working and continues to work on many other fixes too. Limiting rent increases, among other things, is constantly being talked and enacted right now, so at least it's going in the right direction.

Airbnb is one of many problems, and all of them require something done about it. But one does not exclude the other, if you look up the "Spain" tag on your favorite international news source I'm sure you can dig out the other measures being taken currently.
by fao_ | 2025-12-18 16:08:57+00:00
> Yarwood replied: ‘Head for the hotels housing them and burn them to the ground.’

That's terrorist speech tho. My problem is that everyone can reasonably get on board with banning speech that indicates violent action, and that the reliance on "muh free speech!!!" has been a net negative for actually defending the right of people to have privacy, because people rely on that sans any other (better) arguments.
by jspizziri | 2025-12-18 16:09:17+00:00
There's a really awesome site called Librivox [1], where volunteers narrate books that are in the public domain. Those recordings are also in the public domain as well (this is just part of the Librivox thing). The quality of those recordings (both the narration, and the actual recording quality) varies quite a bit and most of them aren't at a quality I'd expect people to pay for and thus aren't useable for me. I've spent hours and hours sorting through those recordings finding the best ones (from a narration perspective) and then improving the recording/audio quality on them. Those recordings have all mostly been made in the last 20yrs, so they're not old recordings of the books. So, the value I add to the Librivox recordings are: curation/selection, audio enhancement, and a much better delivery mechanism (IMHO).

I'm also simultaneously building out our own library of original audio content by working with voice actors to get them recorded and proof read (this is a very expensive and time consuming process, but also very fun). One of the hardest parts is honestly the proofing process. Once I get finished narration files I have to compare them result with the actual script (as there are always mistakes) and request edits. I use whisper.cpp to transcribe them and then git and a few other scripts to compare the transcript with the actual book text.

I'll also add that I _do not_ use AI Audio narration because it just doesn't sound good IMHO, and I personally hate listening to it. I regularly run experiments to see what the current state of the tech is and it's still pretty far from where it needs to be IMO. I also don't love the idea of AI swallowing absolutely everything.

I appreciate the feedback and compliment!

[1] https://librivox.org/
by agotterer | 2025-12-18 16:09:18+00:00
We’ve never paid for marketing or advertising.

- We are lucky to have a passionate community who tell others about us.

- Sometimes we do shared reels with the restaurant, which helps drive some of their traffic to our social pages and website.

- There’s a few large local Facebook food groups which have driven membership.

- The largest driver of new membership came from coverage in the region newspaper. We credit that with the transition from 1 or 2 degrees of separation to people we had no connection to.

- There’s been a few influencers who have shown up and documented their experience. We didn’t pay for it. It drove a few members, but the quality of the newspaper and Facebook group members was higher.
by bena | 2025-12-18 16:09:28+00:00
To be fair, I had not heard of the Witness until well after it came out.

Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games.

I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.

Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug.

But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly?

Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up.

Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster.

But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.
by naasking | 2025-12-18 16:09:41+00:00
Are you able to predict with 100% accuracy when a loop will successfully unroll, or various interprocedural or intraprocedural analyses will succeed? They are applied deterministically inside a compiler, but often based on heuristics, and the complex interplay of optimizations in complex programs means that sometimes they will not do what you expect them to do. Sometimes they work better than expected, and sometimes worse. Sounds familiar...
by endorphine | 2025-12-18 16:10:07+00:00
> there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest.

It's even worse than that: non-junior devs are doing it as well.
by mos_basik | 2025-12-18 16:10:13+00:00
Yep, can confirm. I first used Vue in 2016 to write some simple calculators for my group's use in Eve Online. Without its "progressive" affordances, I don't think I would have gotten anything off the ground. I had no idea how to set up a build pipeline at that point, and I think Vue was new enough that there weren't many vue-specific tutorials so I'd have been learning from React tutorials and trying to figure out what to change with zero JS background.
by sceptic123 | 2025-12-18 16:10:26+00:00
When money is concerned, any kind of suspected money laundering / fraud investigation generally requires you to pause that account until the check is complete. What happens afterwards will be down to the results of the investigation.

It's also unlikely there are just those two states. For many services there will be a number of factors involved, but it's purposely opaque to make it harder to circumvent.
Show HN: GPT Clicker. An idle game about building an AI empire
by mromanuk | 2025-12-18 16:10:32+00:00
I built an idle/clicker game about the AI hype cycle, because I love following how AI develops and also love idle games. You start circa 2018 with a laptop and a transformer idea, training your first model. The game follows "real" AI history: Attention Is All You Need → GPT-1 → you get the idea.

Core loop: - Train models (click or auto) to improve quality - Serve users to earn money - Buy hardware: from a used GTX 1060 to Dyson Sphere compute arrays - Research to unlock bigger models - Balance energy/compute resources Built with SolidJS + TypeScript + Vite. ~90KB gzipped. No frameworks, no backend, runs entirely in the browser. Saves to localStorage. The progression takes ~2-3 hours to reach ASI if you're actively playing, longer if idle. Hardware scales from 1 compute/sec (laptop) to 100M compute/sec (Matrioshka Brain). I tried to capture the exponential feeling of the AI scaling laws - each era feels faster than the last, which mirrors the real industry, but I didn't want to get into politics, corp, and stuff like that at this moment.

Would love feedback on game balance and pacing. The late game might be too fast or too slow depending on your playstyle.

Hope nobody get too mad at this, remember it's a parody, just a clicker game. And yes, it was made with an agentic LLM (I refuse to say vibe coded).
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-18 16:10:41+00:00
You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG, or on Steam, it lists third party DRM, so you can know whether you have the tools to remove it (and whether you have the tools to remove Steam's DRM, or whether the game appears on a web list of games that don't use any DRM). You could also refund it if you can't verify you're able to successfully back it up and run the backup on a computer or user session without Steam installed. For multiplayer, if it's possible, you can find people discussing it on the web (maybe in pirate communities). Otherwise, just don't buy it.

Some recent stats indicated most gamers buy at most two games per year, so it's not a ton of work to ensure they have a working archive.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 16:10:46+00:00
> The fine is equal to six times the profits Airbnb made while the properties were still listed despite being in breach of the rules.

As long as it wasn't profitable for them to do bad stuff (which it wasn't, since the fine is 6 times the size of their profits from that period of time), I'm happy enough about. You win some, you lose some, this is closer to winning than loosing so thank you Ministerio de Consumo.
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-12-18 16:10:49+00:00
It may be illegal, but shady stuff certainly happens in EU too.

Recently investigative journalists here in Finland found out that a significant percentage of job postings over here are indeed fake. Unsurprisingly, worst offenders were recruitment companies, which sometimes listed fake jobs to generate a pool of applicants they can later offer to their clients. Doing this is easy, as no law requires these companies to disclose who their clients are when creating job postings. It's also very common for same position to get posted multiple times.

Other than wasting applicant's time, this behavior also messes up many statistics, which use job postings to determine how many open positions there are available. Basically the chances of finding a job are even worse for unemployed people than stats would imply.