MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thenaturalist | 2025-12-23 22:12:37+00:00
> We assumed it would get lost in complex schemas, make bad joins, or hallucinate table names. So we built guardrails.

An actual sentence written by a "Chief of Software"...

How are people getting hired at such prestigious engineering companies putting out such sentences?

Sorry if this sounds snarky, but I'm blown away.

This is seemingly a team wasting god knows how many man hours and $$$ on tool spend assuming things top down instead of collecting data and benchmarking bottom up.

Crazy on so many levels.
by Jamestor-19 | 2025-12-23 22:13:56+00:00
In today's fast-paced world, having reliable food storage solutions is essential for maintaining freshness and organization in the kitchen. Plastic food storage containers offer convenience, versatility, and durability, making them a popular choice among home cooks and meal preppers. In this article, we will explore the top five highly-rated plastic food storage containers that can help you keep your food fresh and your kitchen tidy.https://info.boxplastic.com/top-5-highly-rated-plastic-food-...
by ajb | 2025-12-23 22:15:04+00:00
The thing that is supposed to happen next is high-bandwidth flash. In theory, it could allow laptops to run the larger models without being extortionately costly, by loading directly from flash into the GPU (not by executing in flash)
But I haven't seen figures of the actual bandwidth yet, and no doubt to start with it will be expensive. The underlying technology of flash has much higher read latency than dram, so it's not really clear (to me, at least) if they can deliver the speeds needed to remove the need to cache in VRAM just by increasing parallelism.
by mooreds | 2025-12-23 22:15:17+00:00
Yes, this is so powerful.

One of my favorite moves is to ask a question that I feel has an obvious answer and then say "what am I missing?" Sometimes I am right, other times I am missing something.

Either way I'm modelling:

- that it's okay to ask questions to which the answer seems obvious

- that it is totally fine not to know everything
Show HN: A lightweight ad blocker Chrome extension I built
by SahilAdBlocker | 2025-12-23 22:15:19+00:00
Hi HN

I built a simple, lightweight ad blocker Chrome extension and wanted to share it with the community for feedback.

What it does:

Blocks common ads, popups, and banners

Handles dynamically loaded content using DOM observation

Very lightweight and fast

No tracking, no unnecessary permissions

Why I built it:
I wanted a minimal ad blocker that doesn’t slow down browsing or overcomplicate settings.

Chrome Web Store link:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ajmonbkfjffgdhhacjm...

I’m especially interested in:

Performance feedback

Bug reports

Feature suggestions

Thanks for checking it out!
by yellow_lead | 2025-12-23 22:15:28+00:00
With regards to the Epstein files, it seems some files are not redacted well.

For instance, this file says Mona if you remove the top layer https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000136...

Some others I've seen include 1-3 more letters than are in the redaction.
by amypetrik8 | 2025-12-23 22:15:52+00:00
I think back to every ... overly enthused student council member or student council president or HOA president I've seen in my education, a microcosm of politics. These are people with a fire inside of them to seize these positions. Speaking with them, as they were my representative to the academic leadership, they would often hear my request and provide a explanation as to why that was not feasible. A naive assessment of their explanation - often at face value reasonable in the most simplistic of ways, a slightly deeper reflection would reveal it was a convenient excuse for the truth - they had a completely different motivation, usually self-interest in nature, but hidden behind the lie to hide the ugly truth.

The same is much true of California. So many strict laws and regulation. For the environment? For safety? Why I can't build a house? No, no - they don't want anyone building houses to keep the prices pumped up high. Same for many things. Keep PG&E rich, and PG&E will keep the people in power rich either directly or through the major supporters of said politicians
by wasabi991011 | 2025-12-23 22:16:11+00:00
> I would state there is one other group that has any academic rigour, and is actually making significant and important progress.

I agree there's a lot of poorly written papers and unrigorous research.
I'm at the beginning of my PhD, so I still don't quite have every group vetted yet. Could you share your area, and what groups to follow (yours and the other good one)?
by sshine | 2025-12-23 22:16:29+00:00
> when more ergonomic alternatives really do exist and are widely used

As someone who got good at Bootstrap, I have to say that Tailwind sucks: it feels like you’re just doing CSS with low-granularity classes. Sure, flexibility, but to the same extent that makes CSS terrible, only now your HTML is littered with inconsistencies.

CSS being nice: one sheet that renders your pages consistent and nice with minimal littering is the markup code.

CSS being sucky: Disconnect between what the CSS codes do, and where they’re used, nearly impossible to clean up, and easy to end up with duplicate efforts.

Bootstrap, for me, strikes the balance better: you do add some classes to the markup, and you get some smart stuff for free, like responsiveness via media queries, but if you want highly configured elements, you extend the CSS; you make a design system and stick to a few custom, high-level classes, and you don’t tack a million classes together at the markup level.
by dentalnanobot | 2025-12-23 22:16:59+00:00
I expected to hate a touch-screen for the main UI, but in my Volvo ex30 there is just so much less to monitor and _do_ while driving that it’s a really relaxing and enjoyable driving experience. Because I’m just paying attention to where the car is going, it feels a lot safer to me vs my previous manual-transmission ICE car.

There’s a big speedometer top right (it’s right-hand drive), an indicator of the driving mode (manual, cruise-control, pilot assist), and the rest is basically map/navigation. No gears, no RPM, no oil temp, no cryptic warning lights.

Steering wheel controls for music, calls, speed control, etc are fine, but the voice control over music, navigation and climate are so good I barely use them: “hey google, make it a bit cooler in here” or “hey google, let’s go to xxx” both work basically flawlessly.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-12-23 22:17:05+00:00
Information storage is the same as fertility.

"If you want to have a baby, you won't be able to conceive. If you want to stay childfree, the condom will break."

If you want to find old logs of your IRC and AIM buddies from 20 years ago, they're gone. If you say something stupid once, it's kept forever.
by IceHegel | 2025-12-23 22:17:37+00:00
Given recent high profile redaction events, I think one simple use of AI would be to have it redact documents according to an objective standard.

That should in theory prevent overly redacted documents for political purposes.

An approach that could be rolled out today would be redacting with human review, but showing what % of redactions the AI would have done, and also showing the prompt given to the AI to perform redactions.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-23 22:17:58+00:00
They have nifty apple-only features, like you can hold them close to the iPhone and they'll pop up and pair with a neat UI.

It's mostly gimicky, but it does give the user the impression that the apple Air pods are higher quality because they have all these things thought out. In actuality, Apple just made it so they're the only ones who can do that.
by sillyfluke | 2025-12-23 22:18:04+00:00
>or, more likely

Yes, argue against unsubstantiated bias with more unsubstantiated bias. Anyone who knows about the high percentage of educated immigrants in the tech sector and who knows the historical importance of immigrants to American innovation could easily find this highly relevant, especially the historical high ratio of successful immigrant founders in SV itself including a couple of white South Africans that come to mind -- at least one of which who seems to have had a less than by-the-book immigrant status and could have been deported in today's climate if someone wished it to be so.

The UK leaving the EU is one
of the highest ranked stories on this site for similar reasons no doubt.
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-23 22:18:10+00:00
A decade ago, a senior staff engineer at Google told me that he doesn't mind delegating the data-entry parts of his job to junior SWEs, so he can focus on higher-level problem solving.

This is how I've been treating AI, except instead of assuming your junior SWE is generally sane and has some understand of what you're doing, you have to make sure you double check everything.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-23 22:18:20+00:00
What I don't really understand is why the big data centre operators destroy their old cards instead of selling them off. What are the downsides for them? Apart from the obvious, i.e. it would bring in money, would it not also drive down the cost for brand new cards? I.e. Nvidia can currently overcharge dramatically because there is such a shortage. If the data centre operators would dump large numbers of used cards on the market would that not increase supply and drive down cost?
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-23 22:18:22+00:00
This article triggers all my “written by an LLM” spidey senses.

Which is ironic considering the subject matter. “Perfect”, but artificially constructed. “Just for me”, but algorithmic slop.

I agree that you can do so much more custom tailoring of bespoke software with the speed an LLM brings. But something inside of me still revolts at calling this anything other than “convenient”.

“Perfect” I will reserve for things I’ve made myself. However “imperfect” they may really be.
by formerly_proven | 2025-12-23 22:19:30+00:00
Is there a good free tool to properly redact PDFs? My workflow is to place black annotation rectangles on top and then print as PDF with "force rasterization" on. The resulting PDF files then just consist of pages with one image each. But this tends to be really suboptimal, because it's usually a grayscale or color rasterization, so file sizes are very large vs. monochrome PDFs with CCITT G3/G4 compression (which is absolutely what you want for text content, excellent compression and lossless). Post-processing PDFs to convert them to CCITT is rather annoying and I only know of CLI ways.
by pepperball | 2025-12-23 22:19:32+00:00
Realistically, probably nothing great.

I enjoyed programming and computers as a hobby in high school, but had eventually decided it was not something I’d like to do as a career.

But my initial plans after high school fell through and I found myself needing to make a living. Naturally I reached for a software career, but I do hate it as much as I expected.

I didn’t really have anything else going for me skill wise. The idea of spending four more years in school didn’t appeal to me as a teenager (though I regret this greatly). I didn’t attend a community college for a few months, but dropped out as it felt like a waste of time and money.

So realistically, I’d probably have been stuck working unskilled near-minimum wage jobs I had been working before I started my career. Prior to that, I had a fascination with biology that competed with computer briefly. “Bioinformatics” was a word that came up often in career ideas while I was in high school, but that was such a small niche, I really had no concept at all as to what that career path would have looked like.

Nowadays, there’s many more things I’m interested in, but they’re all inaccessible as careers at this point.

Over the years, I’ve been inspired by things like RF engineering, physics, PLC programming, and even various natural sciences, but lacked the education/intelligence/cash to go back to school. Certainly for as long as I’d have to for those careers. AI will likely reduce the number of people needed in the sort of fields anyway.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-23 22:20:23+00:00
I'm not saying LLMs can't write embedded C.

I'm saying that the resources available are really limiting for careless slop. At least on the 8-bit end of the spectrum.

The point is that the constraints demand some amount of care. LLM's are capable of that if you hold their hand and keep them focused, but you the programmer still need to know what you're doing.

I don't think there's a moat at all. I think the size of the problem space and the resources available make it a challenge to do anything too horrendous and have it still "work".
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-23 22:20:25+00:00
One of the things Windows did right, IMO. I hate that elevation prompts on macOS and most linux desktops are indistinguishable from any other window.

It's not just visual either. The secure desktop is in protected memory, and no other process can access it. Only NTAUTHORITY\System can initiate showing it and interact with it any way, no other process can.

You can also configure it to require you to press CTRL+ALT+DEL on the UAC prompt to be able to interact with it and enter credentials as another safeguard against spoofing.

I'm not even sure if Wayland supports doing something like that.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-23 22:20:56+00:00
> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec. That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.

I disagree, this is not a given. Usually the opposite is true.

Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.

Apple could be malicious and make the API stupid, but if they were genuine then they wouldn't. They would make a good API, which is much more likely, I think, when the API is public versus some secret private API.
by senderista | 2025-12-23 22:21:44+00:00
If that were true then presumably Microsoft wouldn't have ported it to Windows:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...

Although Windows registered network I/O (RIO) came before io_uring and for all I know might have been an inspiration:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
by foobarchu | 2025-12-23 22:22:26+00:00
> I am talking about not only job shortages but also general humbling of the bloated egos.

I'm gonna give you the benefit for the doubt here. Most of us do not dislike genAI because we were fired or "humbled". Most of us dislike it because a) the terrible environmental impacts, b) the terrible economic impacts, and c) the general non-production-readiness of results once you get past common, well-solved problems

Your stated understanding comes off a little bit like "they just don't like it because they're jealous".
by necovek | 2025-12-23 22:22:57+00:00
I do all my interviewing in a very similar way, but I don't use that to "level" an employee: I want most of the engineers in my team to have this mindset, and the only difference between seniority levels should be in the size/scope of the initiative they led and took ownership of, and obviously, the level of exposure to wrong things they had a chance to do and learn from. I will sometimes take someone where I believe they were not put in a position to do this, and who I believe I can support to develop this mindset.

I know I've done all of this since day 1 of my professional software engineer career (and well, before that too). I've also been "side-moted" to a Tech Lead after 2 years of starting my career in a strong tech company too.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-23 22:23:20+00:00
I think that's the most likely way it'll go.

Windows will remain as the default "enterprise desktop." It'll effectively become just another piece of business software, like an ERP.

Gamers, devs, enthusiasts will end up on Linux and/or SteamOS via Valve hardware, creatives and personal users that still use a computer instead of their phone or tablet will land in Apple land.
Ask HN: What did you lose forever because you had no backup?
by postit | 2025-12-23 22:23:38+00:00
A friend and I were talking about a DOS POS system we wrote decades ago. It was crude, handwritten using Turbo Pascal DBF files and somehow still running in a few places since it got pirated.

We no longer have the source. No install disks. No backups. The software survived longer than our memory of it.

It made me realize how often "temporary" work outlives its creators, while the source vanishes.

What’s the most important thing you lost because you assumed you’d back it up later? Code, data, research, art, configs, anything.

Did that loss permanently change how you handle backups?
by m463 | 2025-12-23 22:23:52+00:00
Personally I think of custom houses vs tract homes as an analogy.

People won't care that much if their daily life software is developed by artisan developers, offshore coders or ai. They will just need to get things done and won't be able to tell who wrote the code.

That said, I still think there will be a spec, and that spec will mostly be written by humans.
by The_Stone | 2025-12-23 22:24:11+00:00
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?

I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
by agnosticmantis | 2025-12-23 22:24:57+00:00
I find it hard to see an upper bound to demand for compute/power.

If models/hardware become 1000X more efficient/cheaper/smaller, people will be running 1,000,000X more jobs with even bigger models on even more intensive tasks, running them for even longer, etc.

We haven't even scratched the surface for video, world models and robotics.

When the markets panicked during the first DeepSeek episode, I just bought more Nvidia for this very reason. NVidia may very well tank sooner or later, but I'm sure it won't be because demand for compute tanked due to more efficient models. A more plausible scenario would be a competitor dethroning NVidia, kinda like Google's recent surge indicated.
by lioeters | 2025-12-23 22:25:01+00:00
I remember LZEXE from those olden days. When I discovered the author of FFmpeg and QEMU also created LZEXE, I was so impressed. I've been using his software for my entire computing career.

It's similar to the respect I have for the work of Anders Hejlsberg, who created Turbo Pascal, with which I learned to program; and also C# and TypeScript.
by fjfaase | 2025-12-23 22:25:01+00:00
The latest version of g++ is written in C++. If I am not mistaken g++ 4.7.4 is the oldest version that is written in C. But it does not support the C++ version in which the latest version of g++ is written. For that you have to compile g++ 10.4.0 first. And g++ 4.7.4 cannot be compiled by the Tiny C Compiler (tcc). The total chain then becomes:

tcc 0.9.26 → tcc 0.9.27 → gcc 4.0.4 → g++ 4.7.4 → g++ 10.4.0 → g++ 13.1.0
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-23 22:25:21+00:00
They do, but strings that are numbers will be reinterpreted as numbers.

[edit]

let testArray = [];
testArray[0] = "foo";
testArray["0"] = "bar";
testArray["00"] = "baz";
console.log(testArray[0]);
console.log(testArray["0"]);
console.log(testArray["00"]);
Show HN: Agentica – 200 reqs/day for free, data not used to train our LLMs
by GenLabs-AI | 2025-12-23 22:25:38+00:00
I built an extension that gives developers cheaper access to AI models in a Kilo Code fork.

Free tier: 200 requests/day to open source models (DeepSeek, Qwen, Minimax)
Paid tier ($20/month): $45 in credits for Claude/GPT-5/Gemini-3 + 1000 daily open source requests

Works in VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Your data isn't used for training.

Just launched today, still rough but functional. Would appreciate feedback.

agentica.genlabs.dev
Download extension from:
https://open-vsx.org/extension/agentica/agentica
by valeratermi | 2025-12-23 22:25:41+00:00
Most social media downloader sites today are overloaded with aggressive ads, popups, redirects, or force you to install apps before giving the file.
I didn’t want to deal with that anymore, so I built a small tool for myself to make the process simple and user-friendly.
It’s still a work in progress, but it already covers my basic needs.
I’d really appreciate feedback, especially on usability and anything that feels confusing or unnecessary.I eventually built a small tool for myself just to avoid all of that.
From your experience, what drives this kind of design?
Is it mainly monetization, legal risks, or something else?
Curious to hear concrete reasons and better alternatives, if any.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-23 22:25:57+00:00
For the general user, yes absolutely.

Linux DEs still can't match the accessibility features alone.

yeah, there's layers and layers of progressively older UIs layered around the OS, but most of it makes sense, is laid out sanely, and is relatively consistent with other dialogs.

macOS beats it, but its still better in a lot of ways over the big Linux DEs.
by Cannabat | 2025-12-23 22:26:02+00:00
Hi Will,

I was about to try opencode after using claude code for quite a while.

I think understand the fundamental difference in how they work (acp against existing agentic loops with toad vs a single agentic loop for all models with opencode) but I’m curious why we might want toad over something like opencode, which lets me use any model under the sun.

I suppose toad gets to use the highly specialized agentic loops for each cli. And has a nicer (? opencode is pretty slick from my brief usage…).

Curious to hear about why you chose to built this way and what advantages you see.
by wiseowise | 2025-12-23 22:26:20+00:00
Can someone who worked in multiple industries clarify: is it only software that has constant identity crisis with "what makes you X" and "what is expected of Y"?

The only thing that makes a senior are years of experience, that's all. You can be a shitty senior if you only do one thing for 10 years, but you're a senior nonetheless.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-23 22:26:21+00:00
Right, but regulations are necessary. And ideological opposition to regulation, as a concept, in inherently wrong and always will be.

Some regulations are good, some are bad. In order to have a free market, you MUST have some regulations. It's not optional.

The reason is simple and intuitive - if you don't regulate the free market, it will just make itself un-free, which is what we're seeing with Apple. You need to actively push back against that.

The reason is all free market players, no exceptions, have the utmost fundamental incentive to make the market non-free. Everyone, all the time, is devising new and innovative ways to make the market they control non-free. Because this is how you maximize revenue.
by pron | 2025-12-23 22:26:26+00:00
What I'm trying to say is that a machine that can reliably write a complex, large piece of software and prove its correctness - somethng that, BTW, humans are not currently capable of doing - is also likely a machine that can do that from the prompt: Write a piece of software that will be popular among women aged 35-65, let alone "write a spreadsheet that's as powerful as excel but easier to use". Of course, once that happens, the market value of any such software will drop to zero, because anyone could give such a prompt. In fact, there would be no need for software as we know it because the AI could just do what the software is supposed to do (although perhaps it would choose to create an executable as an implementation detail).

What I see is people spending a lot of time imagining how we would work with an AI that could solve some huge problems and at the same time fail to solve easier problems. I don't understand the point of the exercise.