MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seg_lol | 2025-12-23 00:19:21+00:00
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers

Lost me right here, MCAS may have been motivated by losing type certification (as it should), but everything they did was not a result of regulations. Including upcharging to make the system actually redundant. Had they actually engineered the MCAS properly, they would have never gotten caught in the first place.
by woooooo | 2025-12-23 00:19:37+00:00
The Chinese absolutely bear responsibility for how they've governed the last 30 years, just as the British bear responsibility for how they governed the prior 150.

The fact that British HK liberalized a little at the very last second before handover is better than nothing, and the National Security Law is definitely bad, but right now the scoreboard is 7/150 years of free speech under the UK, compared to 23/28 years of free speech under PRC. It'll take another 100 years for the PRC to have a worse record than the UK.
by GolfPopper | 2025-12-23 00:19:55+00:00
>It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.

Given that this is the same Supreme Court that ruled Biden (or Trump) could have them all shot[1], it seems near-certain that you're correct.

1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf (JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR dissent, pages 29-30)
by pluc | 2025-12-23 00:19:56+00:00
I think that's kinda what is meant here; LinkedIn could be much more in terms of consistent professional networking, events, learning and even job searching but instead the focus is on algorithmic feed and self-agrandizing which I think is a turn-off to everyone except sociopaths and marketers. Instead at best it's something you for get and at worst it's a tool you're forced into using.
by underlipton | 2025-12-23 00:19:57+00:00
Interested layman here: IIUC, immunotherapy is currently the holy grail for difficult-to-treat cancers like pancreatic. There are designer mRNA vaccines available that have ridiculous efficacy, but they must be tailored to each individual and so are extremely expensive (and are currently undergoing trials). mRNA COVID vaccines have been shown in some studies to increase the lifespan of pancreatic cancer patients. So, it's not hard for me to imagine that a treatment that gives the immune system a crack at learning to identify and destroy pancreatic cancer cells will boost survivability.

Part of the freak-out about the Trump admin's attacking of scientific research (including, especially, of mRNA research) earlier in the year is that it threatened these trials.
by smoody07 | 2025-12-23 00:20:30+00:00
Why is there strong competition for every other social media site? This seems to come down to a few market dynamics:
1. The major influencers who adopt it and bring their followers
2. New networks bring new leaderboards which attract the next generation that has zero equity on the existing sites
3. Regular engagement is critical, otherwise every network faces a death spiral
4. Engagement required to drive ad revenue

LinkedIn is notable for not being affected by these:
1. There are no major influencers (though they tried.) The most influential person on LinkedIn is very close in value to the median software engineer
2. There are no significant leaderboards (though they tried.) Few people care how many followers others have
3. Regular engagement doesn't matter, because it is still the Schelling point for irregular life events (ie needing a job.)
4. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions for recruiters, so the lower engagement is not an existential crisis.

LinkedIn is an always-on jobs expo pretending to be social media. Even the executives think they are social media. They are actually something else.

Some angles to compete:
1. Build better data for an underserved segment. Obvious choice is SWE, but MSFT owns Github as a firewall here. Another candidate is the top 1% of executives: they might be the major influencers that haven't been activated yet.
2. Build an identity layer that mitigates risk of fake job seekers. LinkedIn has halfheartedly tried this but their inertia might be an opportunity.
3. Build the Github for other segments: the verifiable portfolios that show real work.
4. Build a frontrunner to the hiring pipeline. If every star candidate can be identified three months before they start looking on LinkedIn, the recruiting system there will fall apart.
5. Build the workplace social media network that users actually want to use daily. LinkedIn failed at this, and their effort indicates they see the risk of disruption coming from here.

Some existing companies that are on the right track:
1. Slack. Already owns DAU for work, well-funded, competes with MSFT in many domains. 30% confident they've considered moving into this space, but Benioff getting AI-pilled will slow it down.
2. Behance. Owned the market for designers, sold to Adobe, game over.
2. Glassdoor. Useful data that LinkedIn doesn't own, but they seem to have embraced the Yelp business model instead.
3. Fishbowl. Daily engagement solved but they've backed into a local maxima.
4. Upwork. Stuck with low-end brand that will prevent them from winning this market.
5. X. Has all the pieces except for a leader who cares about a jobs board. Would need a certain kind of leader for their jobs product to get it to win.
6. Every other talent startup: fighting for the right revenue, but they almost always approach it from the transactional staffing model or the ATS subscription model. Would need someone to buy all of them up and launch a network with 100M profiles on day one.
Lumina – a minimal AI reflection app (source code available)
by EncoreVlaced | 2025-12-23 00:20:54+00:00
I built Lumina, a small AI-powered reflection and journaling app focused on simplicity and privacy. It helps users explore thoughts through structured prompts and summaries rather than social features or gamification.

I’m looking to sell the full source code with a commercial license to a solo dev or small team who wants a solid base to build on.
by godelski | 2025-12-23 00:21:15+00:00
A few weeks ago I had a bug with bitwarden where every passkey wanted to load from the macbook instead of bitwarden. I ended up being locked out of a few accounts that didn't have OTPs as a fallback. Mostly inconsequential stuff like Twitter.

I love passkeys, but they're still kinda hard to use. There's several sites that wont let you enroll multiple ones and it's easy for systems to step on each other like the aforementioned experience.

The problem is fallback. All my banking apps have SMS OTP fallbacks and that's no better than having only SMS OTP. If you're building these systems make sure you have good fallbacks. What matters in design is not so much how well it works when things go right but how well it works when things go wrong. With security you really cannot ignore edge cases
by mopsi | 2025-12-23 00:21:36+00:00
> Loners would be taken care of by the state. They don't wither.

How? Where does the state take scarves and tomatoes from if we only produce as much as we need within our own circle and exchange them solely among friends?

This is not as trivial question as it may sound. In the USSR, where I grew up, this was classified as a crime of "speculation". People were jailed and their property confiscated to intimidate others to work for the state without bypassing the forced redistribution.

The question of gifting a scarf to a friend, when someone else might need it more, is in disguise, the central question of communism. There is no way to preserve my freedom to give the scarf or other fruits of my labor to whomever I please (or keep it for myself) while simultaneously satisfying the needs of those whose needs are unmet. There simply aren't enough scarves to make everyone happy. If you try to coerce me, I won't knit any scarves at all, or they'll be of very poor quality.

This is essentially how and why the USSR stagnated for decades until it collapsed under its own weight. By the end, despite coercion, productivity had fallen so low that people with physical access to goods (like truck drivers) resorted to bartering, while others (like university professors) starved. The all-powerful state that was supposed to "take care of everything" was nowhere to be seen; they were busy bartering tanks for chicken.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-23 00:22:19+00:00
It's security, so we're not discussing impossibility. You can still phish a passkey, we're just hoping the cryptography is good enough that it remains astronomically unlikely to succeed. Since we're all reasonable people, that chance is low enough that we're fine accepting it. What I'm saying is that the chance with passwords is still low enough that I'm fine accepting, even though it's much higher than the cryptographic security of passkeys. We're simply disagreeing about where we draw the line of "good enough".
by rayiner | 2025-12-23 00:22:22+00:00
> Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.

Trump had to fire Sally Yates who refused to defend it in court:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/31/us-attorney-general.... There was no justification for her refusing to enforce the order. The legality of the order would be tested under rational basis review, which is extremely favorable to the government. And the case squarely implicated the President's authority over national security and the border. It wasn't a slam dunk for the government by any means, but it was way beyond the minimum "colorability" standard for the DOJ to make legal arguments to defend the order while complying with their ethical arguments.

> You mention case developments,

I mean not even updating political appointees about court rulings and such, hoping to keep the cases off the radars of the political appointees.

> as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.

The new administration has won quite a lot of cases. For example, with the funding cuts, the legal strategy was quite well developed. That's why you heard so much in the media about impoundment. Impoundment is what you start talking about when you have no argument that "the administration cannot make this specific cut." It's the argument that, "well, if the administration makes all these cuts, it's an impoundment problem because the administration needs to spend that money on something within the statutory scope." That's why many universities have settled with the administration. They know that, even if they can win on impoundment or something like that, they can't make the administration reinstate the grants to them specifically.

Similarly on affirmative action, the administration has pursued a strong strategy. The kind of affirmative action that was allowed in universities before SFFA was never permitted in employment. But lots of companies engaged in blatantly illegal conduct in adopting preferences or quotas for specific groups: https://www.cadwalader.com/quorum/index.php?nid=9&eid=35. Companies aren't even fighting the administration on this for the most part on that front.

The new administration certainly has had some losses. Part of that is that they're litigating like liberals--making aggressive arguments to push the boundaries of the law, knowing that it will lose a lot of cases. The other part is that the administration doesn't have "A" players in every position. For example on the tariffs, there were major weaknesses in the trial arguments.
by leecommamichael | 2025-12-23 00:22:27+00:00
When I see these subjects, I can't help but talk about the Odin Programming Language. It's been such a joy working nearly exclusively in Odin this year. The creator of Odin might have something interesting to say on this topic. vidarh said "Wirth was perhaps too ascetic in his insistence on keeping the compilers minimal, but you can fine less extreme versions carried on in extensions done in the PhD dissertations of students in his group." I'm not versed in the extensions, but I wouldn't be surprised if Odin looked a lot like them. It's a very practical language, and feels like a proper 21st century C language with Wirth's design ethos.
by mechagodzilla | 2025-12-23 00:23:13+00:00
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison - I enjoy playing around with LLMs, running different models, etc, and I place a relatively high premium on privacy. The computer itself was $2k about two years ago (and my employer reimbursed me for it), and 99% of my usage is for research questions which have relatively high output per input token. Using one for a coding assistant seems like it can run through a very high number of tokens with relatively few of them actually being used for anything. If I wanted a real-time coding assistant, I would probably be using something that fit in the 24GB of VRAM and would have very different cost/performance tradeoffs.
by maxglute | 2025-12-23 00:23:17+00:00
> safest cities in the world

What does that have to do with national security? Public order =/= national security. National security is HK having one of the largest US consulates in the world because it was widely recognized as the western intelligence hub into PRC (a consulate that directly reports strait to US state department lol), no small part due to lack of NSL. That's what HK was, a national security state of exception for treason, one that PRC waited 20 years to close. Cue significant consulate downsizing after PRC pushed through NSL. Beijing cares about national security for the 1C part, not some public order minutiae like grandma getting shanked in 2S.

> progress

Also who cares? HK drowning in stagnant end stage capitalism is exactly the kind of optics PRC wants right now. What is side effect? HK youths flooding to mainland for a good time. Also see recent online discussions around residential fires, many HKers recognizing, valid or not that HK, like rest of west, is farcical procedure shithole that can't get shit done, explicitly highlighting mainland tier1 cities urban management has better execution vs hk having "better" paper laws. They see benefit of actual authoritarianism, just like RoW including disenfranchised in west in the last couple years. They don't want retarded paper order and muh rule of law that hasn't worked for them before or after NSL, because PRC still light kid gloves on HK, increasingly they want to get shit done, like a proper tier1 city.
by swyx | 2025-12-23 00:23:49+00:00
yes actually there have been a few attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WayUp and https://www.productreleasenotes.com/p/what-happened-to-polyw... were 2 stories i've been closer to. you might argue they are not direct linkedin competition, and yes thats the point, you have to have a new angle to disrupt linkedin, but don't doubt that all their investor pitches included a "step 3. become new linkedin"

its ofc just hard to start and grow any social network and the default is death, but i think perhaps the more interesting answers are:

1) hiring is the one area where you want longevity, expertise, trust, and linkedin just had the most time to build that up on both the platform side and in terms of the people available on it

2) linkedin actually DOES put a lot of effort into Sales Navigator and other recruiting tools that basically all other social platforms halfass. so even though you and i may not love linkedin, it is the only platform to treat salespeople and recruiters with any form of love and respect, and you should not be surprised that it does well accordingly despite it's obvious flaws.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-23 00:24:11+00:00
FPGA toolchains certainly could do with being pulled out of the gutter but I don't think that alone will lead to much of a renaissance for them. Almost definitionally they're for niches: applications which need something weird in hardware but aren't big enough to demand dedicated silicon, because the flexibility of FPGAs comes at a big cost in die area (read:price), power, and speed.
by TrackerFF | 2025-12-23 00:24:55+00:00
LinkedIn suffers the same thing facebook does.

It started out as sort of digital resume website where you could also build a network, but ultimately devolved into a social media slop platform.

Kind of like with FB - the feed now consists of 0.01% stuff that I actually care about. It's bots and sales as far as the eye can see.

But, then again, you can't become a billion dollar platform with all that junk.
by ogogmad | 2025-12-23 00:25:43+00:00
I don't think SQL is "perfect" and I'm not sure it's rational to even be saying that. For instance, why is it that the syntax for an SQL query is "select A from B" when many SQL-inspired syntaxes have switched to something like "from B select A" to make it more compositional?

The relational model is pretty simple though. Pandas is an awful mess.
Show HN: Drag-and-drop playground to compare the true sizes of countries
by loa_observer | 2025-12-23 00:26:01+00:00
I built a drag-and-drop map playground to compare the true sizes of countries and visualize Mercator distortion, just for fun and sharing. Open source + easy to replace the GeoJSON with your own data.

Demo: https://www.runcell.dev/tool/true-size-map

Source: https://github.com/ObservedObserver/world-map-reality
by zamalek | 2025-12-23 00:27:38+00:00
Unfortunately grok doesn't even meet that bar anymore. There was the very recent incident where it claimed Musk was the best at everything, so xAI are clearly not beyond baking in intentional bias/clutching pearls.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/20/grok-says-elon-musk-is-bet...
by zahirbmirza | 2025-12-23 00:27:41+00:00
Ignoring the aesthetic, it does what it needs to do. It is an internet layer designed to formalise professional profiles for those who need one. And actually, even Instagram could be seen as a contender to it. YT, hackernews profiles, Twitter profiles even, are used as professional front platforms by many. There is no need for a contender because Linkedin is a poorly thought solution to an ill addressed problem. Moreover, it is undesirable to spend any more time than needed polishing a persona that is mostly relevant for a transitional life periods. Other social networks have become more addictive to use, and Linkdin is now incorporating such features to amalgamate the broadening depths of human time wasting.
by Rochus | 2025-12-23 00:29:19+00:00
> about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents?

It's a completely different language with different focus and features. "better" depends on the requirements you want to solve with the language. Rust can do memory management at compile time whereas Oberon and its descendants (such as my Oberon+ version) use a garbage collector at runtime. Rust is much bigger and more complex than Oberon, but it also has features which make it more suitable for systems programming. Simpler is not automatically better. If a language is too "simple" (i.e. minimalist), the complexity often shifts from the language specification to the application code, requiring more boilerplate or "clever" tricks to solve complex problems.

And it was not only simplicity (as Vidar assumed), but Oberon indeed had a different approach to OO in that there were no bound procedures, but the idea was (as you can observe e.g. in the Oberon systems and in publication by Wirth an his PhD students) that "type extension" (i.e. inheritance) is used to create extensible message hierarchies, which then are polymorphically handled by procedures accepting a VAR parameter of the most general message type. In this handler, the messages are dispatched by the IS operator or the WITH or CASE statement. This has similar effects as e.g achievable by sum types, and interestingly is closer to e.g. Alan Kay's view of OO than the implementation found in Smalltalk-80 (notably, Wirth arrived at this message-centric model independently of Kay’s work in the Smalltalk lineage).
by arminiusreturns | 2025-12-23 00:29:49+00:00
Social gates, not tech ones. Linkedin exploits the network effects of gui-ninjas under stockholm syndrome to an anti-user service.

The same reason you get wierd looks when you say you don't facebook sometimes.

It's like existing outside the control or influence of some $manyuser $app/$website is unthinkable to those who exist within the prison ecosystems. I am a greybeard linux admin moonlighting in windows world, and the state of infra in ms land is baaaaadddd. When I tell engineers though, I get a thousand justifications about why its ok that its this bad (because it was worse before, etc), because the tooling is so bad it gets in the way of accomplishing your goals.

Same mentality... I personally don't really understand it. Either you control your compute or you don't.

Thats who linkedin draws. I used to exclude linkedin resumes when interviewing heavier linux engineering/ops candidates for this reason.
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-12-23 00:30:02+00:00
In a sense they all compete with each other. They are all designed as an addictive feed of shit to click on while they insert ads in between. The fact that the demographics are a bit different just shows that competition is working as they want to divide the market, it’s not typical that competitors exactly get the same demographics. For example, consider who shops at IKEA vs Pottery Barn.
by bottlepalm | 2025-12-23 00:30:06+00:00
I love SQL and use it all day long to answer various business questions, but I would never use raw SQL in my code unless there is a good reason for it (sometimes there is). ORMs are there for maintainability, composability, type safety, migrations, etc.. trying to do all that with raw SQL strings doesn't scale in a large code base. You need something that IDE tools can understand and allow things like 'find all references', 'rename instances', compile time type checks, etc.. Raw SQL strings can't get you that. And managing thousands of raw SQL strings in a code base is not sustainable.

ORMs are one of those things that a lot of people think is a replacement for knowing SQL. Or that ORMs are used as a crutch. That has nothing to do with it. Very similar to how people here talked about TypeScript 10 years ago in a very dismissive way. Not really understanding its purpose. Most people haven't used something like Entity Framework either which is game changing level ORM. Massive productivity boost, and LINQ rivals SQL itself in that you can write very small yet powerful queries equivalent to much more complex and powerful SQL.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2025-12-23 00:30:09+00:00
Cerebras is serving GLM4.6 at 1000 tokens/s right now. They're probably likely to upgrade to this model.

I really wonder if GLM 4.7 or models a few generations from now will be able to function effectively in simulated software dev org environments, especially that they self-correct their errors well enough that they build up useful code over time in such a simulated org as opposed to increasing piles of technical debt. Possibly they are managed by "bosses" which are agents running on the latest frontier models like Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3. I'm thinking in the direction of this article: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-harnesses-fo...

If the open source models get good enough, then the ability to run them at 1k tokens per second on Cerebras would be a massive benefit compared to any other models in being able to run such an overall SWE org quickly.