MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gavinsyancey | 2025-12-08 06:32:33+00:00
No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-08 06:32:54+00:00
Gets a nod though:

>“freed markets” would naturally tend toward far less concentration of wealth – a world of small firms, worker cooperatives, self-employed artisans, and peer-to-peer production.

And quoting Proudhon

>Property is freedom

Imho insurance networks are also politically agnostic:

to each according to his need, from each according to his ability

Interesting to think about how insurance "markets" can _support_ production... (Not just distributing the means thereof, eg how to insure group owned GPUs? Is there a timeline in which GPUs do not depreciate? Do we have to bet on different rates/architectures? There aren't more than a handful)
by Peteragain | 2025-12-08 06:33:22+00:00
The article is actually about the way we humans are extremely charitable when it comes to ascribing a ToM (theory of mind) and goes on to the Gym model of value. Nice. The comments drop back into the debate I originally saw Hinton describe on The Newyorker: do LLMs construct models (of the world) - that is do they think the way we think we think - or are they "glorified auto complete". I am going for the GAF view. But glorified auto complete is far more useful than the name suggests.
by bluecalm | 2025-12-08 06:33:35+00:00
In a very basic case lock free data structures make threads race instead of spin. A thread makes their copy of a part of list/tree/whatever it needs updating, introduces changes to that copy and then tries to substitute their own pointer for the data structure pointer if it hasn't changed in the meantime (there is a CPU atomic instruction for that). If the thread fails (someone changed the pointer in the meantime) it tries again.
by sophrosyne42 | 2025-12-08 06:34:57+00:00
Before even railroads, the original manufactory boom that is commonly associated with the industrial revolution is the exact kind of case the other poster is alluding to when thinking of large economies of scale. I think Kolko is great to demonstrate that economies of scale aren't infinite, and in the absense of government intervention, market forces actively conspire to ensure firms shrink to their optimal size. But that also proves the flip side: firms will grow to their optimal size too. There is no economic reason to be suspicious of large firm sizes, and the political reasons inevitably hinge on some sort of mistaken assumption of the economics of the matter; anti-trust regulations advocacy is a perfect example of this.
Show HN: Brick Starter – .NET SaaS starter kit to ship production apps faster
by plakhlani2 | 2025-12-08 06:35:10+00:00
Brick Starter is a .NET-based SaaS starter kit designed to help teams ship production-ready applications faster by handling the “boring but hard” parts of SaaS: auth, multi-tenancy, billing integration, infrastructure, and a modern frontend stack.

It ships with a modular architecture on .NET Core 8, support for multiple frontends (Angular, React/Next.js, Vue, Blazor, ASP.NET Core), and patterns for background jobs, caching, configuration, and observability. The goal is to let you start from a solid, opinionated base with good defaults, instead of wiring together boilerplate for every new project.

If you’re building a new SaaS or modernizing an existing app, feedback on what’s missing or feels over-engineered would be especially useful
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-08 06:35:38+00:00
Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-08 06:35:54+00:00
> But I'm also surprised any device manufacturer would think it's a better use of their time to ship a bespoke C compiler rather than an LLVM backend that would allow a lot more languages to be built against their ISA, making it more valuable.

They aren't usually building a compiler from scratch; they modify their existing compiler[1] for their new hardware, which is fractions of effort required compared to building a new compiler or modifying the LLVM backend.

Unless it's a completely new ISA, they'll spend an hour or less just adding in the new emit code for only the changes in the ISA.

----------------------------------

[1] Usually just the previous gcc that they used, which is why in 2022 I was working on brand new devices that came with a customised gcc 4.something
by plakhlani2 | 2025-12-08 06:36:25+00:00
Hey HN, maker here – happy to answer detailed questions about the stack, trade-offs, and whether Brick Starter is a good fit for your use case.

What it includes today?

Backend: .NET Core 8 with a layered architecture (API, application services, domain, infrastructure) and patterns for dependency injection, validation, and background processing

Frontends: templates for Angular, React + Next.js, Vue, Blazor, and ASP.NET Core, all wired to the same backend API

SaaS essentials: multi-tenant support, authentication/authorization, user and org management, roles/permissions, and payments using stripe

Infrastructure concerns: caching (e.g., Redis), configuration, logging, and some “starter” patterns for deployment and CI/CD that you can adapt to your own cloud setup

Who it’s for? Teams or solo devs who are comfortable with .NET but don’t want to keep rebuilding the same SaaS plumbing for every new product

Agencies/consultants who repeatedly deliver SaaS-style projects and want a consistent, battle-tested baseline

What it is not? A no-code tool. A magic “click once and you have a SaaS” product; you still write plenty of custom code, but start from something opinionated and production-aware

If you’re using .NET and have strong opinions about architecture, multi-tenancy, or frontend stacks, would love to hear where this matches (or clashes with) how you like to structure projects.
by nykodev | 2025-12-08 06:38:09+00:00
Last year I panic-sold my biotech positions after missing two PDUFA dates in the same week. Both drugs got rejected. I was using a free tracker that hadn't been updated in months.

So I looked at what's available:

→ BioPharmCatalyst: $30-50/month → Free alternatives: clunky UIs from 2010, outdated data, broken filters → Finviz/Yahoo: no catalyst-specific tracking

I built CatalystAlert to fix this.

What it tracks: → 985 biotech companies, 1714 drugs in pipeline → PDUFA dates, Phase 1/2/3 readouts, AdCom meetings → Data pulled daily from ClinicalTrials.gov, SEC EDGAR, FDA

Stack: Next.js, Python data pipeline, daily automated scraping.

No account required, no paywall, no "unlock premium to see this date."

The core stays free. I'm prototyping V2 with ML-based approval probability predictions (trained on historical FDA decisions + trial endpoints) – that might have a paid tier eventually, but the calendar never will.

Feedback I'd love: 1. Data sources I'm missing? 2. Filters or views that would save you time? 3. Anything broken or confusing?

Thanks for checking it out.
by sroerick | 2025-12-08 06:38:17+00:00
I thought it was interesting that BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos.

This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol.

You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and have the SPA read the app.

Unfortunately, the ecosystem was completely greed focused, and nobody is interested in technological advancement in the slightest.
by silisili | 2025-12-08 06:38:52+00:00
America has famously bad government everything. Everything they touch becomes a jobs program for the least qualified. Every comedian jokes about the DMV and TSA because they're the ones most people deal with regularly, but it's depressing to realize every government run institution is just as if not more bizarre. My interactions with USCIS and DHS, who I thought would be more professional, made me question if I was on a hidden comedy show...

My favorite interaction to tell however belongs to the TSA. I went through the scanner and it flagged the back of my head. The TSA agent said he needed to verify, so put on gloves and patted the back of my head before letting me go. I wear a military cut, the back of my head is done with a #1/2 guard. For those not in the US, that's a buzz cut of length 1.5mm.
by duttish | 2025-12-08 06:41:06+00:00
I'll throw the British South Sea Trading Company into the ring for that title of most overvalued company ever.

It had the king himself on the board. The company value represented a decent fraction of the national gdp at the time. All without actually never producing anything of actual value. It was just bribes and speculation all the way through. It's wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

Extra History did a more easily digestible series, which was how I learned about it in the first place. https://youtu.be/k1kndKWJKB8
by tovej | 2025-12-08 06:42:18+00:00
The original point, that LLMs are plagiarising inputs, is a very common and common sense opinion.

There are court cases where this is being addressed currently, and if you think about how LLMs operate, a reasonable person typically sees that it looks an awful lot like plagiarism.

If you want to claim it is not plagiarism, that requires a good argument, because it is unclear that LLMs can produce novelty, since they're literally trying to recreate the input data as faithfully as possible.
by jumploops | 2025-12-08 06:42:30+00:00
I’ve had a similar thought about language, and the evolution or lack thereof with LLMs.

With the printing press+internet, one might argue that we’ve helped cement current languages, making it harder for language to evolve naturally.

(A counterpoint may be slang/memes/etc. which has likely increased the velocity of new words for any given language.)

In either case, one might see LLMs as further cementing language, as it’s the thing the machines understand (until their next training run).

Assuming we struggle to make LLMs that learn in realtime, one might suspect that these amazing new tools might further cement the status quo, meaning less new words than before.

With all that said, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that LLMs will likely speed up the evolution of language.

The hypothesis being, that future generations will develop communication that the robots can’t read, at least at first.

A never-ending game of cat and mouse; while the cat is on v6, the mouse is on v7. Ad infinitum.
by hvb2 | 2025-12-08 06:42:35+00:00
> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.

These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.

I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe
by iberator | 2025-12-08 06:42:42+00:00
No screenshots?!

Not clear nor simple. Imo negligible use for teaching. If you know how to import modules and use library functions then you don't need LOGO anymore...

'KEYWORD(50)'

is always simpler than:

' turtle.function(value, value)'

Great project but missed the opportunity to develop your own LOGO interpreter from scratch in web assembly:)
by rickydroll | 2025-12-08 06:43:04+00:00
I would argue that consolidation happened because rail is a capital-intensive natural monopoly. It's easy to dominate a region just by buying up lines. Smaller lines couldn't steal customers from big players because no other lines were physically able to offer the same service. Trucking is another story. There, the highways are natural monopolies, and trucks are an over-the-top service.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-12-08 06:43:25+00:00
My trick is to re-use the filters. After the first few presses, the filters clog up somewhat and coffee doesn't drip through them as fast. So you can stir and let the mixture sit for a while, without resorting to maneuvers like the inverted method, which are unsafe for groggy programmers who haven't had any coffee yet that morning.

But, I thought Arduino had become officially evil once it joined Qualcomm. Besides which a Raspberry Pi Pico is cheaper than any Arduino-branded board ever was. So I'd just program this type of thing in MicroPython.

I do see that in the article, the project used an Adafruit Trinket M0, a very cute little board that has CircuitPython already installed. So I wonder why not just use CircuitPython. Anyway though, it's a Cortex M0 board, rather than the traditional Atmega that the Arduino world grew up using.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-08 06:43:41+00:00
> You're building your arguments on a false premise, that ALL resources are distributed from some magical mutually exclusive abstract bucket.

There is nothing magical about the idea that a resource used for one thing is unavailable to be used for another thing.

> it isn't true in general, where it's parallelized, distributed, discrete and largely independent instead.

Can you provide any concrete example of where the premise does not hold true?
by djtango | 2025-12-08 06:44:29+00:00
So when I was a chemist at university I saw one of those silly chain mail claims that cigarettes have polonium 210 in them. I thought "that's dumb" let me fact check that; it turns out that phosphates enrich the soil with radionuclides and radon in the soil enters plants and decays to Po210.

So actually yes I am generally in favour of archaic methods for making food because our biochemistry and the environment has had a lot longer to find equilibrium with non-synthetic solutions.

That isn't to say that we should throw away science and give up 200 years of progress on hygiene, but I also don't believe that packing chickens into their own feces then pumping them with antibiotics and washing them in chlorine is all that great either.

Maybe this solves for food scarcity and I'm all for that being available to other people but I'm perfectly willing to pay a premium on alternatives methods that eschew the use of synthetic products in my food chain.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-08 06:44:36+00:00
Depends how you define it and wether you’re defining it as intentionally en masse or as a byproduct of pure self interest regardless of anything else.

There’s plenty of examples, the most famous one in my opinion is that the popularity of legislation is irrelevant for passage, support by wealthy is. Similarly how the vast majority of people obtain political office is by and large courting the influence of wealthy donors (source - the amount of money being spent in politics and particularly dark money). Also how “lobbying” works even in the Supreme Court and pay to play by definition is politically battling the poor.
by lmm | 2025-12-08 06:44:44+00:00
> If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety.

Nonsense. Your funds can be frozen with no recourse even if you're innocent. No-one will tell you what you supposedly did wrong. Everyone who hears about your predicament will make up reasons to believe that you'd done something wrong because they want to believe that the system doesn't make mistakes.
by epsteingpt | 2025-12-08 06:44:49+00:00
It's possible, just unlikely.

The reality is a small business owner does not have the time or wherewithal to negotiate large contracts across hundreds or thousands of brands. They may nail SKU's and quantities better than a Wal-Mart or Dollar General, but at the price of higher costs and lower selection.

You don't really see large scale backlash in communities against these stores for this reason - buying branded at a reasonable price point is foundational for a good quality of life in modern society.

Most people vote with their feet, and are happy with the tradeoff.
by akersten | 2025-12-08 06:45:27+00:00
GitHub is also limiting the new PR review page to only show 40 comments from reviewers. Who knows which 40. If you want to see more, they have a banner that tells you to switch back to the legacy view. No idea if they'll just silently lose the feature of "seeing all your PR's comments" once the legacy view is discontinued.

So I wouldn't take any inferences from their design system as gospel.
by _flux | 2025-12-08 06:45:45+00:00
I don't think it would be typical to depend on exception handling when dealing with boundary conditions with C++ containers.

I mean .at is great and all, but it's really for the benefit of eliminating undefined behavior and if the program just terminates then you've achieved this. I've seen decoders that just catch the std::out_of_range or even std::exception to handle the remaining bugs in the logic, though.
by drnick1 | 2025-12-08 06:46:51+00:00
There is nothing special about the Troubled Engineer's setup. It's mostly a matter of using open platforms. With Firefox on the desktop and Fennec on Android (Graphene), you get full uBlock Origin support and therefore never see any ads anywhere, even on Youtube. On Android, there is also NewPipe that offers "free Youtube Premium" (play in the background and download).

I also use DNS based filtering since I run my own Unbound instance, but it isn't really necessary with the above setup. It may be useful if you must absolutely have a smart TV or other such appliances, but considering that they have cameras and microphones, I will never connect such a device to the Internet anyway.
by defrost | 2025-12-08 06:46:52+00:00
Hybrid: All the focus of at home work coupled with a few days talking smack around the office cooler . . .

"The most important finding of the study is that of hybrid work," Jan Kabatek, a researcher at the University of Melbourne and co-author of the study, told the ABC. "The biggest gains for women were found for work from home arrangements, which involved the majority of days spent at home, but retaining at least one or two days of work from the office or on-site.
by jimmaswell | 2025-12-08 06:47:23+00:00
I recently tried out Copilot with Sonnet to implement whole C++ headers into .cpp files and it did very well making the implementation consistent, readable, and easy to reason about. Not having much C++ experience, it made the whole process much easier - some memory/etc errors in my own code would have been intractible to fix without it. It was also fantastic at turning a postgresql implementation file of that header into an sqlite implementation that worked/passed tests on the first try.

Overall, it seems like defining the structure to some extent yourself and letting the agent fill in implementation and suggest architecture changes is a good way to go to get a lot of useful work out of it without letting the structure of the overall app run away from you.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-08 06:47:46+00:00
If there was tech progress, you would be listing obvious wins. We did that prior to this. I knew my life was better in 2010 than 2000 than 1990. I didn't have to try to convince myself then. All of the ideas we thought were going to lead to something cool have been weaponized against us to maximize corporate profits.

How many apps do you actually use on your phone? The theory was cool, the reality is it's a little addiction slab not really used for the 'cool' ideas.

Airbnb exploited loopholes in local laws to move hospitality into neighborhoods, with detriment to them.

Amazon literally has a plan for when it runs out of low paid workers because it is so bad. Yet it's plan isn't 'be a less shitty company to work for'.

If you did home automation stuff, how much of that is still around, working, and useful? I have a really complex system to turn my front light on at dusk using the internet, something a light sensor did at my parents house in the 90s. And that's about all I have left working.

When you stop your car at a stoplight, and instead of having buttons you have a big screen with an ad, that is also selling all of your movement info, are you experiencing progress?

Netflix, Amazon, etc use to have algorithms that made what you wanted rise to the top. They now all make what Netflix/Amazon/etc want rise to the top. Every tech company's main focus is 'how shitty can I get away with if shitty gets me more money'? Instead of giving me relevant, they now either sell add positions (Amazon) or chose position based on how profitable it is to them (Netflix/Spotify financial/licensing considerations come above an algo taylored for me like they used to have).

We literally have seperate recipes from American companies now. Slop for the domestic American market, and the 1990s actual food grade recipes for Europe.

For our grains now, instead of traditional harvesting, we spray Roundup/glyphosate (tested and approved for earlier in the crop cycle) to kill the wheat/etc to better control harvest. We literally added as a final step for our food to pour questionable glyphosate/herbicides on it all.

America now has more private equity than McDonalds, build on a business model that would have made Reagan era cocaine filled corporate raiders blush. What once made for scandals for movies is now more common than McDonalds. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/05/private-equity-consolidation...
by paulf38 | 2025-12-08 06:48:37+00:00
Rather brassy claims.

Your library has many issues. Some should be easy to fix. You missed many allocation/deallocation functions (3 from ISO C, 1 from POSIX and 4 non-standard ones).

Others will be difficult or impossible for you to address. Your use of --wrap will not work with exes that link to static libc. macOS ld does not support --wrap. You will need to use another mechanism if you want to support macOS. I assume not supporting Windows is intentional.

The other big issue is with custom memory pools. That is always a difficult problem. Valgrind and the sanitizers require user instrumentation. Your leak detection will work with memory pools that just subdivide memory allocated with malloc etc. It won't work for memory pools that work like malloc itself and use brk/sbrk/mmap.

> Let’s make C testing suck less in 2025.

Didn't Bjarne Stroustrup do that already back in 1985?
by altairprime | 2025-12-08 06:48:49+00:00
It’s available in various archives of the Toyota TechStream pre-2024 editions, in some sort of weird encrypted file format that can be trivially decrypted; I haven’t tried myself but the ECU I work with isn’t encrypted in-vehicle. I’ve spent five or six years in Ghidra with various hybrid Subaru-Toyota ECUs from 2013-2020 and I wonder what kind of source control practices result in the massive function spaghetti that must have produced in this SH-2A code; I can see where Toyota bolted their direct injection runloop into Subaru’s. So, yeah, if you’re curious, the firmware’s out there, if you’ve got a few years to spare and an absolutely ridiculous amount of patience (and a solid grasp of CAN bus messaging protocols, which you’ll need to identify code blocks and variables and such!)

“The Car Hacker’s Handbook” may be of interest as a first step review, but honestly I just dove in with Ghidra and just .. didn’t ever stop. YMMV :)