MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sanskritical | 2025-12-29 13:51:43+00:00
The UK is extremely litigious in regards to libel. Her lying would be an act of public libel against the crown prosecutor. She went on TV to talk about it. It's been well covered in everything from the IB Times to The Sun to the Daily Mail (as linked above), as well as fully televised on Piers Morgan. Naturally the team you obviously root for can just refuse to cover any prosecutions which are embarrassing for them and you can simply smugly say "well it's not in any source I trust so it didn't happen."

At this point, assertions such as these are a form of ad hominem fallacy against half of society. You are discrediting the hundreds of sources who have covered this story because of the nature of the speaker while no hardline liberal outlets have covered this story at all and presented a counterargument. If you want to have an alternative narrative, you need to link a major outlet showing her to be a liar. The case has been presented to the public. You don't like the people presenting the case. That doesn't invalidate the case. You must, at this point, present a member of your team making a reasonable, evidenced based deconstruction of her claims. The fact that there isn't any coverage from your side at all of this incredibly well televised and written embarrassment for the legitimacy of crown prosecutors speaks volumes.
by lproven | 2025-12-29 13:51:48+00:00
Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46410650

And as I said there:

It's tragic this gets so little interest while the dismal Wayland is feted. Wayland is like DOS Edlin compared to Arcan: half-implemented, profoundly unambitious, poorly designed, poorly specified, and lacking any imagination.
by matrss | 2025-12-29 13:52:04+00:00
DB has been reorganized as an AG in the 90s, i.e. a corporation under private law. They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, which is a common trait of private organizations. They consistently do so via short-sighted (mis-)management, another common trait with many private organizations. This privatized corporation is indeed fully owned by the state as its only shareholder, but unfortunately that doesn't manifest in the DB being run as the critical infrastructure that it is. I suspect that the indirections in power over the corporation that the privatized structure imposes is a key reason for why it became such a disaster.
by attendant3446 | 2025-12-29 13:52:40+00:00
I was in a similar situation in Egypt once. At the specified time a train arrives, I board it. Only to see that my seat is occupied. We started to discuss the situation and the other passenger showed me his ticket - it was one of the previous delayed trains. We figured it just in time for me to jump out of the wrong train before it left the station :)
by tzs | 2025-12-29 13:53:04+00:00
The Netherlands is in the EU. English is the most widely spoken language in the EU, even after the UK left, because it is by far the most common second language. Nearly half of the people in the EU can speak it.

In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers.

Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there on business plus tourists there is a good chance that if only one language was to be used for train announcements more people on the train would understand if it was in English then if it was in Dutch.
Show HN: Operon – Reliable Agents Using Biological Motifs and Category Theory
by coredipper | 2025-12-29 13:53:31+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been working on a Python library and formal framework to make Agentic AI systems less fragile.

The core premise is that biological cells are essentially distributed information processors that solved "hallucinations" (noise), "infinite loops" (cancer), and "resource exhaustion" (ischemia) billions of years ago. Instead of just using this as a loose metaphor, I used Applied Category Theory (specifically Polynomial Functors in Poly) to rigorously map Gene Regulatory Networks to Software Agents.

Key concepts implemented in the library:

* Metabolic Coalgebras: We model token budgets as a thermodynamic resource. This makes the "Halting Problem" decidable for agents by enforcing strictly decreasing resource states (like ATP depletion), preventing runaway loops.

* CFFLs (Coherent Feed-Forward Loops): A topological motif for "two-key execution" that mathematically reduces hallucination probability (assuming model diversity).

* Chaperones: Partial validators that treat schema mismatches not as "undefined" errors, but as misfolded proteins requiring active repair loops.

This is an early attempt to move from "prompt engineering" to "topology engineering."

Paper (Preprint): https://github.com/coredipper/operon/blob/main/article/main....

I’m particularly interested in feedback on the definition of the Metabolic Coalgebra and if anyone has tried applying Poly to production AI systems before.
by Sharanxxxx | 2025-12-29 13:53:54+00:00
I ran a small SEO experiment on a new site to see whether directory submissions still move the needle.

Process:

Used a curated directory submission service (Listmy.site)

Focused on startup / SaaS directories only

No guest posts, no link exchanges

Result:

DR increased from 12 to 28 in under 2 weeks

This isn’t meant as a replacement for long-term link building, but it seems useful as a base layer for new domains.

Curious how others here approach early backlink building today.
Are directories still part of your stack or completely obsolete for you?
by ReflectedImage | 2025-12-29 13:54:00+00:00
If JITs hadn't been invented you would be completely right but JITs have been invented.

There are deeper optimizations that JITs can do such as knowing at runtime that the value of a variable is always 2 that typing information simply can't express.

Duck typed Python is optimal for development speeds, the only thing that matters in startup environments. It has it's niche.

You aren't gradually improving, you are gradually deteriorating the codebase to make it look more familar to you.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-29 13:54:12+00:00
> You won't find many historical examples of fascists being booted out by the people.

Every fascist regime that has ever existed has been ousted by war, revolution, or the vote. There are no fascist regimes left, unless you expand the definition of the term to mean “any authoritarian regime,” in which case there are plenty of historical examples of popular revolt.

> The only successful revolutions are piloted by a small elite with further interests that may not coincide with the people.

This isn’t true.
by rplnt | 2025-12-29 13:54:15+00:00
If you travel to Budapest from Berlin you buy the ticket from DB and the crew changes as follows: German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian. None of the first three crews would speak Hungarian. Luckily all will be able to communicate in English.

(regular announcements oftentimes won't be in Hungarian until you are in Hungary, that depends on the train origin, but I would only expect local+English)
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-12-29 13:54:28+00:00
> Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.

Because donations are a system that works very much in their favor and not at all in favor of other types of projects. Look at the OpenSSL Software Foundation having received less than $2k in yearly donations during the leadup to heartbleed.

> Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.

I very much want to disagree with you, but I do not know how. Achieving some commercial success if you do look for it where others with your skill set are successful is not too difficult (see the trades), but the whole point of such projects is the exact opposite: Doing things differently and pushing accepted boundaries to where you think they should be.

On the other hand I think that this is acceptable. As I wrote in another comment, the obligations in these projects mostly arise from what the developers wants to commit themselves to (or, sadly, do so mistakenly). It is very reasonable to e.g. not value the long term success of your project highly.

You might want to just share an idea, maybe someone else will carry on your project or maybe if in 5 years someone shows a picture of you proudly presenting your project, you're like "AI has gotten really impressive, if I didn't know better, I don't think I could tell that this is a fake". And if you're anything like me, strong commitments to internet strangers might be life-threatening. 2 out of 3 times a promise I made got upvoted, I got hit by a car within less than 48 hours of making it and not once otherwise. An up-arrow got just one pointy end, a GitHub star 5. I'm not taking chances.
by FeloniousHam | 2025-12-29 13:54:38+00:00
It's not that Linux is "bad" when the hardware is incompatible, it's not "Linux's fault". It's that, at a certain age, I don't want to spend my precious few hours of free time working _on_ my computer, I just want it to work.

(big fan of MacOS, and esp. third-party Mac software, the quality of which simply does not exist on any other platform)

(Also, I have huge affection for Linux. I used Linux exclusively for years personally, and any place I could sneak it into my work environment)
by riedel | 2025-12-29 13:55:03+00:00
EURkey seems to work particularly well for German [0]. I wonder why such alternative keyboard layouts have not caught up a bit more. Problem it is really hard after 30 years programming ( and using vim) on German keyboards (which admittedly is a pain) retraining my muscle memory.

Edit: EURkey seems to be pretty much the altgr-weur mentioned in OP

[0] https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/start.html
by nchmy | 2025-12-29 13:55:12+00:00
I dont think that what you've described is "postmodernism", even slightly...

How were the use of dichotomies in "deconstruction" your takeaway from the article?

If anything, the rise and seemingly fall/disappearance of postmodern/academic-driven political correctness, diversity in FAANG etc... shows that it has died there as well (for better or worse - I'm NOT getting into that discussion here).
by svara | 2025-12-29 13:55:19+00:00
It's a big, systemically failing organization running way beyond its capacity. Failures rippling through and compounding in a tightly coupled rail network.

If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at another?

I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train behind and in front of them with no buffer.
by naasking | 2025-12-29 13:55:25+00:00
> which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred.

If you point out that one racial demographic is responsible for more crimes than another, would that run afoul of the statute?

If not, what if you additionally point out that the reason these crimes were committed is likely because that behaviour is normalized in their culture? This seems like it would definitely run afoul of the statute, and if this logical deduction were valid, then this sort of criticism would be suppressed despite being legitimate, and could be weaponized against people.

I'm frankly not so convinced that it's possible to define hate speech in a way that does not allow for these failure modes.
by laxmansharma | 2025-12-29 13:55:39+00:00
If you have built a standard RAG pipeline using linear chains (like LangChain's LCEL), you have a powerful retrieval engine, but you don't yet have an autonomous agent. Linear workflows hit a dead end when faced with complex tasks requiring iteration, planning, or self-correction.

This deep dive explores the fundamental architectural shift required to move from stateless, one-way sequences to dynamic, stateful, and cyclic graphs using LangGraph. We move beyond the "assembly line" analogy to a "war room" mental model, where nodes share a persistent state to collaborate on complex problems. The post includes detailed visualizations of state evolution and a complete Python code walkthrough of building a "Reflection Agent" that drafts, critiques, and revises its own work in a loop.
by pell | 2025-12-29 13:55:45+00:00
> Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped [..]

I agree with you that there’s a lot of complaining and it does get tiresome. The German train system is one of the most complex in the world and works closer to an interconnected spider web than the typical straight line systems in other countries.

However much of this has been predicted in the past. I think that’s why a lot of people are annoyed. Here are some sources if you’re interested to read more:

(2006) Audit critique regarding the bad state of DB funding after privatization: https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/16/008/1600840.pdf

(2011) DB is not spending enough on the track network: https://taz.de/Investitionen-in-das-Schienennetz/%215117195/

(2014) State of German train bridges: https://www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2014-09/deutsche-bahn-bruecke...
Show HN: Kuack – Run Kubernetes jobs in visitor browsers
by kuack | 2025-12-29 13:56:09+00:00
WebAssembly makes it possible to run serious computation in browsers. I wanted to see if we could treat browsers as Kubernetes workers.

Kuack is a Virtual Kubelet provider that schedules Kubernetes workloads to browser tabs. Visitors' browsers connect, report capacity, and become ephemeral workers. It looks like a regular Kubernetes node - same kubectl commands, same OCI images, same workflows. The difference is that pods execute in browsers instead of servers. With multi-platform OCI images, Kubernetes can fall back to regular nodes if no agents are available.

It's designed for short-lived, stateless, CPU-heavy jobs: load testing from real networks, local data preprocessing, edge computing scenarios, machine learning tasks, etc.

Not a replacement for your cluster - just an extra option for workloads that benefit from browser execution.
by dauertewigkeit | 2025-12-29 13:56:13+00:00
The article really wants to drive home how bad "central planning" is, but the problem, as per the article, originates from the fact that the food banks themselves are operating semi-independently from Feeding America. So actually the whole problem originates because you already have decentralization, which is the opposite of central planning. And this is a common situation with a lot of public services when they do a half-assed approach of providing the service publicly. Healthcare is a good example.

As per the article, the issue was that due to the food banks operating independently, the food banks were not relying information about their locally sourced food donations to Feeding America. Their solution is a fake currency, basically a way of rationing food from Feeding America. But of course they wouldn't put it in those terms, because of the socialist connotation of the word, "rationing". Instead they call it "market design". LOL. But the point is, Walmart which is more centralized than this operation, has no problem. So actually central planning isn't the issue here. The issue here is that you have a decentralized operation that necessitates a market mechanism.

Politics informed by ideological economists creates the problem. Economists informed by political ideologies create the solution to the problem that only exists because of their design.
by kwanbix | 2025-12-29 13:56:24+00:00
I lived in Berlin for 10 years. In my experience, people complain too much about German public transport. But comming from a south american country with reasonably good public transport, I found German's one very good.

The only thing I can agree is the "speaking only in german as if it was the lingua franca of the world". Germany is part of the EU. The EU has 24 langueages. You should at least speak in English. And no, my mother language is not english but spanish.
by xnorswap | 2025-12-29 13:56:38+00:00
This isn't just about AI, the exams were only moved to remote for COVID.

There will be a lot of COVID-era qualifications that are treated with a hint of suspicion in the future.

Take a look at A-level scores: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-results-2024-future-exams-...

( direct link to graph: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Overall... )

It's unfortunate for those affected either way. It was a difficult time when drastic measures needed to be taken at short notice.

It's right to go back to in-person testing if there is a problem keeping remote exams fair.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-29 13:56:43+00:00
Just FYI. You're right, and I probably could have phrased it better, but I wasn't talking about this post.

Most posts are "I worked at a company that did stuff I really liked, and was honored to work with some really inspiring people."

That's usually enough to cause people to assume that I'm insulting them.

I do my best to not be offensive, but some folks live in a world, where everything is a personal slight, and there's really nothing I can do about that.
by jltsiren | 2025-12-29 13:56:45+00:00
Educated immigrants often consider countries interchangeable. They are in a country, because they found an opportunity and took it. But they are not committed to stay, because better opportunities could arise elsewhere. When you have already immigrated once, doing it again is only going to get easier.

Immigrants with fewer opportunities are more likely to try to learn the language and integrate. When a country is offering them something they can't find anywhere else, it makes more sense to go through all that effort. Even knowing that they will probably never fully fit in.
by bwb | 2025-12-29 13:57:44+00:00
Ah gotcha, which ones are you looking for?

So far, we only have ~5,000 votes for ~15,000 books over 2023 to 2025. We are still small but growing fast. Any chance you would share your 3 favorites this year and help us grow?

We are working on doing this on a much bigger scale and building a beta now too.
by delfinom | 2025-12-29 13:58:09+00:00
Look, as an EU country citizen, English is more or less the defacto language of the EU, regardless of what politicians declare. Everyone in the EU speaks english in some form as even traveling to a next door country like you state requires communication.

There are cases where in Belgium you will see signs in 4 languages (Dutch, French, Flemish and English)

Also if you ever travel in Japan, they have signs, especially on trains, all in, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English all in one. (usually rotating signage). So the precedent is there but :shrug:.

Point is, when your customer base is logically needing more language options, it should be considered.
by aebtebeten | 2025-12-29 13:58:28+00:00
(I was once chatting with a swiss lawyer, and asked if he were familiar with the concept of "venue shopping". He pointed out the 26 cantons[0] and asked if he needed to proceed any further?)

("Welfare & Steering": JH's 1973 "relative success of the welfare-state compromise" may be a bit dated? I get the impression that ever since 1980, and distinctly accelerating since 1992, the Old Country's politics has, on average, been reducing both outputs: welfare and steering)

For CH, I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjlT4BME2aE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYJ5V2HYy4 captured the difference in vibe well. (one detail SwissBloke didn't go into the weeds on: the army asks dozens of people to leave each year, on grounds largely ranging from far left extremism through fundamentalist islamic extremism to far right extremism, and a consequence of that is that one has to return one's service rifle. Part of having a hunting license[1] is being a member of a hunting club, and presumably they too will kick you out should you start to seem too crazy to associate with)

[0] it'd be a bit more difficult to game, but as far as gun ownership by foreigners is concerned, it's max(home country, CH), so there could be up to 195 potential venues involved, and I have the distinct impression that, having come from the States, I would have only hit the limit at local[2] law.

[1] another example of difference in vibe: in the US, folks complain bitterly if the exam for a hunting license takes more than 1 day; in my old part of CH, the process took 2 years, involving classroom time, community service, and practical, written, and oral tests.

[2] the cantonal police got a call about an old nutter in my first few years here. I was impressed, because apparently they just went out, talked with him, and left him all his legal weaponry, but took the full auto weapons, grenades, and other explosives with them when they left. I imagine in the Old Country that kind of visit might've been closer to a Waco?

Reflection: there's the societal vibe difference, and then there's not having an expansively interpreted 2A. Our constitution dates all the way back to 1999, because we believe in cleaning up the legacy cruft.
by Taek | 2025-12-29 13:58:53+00:00
I have close acquaintances who will take that $50, spend it on drugs, and then starve to death. If you want them to stay alive, you have to give them non-money.

If everyone spent money like a rational, 100 IQ individual with a moderate amount of schooling on basic financial strategies, it'd be a lot easier to manage a population. Unfortunately, less than half of the population is 100 IQ, and in some areas less than 5% of the population understands a single high school course worth of financial management.

And then of course you have fundamentally irrational actors as well, like drug addicts. IQ and education don't help there, addictions are monsters that swallow people of all socio-economic varieties.

So you have to either let those people squalor, or find another solution.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-29 13:59:27+00:00
No.

Open source is generally limited to software that a developer finds to be "fun". This is mostly software related to computer operations and networking.

Maintenance and support are not much fun so open source generally avoids offering any.

Lots of business software and/or services are not much "fun" so open source typically avoids these too. A good example is US payroll.

Basically, any software that involves "non-computer" knowledge or experience is likely to be an open source dead zone.
Show HN: Stos - Open-source StackOverFlow client built in Compose Multiplatform
by m4ykey | 2025-12-29 13:59:42+00:00
Hi,
I built Stos because I wanted a dedicated app for browsing StackOverflow without the distractions of browser. It's built using Compose Multiplatform, which allowed me to share code across platforms.

I'm curious to hear what you think about this app. Feedback is very welcome!
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-12-29 13:59:50+00:00
> I don’t know if structural engineering works like this, but I do know that software engineering doesn’t.

Structural Engineering (generally construction engineering) does work like that. Following the analogy, the engineers draw; they don't lay bricks. But, all the best engineers have probably been site supervisors at some point and have watched brick being layed, and spoken to the layers of bricks, etc. Construction methods change, but they don't change as quickly as software engineering methods. There is also a very material and applicable "reality" constraint. Most struct's knowledge/heuristics remains valid over long periods of time. The software engineers' body of knowledge can change 52 times in a year. To completely stretch the analogy - the site conditions for construction engineering are better known than the site conditions for a large software project. In the latter case the site itself can be adjusted more easily, and more materially, by the engineering itself i.e. the ground can move under your feet. Site conditioning on steroids!

Ultimately, that why I agree fully with the piece. Generic advise may be helpful, but it always applies to some generic site condition that are less applicable in practice.