MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vinhnx | 2025-12-11 03:12:27+00:00
A few months ago, I had a frustrating experience with the Gemini API while building an AI chat app as a side project. I registered through AI Studio and set up billing via Google Cloud Console, which offered a free trial with $200 in credits or 3 months of API usage. After deploying the Gemini API for my project, I navigated through the numerous settings in Google Cloud Console but forgot to set a billing limit. That month, I was charged over $250 on my credit card, well beyond the free trial allowance. It was entirely my fault for not setting a limit and not reviewing the free trial terms more carefully.

That said, while setting up the Gemini API through AI Studio is remarkably straightforward for small side projects, transitioning to production with proper billing requires navigating the labyrinth that is Google Cloud Console. The contrast between AI Studio's simplicity and the complexity of production billing setup is jarring, it's easy to miss critical settings when you're trying to figure out where everything is.
Show HN: I built a "time machine" with Gemini 3
by bosschow | 2025-12-11 03:13:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a fun toy using Gemini 3.

It’s simple: Upload a photo of yourself, pick a time and place, and see what you look like.

I’ve been testing it with "1920s NYC" and "Ancient Rome" — the consistency is actually pretty wild.

Just for fun, give it a try:

https://chronolens.world/
by here2learnstuff | 2025-12-11 03:13:05+00:00
What is it that you don't like about Pulumi? As I mentioned in another comment, my team of backend-engineers who took over an infra team went from Cloudformation -> CDK -> Terraform -> Pulumi and honestly find it the most approachable for other engineers familiar with normal programming languages (sorry HCL). We've been using it since 2021 and have a "what's on main is what's deployed" philosophy and adopted a RunAtlantis inspired workflow where previews are run as status checks on PRs and require explicit approvals, apply is run on merge to main and periodically, and drift checks run preview+refresh and alerts if what's checked in doesn't match what exists. We don't really use stacks, we just use a separate project for everything and write code to encapsulate modules (and luckily we can easily write unit tests and runtime assertions).
by xp84 | 2025-12-11 03:13:23+00:00
> Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego. I highly agree with you - and that’s coming from someone who can’t stand the Democrats[1]. Things like announcing all of a sudden that he opposes a merger when everybody knows Kushner is involved with a rival bid… it’s too obvious how much corruption is his very operating system. [1] (I didn’t vote for either candidate for President, but I’m not in a swing state so I’m not sorry)
by grog454 | 2025-12-11 03:14:52+00:00
> By this logic, literally nobody anywhere has free speech.

Nobody anywhere has freedom of speech. And a majority of people don't really think about what it means and don't want it in the purest form despite what they say.

Two examples of "free speech" that are protected in the U.S. under the first amendment:

1. Overt racism (less threat of imminent violence).

2. Nazi apparel.

Say the wrong word or show the wrong symbol in certain settings and you'll quickly understand what I mean. Furthermore I'm confident > 50% of U.S. citizens would find you in the wrong and would support whatever happens to you without much consideration of legality.

Freedom of speech is an ideal with no successful implementation and I don't think that's a bad thing. I prefer to live in the real world where saying stupid shit has consequences and people think just a little bit more carefully about what they say.
by mhitza | 2025-12-11 03:15:19+00:00
Has anyone here, that's built SaaS software, tried to use a one database per customer approach?

It's been in my mind for a while, as an easy way to isolate customer data, make migrations easier and build monitoring for per customer resource usage.

Haven't seen this approach used in practice yet, and didn't get the chance to architect new SaaS products in the last few years and try it out long term.
by simianwords | 2025-12-11 03:15:33+00:00
Rich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies.

It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets. So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before.

Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies. I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.
by hackingonempty | 2025-12-11 03:16:09+00:00
I am disappointed to find no mentions of zero knowledge proofs or any other indications that we wont have to trust anyone with this task.

We have the technology to do age verification without revealing any more information to the site and without the verification authority finding out what sites we are browsing. However, most people are ignorant of it.

If we don't push for the use of privacy preserving technology we wont get it and we will get more tracking. You cannot defeat age verification on the internet, age verification is already a feature of our culture. The only way out is to ensure that privacy preserving technologies are mandated.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-11 03:16:35+00:00
(Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway.

There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.
by andai | 2025-12-11 03:16:51+00:00
There's a couple different threads here.

Can we make a decentralized search engine. Which breaks down into two questions, is it technically feasible and is it socially feasible?

(Maybe the word search would be a bit more broad than retrieving web pages. It could be for everything right.)

I don't know but I'm inclined to say that the difficulty will be more on the social side than on the technical side.

The web was very decentralized 20 years ago, and we had all manner of peer to peer systems already. There just doesn't seem to be much appetite for that kind of thing, at least in the mainstream.

Although there might be something to it, with the AI part of the equation.

Like we had self hostable services for a long time, most people just don't want to be a sysadmin.

Well, I gave Claude root on my $3 VPS. Claude is my sysadmin now. I don't have to configure anything anymore. Life is good :)
by dutchtropez | 2025-12-11 03:17:01+00:00
Hi everyone — I built something over the past week that I wanted to share:

Concord is a lightweight, offline-first cognitive engine that runs locally and uses a structured format called DTUs (Discrete Thought Units) for ideas, reasoning, and knowledge.

This isn’t a chatbot. It’s closer to a personal research workspace with: • DTU creation + indexing • Forge Mode (CRETI) — break ideas into Core / Reasoning / Evidence / Tests / Impact • PersonaOS — create small “agent personas” that generate DTUs • Autoprocess — optional background evolution of your DTU graph • Offline mode (no tracking, no ads) • Online mode (optional, if users want to connect to an LLM)

The whole stack is open source because I want people to build their own tools on top of it.

Right now Concord is a simple community version, but its purpose is clear: give people something that feels like a thinking workspace, not a website.

I’m sharing it early to get feedback from developers, researchers, and builders who care about offline tools, cognitive systems, or new ways of organizing knowledge.

Repo link: https://github.com/ryttps94jq-gif/Concord-web-mvp

If anyone wants to try it, contribute, or fork it for their own projects, I’d genuinely appreciate the eyes on it.

Thanks for reading — happy to answer questions.
by aj7 | 2025-12-11 03:17:56+00:00
This is a hugely important point. The de Broglie wavelength of the photon is hundreds to thousands of nm. There is no possibility of VLSI scale-up, a point conveniently omitted in hundreds of decks and at least $1B in investment. Photonic techniques will remain essentially a part of the analog pallette in system design.
by susam | 2025-12-11 03:18:31+00:00
> I'd suggest you submodule in dependencies rather than curl. Supply chain attacks and version incompatibilities both happen and suck

What kind of supply chain attack or version incompatibility would affect

curl -sSL https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/archive/v1.3.1.tar.gz | tar -xz

but not

git submodule add https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot.git && cd hunchentoot/ && git checkout v1.3.1 ?
by toss1 | 2025-12-11 03:19:30+00:00
Yes, and about twice I've seen this done really right, wherein they post signs of the synchronization speed (e.g., "Lights Timed for 35mph"). I just get in sync with one light and adjust speed and it feels almost magic to go a few miles hitting every green light (it kind of is the macic of math).

It'd be cool if more roads were implemented that way.
by minitech | 2025-12-11 03:19:46+00:00
> Can you type it from memory, without looking it up?

Well, yeah, but that’s not a very useful heuristic for people who are already aware of the algorithms in question. If you ask people to come up with a way from scratch – probably without explicitly asking, in order to get better success, like by watching how they sort cards – I bet they won’t tend to come up with bubble sort. Maybe that says something about the relative intuitiveness of the approaches? Or not.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-12-11 03:20:55+00:00
Here is an excellent and HN-worthy writeup of the argument for legality, and the counterargument that it was an improper booby trap.[1] It seems to me most of the polarizarion on this board could have been avoided had the original article recognized (as does the one linked here) "that the legality or illegality of the pagers attack can only be determined on the basis of a detailed factual analysis and that the relevant facts are still not fully known."

I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion.

[1] https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pager...
by sgc | 2025-12-11 03:22:22+00:00
That might be the how, but the because/why is that a company is arbitrarily enforcing horrible design decisions by many websites that force users to use specific browsers, and penalize/cripple those who try to work around such nonsense. There has to be a less lazy way of combating bots, if that is even the real reason for them being so aggressive about it (which I doubt - it's going to be about money for major stakeholders in the end).
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-11 03:22:30+00:00
I love how people think Azure is somehow worse than AWS when the latter isn't even a single portal, it's many, each of which shows just one product in one region. Oh, you needed a VM with a network and some storage, including access to blobs somewhere else in the world? Just open up a dozen tabs and join the randomly generated gibberish resource identifiers yourself manually like a savage!
by nl | 2025-12-11 03:23:17+00:00
Does anyone remember the Yahoo design patterns library? It was mostly for UX pattern (eg: ways to "Rate an object") and it was really good.

Almost 20 years ago.. damn.

https://creativecommons.org/2006/02/14/yahoodesignpatternlib...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060221111812/http://developer....

They had a great comparison of the different behaviors leaderboards could encourage in users.
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 03:25:29+00:00
(1) We have videos of the explosions and their scale.

(2) We have Hezbollah's own claims about how many of their fighters were actually killed.

(3) We have Hezbollah's own photographs of scores of injured Hezbollah fighters --- people not blown apart from the explosions, further backing a claim that all sides to the conflict are making (far more casualties than KIA).

(4) We know how small the pagers were (indeed, exactly what pagers they were) and what the explosive was.

To the extent Lebanon is reporting higher civilian casualties than Hezbollah fighter casualties, the balance of evidence is that at least one of two things is happening: either Hezbollah is dramatically understating its own casualties, or Lebanon is dramatically overstating civilian casualties.

later

(Or we're just misreading the statistics! Pretty normal outcome for a message board discussion!)
by acyou | 2025-12-11 03:25:52+00:00
I call this the "judgement day" scenario. I would be interested if there is some science fiction based on this premise.

If you believe in God of a certain kind, you don't think that being judged for your sins is unacceptable or even good or bad in itself, you consider it inevitable. We have already talked it over for 2000 years, people like the idea.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-11 03:26:49+00:00
Many (all?) states have an immunization registry ("Immunization Information System"); when you’re vaccinated, the provider submits a digital record with your name and date of birth, along with their info and the vaccine info, to the registry. This is programmatically ingested by Epic’s EMR system, if configured, and will even show up in your mobile app and web interface when logged into your health system’s app. So, in some cases, yes.

With that said, for emergencies, one might have an emergency bracelet with this info on it in the event pain management is required unexpectedly. Otherwise, pain might not be managed.

https://www.cdc.gov/iis/contacts-locate-records/index.html
by scarecrowbob | 2025-12-11 03:27:23+00:00
The people you're describing found it consistent with liberty to own other humans, so forgive me if I am skeptical.

I understand your point, I just have a different theory of rights. Just because something is logically conistent doesn't mean I agree with the starting premises.

Personally, are any of your beliefs or statements things that could ban you for entry into the US? Because I have quite a few things that I have said on social media which would likely prevent my entry. It certainly doesn't make me feel like a "member of a body politic" when that body treats my beliefs as intrusive and foreign.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-12-11 03:27:30+00:00
Fair point on UB — LLMs absolutely do not reason about it (or anything else). They just reproduce the lowest-common-denominator patterns that happened to survive in the wild.

I’m not claiming the generated C is “safe” or even close. I am sure that in practice it still has plenty of time-bombs, but empirically, for the narrow WASM tasks I tried, the raw C suggestions were dramatically less wrong than the equivalent JavaScript ones — fewer obvious foot-guns, better idioms, etc.

So my original “noticeably better” was really about “fewer glaring mistakes per 100 lines” rather than “actually correct.” I still end up rewriting or heavily massaging almost everything, but it’s a better starting point than the JS ever was.
by verdverm | 2025-12-11 03:27:34+00:00
Google has the ADK project, which is really good.

Python is the primary implementation, Java is there, Go is relatively new and aiming for parity. They could have contributed the Typescript implementation and built on common, solid foundation, but alas, the hydra's heads are not communicating well

These other "frameworks" are (1) built by people who need to sell something, so they are often tied to their current thinking and paid features (2) sit at the wrong level. ADK gives me building blocks for generalized agents, whereas most of these frameworks are tied to coding and some peculiarities you see there (like forcing you to deal with studio, no thanks). They also have too much abstraction and I want to be able to control the lower level knobs and levers

ADK is the closest to what I've been looking for, an analog to kubernetes in the agentic space. Deal with the bs, give me great abstractions and building blocks to set me free. So many of the other frameworks want to box you into how they do things, today, given current understanding. ADK is minimal and easy to adjust as we learn things
by Nursie | 2025-12-11 03:27:48+00:00
My favourite micro pressure-group in Australia is the Pedestrian Council of Australia.

Whenever there's talk about car safety measures, e-scooters or anything else, the press goes to the official-sounding "Pedestrian Council of Australia" for comment. And obligingly, Harold Scruby who is the CEO, Chairman and entire membership of said council will hold forth.

He's been spectacularly successful at getting himself listened to, as if he represented something.

Collective shout are just as illegitimate.
by nutanc | 2025-12-11 03:28:21+00:00
The question here is, is social media addictive and is it harmful. If we have enough evidentiary proof, then yes, it should be banned just like we do for alcohol or cigarettes. We also ban porn for kids. And we don't need any ID proofs in implementing the ban. So we have a precedent. It's not perfect, but society knows it's bad, government, family, schools come together and implement the ban. No need for IDs etc and give more control to government.
by some-guy | 2025-12-11 03:28:23+00:00
One thing I don't hear people talking about very is about how AI is going to make money in any other way other than cutting employment.

With the internet, and especially with the internet being accessible by anyone anywhere in the world in the late 2000s and early 2010s globally, that growth was more obvious to me. I don't see where this occurs with AI. I don't see room for "growth", I see room for cutting. We were already connected before, globalization seems to have peaked in that sense.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-11 03:29:20+00:00
> Letting people come here and see that most Americans aren't monsters pays dividends beyond the dollars they spend.

40% of the population still support Trump.

If you have 10 friends and ask them where they want to meet for dinner and 6 say let’s go to a Mexican restaurant and the other 4 say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, you still need to be concerned about your friend group.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-11 03:30:18+00:00
> International law exempts piracy

UNCLOS provides that “all states have universal jurisdiction on the high seas to seize pirate ships and aircraft, or a ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates, and arrest the persons and seize the property on board” [1].

> if we're using that as a justification, are we admitting the US has turned pirate then?

No, because the seizure was not “committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft” [2]. Under UNCLOS states can’t be pirates.

(Again, this is academic. China has been blowing off UNCLOS judgements in the South China Sea for years.)

[1] https://www.un.org/depts/los/piracy/piracy_legal_framework.h...

[2] https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
by atonse | 2025-12-11 03:30:32+00:00
As others have pointed, this is unfortunately already true, due to big data and analytics companies hoovering up everything.

So again, what changes in any fundamental way?

This is a tech forum. There are already standards that can be used to verify age without requiring a lot of extra info. (Already used by drivers licenses at TSA checkpoints, those are all standards).

There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-12-11 03:31:08+00:00
In case some of you find it entertaining. When MCP came out I had a flashback to COM/DCOM days, like IDispatch and list/tools.

So, I built an MCP server that can host any COM server. :)

Now, AI can launch and work on Excel, Outlook and even resurrect Internet Explorer.

https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/mcp-com-server-aut...
by Manuel_D | 2025-12-11 03:32:00+00:00
> i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror

That's not really a good description of terrorism. Terrorism is going after non-military targets, or at least indiscriminate targeting, for the express purpose of causing terror.

If an enemy tank platoon is rolling down the street, the operator of an antitank missile certainly knows that blowing up the lead tank and killing the crew in front of their compatriots is going to instill terror in the rest of the tank platoon. Taking that action anyway is correctly described as an act that intentionally instills terror, but that's not an act of terrorism. War, regardless of if it's waged lawfully, is often terrifying.

The way to successfully argue that Israel's pager attack was an act of terror is to show indiscriminate targeting - not merely highlight how terrifying it is to have a bunch of high level officers killed at once. However, investing a lot in the latest information gathering technology sound like the opposite of indiscriminate targeting.

I obviously can't speak for how the public writ large would react to our hypothetical. But I can at least speak for myself that if Hezbollah somehow, say, flew a bunch of drones onto IDF bases and killed officers, then that would be an act of war but not an act of terrorism no matter how terrified it might make Israelis feel.
by hilbert42 | 2025-12-11 03:32:24+00:00
Right, it sucks for all. What truly pisses me off is that early on very smart people in Big Tech realized that to make a financial killing they'd have to get in quickly and lock in populations before governments et al realized the negative implications and introduced policy/regulations.

As with addiction or clicking a ratchet forward, they knew that reversing direction would then be nigh on impossible. Society seems to have little or no defense against such threats and I'd bet London to a brick that it'll be repeated with AI.
by wildzzz | 2025-12-11 03:33:18+00:00
It all stems from the companies behind the HDMI authority. It's basically all of the major AV device makers circa early 2000s. They wrote the spec and added it to all of their products. Displayport wasn't around just yet so HDMI just beat it to market. Since everyone needed an HDMI thing to go with their HDMI thing, everyone else jumped on the HDMI bandwagon. Although I'm really not sure how HDMI managed to get it's way into PCs. Displayport should have just cornered the entire market, it's very popular on business-class machines. I'm guessing it's because of HTPCs and people wanting to put big TVs on their PCs is what led to the adoption.
by addaon | 2025-12-11 03:33:19+00:00
Except that if you're in country B, which has a law that says "you may not make information available to children that discloses that Santa Claus is made up," and the age of becoming an adult in your country is 18 -- knowing that a person accessing your site from country A is an adult in country A (which means, say, ≥ 16) is not sufficient to comply with the law.