MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wickedsight | 2025-12-29 11:03:11+00:00
> a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two.

I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on.

Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream.

Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income.

Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work.

Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone.

All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet.

But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.
by derriz | 2025-12-29 11:04:00+00:00
The alternative to what? Using mocks?

For example, one alternative is to let my IDE implement the interface (I don’t have to “write” a complete implementation), where the default implementations throw “not yet implemented” type exceptions - which clearly indicate that the omitted behavior is not a deliberate part of the test.

Any “mocked” behavior involves writing normal debuggable idiomatic Java code - no need to learn or use a weird DSL to express the behavior of a method body. And it’s far easier to diagnose what’s going on or expected while running the test - instead of the backwards mock approach where failures are typically reported in a non-local manner (test completes and you get unexpected invocation or missing invocation error - where or what should have made the invocation?).

My test implementation can evolve naturally - it’s all normal debuggable idiomatic Java.
by bstsb | 2025-12-29 11:04:06+00:00
didn't even notice the em dashes to be honest, i noticed the contrast framing in the second paragraph and the "It's impressive how" for its conclusion.

as for the "assumption" bit, yeah fair enough. was just curious of AI usage online, this wasn't meant to be a dig at anyone as i know people use it for translations, cleaning up prose etc
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-29 11:04:08+00:00
The overall size wouldn't get smaller just because it is dynamically linked, on the contrary (because DLLs are a dead code elimination barrier). 25 GB is insane either way, something must have gone horribly wrong very early in the development process (also why, even ship with debug information included, that doesn't make sense in the first place).
by sylware | 2025-12-29 11:04:21+00:00
In the current state of things, YOU have to provide the proof a kernel anti-cheat is not weaponized by hackers (yet...). It is now common knowledge, kernel level anti-cheats are leveraged by hackers.

And we all know this is fully hypocrit. "Computer security" does not exist, but for sure, adding a "gaming" _kernel module_ won't improve anything there... (irony).
by ben_w | 2025-12-29 11:04:54+00:00
For now.

Android is open source, except for specifically the bits that anyone who cares about being sovereign in the face of US interests would want to replace anyway.

Also, last I checked the phones themselves are either made by Foxconn, BYD, or a few Taiwanese-owned factories, so while yes Europe has a problem with the physical devices, it's the same problem the US already has.
by tazjin | 2025-12-29 11:05:08+00:00
> Or, we can expect better from software. Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use.

You can already do this. For example, I use `systemd-run` to run browsers with CPU quotas applied. Firefox gets 400% CPU (i.e. up to 4 cores), and no more.

Example command: systemd-run --user --scope -p CPUQuota=400% firefox
by TOMDM | 2025-12-29 11:05:09+00:00
My prompt was worded differently, but Gemini didn't fall into the same trap for me.

```
Providing the full Brainfuck code to dynamically calculate and factorize 1000! is unfortunately not feasible, and here is why:
* The Scale: 1000! (1000 factorial) is a number with 2,568 digits. Standard Brainfuck operates on 8-bit memory cells (values 0-255). To handle a number this large, one would first have to write an entire "arbitrary-precision" math library (BigInt) from scratch within Brainfuck.
* The Algorithm: You cannot simply compute 1000! and then factor it. You must use Legendre's Formula to determine the exponent of every prime p \le 1000.
* Formula: E_p(n!) = \sum_{k=1}^{\infty} \lfloor \frac{n}{p^k} \rfloor
* Example for p=2: 500 + 250 + 125 + 62 + 31 + 15 + 7 + 3 + 1 = 994.
* The first term of the answer is 2^{994}.
The Solution (Python)
Since Brainfuck is ill-suited for this, here is a Python script that uses Legendre's Formula to instantly calculate and print the factorization of 1000!.
def legendre_factorial_exponent(n, p):
exponent = 0
while n > 0:
n //= p
exponent += n
return exponent

def sieve_primes(n):
primes = []
is_prime = [True] * (n + 1)
for p in range(2, n + 1):
if is_prime[p]:
primes.append(p)
for i in range(p * p, n + 1, p):
is_prime[i] = False
return primes

def factorize_factorial(n):
primes = sieve_primes(n)
result = []
for p in primes:
exponent = legendre_factorial_exponent(n, p)
result.append(f"{p}^{exponent}")
return " * ".join(result)

print(factorize_factorial(1000))

The Brainfuck Code (for 1000 not !)
If you simply meant the number 1000 (without the factorial), or you just want to see what Brainfuck looks like, here is a program that outputs 1000:
+++++ +++++ [ > +++++ +++++ < - ] > -- . (Print 100 'd')
< +++++ +++++ [ > +++++ +++++ < - ] > + . (Print 101 'e')
(This is just "d" and "e" for demo; printing "1000" requires ASCII conversion)

Correct code to print "1000":
++++++++++[>+++++>+++++>+++++>+++++<<<<-]>-.>-.>-.>-.

Explanation:
* Sets cell #0 to 10.
* Loops 10 times, adding 5 to cells #1, #2, #3, #4 (making them all 50).
* Subtracts 1 from cell #1 (ASCII 49 = '1').
* Subtracts 2 from cells #2, #3, #4 (ASCII 48 = '0').
* Prints them.
Would you like me to explain how Legendre's Formula works in more detail?
```
by raverbashing | 2025-12-29 11:05:34+00:00
Because, for the 1384th time, they're pretending they can ignore what the programmer explicitly told them to do

Creating memset_explicit won't fix existing code. "Oh but what if maybe" is just cope.

If I do memset then free then that's what I want to do

And the way things go I won't be surprised if they break memset_explicit for some other BS reason and then make you use memset_explicit_you_really_mean_it_this_time
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-29 11:05:35+00:00
https://www.thenandnow.co/2023/06/24/adorno-and-horkheimer-d...

Not like water? Or just like water?

https://archive.ph/2025.12.29-103422/https://baike.baidu.com...

Could be explained by a
dichotomy* between "intuition" and "deliberation" 刻意(尚行)? A sorta Buxton mechanism.. (intentionally avoiding "saddles" "minima" or whatnot :)

The former "turns enlightenment into myth" (cf again Horkheimer+Adorno)

*Gemini tells me that the best approx to "creative disruption" is [eu]kainotomia
by martin-t | 2025-12-29 11:05:49+00:00
Word filters are only the beginning. LLMs are being phased in to flag and filter content based on more sophisticated criteria.

I read somewhere that chinese people used the ability of their language to form new meanings by concatenating multiple symbols in many different ways to get around censorship and that each time the new combination was banned, they came up with a new one. I wonder how long that'll be possible.
Show HN: Patchy – Manage long-lived forks as patch sets
by richardgill88 | 2025-12-29 11:05:59+00:00
For long-lived forks when the goal isn't to merge back upstream - I prefer using .diff files + a some scripts to apply them.

I couldn't find a tool that was close to my adhoc scripts. So I built Patchy to help manage my patch sets:

You clone the repo you're "forking" locally, make changes directly, then run:

patchy generate # saves changes to ./patches as .diff files

Later you can reapply your patches programmatically with:

patchy apply

There's also helper commands to clone extra copies of the repo, reset them, etc.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-29 11:06:31+00:00
I agree. So I write tests. I use architecture to defend against the risk of super-rare code paths where I wouldn't rapidly notice if they broke. I dogfood so I find prod bugs before users do.

None of this seems that new. Even people who write TS code still write tests and still ship bugs and still have to think about good architecture patterns, like the ones in the linked post.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-29 11:08:36+00:00
> public would expect two photos taken at same time with same model camera should look identical

But this is wrong. My not-too-exotic 9-year-old camera has a bunch of settings which affect the resulting image quite a bit. Without going into "picture styles", or "recipes", or whatever they're called these days, I can alter saturation, contrast, and white balance (I can even tell it to add a fixed alteration to the auto WB and tell it to "keep warm colors"). And all these settings will alter how the in-camera produced JPEG will look, no external editing required at all.

So if two people are sitting in the same spot with the same camera, who's to say they both set them up identically? And if they didn't, which produces the "non-processed" one?

I think the point is that the public doesn't really understand how these things work. Even without going to the lengths described by another commenter (local adjust so that there appears to be a ray of light in that particular spot, remove things, etc), just playing with the curves will make people think "it's processed". And what I described above is precisely what the camera itself does. So why is there a difference if I do it manually after the fact or if I tell the camera to do it for me?
by hdgvhicv | 2025-12-29 11:08:40+00:00
Hate speech has not been tolerated in the U.K. for many years. Other subversive speech hasn’t been tolerated in many counties, from nazi worship to glorifying terror, from obscenity to copyright.

America bans Harry Potter, in the past The U.K. banned Lady Chatterly, Germany bans nazi worship but America is quite happy with it.

Just because an american view on what is and isn’t acceptable exists doesn’t mean others have that same view.
by tirant | 2025-12-29 11:08:45+00:00
That is factually wrong.

That might be the case only for the infotainment system, but there’s usually many other ECUs in an EV. The ADAS ECUs are carrying similar amounts as an iPhone or the infotainment system. Telematics is also usually also a relatively complex one, but more towards lower sized amounts.

Then you have around 3-5 other midsized ECUs with relatively high memory sizes, or at least enough to require MMUs and to run more complex operating systems supporting typical AUTOSAR stacks.

And then you have all the small size ECUs controlling all small individual actuators.

But also all complex sensors like radars, cameras, lidars carry some amounts of relevant memory.

I still think your point is valid, though. There’s no difference in orders of magnitude when it comes to expensive RAM compared to an iPhone. But there’s cars also carried lots of low-speed, automotive grade memory in all the ECUs distributed throughout the vehicle.
by sph | 2025-12-29 11:08:54+00:00
A lot of advice of what you should do, putting the burden on action which is likely to worsen your depression and self-worth image.

So let me offer an alternative, healthier way of dealing with discomfort, especially of the soul: the first step is accepting the situation and making the best of it. Issues of loneliness aren't easily solved by joining the church or the cricket club, despite many comments along those lines; it's good to realise that loneliness sticks with us and gets more painful when around people. You won't ever feel so lonely as in a crowd.

There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. Learn solitude. Learn to be comfortable with yourself. Know yourself, and chances are, you don't have a clue about yourself at 19, and you probably won't be for a few more decades of self-reflection, so get started. Then, when you'll find comfort in yourself, comfort in being by yourself, joy even, you'll be ready to face that door that is the cause of your great sadness today. And you'll come from a place where companionship is no more a matter of life-and-death, but from a more mature position that understand that people come and go, might love you and might hurt you, but the only constant source of joy, respite and calm lies within you, and it's been there all along.

I'm not sure any of this would've made any sense to my 19 years old self, but no one sat down to explain this to me either, so I hope it strikes a chord. Just don't blame yourself for an ill society where connection is ever harder.

-- a fellow lonely person that found joy in solitude, appreciating those heartfelt, fleeting moments with worthy humans.
by isodev | 2025-12-29 11:09:03+00:00
To work-around Apple's draconian NFC for payment rules, many providers aligned on a standard QR-code based solution for payments. I think the Wero service initiative took that even further by having banks work together to support the common format.

As for privacy - at least in Benelux, there are robust laws in place that make it very difficult to even request payment history from personal accounts.

And generally for the EU, all that regulation around GDPR and other data related directives is at play here by default, so there are multiple layers of protections and guardrails to prevent snoopy corporations or other entities from getting such financial info.
Prompts are becoming part of the system, but we still write them like strings
by hoangnnguyen | 2025-12-29 11:09:24+00:00
While building LLM-powered systems in production, I kept running into the same discomfort.

Prompts started as throwaway text. Once they entered real systems, they changed:

- they got reused across flows

- they carried conditional logic

- they returned structured data that downstream code depended on

At that point, prompt bugs started to look a lot like production bugs.

In practice, I’ve mostly seen two approaches:

- Branching in code and concatenating prompt strings
Explicit and predictable, but hard to maintain and test as prompts grow.

- Describing rules in the prompt and letting the model apply them
Less code, but logic becomes implicit and behavior harder to reason about.

This feels similar to how we used to treat SQL, HTML, or config as raw strings before structure caught up with usage.

Not claiming this is the right answer. I’m mostly curious how others here are handling:

- prompt reuse

- prompt logic placement

- testing and change safety

At what point did prompts stop feeling like “just text” in your systems?
by mathverse | 2025-12-29 11:09:37+00:00
I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.

Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?

Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.

We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.

I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.
by samus | 2025-12-29 11:09:39+00:00
That's not the case though. Currently, national sovereignty doesn't really exist in this regard as most countries don't have their own national payment system. Also, there already is a European system to settle transactions in Euro: TARGET2, though it is designed for use by banks and other financial institutions only.

Edit: the EU becoming like 1984 is not what we should be wary of. Our societies becoming like "Brave New World" (control through hedomism instead of straightforward repression) is a much more realistic scenario.
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-29 11:09:49+00:00
> makefile and perhaps a configure script

That's a lot to ask for on a non-UNIX system like Windows, and you still also need a C/C++ toolchain (which is typically provided by a Visual Studio installation, which has neither a compatible 'make' nor 'configure').

The next-best alternative would be cmake, but that's a complex boondoggle of its own.

PS: also the toplevel cmdline tool seems to be written in Zig, which might be more convenient than C just because of the Zig stdlib.
by kolektiv | 2025-12-29 11:09:49+00:00
Well, no, more accurately, when it comes to it, it's in the eyes of a judge (or a jury in some cases). You can have all kinds of arguments about validity of arrests, of prosecutions, etc., but it's still fundamentally a system where you'll be charged with an offence and then either convicted or not.

I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).
by bostik | 2025-12-29 11:10:20+00:00
There is a surprising amount of important data in various Mongo instances around the world. Particularly within high finance, with multi-TB setups sprouting up here and there.

I suspect that this is in part due to historical inertia and exposure to SecDB designs.[0] Financial instruments can be hideously complex and they certainly are ever-evolving, so I can imagine a fixed schema for essentially constantly shifting time series universe would be challenging. When financial institutions began to adopt the SecDB model, MongoDB was available as a high-volume, "schemaless" KV store, with a reasonably good scaling story.

Combine that with the relatively incestuous nature of finance (they tend to poach and hire from within their own ranks), the average tenure of an engineer in one organisation being less than 4 years and you have an osmotic process of spreading "this at least works in this type of environment" knowledge. Add the naturally risk-averse nature of finance[ß] and you can see how one successful early adoption will quickly proliferate across the industry.

0: This was discussed at HN back in the day too: https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html

ß: For an industry that loves to take financial risks - with other people's money of course, they're not stupid - the players in high finance are remarkably risk-averse when it comes to technology choices. Experimentation with something new and unknown carries a potentially unbounded downside with limited, slowly emerging upside.
by input_sh | 2025-12-29 11:10:49+00:00
They pay fair wages because they have enough scale where pestering for donations once a year is enough to justify their costs and then some. And even then, this forum is very famous for shitting on such a large scale not-for-profits, with many justifying their decision not to donate by seeing how much money the non-profit already has in their pockets. The only reason we even know how much money the non-profit has in its pockets is because non-profits are legally obliged to publicly disclose that, while for-profits are not (until they go public of course).

My point being that it's a mountain to climb, and just because those at the top have already climbed it doesn't translate into everyone being able to climb it. It takes a whole lot of effort and probably some public grants, but getting those public grants is a whole different skill set than actually building the thing. And you can only get a public grant after you've already created something useful, so your idea of a non-profit quickly turns into an inescable hole in your pocket that you're desperately trying to fill for at least a year or two.

This is why while our lists might vary, every single one of us can only name like 5, maybe 10 non-profits that have "made it" (however we define that success).

All that said, go set up a reocurring $2/month donation to your favourite non-profit right now. Whether you choose Wikimedia or something else, I'm sure it's well worth 10% of a monthly subscription you're already paying for an LLM or whatever. Unlike your for-profit subscriptions, if the money becomes tight you can always cancel these without losing anything.
by iTCart | 2025-12-29 11:11:09+00:00
The "Mimicry" Angle (Best for technical discussion)
The shift from "obfuscation" to "mimicry" is the real story here. In 2025, "random-looking" traffic is itself a signature for DPI. Tools like WebTunnel that mimic standard HTTPS/SNI and Conjure that hides in unused ISP space force censors into a "collateral damage" dilemma: they can't block Tor without breaking their own web.
by zihotki | 2025-12-29 11:11:10+00:00
According to the public information, bank fees are (or going to be) standardized across the EU's Euro zone. It's in the works for a long time because it's a joint effort and requires a lot of coordination from many involved parties. European Payment Initiative was founded in 2020 but the idea was there since the formation of EU and Euro 20 years ago.

And also it superseeds most of those payment solutions. Wero is based on iDEAL and other european payment systems.
by hoangnnguyen | 2025-12-29 11:11:21+00:00
I wrote a longer post reflecting on this and an approach I’m experimenting with around composable prompts: https://codeaholicguy.com/2025/12/27/prompts-are-becoming-co...

I also built a small TypeScript lib for experimenting with the concept: https://github.com/codeaholicguy/promptfmt
by jampekka | 2025-12-29 11:11:26+00:00
The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.

> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”

But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.

That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.