MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kiliantics | 2025-12-22 17:23:38+00:00
Same, specifically boat-building for me because it just draws me in.

But more generally, I would like to commit my time to making the built world more beautiful and sustainable. I despise the obsolescent plastic slop that we all are forced to use, wear, live in, and just see and be around all the time. I find it such a degradation in our society -- the shift in taste and values away from an appreciation of well-made, durable, and well-designed physical objects.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 17:23:39+00:00
Even then, the US largely resists regulation, even if that is somewhat changing. You can look in terms of essential infrastructure, manufacturing and technology overall beyond software. The U.S. largely has lost control over most of it. And while I'm not in favor of isolation, I find that purely from a security perspective, the US should be capable and in a position to fulfill at least half of its' infrastructure needs domestically, and should be optimized to do so.

IMO this should include food, medications, communications and physical infrastructure needs. Not every nation is large or vast enough to do this, the US emphatically is and should take advantage of it. Every nation should work towards the best interest of its' citizens needs, and negotiate with others in good faith assuming they are doing the same.

I think that globalist and corporatist mindsets are dangerous in general. that's just my take.

Edit: to be clear, I absolutely accept and encourage the EU and EU governments in terms of exercising and increasing a position of independence and sovereignty... I'm only pointing out that the US position isn't exactly as strong as it probably should be either.
by mikert89 | 2025-12-22 17:24:12+00:00
I read it when I was 15/16, along with "beyond good and evil" by nietzsche. I grew up in a religious house hold, and it really brought alot of things into question. Mostly lead to a many year long existential crisis. I also felt isolated from my peers, as I was reading these books and supporting secondary academic texts. My day to day thought process was "different". I did fall into something I would consider to be like mental masochism, where I actively tried to stretch (or tear down) my psychology and understanding using these texts.

I am now actually 36, and I don't know that deep philosophy, while some of it true, actually had a positive impact on my life.
by freedomben | 2025-12-22 17:24:14+00:00
Oh man, we've got a lot of similarity there! I even took 2 weeks of PTO at one point when I was feeling massive burnout and spend that time in the shop building a table, chairs, benches, and a couple of attempts at mantles. Chairs were a lot harder than I initially thought (mostly making them comfortable to sit in), but the table and benches were easy enough I could crank out a table in a day and two or three benches the next day.

After that two weeks I even did some market research to see if there was any way to make a remotely comparable living off of it (unfortunately there wasn't, at least until the kids are out of the house and expenses go way down). I also realized that my style was not well aligned with popular styles at the time (this was 2019), and that shipping costs basically meant I could only sell to local area (and even then delivery cost/time would require adding too much margin).

Someday hopefully life will be more compatible with our dream :-)
by Arainach | 2025-12-22 17:24:19+00:00
> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc.

I've tried and fail to write this in a way that won't come across as snobbish but it is not the intent.

It's a matter of standards. Using proper language is how I think. I'm incapable of doing otherwise even out of laziness. Pressing the shift key and the space bar to do it right costs me nothing. It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots. You won't be arrested or punished for not returning the shopping cart to where it belongs, you still get your groceries (the same results), but it's what you do in a civilized society and when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.
by dpark | 2025-12-22 17:24:22+00:00
> Isn't that the crux of the issue? Perl was great if you're a hacker who 'got' it. For the remaining 95% of the population, Python worked.

It’s really not the crux of the issue though. “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not. This is certainly not the only reason that Python became so successful.

Tangentially, in my experience Perl was great for one liners and small glue projects. I never saw significant, valuable works of code built in Perl even when I worked at a company (Yahoo) that widely used Perl. I am convinced that much of Perl’s beauty is in its cleverness and’s not in its utility for large projects.
by pron | 2025-12-22 17:25:28+00:00
> Here's a LLM literacy dipstick: ask a peer engineer to read some code they're unfamiliar with. Do they understand it? ... No? Then the LLM won't either.

Of course, but the problem is the converse: There are too many situations where a peer engineer will know what to do but the agent won't. This means that it requires more work to make a codebase understandable to a human than it does to make it understandable to an agent.

> Moving more implementation feedback from human to computer helps us improve the chance of one-shotting... Think of these as bumper rails. You can increase the likelihood of an LLM reaching the bowling pins by making it impossible to land in the gutter.

Sort of, but this is also a little similar to claiming that P = NP. Having a an efficient way to reliably check if a solution is correct is not the same at all as a reliable way to find a solution. It's the theory of computation that tells us that it probably isn't. The likelihood may well be higher yet still not high enough. Even though theoretically NP problems are strictly easier than EXPTIME ones, in practice, in many situations (though not all) they are equally intractable.

In fact, we can put the claim to the test: there are languages, like ATS and Idris, that make almost any property provable and checkable. These languages let the programmer (human or machine) position the "bumper rails" so precisely as to ensure we hit the target. We can ask the agent to write the code, write the proof of correctness, and check it. We'd still need to check that the correctness property is the right one, but if the claim is correct, coding agents should be best at writing code, accompanied by correctness proofs, in ATS or Idris. Are they?

Obviously, mileage mauy vary dependning on the task and the domain, but if it's true that coding models will get significantly better, then the best course of action may well be, in many cases, to just wait until they do rather than spend a lot of effort working around their current limitations, effort that will be wasted if and when capabilities improve. And that's the big question: are we in for a long haul where agent capabilities remain roughly where they are today or not?
by prmph | 2025-12-22 17:25:49+00:00
Nothing will really work when the models fail at the most basic of reasoning challenges.

I've had models do the complete opposite of what I've put in the plan and guidelines. I've had them go re-read the exact sentences, and still see them come to the opposite conclusion, and my instructions are nothing complex at all.

I used to think one could build a workflow and process around LLMs that extract good value from them consistently, but I'm now not so sure.

I notice that sometimes the model will be in a good state, and do a long chain of edits of good quality. The problem is, it's still a crap-shoot how to get them into a good state.
by victorbjorklund | 2025-12-22 17:25:54+00:00
Biggest change to my workflow has been to break down projects to smaller parts using libraries. So where I in the past would put everything in the same code base I now break down stuff that can be separate to its own libraries (like wrapping an external API). That way the AI only needs to read the docs for the library instead of having to read all the code when working on features that use the API.
by earthnail | 2025-12-22 17:25:55+00:00
When Apple introduced these changes, rates for Apple Search Ads tripled.

Because Apple Search Ads are offered by the same company that sold you the device, they are legally not a “third party” service. Apple still tracks your installs, your revenue, your retention period, etc, and uses it for Apple Search Ads. Developers can see these metrics for their own apps.

You can’t opt out of this.
by everfrustrated | 2025-12-22 17:26:11+00:00
I think what gets lost in this is that we should expect a lot more traffic from AI if simply for the reason that if I ask AI to answer my question it will do a lot more work and fetch from a lot of websites in generating a reply to me. And yes searching over git repos will absolutely be part of that.

This is all "legitimate" traffic in that it isn't about crawling the internet but in service of a real human.

Put another way, search is moving from a model of crawl the internet and query on cached data to being able to query on live data.
by CPLX | 2025-12-22 17:26:13+00:00
Wait, what? Can you please describe this shame incident?

Also, I have extremely frequent commits and version control syncs to GitHub and so on as part of the process (including when it's working on documents or things that aren't code) as a way to counteract this.

Although I suppose a sufficiently devious AI can get around those, it seems to not have been a problem.
Show HN: Beating SOTA embeddings on DeepMind's LIMIT benchmark (94% vs. 18%)
by sangeet01 | 2025-12-22 17:26:17+00:00
DeepMind's recent paper "On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval" identified a capacity bottleneck in dense embeddings, showing that even SOTA models like E5-Mistral and GritLM struggle on their LIMIT benchmark (scoring ~8-18% Recall@100).

I hypothesized that this isn't a retrieval limit, but a compression limit.

I built Numen, a retrieval engine based on high-dimensional sparse-dense n-gram hashing (32k dimensions) rather than learned embeddings.

The Results (on LIMIT test set):

BM25 (Baseline): 93.6%
E5-Mistral: 8.3%
GritLM 7B: 12.9%
Numen (My implementation): 93.9%
It beats BM25 while maintaining a vector architecture, completely sidestepping the geometric bottleneck of dense models.

The benchmark script (
numen.ipynb
) is in the repo for reproduction.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 17:26:46+00:00
> the hn front page is the same for all users

Yes, it's an algorithmic feed that treats all active users as your friends. Stories are still boosted by votes, sorted algorithmically, and ordered by an opaque algorithm. It would fall under the ban described above.

> on ig, im happy to see my friends' posts, but

Yes, but how would that work on HN? You see no stories until you start friending people? How would you discover people if recommendation engines weren't allowed?
by indubioprorubik | 2025-12-22 17:26:54+00:00
Well, the purpose of the whole thing is to harden humanity against downfalls, distribute it all away from the people (who might become religous fanatics and analphabets) and away from the governments these people produce (insane clerics and tyrannical military dictators). The idea is to get infrastructure and software that can keep humanity going regardless. If you get research done beneath a bhurka under the taliban after a regional nuclear exchange then we reached the mile-stone of "civilizational" root hardening this whole affair aims towards.
by Alex2037 | 2025-12-22 17:26:58+00:00
lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.

like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,

and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
by tjr | 2025-12-22 17:27:20+00:00
There have been lots of tools and resources that have promised (and delivered!) increased programming productivity.

Individual results may vary, but it seems credible that thoroughly learning and using an editor like Vim or Emacs could yield a 2x productivity boost. For the most part, this has never really been pushed. If a programmer wanted to use Nano (or Notepad!), some may have found that odd, but nobody really cared. Use whatever editor you like. Even if it means leaving a 2x productivity boost on the table!

Why is it being pushed so hard that AI coding tools in particular must be used?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-22 17:27:22+00:00
Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.

If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
by ses1984 | 2025-12-22 17:27:35+00:00
I'm not sure if I would call it sarcasm, but it's a reference to a popular computer science joke format.

The first time I saw it:

>There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

The joke is that 10 is how you express 2 in base 2.

I think there is another layer to the joke, though; often in mathematics, computer science, algorithms, and software engineering, things get divided into sets, sets get broken down into two sets according to whether some property about the elements is true or false, and this joke echoes that.

It's just meant to be silly.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-22 17:28:14+00:00
> n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin

AKCSHUALLY

The root of the mean of the squared distances is sqrt(n).

The phrase as you quoted is the mean of the absolute distance. In general those are different. I don't know the latter from memory, and a quick look at the wikipedia page for Brownian motion doesn't have it.
by freedomben | 2025-12-22 17:28:18+00:00
Indeed! I also found it let me indulge in a secondary passion of mine which is fuel efficiency. For example, when I'm building it myself I can make the walls ludicrously thick and insulated to the point where it stays a relatively moderate temp inside even without climate control. I built a shed to use as a luxury dog house, and it was tight enough that a single small space heater could keep it quite pleasant in the winter (when outside temps would be a low of around 12 deg F and high around 28 deg F).

Material costs were a little ridiculous, but since I'm only building for myself that wasn't a huge issue :-)
by skeledrew | 2025-12-22 17:28:27+00:00
It's already pretty useful with the number of mentions available. Higher a number, the more that generally find a work of interest. Unless there are members who just love to spam the names of particular books. My main gripe is that this isn't a repo/gist, as a site this specialized is more likely to disappear into the wind at any time. Also the Amazon buy links; would prefer a link to Wikipedia, or even Goodreads.
Show HN: Meds — High-performance firewall powered by NFQUEUE and Go
by cnaize | 2025-12-22 17:28:58+00:00
Hi HN,
I'm the author of Meds (https://github.com/cnaize/meds).

Meds is a user-space firewall for Linux that uses NFQUEUE to inspect and filter traffic.
In the latest v0.7.0 release, I’ve added ASN-based filtering using the Spamhaus DROP list (with IP-to-ASN mapping via IPLocate.io).

Key highlights: Zero-lock core, ASN Filtering, Optimized Rate Limiting, TLS Inspection, Built-in Prometheus metrics and Swagger API.

Any feedback is very welcome!
by sipofwater | 2025-12-22 17:29:15+00:00
* "The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires." by John B. Sparks: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200375~3001080:The-Histomap--Four-Thousand-Years-O), https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.... (4194 x 19108 pixels, web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg) via https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net... (web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg); https://archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915c... (4194 x 19108 pixels, archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915cbd50a.jpg) via https://archive.ph/1wEk8

* "(Covers to) The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires.": https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200374~3000299:-Covers-to--The-Histomap--Four-Thou)
Show HN: Locolle – A bookmark manager for real-world locations
by patrickTTT | 2025-12-22 17:29:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the developer behind Locolle (https://locolle.app). I built it because I was frustrated with how difficult it is to actually "manage" place recommendations.

The Problem: My restaurant/travel saves were scattered across Apple Maps pins, long-forgotten Notes app lists, and buried group chat messages. Google/Apple Maps are great for navigation, but their "saved places" features feel like an afterthought—cluttered and hard to share meaningfully.

The Solution: Locolle treats locations like Spotify treats songs. You can:

- Create themed collections (e.g., "Best Espresso in Tokyo" or "Quiet Bars for Deep Conversations").
- Collaborate on collections with friends/partners in real-time.
- View everything on a 3D Earth view (my personal favorite feature for visualizing travel history).

Technical/Product Choices:

- iOS First: Built with SwiftUI and MapKit. I focused heavily on making the "save" flow as frictionless as possible.
- 3D Visualization: I spent a lot of time tweaking the 3D Earth view to ensure it handles hundreds of pins without performance lag.
- No Gamification: There are no "points," no "fog of war," and no social feed. It’s a tool, not a social network.

Why I’m showing it here: I’m looking for feedback on the UX and the utility. Is this a problem you face? How do you currently manage your "mental map" of the world?

The app is currently on the App Store (iOS only): https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6755667314

I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially regarding the mapping UI or any features you feel are missing from modern map apps.

I'm also happy to give away some Pro licenses to HN users — just drop a comment if you find a bug or have a suggestion.

Thanks!
by tharkun__ | 2025-12-22 17:29:59+00:00
So like most junior to mid level devs ;)

Claude does have this specific interface for asking questions now. I've only had it choose to ask me questions on its own a very few times though. But I did have it ask clarifying questions before that interface was even a thing, when I specifically asked it to ask me clarifying questions.

Again, like a junior dev. And like a junior dev, it can also help to ask it to ask / check what its doing "mid-way", i.e. watch what it's doing and stop it, when it's running down some rabbit hole you know is not gonna yield results.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-12-22 17:30:14+00:00
Sure, in a world where you can effortlessly make that work without waste or moral lossage through faceless bureaucracy on the enforcing side, that seems like a great model. E.g. a parent setting some rules around a large monthly stipend for a child: the humanity remains, it’s efficient, the morality of “if you want money you have to do something for it” can be preserved without incurring larger moral costs like “you don’t understand the circumstances”, and maybe/probably efficiency can actually be improved.

as far as I understand this entire conversation around ubi, that ideal isn’t the issue. Proponents rather hold that you cannot scale this to a society without the cost exceeding the benefit. The bureaucratic machine to sustain these rules inevitably becomes soulless, expensive, inefficient, and counter productive. Is the argument.

It’s not that we shouldn’t, it’s that, at scale, we can’t. Is the argument :)

I don’t think your statement on morals is necessarily incompatible with the practical considerations offered by others. It’s a different conversation.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-22 17:30:14+00:00
> “Better than Perl for normal developers” is not a high bar. Most languages clear that bar whether they are successful or not.

Dial the clock back to 2002, and this statement is not true. Perl became popular not because of its beauty, but because of it being extremely effective glue. It was a language to get stuff done while writing little code.

The only mainstream alternative was Python.
by agwa | 2025-12-22 17:30:18+00:00
I can't find it now but I recently saw a graph of new Debian Developers joining the project over time and it has sharply declined in recent years. I was on track to becoming a Debian Developer (attended a couple DebConfs, got some packages into the archive, became a Debian Maintainer) but I ultimately burned out in large part because of how painful Debian's tooling makes everything. Michael Stapelberg's post about leaving Debian really rings true: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...

Debian may still be "getting by" but if they don't make changes like this Git transition they will eventually stop getting by.
by sipofwater | 2025-12-22 17:30:57+00:00
"The world without hegemony" "As Pax Americana ends, a multipolar order is emerging. The history of Southeast Asia holds lessons for what’s to come": https://aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us... (aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us-about-a-multipolar-order) via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771497 ; https://archive.ph/wBrLt