MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by plaidthunder | 2025-12-31 19:12:31+00:00
The flip side of that, is that the same sense of urgency that flings populists into power also compels them to start to bend the systems that got them there in order to maintain power.

After all, if the evil "elites" -- as if populists don't comprise their own elite class -- ever gain power again they could undo all of our "progress".

You can see this tendency in how some red states, like Texas, have tried to furiously redraw their maps to maintain control of the US house. They are doing this because they fear that "the people" will not choose to give them a majority again. They even admit to it openly. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/15/trump-five-seat-pic...

California had a state wide vote to do the same thing. But they were acting in kind. Tit-for-tat is a reasonable strategy what Texas did. Though it remains a shame that it came to it.

Cumulatively, these actions represent a breakdown of the machinery in our system that allows us to course correct. It's not healthy for anyone.

Planned markets lead to bad economic outcomes, why? Because when you fix prices you lose the ability to react appropriately to changing conditions. Managed democracies lead to bad social outcomes for the same reason. You need reasonably fair elections in order to sense the condition of the population and react to it.

Yet, populist rhetoric ups the emotional ante to the point where it starts to convince people that it's a good idea to subvert this. The old "Flight 93 Election" essay from 2016 is the perfect case study in this sort of absurd rhetorical escalation. Where they literally said, if Trump doesn't win America is doomed forever. We have to "charge the cockpit" before the plane crashes, so to speak.

Yet, when he lost in 2020, America didn't end forever. It's all been a farce and a grab for power.
by basilikum | 2025-12-31 19:12:35+00:00
That's only mathematically true. The advantage is way too small to be relevant.

Your advantage is having exhausted a fraction of the search space. But that fraction is tiny.

You're trying to find a hash with a value below a certain threshold (simplified said, a hash starting with a certain amount of zeroes). You do this by trying random inputs to the hash function. Every input has the same probability of getting an output that is low enough in value. You are not advancing by having tried other inputs. It's practically equivalent to rolling multiple dices until enough of them show a one. Every roll has the same probability of succeeding regardless of the rolls before.
by busywaiting | 2025-12-31 19:12:51+00:00
> The original phrase "The customer is always right" had an important caveat: "... in matters of taste".

This is not true. This is fairly recent Internet revisionism with no historical basis, an attempt to "well ackshually" the phrase into something else to make a point.

"The customer is always right" has always meant, "It's better to appease occasional assholes than to risk ever disappointing a customer with a legitimate grievance." Of course, TCIAR is not a natural imperiative. It's an unproven philosophical proposition that may or may not be appropriate at any given time and in any given industry.

To the extent that there is an "original" formulation, it might be Marshal Field's "Give the lady what she wants," which is (probably intentionally) vague on exactly how it should be applied. (And remember that "lady" in Field's time had some classist connotations that are less present today.")
Discussion about AI in data tracking and databrokering
by webowl | 2025-12-31 19:12:52+00:00
I was thinking about how huge AI is nowdays in the tracking & databrokering schemes, like how companies can use AI to make data tracking and ”databrokering” easier and that way show very targeted ads and sell data, it’s wild how AI changes that area and how big potential it is for databroker companies etc, and i think we will see even more targeted ads in the future than now because of Artificial Intelligence, which might not be the best thing to hear for privacy enthusiasts.
by sneak | 2025-12-31 19:13:00+00:00
I disagree. The moral thing to do would be to respect the stated wishes of the author of the software, who made clear when they published it that no payments of any kind are expected.

If I gave you a gift and you tried to give me money, I would be offended.

I’m not saying free software publishers wouldn’t accept donations - just that publishing free software is giving a gift to the world, and there is NO moral obligation placed on recipients. That’s the point of free software.
by dpark | 2025-12-31 19:13:11+00:00
I don’t know anything about the “Pacific Islander lobby” but it’s not relevant here. The sentence here is clearly just not using the Oxford comma. Only the summary for journalists uses this construction. The actual abstract does not.

This paper breaks out Asian and Pacific Islander as separate ethnic groups in their data. You can see it in this summary and in the slightly more detailed data if you click through to the paper on JAMA.

(Actually they break out “Non-Hispanic Asian” and “Non-Hispanic
Native Hawaiian or
Other Pacific
Islander”. The need to call out “non-Hispanic” on every ethnicity seems weird.)
by pregnenolone | 2025-12-31 19:13:37+00:00
I'm sorry, but this is a big load of crap and that includes some of the comments in here. Java enthusiasts are the absolute world champions of sugarcoating the shortcomings of Java and the JVM in general.

This is what writing a CLI application in Go looks like: you download Go and immediately have all the tools needed to manage dependencies, write applications, and compile them into lightweight, distributable binaries with a simple command.

Now, let’s consider how this process looks in Java. First, you need to download A(!) JDK – and there are multiple ones. Many newcomers struggle with the variety of JDKs, but let's move past that. The JDK alone doesn’t handle dependencies; it’s highly likely you’ll end up using either Maven or Gradle, both of which are complex and tiresome, requiring you to deal with either XML (Maven) or Groovy/Kotlin. What seems to be missed is the potential of tools like JBang, which should ideally come out of the box. The Scala people addressed this effectively with scala-cli which is now the default Scala runner. Anyway, you’re still far from finished. You've just figured out how to write applications; now you need to figure out how to distribute them. This involves understanding jpackage – if you want an application smaller than 100MB, you’ll likely need to use jlink beforehand. And, heaven forbid, your application uses Java 9+ modules, as then you'll be wrestling with the complexities of modularity itself. If you’ve managed to navigate all of this, you’ll end up with an application that includes a bundled JRE. A compressed, modularized “hello world” application can easily size at least 30MB and take several hundred milliseconds to start.

Then there's Graal Native, which allows you to compile your applications ahead of time into natively executable binaries. However, compiling Java applications ahead of time is complicated by runtime class initialization, reflection etc. which is why the Graal compiler needs significant configuration beforehand. There are tracing agents to help you compile such configurations, but even with them, it’s incredibly tiresome and not always reliable. Furthermore, the produced binaries tend to be large and don't play well with upx.

I think the JDK developers could learn from Scala CLI, which is now the default Scala runner. I'm convinced it would really help Java if it came with something like that out of the box.
Happy New Year HN!
by thunderbong | 2025-12-31 19:13:48+00:00
Wishing everyone here a wonderful 2026.

But more than that, I would like to wish this forum, this space, this virtual reality on the internet, another wonderful year. For broadening horizons, for piquing curiosity, for reminding all of us to celebrate and rejoice at the wonder and awe in the world around us.

Happy New Year!
by aaronblohowiak | 2025-12-31 19:14:03+00:00
The idea of doing a thing (or having done the thing) and the actual DOING of the thing are very different. See this a lot where people think they want to be a woodworker or a baseball player or an author, but the actual _work_ of sweeping dust, doing 200 hits a day off a tee or grinding out words by deadlines are not as appealing as the halo or mystique of the final product once made the activity seem. this doubles on the effect that humans are terrible at predicting what will make us happy. so, i am glad this author was self aware enough to follow their bliss, but the last paragraph made me wonder if their introspection was fully resolved.
by meanraw | 2025-12-31 19:14:25+00:00
Struggling with screen time? This app helps you break the cycle by turning walking into the key that unlocks your favorite apps and websites. Set the apps or web domains you want to limit, choose how much walking earns you screen time, and let healthier habits build themselves—step by step.

How It Works
• Select apps & websites to limit Social media, streaming, games—choose what you want to take control of.

• Earn screen time by walking: The more you walk, the more time you earn to use the apps you’ve locked.

• Get healthier without trying: Every scroll becomes a reason to walk. Healthier habits come naturally.
by zkmon | 2025-12-31 19:14:49+00:00
This story is a prototype of thousands of other stories going on right now. Of course we can't blame the book businesses. They are in survival struggle. They have no clue what to do. Every business is barely holding onto whatever that might keep them in business. AI is bad, but it is the new mafia in the town. Just erase all your beliefs instincts and make friends with it.

Maybe write a book about "Classic projects using AI", whether it makes sense or not. And use AI to write that.
by andreyandrade | 2025-12-31 19:14:54+00:00
Ponto Zero scores markets 0-100 based on:
- Number of established players
- Market concentration
- Entry barriers
- Growth rate
- Sector maturity

Examples: Food Delivery (92/100 - Critical), Elder Care Tech (28/100 - Low).

Stack: Pure Go, LevelDB, server-side HTML, zero JS frameworks. Loads <1s.

Currently ~80 markets analyzed. Open to suggestions for markets to add.

Feedback welcome – especially on methodology improvements.
by triceratops | 2025-12-31 19:15:11+00:00
I'm going to restate my proposed age verification system here. I've posted it several times as a comment on this website. It works as follows:

1. A private company, let's call it AgeVerify, issues scratch-off cards with unique tokens on them. They are basically like gift cards.

2. AgeVerify's scratch-off cards are sold exclusively in IRL stores. Preferably liquor stores, adult stores, and/or tobacco/vape shops. Places that are licensed and check ID.

3. Anyone who wants to verify their age online can purchase a token at a store. The store must only demand ID if the buyer appears to be a minor (similar to alcohol or tobacco purchases). The store must never store the ID in any form whatsoever.

4. Giving or selling these tokens to a minor is a criminal offense. If a store does it, they lose their liquor or tobacco license. Treat it just like giving a minor alcohol or tobacco.

4a. Run public service announcement campaigns to communicate that giving an AgeVerify token to a child is like handing them a cigarette. There should be a clear social taboo associated with the legal ban.

5. The buyer of the AgeVerify token enters it into their account on whatever social media or adult website they want to use. The website validates the code with AgeVerify.

6. Once validated, the code is good for 1 year (or 6 months or 3 months, adjust based on how stringent you want to make it) - then it expires and a new one must be purchased.

7. A separate token is required for each website/each account.

8. The website is responsible for enforcing no account sharing.

No identifying information is stored anywhere. Kids find it very hard to access age-restricted materials online, just like the vast majority of kids don't easily have access to alcohol or cigarettes.
by socialcommenter | 2025-12-31 19:15:36+00:00
I'm not sure it stops there, either - I wonder if others feel the same. If every platform is doing this, then are they destroying the trust of online media (the internet?) in general? Facebook isn't exactly alone in its reputation of monetising people's attention and serving them dangerous content.

I'm eagerly waiting for the day when the elderly people in my family swear off the internet entirely.
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-31 19:16:02+00:00
Well, one part of a proper education of a child is to teach them that life isn't about gratification. Neil Postman made this point already in Amusing Ourselves to Death. By educating kids with Sesame street you didn't teach them to love education, you taught them to love television.

When you make learning synonymous with fun people start to believe that if they aren't having fun they aren't learning. Which accounts I think for something that a lot of teachers at all levels have observed, kids are increasingly unable to learn if there's no immediate reward.
by leonidasv | 2025-12-31 19:16:13+00:00
I used to watch archived episodes of Computer Chronicles on YouTube almost every night before going to bed back in 2016~2018. It was my bedtime entertainment, watching those recordings from another era of computing and observing the hosts' enthusiasm for things we take for granted today. As a late millennial, it helped me experience a bit of what the 80s and 90s were like in computing.

RIP Stewart.
by teamonkey | 2025-12-31 19:16:28+00:00
It’s easy to see that the surface of the earth is a ball - or at least a curved surface - simply by going to the seaside and watching ships dip below the horizon before they fully disappear.

The ancient Greeks proved it was a ball and measured the dimensions of it using mathematics, but the concept of a curved earth was known to seafarers long before that.
by gjvc | 2025-12-31 19:16:54+00:00
Very much agree. Being in the UK I never saw the original broadcasts, but I've enjoyed them on YouTube. (the ability to "time-travel" with YouTube never ceases to amaze me.)

We had a similar pair over here in .uk -- Chris Serle and Ian McNaught-Davis. They had a down-to-earth way of presenting the like of which we will not see again, mainly because of their characters, but also of the context in which they were presenting: as you say seeking to make the public aware about the wave of the future. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme (the theme music of which was Kraftwerk's "Computer World", no less!))
by k__ | 2025-12-31 19:16:58+00:00
Somehow, I miss the time when I was writing a book. It's nice to do the work and research and also nice to refine. Getting money later without doing much anymore was also cool.

But my consecutive attempts of writing a book failed because of my ADHD and missing guidance. I can't do employment, but I really need someone to "nag" me 2-3 times a month to keep focus.
by taylorsatula | 2025-12-31 19:17:03+00:00
Hi all, thank you all for the OUTPOURING of support for the MIRA project over the past few weeks. It trips me out that people are creating discussions, lodging bugs for me to fix, and even proposing feature improvements!

This release represents focused work on MIRA's relationship with self, time, and context. Since the original 1.0.0 release generic OpenAI/local providers have full feature parity with the native Anthropic format, the working_memory has been modified so that the model receives a HUD (for lack of a better) word in a sliding assistant message that contains reminders and relevant memories, and adjustments to the context window to better articulate the passage of time between messages.

In the 1.0.0 release I did not realize the percentage of users who would be operating the application totally offline. Significant improvements have been made on this front and now has rock offline/self-hosted solid reliability.

Also, since the original 1.0.0 release I have switched to a AGPL 3.0 open-source license.

Various other improvements have been made and are contained in the release notes for releases 2025.12.30-feat and 2025.12.24.

Thank you all again for all of the feedback. It is wildly satisfying to work on a project so diligently for so long and then have it embraced by the community. Keep the feature requests comin'!
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-31 19:17:09+00:00
We went through this before when role playing started to become a thing (DnD was blamed for many suicides although most claims were debunked). Now that role playing is comprehensively computerized, is this going to be a thing we go through again? I can’t help but wonder how AI safeguards will help here and how people will get around them anyways (using local uncensored models).
by gunnarmorling | 2025-12-31 19:17:58+00:00
It's a non-issue with GraalVM native binaries. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445989 for an example: this CLI tools starts in ms, fast enough you can launch it during tab completions and have it invoke a REST API without any noticeable delay whatsoever.

But also when running on the JVM, things have improved dramatically over the last few years, e.g. due to things such as AOT class loading and linking. For instance, a single node Kafka broker starts in ~300 ms.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-31 19:17:59+00:00
Things go in cycles because people who get into power on a crusade against something are never satisfied that they've done enough to address that issue.

In the gilded age we had robber barons and trusts. That lead to trust-busting and anti-monopoly regulation. Eventually the history is forgotten and people see the current regulations as burdensome. Someone gets into power with a mandate to deregulate, and we eventually end up with monopolies again.

Private enterprise and free markets are good. Monopolies are not. It doesn't have to be one or the other but nobody can seem to take their hands off when we reach a happy middle ground.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-31 19:18:18+00:00
Linking to your site in every single comment will get downvotes. It's not a hard rule, there are a few exceptions, let's say it applies 99% of the times.

Using a sockpuppet/coworker/whatever like https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=puildupO to make questions so you can reply with a link to your site will get downvotes.
Show HN: Fleet / Event manager for Star Citizen MMO
by legitcoders | 2025-12-31 19:18:41+00:00
I built an open-source org management platform for Star Citizen, a space MMO where player orgs can have 50K+ members managing fleets worth millions.

https://scorg.org

The problem: SC's official tools won't launch until 2026, but players need to coordinate now - track 100+ ship fleets, schedule ops across timezones, manage alliances, and monitor voice activity during battles.

Interesting challenges solved:

1. Multi-org data isolation - Users join multiple orgs, so every query needs scoping.

2. Canvas + Firebase Storage CORS - Couldn't export fleet layouts as PNG. Solution: fetch images as blobs, convert to base64 data URLs, then draw to canvas. No CORS config needed.

3. Discord bot - Built 4 microservices (VoiceActivityTracker, EventNotifier, ChannelManager, RoleSync) sharing Firebase state. Auto-creates channels for ops, cleans up when done.

Features: role-based access, event calendar with RSVP, LFG matchmaking, drag-and-drop fleet builder, economy tools, alliance system, analytics dashboard, mobile-responsive.

~15 pages, fully functional. Custom military-inspired UI (monospace, gold accents).
by rijavecb | 2025-12-31 19:19:27+00:00
Happy New Year from Bucharest!

My wrap includes getting married, travelling to Italy, Slovenia and Germany, finally making a few sales of the app I'm working on, and dealing with residence permit. In 2026 I will continue working on my apps and hopefully make more sales, I hope to do some freelancing, fish more with dad and travel a bit.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-31 19:19:40+00:00
It's a really tiresome conversation, and I should just stop replying, but...

If you have to stop torrenting it doesn't mean that you have to pay $20 per movie. There is a price >0 that you're willing to pay to do something you love. On youtube there's a lot of movies for 4 or 5 dollars.

I'm also using Claude, both through Cursor (paid by my company) and privately (paid by me, $20/ month).
by manchicken | 2025-12-31 19:19:43+00:00
You may be mistaken. There is a good (and growing) number of folks who have noticed that vibe-coding isn’t always the right fit. There have also been a number of instances where AI agents have destroyed production environments.

In your 4+ years of “experience,” have you acquired the experience necessary to protect anybody’s GitHub, slack, or any other enterprise systems from the numerous security concerns that you’re just hand-waiving away?

Not all “devs” use AI, and very few companies would trust a fully vibe-coded enterprise system plugin with no security team, no enterprise support, no GDPR documentation, and all fielded by a team with fewer than five years of experience.

That seems like the path to breaches, or to having an agent take destroy sensitive systems, or both.
by judah | 2025-12-31 19:20:28+00:00
Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.

Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.

This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.
by nospice | 2025-12-31 19:20:28+00:00
I am honestly a bit puzzled by this description and I wish they had named the publisher. I'm fairly familiar with this space and the usual experience with tech publishers is that they don't get all that invested in what they publish because 99% of technical books sell somewhere between 500-5,000 copies. That's barely enough to pay the copyeditor to do the bare minimum (often paying attention only for the first couple of chapters), then pay the layout guy, then the proofreader.

The usual accounts I've heard from my friends who published with Wiley, Addison-Wesley, or O'Reilly is that they sign up, get some in-depth feedback on the first couple of chapters, and then are on their own. I've never heard of a tech publisher exercising this level of creative control. I don't doubt that this happened, but it just sounds out of the ordinary.