MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by llmslave2 | 2025-12-30 10:26:55+00:00
In my career I've seen many programmers who cut corners to finish their work faster. It's rarely laziness, but something else that I'm not sure of. But they race to churn out something that appears to work before jumping into the next thing, usually with messy unmaintainable code with poor performance characteristics, lacking any handling of edge cases and with subtle (and not so subtle) bugs.

I think AI is like crack for these programmers, since the output of LLM's is so similar to what they would normally produce. In some cases it really is a 10x speedup for them. But it's also a 10x slowdown for those who have to fix and maintain that software. Which I believe explains both the lack of increased production output and variance of opinion on this.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-30 10:27:08+00:00
People investigation Israel for war crimes tend to get sanctioned by the Americans. Because European banks don't have the necessary guardrails to block an individual account from participating in their American-facing banking operations, they have to choose between being sanctioned themselves or kicking out their America-sanctioned customers.

The real solution is for them to fix their shitty systems but I don't a handful of judges, lawyers, and human rights activists are important enough for them to make that investment.
Show HN: HyperCell – Open-source Excel calculation engine for Java
by bradpeters | 2025-12-30 10:27:34+00:00
Hi HN! I built HyperCell to solve a problem we kept hitting at our company (Scoop Analytics):

Business teams model everything in Excel – pricing logic, risk calculations, financial forecasts. Engineers then rewrite that logic in Java. Every time. This translation process causes bugs, delays, and drift between "what the business thinks the logic is" vs "what's actually running."

HyperCell takes a different approach: load the Excel file, compile the formulas into a DAG, and execute them in-memory. No translation. The spreadsheet IS the code.

Technical details:
- Parses Excel formulas using ANTLR4
- Builds a dependency graph for intelligent recalculation
- 200+ functions (SUM, VLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, IF, NPV, IRR, etc.)
- Cross-validated against Excel with 82,881 formulas at 100% accuracy
- ~50ms to load a typical workbook, sub-millisecond recalculation

Use cases we've seen:
- Insurance companies running rating models
- Fintech doing real-time pricing
- E-commerce with vendor-specific shipping rules

It's Apache 2.0 licensed. We extracted it from our production system where it's been running for 2+ years.

Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or implementation!
by hn8726 | 2025-12-30 10:27:37+00:00
It's still possible, you just need to declare which other apps you query for. Even then, there are loopholes that still let you query for all apps installed on the device.

But HSBC app declares "<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES"/>" permission, which requires an explicit approval (https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...) but

> Apps that have a verifiable core purpose facilitating financial-transactions involving financially regulated instruments (for example, dedicated banking, dedicated digital wallets) may obtain broad visibility into installed apps solely for security-based purposes.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 10:28:00+00:00
For all we know, you both could comparing using a Nokia 3310 and a workstation PC based on the hardware, but you both just say "this computer is better than that computer".

There are a ton of models out there, ran in a ton of different ways, that can be used in different ways with different harnesses, and people use different workflows. There is just so many variables involved, that I don't think it's neither fair nor accurate for anyone to claim "This is obviously better" or "This is obviously impossible".

I've been in situations where I hit my head against some hard to find bug for days, then I put "AI" (but what? No one knows) to it and it solves it in 20 minutes. I've also asked "AI" to do trivial work that it still somehow fucked up, even if I could probably have asked a non-programmer friend to do it and they'd be able to.

The variance is great, and the fact that system/developer/user prompts matter a lot for what the responses you get, makes it even harder to fairly compare things like this without having the actual chat logs in front of you.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-12-30 10:28:26+00:00
> Entire categories of illegal states and transitions can be eliminated.

I have an over-developed, unhealthy interest in the utility of types for LLM generated code.

When an llm is predicting the next token to generate, my current level of understanding tells me that it makes sense that the llm's attention mechanism will be using the surrounding type signatures (in the case of an explicitly typed language) or the compiler error messages (in the cases where a language leans on implicit typing) to better predict that next token.

However, that does not seem to be the behaviour i observe. What i see is more akin to tokens in the type signature position in a piece of code often being generated without any seeming relationship to the instructions being written. It's common to generate code that the compiler rejects.

That problem is easily hidden and worked around - just wrap your llm invocation in a loop, feed in the compiler errors each time and you now have an "agent" that can stochastic gradient descent its way to a solution.

Given this, you could say well what does it matter, even if an LLM doesn't meaningfully "understand" the relationship between types and instructions, there's already a feedback loop and therefore a solution available - so why do we even need to care about the fact an llm may or may not treat types as a tool to accurately model the valid solution space.

Well i can't help think this is really the crux of software development. Either you're writing code to solve a defined problem (valuable) or you're doing something else that may mimic that to some degree but is not accurate (bugs).

All that said, pragmatically speaking, software with bugs is often still valuable.

TL;DR i'm currently thinking humans should always define the type signatures and test cases, these are too important to let an LLM "mid" its way through.
by ruszki | 2025-12-30 10:28:40+00:00
I heard this “review very closely” thing many times, and rarely means review very closely. Maybe 5% of developers really do this ever, and I probably overestimate it. When people send here AI generated code, it’s quite obvious that they don’t review code properly. There are videos when people recorded how we should use LLMs, and they clearly don’t do this.
by KurSix | 2025-12-30 10:28:54+00:00
This was inevitable, and it's not about being strict, but about banal technical limitations. Remote proctoring has always been security theater, but Vision LLMs combined with hardware solutions put the final nail in the coffin. The fundamental problem is simple: you cannot software-secure a device to which the attacker has physical access.
ACCA simply admitted defeat in an arms race where the attack became orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective than the defense. The only reliable "air gap" from AI today is a physical room and paper
by sschueller | 2025-12-30 10:29:25+00:00
First of all you need to provide some proof because being against a genocide is not antisemitic. Hating Israel is not antisemitic even if Bibi wants you to believe that.

Second of all, what happened to free speech? In fact I can list several actual antisemites currently operating freely in the US political discourse who are gathering larger and larger audiences. Why aren't they being sanctioned?
by allan_s | 2025-12-30 10:29:35+00:00
Yes sorry I meant firefox not for the way its sync , but in the way its a heavy client you install.
As said for me most of my devices will be at some times during the week in the same nat so that no centralized server even short lived should be needed. And for personnal use, I only care if the device I have on me is the one with latest data especially as for most use case I'm the only one reading/ writing , so eventually consistency is not an issue
by anthk | 2025-12-30 10:29:59+00:00
In Spain (I think the whole Hispano-America by proxy) the BBVA's banking app just allow a 6 char long password. This is bullshit. Also, if you try to root the smartphone the app might disable itself.
I'm tired of this. Can't wait to a good cyber attack from Russia+China so the whole security theater crumbles down (and in China too because of the social credit) until the civil rights get restored back.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-30 10:30:08+00:00
It doesn't. I don't know if she's an antisemite, but unless the bank dumps her for being one and an Italian judge agrees that they're allowed to for that reason, this is a clear result of foreign political influence.

Calling the UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories a "vile antisemite" sounds a lot like trolling, though.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 10:30:42+00:00
People, at least novice developers, tend to prefer fast and quick boilerplate that makes them look effective, over spending one hour sitting just thinking and designing, then implementing some simple abstraction. This is true today, and been true for as long as I've been in programming.

Besides, not all programming work can be abstracted into a library and reused across projects, not because it's technically infeasible, but because the client doesn't want to, cannot for legal reasons or the developer process at the client's organization simply doesn't support that workflow. Those are just the reasons from the top of my head, that I've encountered before, and I'm sure there is more reasons.
by low_tech_love | 2025-12-30 10:30:44+00:00
The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.
Show HN: Cover letter maker with Ollama/local LLMs (Open source)
by stanyy | 2025-12-30 10:31:09+00:00
I made an open source web app that generates cover letters using local AI models (Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, Openrouter, etc) so your CV and job application data never leaves your browser.
No placeholders. No typing. Letters are ready to copy and paste. 100% local and private depending on the LLM of your choice. Multi-language support (so you can add more languages).

It connects to any OpenAI-compatible local LLM endpoint. I use it with Ollama + llama3.2, but it works with any server.

The generated letters unique since they are based on your unique experience and skills from your resume. They will also be written as if directly responding to that job posting, so all letters are unique.

I honestly don't feel bad about using or making this becuase while actively applying for jobs, I see that a high percentage of recruiters now use AI to generate job descriptions and also during the interview process.

I was tired of wasting time with writing and personalising letters while applying for jobs. All other tools I tried weren't as quick as I wanted because I still needed to modify the letters to replace placeholders.

I also didn't find any tool that let's me use my local LLM for free, and I didn't want to pay for ChatGPT/Claude API calls for every job application.

The output quality is good, and it can bypass some AI detectors.

It's open source too and free to use. You can self-host it or run it locally in development mode.

GitHub: https://github.com/stanleyume/coverlettermaker

Cheers :)
by archi42 | 2025-12-30 10:31:34+00:00
Nope. That's a misconception. Due to space constraints I don't have dedicated speakers for our living room TV. And I don't think I'm the only one.

And I do own two proper dedicated speakers + amps setups. I also know how to use REW and Sigma Studio. So I guess I qualify regarding "cares".

Sadly I lack time to build a third set of cabinets to the constraints of our living room.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-30 10:31:50+00:00
I'm listening to a majority of video content in my stereo headphones on PC. They are good and quality of every source is good. Everything sounds fine except for some movie and some TV shows specifically. And those are atrocious in clarity.

Regarding internal speakers, I have listened to several cheap to medium TVs on internal speakers, and yes on some models the sound was bad. But it doesn't matter, because the most mangled frequencies are high and low, and that's not the voice ones. When I listen on the TV with meh internal speakers I can clearly understand without any distortion voices in the normal TV programming, in sports TV, in old TV shows and old movies. The only offenders again are some of he new content.

So no, it's not the internal speakers who are at fault, at all.
by sdoering | 2025-12-30 10:32:11+00:00
I have set up a few alerts and feeds I check semi-regularly. And I have a script sending me a summary of important world, regional, local news as a pushover notification in the morning. So I get two pushes - one is for the weather report, one for global events that might impact my life (I am still in the process of dialing in the sensitivity level of what the report should contain).

Because - on the other hand - I am very much interested in advances in different sciences and would love a better report on actual advances (and not just BS headlines about some new weight loss thing or currently alien speculations from interstellar objects)...

But I am getting there over time. So that I can increase the signal to noise ratio a bit.
by accidentallfact | 2025-12-30 10:32:50+00:00
I think it isn't a mixing issue, it's an acting issue.

It's the obsession with accents, mixed with the native speakers' conviction that vowels are the most important part.

Older movies tended to use some kind of unplaceable ("mid atlantic") accent, that could be easily understood.

But modern actors try to imitate accents and almost always focus on the vowels. Most native speakers seem to be convinced that vowels are the most important part of English, but I think it isn't true. Sure, English has a huge number of vowels, but they are almost completely redundant. It's hard to find cases where vowels really matter for comprehension, which is why they may vary so much across accents without impeding communication. So what the actors do is that they focus on the vowels, but slur the consonants, and you are pretty much completely lost without the consonants.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 10:33:02+00:00
That sort of sanctioning is world-wide, isn't it? Not specifically targeting EU banks, but rather she's blacklisted from any bank in the world who follows those blacklisting lists, at least from what I understand it.

Parent's comment gave me the impression that this was something exclusive to EU (and Swiss) banks in particular, since they were mentioned by name.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-30 10:33:06+00:00
* Cities: By rights, he should be correct about cities, but instead humans are all being forced into cities even though there is no particular need to.

* Planetary engineering: We seem to be able to change the environment of this world but are nowhere near doing it to other ones yet.

* Primates: Nowhere near that one.

* Replicators: nowhere near this yet.

* Suspended animation: I have heard this discussed for decades but AFAIK no one has managed to achieve a decent version of it.

* Telecommunication: largely correct.

* Transhumanism: he talks about the evolutionary potential but not about the potential costs, or how certain forces could use it to control others.
by hulitu | 2025-12-30 10:33:14+00:00
> Public figures and European firms push users to leave US platforms they warn are damaging democracy

> CCC members in local chapters throughout Germany will assist users, for example, in switching their browsers from Google’s Chrome to Firefox or from Elon Musk’s X to Mastodon, a European-run decentralised social media network.

So Microsoft with Edge (based on ... Chrome) is ok. And no word about Facebook, or Apple or Intel, or Android or Micron, or Asus, or MSI, or Nvidia, or ...

But hey, it is a start. /s
by bhouston | 2025-12-30 10:33:29+00:00
TL/DR: I strongly encourage you to understand the fundamentals and not view all of our tools as black boxes, but once you have an understanding of the tools and the various layers of abstraction, feel free to use them to boost your productivity and output.

---

This is equivalent to saying "to understand wood working, do not use power tools, use hand tools to understand the wood and the process."

Sure, if you want to artisan woodworking, sure skip power tools or at least try it for a while to get a deeper understanding.

It is no different than saying that programming languages hide the subtleties of the hardware and we should be using assembly.

But once you understand the fundamentals, if you want to get a lot done at low cost (e.g. a professional who delivers at scale), you definitely need to use the power tools (e.g. high level abstractions/automations) that boost productivity.
by ben_w | 2025-12-30 10:34:11+00:00
I don't speak for mullingitover, but… "other" reasons? Surely all the stuff he's done are the reasons?

And Musk seems to have tarred himself:

Tesla sales are down a lot even in places where the market is growing, in part because it was lefty liberals who were the original primary market for EVs.

Musk's support for Trump (who openly hates eco-friendly anything and appears to be tanking the US economy with inflation and tariffs and the only growth sector being AI DCs) also appears to be the reason the entire EV market in the US is going down.

He's also having spats with various national leaders. But… look, in UK, Keir Starmer has catastrophically poor opinion poll ratings, Musk's managing to bob around the same level, slightly worse, in part due to tweeting things seen as calling for a civil war in the UK.

Similar in Germany. Where the Gigafactory is… ah, still a building site, not having needed to expand to the full potential of the water licence it had. (A factoid I only know about due to comparisons with the combined AI data centre use across the state of Arizona).
by low_tech_love | 2025-12-30 10:34:16+00:00
My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.
by hardwarepirate | 2025-12-30 10:34:23+00:00
i can recommend renoise, not sequencer, but a tracker, used for creating demo tracks (the music in cracks) or genres like breakcore, jungle, edm. venetian snares uses it after he used cubase in the 90s/00s.

it's rather customisable, reasonably priced and just works great as a daw for electronic music.

https://renoise.com/download
it even comes with a demo and it's own vst for other daw'.
by ema | 2025-12-30 10:35:04+00:00
I think Gothic II did this really well. While there are some clear borders a lot of the transitions between the three categories are gradual and organic. You're mostly safe in the secondary settlements but go too far into someone's backyard and you might suddenly find yourself fighting for your life. It also managed to make the place feel expansive without any place feeling like repetitive filler content.
by benjiro | 2025-12-30 10:35:59+00:00
> as far as I understand that did not affect the individuals' ability to to bank

Did you read the article?

The judge reported closed/blocked bank accounts, booking being cancelled (successful booked, then later cancelled by the companies)...

https://verfassungsblog.de/sanctions-us-icc-united-states/

From a other poster:

> He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction.

Same with recently Garry Kasparov been designated a "T" by Russia. Banks simply do not take risks dealing with hot customers, as this can affect their entire business (especially if they have branches in the US).

So they rather railroad individuals that have little power, then take the risk that they will lose millions if the US sanctions their bank. Its also linked to a lot of other things.

Somebody who worked at a bank gave a description yesterday on how it works. And if your on that list, you are really in a world of hurt.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-30 10:36:15+00:00
This is beautiful. Love the design. When I read the title I thought it was "one page per Unicode" so I click on the codes and hope a page will open with a giant Unicode where I can see about it in details.

Oh well! Still good.

When I click the "Click to copy" my UI reflex tells me to look for a "Copied!" or similar acknowledgement. But I don't see one, so there's uncertainty if it was copied safely to my invisible clipboard or not.

Please keep making this, it's good! What inspired you for the design? I like this style, and notice it around, but can't pinpoint.
by pimeys | 2025-12-30 10:36:53+00:00
Yeah. I know, I'm from Finland originally. People in Berlin are quite often just rude, but it's just something you have to deal with when living in this city.

I've been living in Berlin for 15 years now, and every time I visit Finland I'm shocked when for example the cashier in the supermarket smiles to me and is friendly. Are they mocking me, is this a joke? It takes a few days to adapt.

Naturally living in Berlin means you learn to hate and love your city at the same time. You hate so many things in here, and when you travel, you're happy to come back because the place you were in of course misses all the unique aspects of Berlin.
by praseodym | 2025-12-30 10:37:30+00:00
They might not be dependent on ad revenue, but they are a greedy company that will not leave any money on the table. Next year, more ads are coming to the App Store that already generates a profit of over $10 billion/year: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-more-ads-are-...