MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hamdingers | 2025-12-07 16:40:18+00:00
Candy bars and soda sure whatever. Look at essentials. The dollar store near me charges $1.99 for 8oz of Tide, the Albertsons a single block further charges $9.99 for 84oz, the dollar store is over double the cost. It's the same story with soap, cleaning products, etc. A tiny container for cheap feels like a deal if you can't do the math, but it's not. Feel free to "test it yourself."

I'm lucky in that I have a real grocery store nearby to compare to. If you live in a food desert where these big chains have driven out all competition you wouldn't have a choice.
by eudamoniac | 2025-12-07 16:40:23+00:00
Recommending books based on reading history is one of the very few uses of AI I'd consider good. With enough metadata about books it will be able to recommend similarities better than anyone, with appropriate topical filters. Storygraph is a Goodreads alternative trying to make use of this.

It would probably be better to use a deterministic graph algorithm to do this, but it's seemingly too hard for anyone to do properly.
by maccard | 2025-12-07 16:40:34+00:00
> Obviously the battery should be replaceable. (It should be in most electronics, really...)

This is super wasteful when we can just hook up a heating element to an insulated tank and keep it hot like Quooker [0] does. Assuming the 3L tank, that would mean probably 20 minutes to heat the tank if it's entirely emptied for the US, but that's how long it would take to boil that water with an electric kettle _anyway_. If you want 5l of water for cooking, you cna use your 3L tank and fill it up with the "slightly lukewarm water that keeps coming through the tap", and then put it on the hob _anyway_. In the best case you're boiling 2L of water instead of 5 anyway.

> That doesn't seem like a particularly tricky problem to me. The standard kettle already tries as hard as possible to insulate the heat. If you were really worried it'd be possible to put the battery on a separate power brick instead probably.

Dunno what kettle you're using but no kettle I've ever used has been insulated. They're either plastic, or stainless steel. They do usually have a lid, which helps.

[0] https://www.quooker.co.uk/tanks
Show HN: A Vaadin 24, Spring algebra calculator with dynamic variable buttons
by bellaOxmyx | 2025-12-07 16:40:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this small symbolic algebra calculator as a side project, and I just added a new UI concept I'm excited about: the calculator creates variable buttons dynamically based on whatever the user types.

Type "furnace1", and a button for furnace1 instantly appears. Type multi-character variables like b1 or house2, and they become buttons too. It's a calculator metaphor, but for symbolic equations instead of only numbers.

It's built with Vaadin 24 and Spring Boot in just a few hundred lines of Java. The backend calls a symbolic solver, and the UI stays clean because only the variables actually used appear on the screen.

Live demo: https://algebrator-repo1a-production.up.railway.app/

Source code: https://github.com/eGantry/algebrator-repo1a

Would love feedback on: - the dynamic-variable UI idea, - the UX flow, - whether this approach feels intuitive for math/puzzle problems, - any ideas for extensions or edge cases to test.

Thanks for taking a look!
Ask HN: Why don't we teach technical founders to sell their vision?
by jclopezsDS | 2025-12-07 16:40:51+00:00
Observation: The best technical founders I know became the best salespeople.

The #1 skill they learned wasn't code, it was selling their vision.

Why don't we teach this? Most technical founders learn to code, but not to sell. Yet selling your vision is what separates successful founders from great engineers.

What's your take?
by bcantrill | 2025-12-07 16:41:34+00:00
I am really surprised that people are surprised by this, and honestly the reference was so casual in the RFD because it's probably the way that I use LLMs the most (so very much coming from my own personal experience). I will add a footnote to the RFD to explain this, but just for everyone's benefit here: at Oxide, we have a very writing-intensive hiring process.[0] Unsurprisingly, over the last six months, we have seen an explosion of LLM-authored materials (especially for our technical positions). We have told applicants to be careful about doing this[1], but they do it anyway. We have also seen this coupled with outright fraud (though less frequently). Speaking personally, I spend a lot of time reviewing candidate materials, and my ear has become very sensitive to LLM-generated materials. So while I generally only engage an LLM to aid in detection when I already have a suspicion, they have proven adept. (I also elaborated on this a little in our podcast episode with Ben Shindel on using LLMs to explore the fraud of Aidan Toner-Rodgers.[2])

I wasn't trying to assert that LLMs can find all LLM-generated content (which feels tautologically impossible?), just that they are useful for the kind of LLM-generated content that we seek to detect.

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003

[1] https://oxide.computer/careers

[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-material...
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-07 16:41:36+00:00
> Also, the AfD folks would be rather fighting for Russia

This is what I was suspecting a bit.

But how did they get there? didn't the people from the former German Democratic Republic (where AfD is very strong and a lot of recruits are) broke the wall to liberate themselves from Russia and the USSR?

What happened in the last decade that they would now swing back to Russia?
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-07 16:41:59+00:00
Of course it was cultural. This article covers it all in more detail, but I was coding a lot in this period of Perl's decline, and in hindsight it was all so obvious.

I wrote a lot of Perl 3 and Perl 4 to date my experience.

Rails was designed to be a luxury hand-holding experience using a language that was intended - as a design goal - to make programming fun. There was even for a while in the late 2000s the culture of _why and MINSWAN.

PHP was fast, easy, forgiving. It also led to such awful code that several companies banned it. I think nearly all of us who got to deploy code with nothing more than FTP miss that. Of course today it runs more of the web than any other language.

Perl on the other hand wasn't interested in any of that, so many people just left because they were pulled by better ecosystems that took the web seriously, or pushed by a culture that believed the priesthood was real.

For me, Rails and Ruby were genuinely joyful discoveries after spending a couple of years wrestling J2EE and .NET apps in the ~2002-2005 era, and the Perl community felt crusty and unwelcome and immature by comparison.

Today I'm no fan of come of the politics of people being some popular Ruby frameworks cough, but I enjoy Ruby and I'm enjoying my dive back into systems programming via re-learning C and taking a long look at Zig. I'm not sure I'll ever write "production" Perl again.
by GustavHartz | 2025-12-07 16:42:22+00:00
We've been working on this at cecuro.ai. When we test Sonnet 4.5 against real cyber security audit reports from the major firms on code that came out after the model was trained, it finds around 95% of the same bugs the auditors found. Also catches some medium severity stuff they missed. We find that you can't just point one model at a contract and expect good results though. Need to run multiple models with different prompts because they each have different blind spots. Still tricky to get working well and not cheap. Happy to share more if anyone's curious
by upofadown | 2025-12-07 16:42:41+00:00
If you are searching for references with plausible sounding titles then you are doing that because you don't want to have to actually read those references. After all if you read them and discover that one or more don't support your contention (or even worse, refutes it) then you would feel worse about what you are doing. So I suspect there would be a tendency to completely ignore such references and never consider if they actually exist.

LLMs should be awesome at finding plausible sounding titles. The crappy researcher just has to remember to check for existence. Perhaps there is a business model here, bogus references as a service, where this check is done automatically.
by dmix | 2025-12-07 16:43:06+00:00
I learned this recently. I got into waxed canvas/cotton jackets for outdoors stuff, where people would oil it for waterproofing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_cotton

The jackets look nice but they are heavy, don't breath well, and are usually expensive for quality, and they are more water resistant than waterproof.

Compared to modern ultra-light synthetic jackets (down etc) that are legitimately water/windpoof which feels much nicer and warmed doing high activity stuff in poor weather. The only downside is they aren't as rugged, like getting a scratch walking through a bush or cuts from tools/dogs.

Old stuff always lasts longer but the IRL experience doesn't always outweigh the cons.
by PeterStuer | 2025-12-07 16:43:15+00:00
I think the root problem is that everyone involved, from authors to reviewers to publishers, know that 99.999% of papers are completely of no consequence, just empty calories with the sole purpose of padding quotas for all involved, and thus are not going to put in the effort as if.

This is systemic, and unlikely to change anytime soon. There have been remedies proposed (e.g. limits on how many papers an author can publish per year, let's say 4 to be generous), but they are unlikely to gain traction as thoug most would agree onbenefits, all involved in the system would stand to lose short term.
by ineedasername | 2025-12-07 16:43:46+00:00
How can someone not be aware, at this point, that— sure- use the systems for finding and summarizing research, but for each source, take 2 minutes to find the source and verify?

Really, this isn’t that hard and it’s not at all an obscure requirement or unknown factor.

I think this is much much less “LLMs dumbing things down” and significantly more just a shibboleth for identifying people that were already nearly or actually doing fraudulent research anyway. The ones who we should now go back and look at prior publications as very likely fraudulent as well.
by bob1029 | 2025-12-07 16:44:03+00:00
In terms of code & data, I would say that duplication is mostly upside because the cost of refactoring is negligible. If all call sites are truly duplicate usages, then normalizing them must be trivial. Otherwise, you are dealing with something that seems like duplication but is not. The nuance of things being so similar that we would prefer they be the same (but unfortunately they cannot be) is where we will find some of the shittiest decisions in software engineering. We should not be in a rush to turn the problem domain into a crystalline structure. The focus should be about making our customer happy and keeping our options open.

That said, I have found other areas of tech where duplication is very costly. If you are doing something like building a game, avoiding use of abstractions like prefabs and scriptable objects will turn into a monster situation. Failure to identify ways to manage common kinds of complexity across the project will result in rapid failure. I think this is what actually makes game dev so hard. You have to come up with some concrete domain model & tool chain pretty quickly that is also reasonably normalized or no one can collaborate effectively. The art quality will fall through the basement level if a designer has to touch the same NPC in 100+ places every time they iterate a concept.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-07 16:44:18+00:00
This is exactly what the advice is trying to mitigate. At least as I see it, the responsible engineer (meaning author, not some quality of the engineer) needs to understand the intent of the code they will produce. Then if using an llm, they must take full owners of that code by carefully reviewing it or molding it until it reflects their intent. If at the end of this the “responsible” engineer does not understand the code the advice has not been followed.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-07 16:44:48+00:00
> Sure, that is why you trust a blackbox software from some random company running as a rootkit, whose concrete version you do not even control, because it is remotely updated by them.

It doesn't have to be "a random company". Microsoft, for example, now ships EDR as part of the operating system.

Many companies prefer other vendors for their own reasons. Sometimes one concern is the exact issue you're describing. By using another vendor outside of MS they can layer the security rather than putting all their eggs in a Microsoft designed basket. We sometimes call that a "security onion" in cyber.

I have no idea what the Linux version of that would even look like though. I imagine you'd just choose one of the many 3rd party EDR's from "random companies." It's another reason I asked the original question about how Sysadmins cope with Linux these days. MS has an entire suite of products designed to meet these security, regulatory, and compliance problems. Linux has... file permissions I guess?
by implabinash | 2025-12-07 16:44:56+00:00
Hi, everyone,

I am Abinash. I have started streaming about my development workflow, sharing my work and experiences.

Today, we are solving a couple of SQL challenges named "SQL Murder Mystery".

Link:

YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/xFc-psW0LtA?feature=share Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/implabinash Kick: https://kick.com/implabinash

Feel free to share your feedback.

Thank you.
by mamcx | 2025-12-07 16:45:12+00:00
yeah, this is the actual good mindset.

C has never been a particularly good language, and is so good that finally (with tons of pushbacks!) there is an alternative that make the case so strong that is at least considered the possibility that will come the very happy day where C will be our past.

The only, true, real blocker is that C is the ABI. But if we consider the possibility that C can AND should be the past, then the C Abi can finally adds sophisticated things like Strings and such, and maybe dreaming, algebraic types (ie: the C will be improved with the required features so it can evolve the ABI, but not because will be a good language for write it (manually) on it).

And to reiterate: C should finally be a real assembly language, something we not need to worry about.
by ho_schi | 2025-12-07 16:45:47+00:00
True. Software and computers don’t even exist to save money. A lot of problems stem from the weird idea of MBAs that a computer, digitalization or even cloud are there to save money.

I hope Holstein prepared the switch well and kill off any Microsoft stuff as quick as possible. Nothing is worse than co-existence with something hostile which doesn’t want to be compatible.

* No Dual-Booting * No VM * Especially no WINE (your ducked with every odd update) * And by the love of god, hit everyone with a bat which tries to ship incompatible files (MS-Office, ppt, xls, pst…) to you. Links to “Microsoft Teams”? Hit harder and show no mercy :)

What to do, minimal list:

* Make plan. * Used standards wherever possible. * Switch file-formats and external platforms before. Use a standard distribution and DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION. If you have a big IT department with hundreds of employees, maybe an own repository with your custom software. * Enforce all suppliers hard to support Linux natively! If not? Drop them. Search a honest company which gives you also the source. * Avoid the usual mistake like “this a local support company” or “their offer is cheaper” * Don’t purchase shitty hardware. ThinkPads are a good start, but we speak about printers, NFC, label writers, scanners and so on.

If your answer doesn’t include either Debian, Red Hat, Canonical or Suse it is probably the wrong choice. You need support.

The remaining 20 percent of workplaces are currently still dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel, as there is a technical dependency on these programs in certain specialized applications. According to Schrödter, however, the successive conversion of these remaining computers is the stated goal.

A red flag. Soft migrations work only, if both side cooperate. If not, hard migration. Short pain is better than long suffering.

PS: And don’t repeat Munich! Munich is “HOW NOT”. Three distinct IT-Departments. And the next major was “convinced ” with tax money and a Microsoft Headquarters. Result, it is worse than before.
by gessha | 2025-12-07 16:45:59+00:00
Because in NYC I pass by tens of the bodegas on the way to work and I can shop at any one of them. I can also shop at Aldi’s, Trader Joe’s, Costco, what have you.

You said it well yourself - “begrudgingly”. With so many options and price points, I don’t have to begrudgingly shop at bodegas. I do it happily if it serves my goal of getting a single can of Coke. If I want to get a whole stack of them, I’d happily get them at Costco. Options are great when you have them.
by jordanpg | 2025-12-07 16:47:04+00:00
Does anyone know, from a technical standpoint, why are citations such a problem for LLMs?

I realize things are probably (much) more complicated than I realize, but programmatically, unlike arbitrary text, citations are generally strings with a well-defined format. There are literally "specs" for citation formats in various academic, legal, and scientific fields.

So, naively, one way to mitigate these hallucinations would be identify citations with a bunch of regexes, and if one is spotted, use the Google Scholar API (or whatever) to make sure it's real. If not, delete it or flag it, etc.

Why isn't something like this obvious solution being done? My guess is that it would slow things down too much. But it could be optional and it could also be done after the output is generated by another process.
by neilv | 2025-12-07 16:48:47+00:00
That's great, and a mix of all kinds of signs is to great effect. (People from all sorts of demographics using whatever means they can to be heard.)

Sometimes the sign-makers are artistically inclined, and may have access to better materials.

The most memorable example was at the political demonstrations (and counter-demonstrations) leading up to the Massachusetts constitutional convention that legalized gay marriage. For the State House one I photographed (learning photojournalism on the side), the anti-gay-marriage people were mostly bused in, including a pair of angry-looking old nuns in black full habit, and handed out the same ugly stock sign. (There's an obvious joke that they couldn't find a graphic designer who was sympathetic to the anti-gay cause.) Separated from them, across a street was a huge counter-protest, with an ocean of all sorts of creative, colorful, and positive handmaid signs, held by generally good-natured and thoughtful looking people.
by dmix | 2025-12-07 16:49:32+00:00
> After upgrading the library, performance and CPU characteristics on Scala 3 became indistinguishable from Scala 2.13.

We had a similar experience moving Ruby 2->3, which has a ton of performance improvements. It was in fact faster in many ways but we had issues with RAM spiking in production where it didn't in the past. It turned out simply upgrading a couple old dependencies (gems) to latest versions fixed most of the issues as people spotted similar issues as OP.

It's never good enough just to get it running with old code/dependencies, always lots of small things that can turn into bigger issues. You'll always be upgrading the system, not just the language.
by grayhatter | 2025-12-07 16:49:59+00:00
> That is not, cannot be, and shouldn't be, the bar for peer review.

Given the repeatability crisis I keep reading about, maybe something should change?

> 2. The software is also self-contained. That's "prodcution". But a scientific paper does not necessarily aim to represent scientific consensus, but a finding by a particular team of researchers. If a paper's conclusions are wrong, it's expected that it will be refuted by another paper.

This is a much, MUCH stronger point. I would have lead with this because the contrast between this assertion, and my comparison to prod is night and day. The rules for prod are different from the rules of scientific consensus. I regret losing sight of that.
by bluGill | 2025-12-07 16:50:35+00:00
> A gun going off when you don't intend is a negligent discharg

false. A gun goes off when not intended too often to claim that. It has happned to me - I then took the gun to a qualified gunsmith for repairs.

A gun they fires and hits anything you didn't intend to is negligent discharge even if you intended to shoot. Gun saftey is about assuming a gun that could possible fire will and ensuring nothing bad can happen. When looking at gun in a store (that you might want to buy) you aim it at an upper corner where even if it fires the odds of something bad resulting is the least lively to happen (it should be unloaded - and you may have checked, but you still aim there!)

same with cat toy lazers - they should be safe to shine in an eye - but you still point in a safe direction.
by agentultra | 2025-12-07 16:50:57+00:00
You seem to be getting hung up on the details of guns and missing the point that it’s a bad analogy.

Another way LLMs are not guns: you don’t need a giant data centre owned by a mega corp to use your gun.

Can’t do science because GlockGPT is down? Too bad I guess. Let’s go watch the paint dry.

The reason I made it is because this is inherently how we designed LLMs. They will make bad citations and people need to be careful.
by thebadkraft | 2025-12-07 16:50:58+00:00
I just released Sigma-Test v1.0.0 – a pure C, no-macro test runner that’s smaller than most JSON test configs and ships with permanent, zero-config memory leak detection.

- *<60 KB* static binary (58 KB on x86-64) - Zero dependencies, near-zero overhead

If mallocs ≠ frees, it screams *WARNING: MEMORY LEAK* in red, every single run.

- Colored output - Pluggable hooks that don't silence the console - No Valgrind. No ASan. No flags. No excuses. ===== Memory Allocations Report ================================= WARNING: MEMORY LEAK — 1 unfreed allocation(s) Total mallocs: 2 Total frees: 1 =================================================================

Tired of forgetting to run leak checks? This one never forgets.

Code: https://github.com/Quantum-Override/sigma-test/blob/v1.0.0-release/README.md

Feedback, roasts, and pull requests welcome. Let’s make C testing suck less in 2025.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-07 16:51:05+00:00
> just scams and speculation

The "currency" part is actually the only one that is not a scam, as long as you understand what it is and the trade-offs it makes.

If you do actually have a legitimate reason to use it (because conventional payment rails are not available, or you're doing crime, or need pseudonymity), it is a perfectly fine tool.
by maccard | 2025-12-07 16:51:07+00:00
Not OP but - I can't answer the specific regs, but 16A/240V is absolutely bog standard for the UK and every high street store stocks ovens that will draw this down. They need to be on their own circuit, e.g. this [0].

I've never seen a single oven pull more than this, but devices like [1] are fairly common where you have two independent ovens in one, and it can pull 21A - this would necessitate the 25A supply.

As for three phase - https://www.howdens.com/-/media/howdens/assets/clh_asset_pro... this hob (which I have) will take 3-phase 16A, or single phase 32A. I've not come across any 32A 3-phase devices for home usage, though.

[0] https://ao.com/product/b54cr71g0b-neff-n70-slide--hide-elect...

[1] https://www.smeguk.com/products/DUSF6300X