MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LtdJorge | 2025-12-15 11:01:52+00:00
Yes, that's a very common misconception.

Of course, if your program compiles, that doesn't mean the logic is correct. However, if your program compiles _and_ the logic is correct, there's a high likelihood that your program won't crash (provided you handle errors and such, you cannot trust data coming from outside, allocations to always work, etc). In Rust's case, this means that the compiler is much more restrictive, exhaustive and pedantic than others like C's and C++'s.

In those languages, correct logic and getting the program to compile doesn't guarantee you are free from data races or segmentation faults.

Also, Rust's type system being so strong, it allows you to encode so many invariants that it makes implementing the correct logic easier (although not simpler).
by alias_neo | 2025-12-15 11:02:28+00:00
Maybe this is what I need to do.

I disconnected our living room LG TV from the internet and got a Fire Stick 4K Max, but I hate it; 90% of the screen is advert, and you get a tiny sliver for the 5 apps it lets you see, and you have to go digging for the rest, not to mention the home-screen advertising isn't always appropriate for young children.

I hadn't considered Apple TV because I've never been an Apple user, but perhaps this is what I need.

Though I'm an Android user, all of the Android TV devices seem to be junk or ad-ridden junk.

Is Apple TV the way to go (asking other opinions).
by ben_w | 2025-12-15 11:02:41+00:00
> I think I'd favor a "personal allowance" model similar to income tax, where you get the first X units of energy tax free and then have to pay VAT, carbon taxes etc. on the rest of it.

I can see why this is tempting, but I think there's a better way to legislate with this, especially with that poster child.

I'm a landlord of a flat. I used to live in it before I left the UK. The EPC rating is D, so despite the double glazing it's still pretty cold in winter. I am now living in a fancy new-build in Berlin which, despite being 3 times the size of that flat, can be kept warm for 10 months of the year just by body heat and waste energy from the white goods — even with higher electricity costs in Germany, it costs less to be comfortable in this building in a T-shirt all year round (even while snow is falling outside), than to be wearing fleeces and sleeping with hot water bottles and still not be completely comfortable in that flat in the UK.

A few years back there was a proposal for legislation that would increase the requirements for all rental property to be at minimum C-rated by 2030, as I understand it this was dropped and the current minimum is F or something ridiculous like that. My agent's advice is to not do anything until the legislation is actually sorted, even though I'm happy to spend whatever to upgrade the place, because until you know what the legislation demands there's always a risk of doing the wrong work beforehand, having to rip it out and put something else in.

IMO, government should push for this kind of boost, as it has with other energy-saving and insulation-boosting measures.

My first rental after graduation was a Welsh solid stone wall construction; like the example you gave, I couldn't keep warm there even with the electric bar heater a meter from me.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-12-15 11:02:49+00:00
> And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.

We already have grids operating without traditional baseload. This is a 2015 talking point.

See for example South Australia keeping either 40 MWe or 80 MWe fossil gas in standby (I would presume this is the lowest possible hot standby power level for said plants). They are aiming to phase this out in the near future as storage comes online.

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...

Inertia is trivially solved in 2025. Either through grid forming inverters which today are available off-the-shelf or the old boring solution of synchronous condensers like the Baltic states used to have enough grid strength to decouple from the Russian grid.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/baltic-power-grid
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-15 11:03:21+00:00
>I'm curious - how do you see Europe surviving if not through further integration?

I don't, with or without further integration. Not everyone or everything is meant to survive. Everything has a shelf life. The Roman empire also collapsed. Rearranging the deckchairs of the titanic doesn't change the outcome.

>What is your preferred model? All of us staying in little insignificant countries, kowtowing to larger powers?

A union is good, but the EU only worked at preventing another world war between members, not at helping us be united against foreign entities, because you can't force unity between different dethatched cultures just because we're neighbours, as proven by Yugoslavia, the USSR, etc.

Every EU member is still driven by self interest and own group preference, which will be the EU's doom. Like Spain doesn't really care as much about the Eastern war as Poland or Romania do because they're far away from the war and don't see why they should pay more taxpayer money for it. Germans care more about something happening in Austria than about what's happening in Bulgaria. And so on.
by chatmasta | 2025-12-15 11:03:22+00:00
How does blocking ASNs solve the problem you described, with proxy backdoors in apps? These will use residential/mobile IPs, right? That’s the point.

btw, may as well name and shame: the biggest culprit is Bright Data, formerly known as Luminati, also known as HolaVPN (the Chrome extension where they got their start, promising a VPN, routing traffic through a few DigitalOcean boxes, while selling each of their millions of users as a residential proxy endpoint to industrial scrapers). Nowadays they do the same but without the SPOF: they license their “SDK” to app developers, who launder the liability on their behalf.
by orthoxerox | 2025-12-15 11:03:53+00:00
It's not just Postgres or even OLTP. For example, if you have an Iceberg table with SCD2 records, you need to regularly locate and update existing records. The more recent a record is, the more likely it is to be updated.

If you use UUIDv7, you can partition your table by the key prefix. Then the bulk of your data can be efficiently skipped when applying updates.
by Tsarp | 2025-12-15 11:04:08+00:00
Building Arivu: CLI/library that normalizes fetch/search across a bunch of sources (arXiv, PubMed, HN, GitHub, Reddit, YouTube transcripts, RSS, web pages…).

I use it as a context fetcher i.e grab an abstract/transcript/thread as clean text/JSON, pipe it into summaries or scripts.

Also runs as an MCP server (experimental), so tools like Claude Desktop or CLI assistants can call the connectors directly.

arivu fetch hn:38500000 arivu fetch PMID:12345678 arivu fetch https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07041

https://github.com/srv1n/arivu
by inferiorhuman | 2025-12-15 11:04:31+00:00
In Cortex M33 land $15 will get you an entire NXP (or STM) dev board. An MCX-A156 will set you back about $5 which is about on par with an STM32H5. You can go cheaper than that in the MCX-A lineup if you need to. For what I'm working on the H5 is more than enough so I've not dug too deep into what NXP's FlexIO gives you in comparison. Plus STM's documentation is far more accessible than NXP's.

Now the old SAM3 chip in the Arudino Due is a different beast. Atmel restarted production and priced it at $9/ea. For 9k. Ouch. You can get knockoff Dues on Aliexpress for $10.

Edit: I'm only looking at single core MCUs here. The MCX-A and H5 lineups are single-core Cortex M33 MCUs. The SAM3 is a single core Cortex M3. The RP units are dual core M33. If the RP peripherals meet your needs I agree that's a great value (I'm seeing pricing of $1+ here).

Edit2: For dual core NXP is showing the i.MX RT700 at around $7.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-15 11:05:28+00:00
The problem IMO is simpler.

You have a product, which sits between your users and what your users want. That product has an UI for users to operate. Many (most, I imagine) users would prefer to hire an assistant to operate that UI for them, since UI is not the actual value your service provides. Now, s/assistant/AI agent/ and you can see that your product turns into a tool call.

So the simpler problem is that your product now becomes merely a tool call for AI agents. That's what users want. Many SaaS companies won't like that, because it removes their advertising channel and commoditizes their product.

It's the same reason why API access to SaaS is usually restricted or not available for the users except biggest customers. LLMs defeat that by turning the entire human experience into an API, without explicit coding.
by adwn | 2025-12-15 11:05:47+00:00
Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of electricity still falls to negative values(!) over noon, almost every day.
by kreetx | 2025-12-15 11:06:04+00:00
Using an UUIDv4 as primary key is a trade-off: you use it when you need to generate unique keys in a distributed manner. Yes, these are not datetime ordered and yes, they take 128 bits of space. If you can't live with this, then sure, you need to consider alternatives. I wonder if "Avoid UUIDv4 Primary Keys" is a rule of thumb though.
by zdc1 | 2025-12-15 11:06:38+00:00
Covid showed me that the daily ritual of getting up at the same time, getting dressed in proper clothes, and taking a train somewhere all massively helped my mood and level of willingness to engage with life.

I can see how, in the absence of responsibilities, it's easy to slowly slide into a rut and become a depressed lump of a human that doesn't want to do anything. I also see that as part of the challenge: how do I stay disciplined enough to be happy, without being dependent on a job to force me out of bed?
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-15 11:08:29+00:00
I'm currently working again on my ebpf firewall, where I'm integrating an active DDoS kind of analysis across the network, so that other backends using that firewall can synchronize their blocklists more efficiently and contribute their traffic data.

I want the firewall to be some kind of middleware(?) for Go backends, so you can plug it in and can stop worrying. At least that's the idea.

It's similar probably to what cloudflare's DDoS protection is built like, but I'm focusing on Go backends first (my own use case) and am trying to make this as decentralizable as possible.

Is gonna take a bit until I'm confident that this approach will work, but I highly recommend eBPF for blocking and traffic analysis. It's insane what you can offload to the NIC, even when it's only partial support and not fully supporting XDP. The blocks are just so much faster to do than in userspace.
by mort96 | 2025-12-15 11:09:07+00:00
I tend to avoid UUIDv7 and use UUIDv4 because I don't want to leak the creation times of everything.

Now this doesn't work if you actually have enough data that the randomness of the UUIDv4 keys is a practical database performance issue, but I think you really have to think long and hard about every single use of identifiers in your application before concluding that v7 is the solution. Maybe v7 works well for some things (e.g identifiers for resources where creation times are visible to all with access to the resource) but not others (such as users or orgs which are publicly visible but without publicly visible creation times).
by eimrine | 2025-12-15 11:09:23+00:00
I was very excited about smartphones 20 years ago, my first and second smartphone had Symbian when nobody from my environment used computers daily, then I've got Android and after that the value of that piece of technology has sagged. I have no smartphone for at least 10 years and have an experience that now I have to be really excited about living with not a single one. Trying hard to get a smartphone has been replaced with trying hard to not get a smartphone.
by ChaosOp | 2025-12-15 11:09:27+00:00
I'm building a web-based local multiplayer party game platform. It's like a lovechild of Jackbox Games and Mario Party: https://gamingcouch.com. We just won silver at the Big Indie Pitch competition as well!

- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.

- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)

- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs are necessary to play

- All games support up to 8 players at a time and are action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia or asynchronous games!

- In the future we plan to open up the platform for 3rd party developers (and Gamejams!) as well. We take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking code and building the infrastructure.

Interested to hear if this resonates with Hacker News readers!
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-15 11:09:32+00:00
>National governments are a relic of old tribal days, we are all Europeans.

Says who?

Tribalism along with own group preference, is one of the core human instincts, in line with the search for food, shelter and the reproductive instinct. You are free to ignore this instinct because you feel more academically enlightened or something, but you will be in for a rude awakening when you'll find yourself in the minority and eliminated from the gene pool by those who let themselves driven by basic instinct and will vote and reproduce accordingly.

>If we can finally get rid of those impediments, we will be able to project so much more power.

Yes, if we can get rid of local democratic governments with direct accountability and replace them with an unaccountable EU dictatorship, we'll have so much power projection.
by chatmasta | 2025-12-15 11:09:46+00:00
Yes but how’s that going to help when the IPs you’re banning are mobile IP addresses? Bright Data claims to have over 7 million of them in their network. They aren’t in contiguous ASNs because they’re sourced from regular human users unknowingly running proxy endpoints on their mobile devices.

(I agree, eBPF is very cool. Once you dive into the Linux network internals you discover a bunch of shortcuts you can take to execute code on packets before they ever leave kernel space.)
by crote | 2025-12-15 11:10:19+00:00
The path is obvious, is it not?

Having two independent cellular modems in a car is obviously silly, so it only makes sense to use the same module both for the mandatory emergency calling and for the telemetry.

Because the emergency calling is mandatory, it'll of course be made impossible to disable the modem - and by extension the telemetry. Oh, you disabled the telemetry? I bet that'll be called "tampering with safety equipment", and your insurance is now void, and your car is no longer road legal.

If the law doesn't mandate that eCall has to be fully independent, it'll 100% be used to spy on you.
by mattmanser | 2025-12-15 11:10:24+00:00
SaaS software, by it's very nature, tends to gets tested tons more than your inhouse software. It also has more devs working on the software. It is almost certainly more stable and can handle more edge cases than anything developed inhouse. It's always a question of scale.

But what you're describing is the narrow but deep vs wide but shallow problem. Most SaaS software is narrow but deep. Their solution is always going to be better than yours. But some SaaS software is wide but shallow, it's meant to fit a wide range of business processes. Its USP is that it does 95% of what you want.

It sounds like you were using a "wide-shallow" SaaS in a "narrow-deep" way, only using a specific part of the functionality. And that's where you hit the problems you saw.
by mirabilis | 2025-12-15 11:10:37+00:00
Still, in the context of the story: body transplant? Womb transplant? some kind of far-off mass-CRISPR chromosomal rewriting? Alien raygun that turns you into Farrah Fawcett? If any of the biological rules could someday be edited at will, then this insistence upon definitional, immutable, and perhaps spiritual femaleness comes across as more of a matter of your own preference.
by Lucasoato | 2025-12-15 11:11:04+00:00
Hi, a question for you folks. What if I don’t like to embed timestamp in uuid as v7 do? This could expose to timing attacks in specific scenarios.

Also is it necessary to show uuid at all to customers of an API? Or could it be a valid pattern to hide all the querying complexity behind named identifiers, even if it could cost a bit in terms of joining and indexing?

The context is the classic B2B SaaS, but feel free to share your experiences even if it comes from other scenarios!
by lwhi | 2025-12-15 11:11:12+00:00
That's definitely a fair point.

However, let's say I record human interactions with my app; for example when a user accepts or rejects an AI sythesised answer.

This data can be used by me, to influence the behaviour of an LLM via RAG or by altering application behaviour.

It's not going to change the weighting of the model, but it would influence its behaviour.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-15 11:11:18+00:00
Emacs is a text-interface, character-based, there is no pixel-control. So everything graphical or pixel-related is mostly impossible, until it gets special treatment or involves some hacks to allow some very special limited usage. Electron on the other side has webstack and it's full range of abilities for GUI, mouse-interaction, video, fancy font's, even a freeform canvas and some more...
by zorked | 2025-12-15 11:11:31+00:00
> This, along with the fact that salaries are absurdly low, shows a lack of interest by the Brazilian government, people, and industry, in the development of science in this country.

No, it shows that the country is poor - the desire to pay higher salaries was always there, but it's hard. People in rich countries think money grows on trees because for them, it kind of does.

And this is why development advice from "intellectuals" in rich countries is worthless.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-15 11:11:55+00:00
> Yes, if we can get rid of local democratic governments with direct accountability and replace them with an unaccountable EU dictatorship, we'll have so much power projection.

I'm glad we agree! I think a Titoist approach would work best, though I also like some elements of Xi Jinping thought - namely the technocratism. What would your preferred model be?
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-15 11:12:31+00:00
Reminds me of how the Navy heard the OceanGate submarine implode immediately when it lost contact en route to the Titanic, but waited several days before they admitted that because at the time noone even knew they had such a system of hydrophones in place. I wonder what else they have that we don't know about. The oceans are not just unexplored as a habitat, but also as an intelligence theater.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-15 11:12:45+00:00
Technologies of making synthetic fuel using energy, water and carbon dioxide are a century old and they have been used for producing great quantities is special circumstances when the price did not matter, e.g. by Germany during WWII (though at that time they produced cabon monoxide by burning coal, instead of reducing carbon dioxide from air, because this was cheaper).

The only reason why they are not used now is that the current price of fossil oil is significantly lower.

There is research to develop more efficient methods for the synthesis of hydrocarbons, based on the electrolytic reduction of carbon dioxide, but their progress is slow, in good part because such critical research is funded much less than frivolous research, such as that for AGI.
by dgb23 | 2025-12-15 11:14:11+00:00
Switzerland taxes wealth instead of capital gains (except for professional investors).

In some ways taxing wealth is quite simple, because wealth is already meticulously recorded via contracts and owners go out of their way to estimate the magnitude of their wealth for example to borrow money or for other financial and economic obligations.

Another approach would be to tax capital gains at the same rate as income and introduce additional top brackets. I have a hard time to find a good faith reason for capital gains to be taxed less than labor.
by NotGMan | 2025-12-15 11:14:27+00:00
EU was supposed to be an economic union, but it morphed into a politicaly cancerous union.

Now it's evocing emergency acts to bypass union member states when it sees fit.

On using Russian frozen assets:

>> The vote put forward by von der Leyen reframed the issue of frozen Russian assets as an economic emergency rather than a sanctions policy. This allowed the Commission to invoke Article 122 of the EU treaties, an emergency clause that permits decisions to be adopted by a qualified majority vote instead of unanimity, effectively bypassing veto threats from countries opposed to the move.
by David_0101 | 2025-12-15 11:14:36+00:00
I’ve been testing how AI assistants like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity select products for shopping-related answers.

What surprised me: - Many products that rank well on Google never appear in AI-generated shopping answers - Missing structured product data seems to matter more than backlinks - Price and inventory consistency affects selection more than SEO

I wrote up my findings here: https://www.sixthshop.com/what-is/ai-shopping-visibility

Curious if anyone else has observed similar behavior or understands how these models decide what to recommend.
by zkmon | 2025-12-15 11:14:50+00:00
When you say agents, do you mean the workflow runners that can call APIs and automate the workflow steps?

Automation is not new. What's new is the capabilities of the models that can be assigned with some of the workflow steps. If these steps were served by SaaS companies so far, they will still serve it. Maybe they make it much cheaper and use a model themselves.
by chatmasta | 2025-12-15 11:14:52+00:00
> one would proritize trying to fix things upstream closer to the root

One should prioritize fixing things one is responsible for. If you make a commitment to protect your user’s data, then you take responsibility for the tools you use, and how you use them.

Whether or not you – or someone else – should fix those tools upstream, is a separate issue to be solved later. First solve the problems that are your responsibility. Then worry about everyone else.

The npm ecosystem has many security issues but they are all mitigatable.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-15 11:15:06+00:00
If you have such a beast you have n problems. Not being able to apply AI to it is just (n+1)th.

It works great when dealing with microservices architecture that was all the rage recently. Of course it doesn't solve it's main issue that is that microservices talk to each other but it still lets you sprint through a lot of work.

It's just that if you engineered (or engineer) things well, you get immediate huge benefits from AI coders. But if all you did last decade was throw in more spaghetti into already a huge bowl of spaghetti you are out of luck. Serves you right. The sad thing is that most humans will get pushed out into doing this kind of "real development" so it's probably a good time to learn to love legacy, because you are legacy.
by pvdebbe | 2025-12-15 11:15:31+00:00
Fantastic tools you've collected here! My rationale for building own decks for my wife is that I'm intending to start slow and easy, and I'll build new cards that are closely tied to days' lessons I'm giving her. I'm hopeful that after a while she gains confidence to start going through premade decks. With anki and similar tools it's important not to just memorize words without having some handle on how to build sentences etc. I spent a lot of time learning Japanese that way, only to find that I maybe memorized words but to build sentences with them...