MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metalman | 2025-12-07 09:07:58+00:00
the article has very interesting examples of how individual gut biomes produce radicaly different products in different people, with some able to completly digest sorbitol, and in others is passed to the liver where it is converted to a fructose, like, compound other complicatiins are mentioned but most certainly, adding sorbitol to anything, is at best, a zero sum equation, and for many it will cause some harm. personaly, I dont argue with what nature has contrived over the countless millenia, and enjoy cooking useing whole food ingredients that are instantly recognisable as to what they are, by sight and smell. And while it IS, time consuming, I know for a fact that paying for the quality and quantity of food I make and eat, in a resturaunt, is well past my and most peoples means. The unspoken premise, here, in many discussions of health and food, chemicals, additives, pesticides,etc, is that human sensory input has no value as it is subjective, which is something I disagree with, on every level.
Show HN: Quirky – server monitoring for real people
by remy_v | 2025-12-07 09:08:04+00:00
I needed a simple server monitoring & notifying tool, and I wasn't really happy with grafana (or the alternatives). After seeing this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934940, I decided to build my own.

Still in the early stages, but you define your checks using composable steps (http_get, compare_timestamp, etc), and custom checks can be written in any language that can return json.

Backend is written in haskell, so the easiest way to try it out right now is with nix:

nix run .#quirky -- examples/demo.yaml

And then you can see the dashboard on http://localhost:9855
by adrian_b | 2025-12-07 09:08:46+00:00
The semiconductor device industry and Silicon Valley would have never appeared if the early companies working in this field would have been controlled by people obsessed about secrecy and "IP protection".

During the fifties and the sixties, and even until the early seventies, it was common for everyone to publish research papers very unlike those that are published today, where the concrete information is minimal.

In the early research papers about semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, it was normal to give complete recipes, including quantities of chemicals, temperatures and times for the processing steps and so on. After reading such papers, you could reproduce the recipes and make the device described and you could measure for yourself to see how true are the claims presented in the paper.

That open sharing of information has led to a very quick evolution of the semiconductor technologies during the early years, until more traditional business-oriented management has begun to restrict the information provided to the public.

It is said that such sharing of information still exists in China in many fields, and it is the source of their rapid progress.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-07 09:10:06+00:00
> Not that hard; Ladybird, with a fraction of the resources available to the servo team, is C++ (Moving to swift soon) and they got pretty damn far.

You know the saying about the first 90% and then the second 90%? Making a web browser is the fractal version of that.

> The lack of velocity in Rust is real; it's a trade-off between velocity and safety,

No it's not, Rust has in fact much higher velocity than C++, even at Mozilla which was basically a C++ shop beforehand (and a pretty good one at that).

> and Ladybird has amply demonstrated just how rapid C++ velocity can be.

No, you seem to have a misunderstanding of what servo was. Mozilla didn't use Rust yo make a safer browser, they used Rust to make a faster browser by leveraging all the cores of modern CPUs. That was the primary motive for making Rust in the first place: making multithreading tractable for humans.

As a result, the servo project aimed for SotA performance and modules were rewritten multiple time as they improved the architecture for performance (see the different iterations of Stylo or Webrender, which ended up in Firefox proper when it converged).

That's why it was apparently slow, not because of safety but because it aimed to be the first fully parallel browser (which is something enabled by Rust's safety).

You can argue that Rust has lower velocity than garbage collected language because you need to think about ownership, but not that it has lower velocity than other low-level languages: they too need to think about ownership, they simply have no static check to catch errors at compile time: every error raised by the borrow checker would be as segfault. (And Rust keeps what makes C++ already much higher velocity than C, the ability to build powerful abstractions at no performance cost).
by pjmlp | 2025-12-07 09:10:32+00:00
Strange, maybe because of being a 70's kid and a D&D nerd, that kind of stuff is exactly why I liked Perl in first place.

That and Perl giving me a reason to do safe programming in UNIX with a managed language that exposed all the UNIX API surface, and only switching back into C when I actually needed some additional perf, or low level stuff not fully exposed in Perl.

Then again, I am also a fanboi of Haskell, C++, Scala, Idris and similar "wizard" languages.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-12-07 09:11:32+00:00
From that article:

After taking his final photograph, Landsburg removed the roll of film from his camera and placed it in a canister. He buried the camera and the film canister deep in his backpack. Then, he placed the backpack on the seat next to him and covered it with his body.

It was more than just jumping on top of his camera. Sounds like there’s some confidence about his intention.
Show HN: AI Paul Graham
by arlanrakh | 2025-12-07 09:11:49+00:00
I built an AI version of Paul Graham, fully powered by the Nia API.

* Nia gives coding agents accurate context by indexing entire codebases, documentation, and packages. It fixes hallucinations by letting agents retrieve real source information instead of guessing. Developers ship faster because AI can read and understand their actual project. This is a different use case of Nia but apparently it also works.

You can chat with it and ask any question because it has access to Nia’s knowledge base, which indexed all of his personal essays. The agent is able to call multiple tools that directly use Nia’s API:

• NiaWebSearch - searches the web • searchEssays - semantic search over all essays • browseEssays - shows the full tree of essays • listDirectory - lists essays in a path • readEssay - reads full essay content • grepEssays - regex pattern search • getSourceContent - retrieves full source by identifier

Models: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5 moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking xai/grok-4-fast-reasoning alibaba/qwen3-vl-thinking

It’s fully free and open source.

Try it: https://www.paulgraham-nia.com/ Code: https://github.com/nozomio-labs/paulgraham-ai
by _jzlw | 2025-12-07 09:13:07+00:00
Native mobile or native desktop? The former is relatively easy, at least for Android. React and Angular both have very good Material UI libraries. But making a PWA feel like a native desktop app is hard. There's a reason most Electron apps adopt their own unique theme. I've never seen a component library that fully replicates a desktop UI without feeling like a web app, not even Microsoft's own Fluent UI web components.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-12-07 09:13:48+00:00
PowerShell does provide a ConvertTo-Json [0] for those who need it.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

Contrary to how it sounds I actually like PowerShell as a scripting language in itself. A lot of its ideas are pretty clever.

I treat my dormant familiarity with it as a resume hedge. Ideally things in my life continue to go well, and I can keep climbing the ranks of doing more and more impressive things powered by the Unix systems I've been daily driving since I was 14. If, however, things in my life ever go truly sideways, I could probably dial it way back and eke out an existence at some low pay, low stress, fully remote Windows admin job at some dinosaur of a company somewhere. There I could use PS and its deep, deep integration with all things Windows to automate 90-99% of it away, so that I could spend my time e.g. tending to my young children instead. (Even if Copy-Item is 27% slower than drag and drop. My time is still more expensive than the machine's.)

I truly never hope that has to happen, of course.
by Qwertious | 2025-12-07 09:14:20+00:00
The poors had refrigeration, in the form of ice boxes. Not refridgerators, just basically eskies that the ice man came and shoved a big block of ice into once a week. So basically you could only make ice cream (etc) on the day the ice man came, if you were poor.

...so people just made their ice cream on that day. It required a little planning, is all.
by gingermusketeer | 2025-12-07 09:14:29+00:00
KartaCam 2 [1] by grab seems to be a similar piece of hardware and has a closer relationship to OSM. The KartaView app [2] allows contributions via smartphones.

[1] https://store.kartaview.org/collections/kartacam-2 [2] https://kartaview.org/
by tyami94 | 2025-12-07 09:14:51+00:00
That's because the data is inherently flawed. The poverty line this year is $15,650 for an individual. That's not poverty, that's destitution. From personal experience, living in WV, you cannot survive on that amount of money without either sleeping under a bridge/in a car or dumpster-diving/shoplifting all of your meals.

Folks say just get on food stamps or medicaid, but it's not that simple. At that level of destitution you may not have a phone, an address, basic ID/documentation, or even a means of getting to the office to apply. Means-testing makes the process so drawn-out and convoluted, that many folks (including myself) don't even bother, because there are more immediate things to worry about (once again speaking from experience).

After years of destitution, I finally managed to make a bit more than twice the FPL and I was still struggling (but significantly better off). Just recently I lost that job for reasons outside my control and after my unemployment runs out I'm back where I started. Everyone I know has a similar story. Any data that says that poverty is decreasing in the US is detached from reality.
by kace91 | 2025-12-07 09:14:56+00:00
>Three whole books likely exceeds their context window size of course

This was not “read all three books”, this was “check these three links with the (known) book synopsis/reviews there” and it made up the third one.

>I would consider this a failure in their tool use capabilities, not their reading ones.

Id give it to you if I got an error message, but the text being enhanced with wrong-but-plausible data is clearly a failure of reliability.
by cbeach | 2025-12-07 09:15:06+00:00
Another factor the author didn’t mention: Cancel culture.

Some of the biggest Scala companies and institutions have been heavily captured by the Left, and they have wreaked puritanical havoc on their political rival contributors, and anyone deemed to associate with them.

Typelevel, in particular, has taken politicisation to the next level. And the Scala Center made a political sciences grad with no commercial or academic Scala experience their executive director.

Typelevel’s Travis Brown (the activist who notoriously doxxed LibsOfTikTok) made it his mission to identify anyone in the Scala community who had rightwing views, or associated with any rightwinger, and then systematically try to destroy their career. He was so blatent about it, he had GitHub repos with names like “cancel culture” where he would use his insider knowledge of the Twitter social graph to smear people by association. Absolute psychopath.

So Scala’s ecosystem fractured down the middle, with anyone who didn’t share Typelevel’s puritanical worldview being ousted, and many moving to the competitor ecosystem of Zio, run by John De Goes (one of the victims of cancellation). John even created a parallel community of conferences and Scala training, which became very popular. But ultimately the toxicity of the language ecosystem and the Scala Centre’s failures under Darja Jovanovich and lack of commercial savvy of Martin Odersky led John to the point where he all but quit Scala, and embraced Rust instead.

https://degoes.net/articles/splendid-scala-journey

The cancellation of Jon Pretty was the thing that disturbed me the most. It ruined Jon’s life (not just his career). And ultimately, when Jon took some of the protagonists to the UK high court, they admitted they had no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.

https://pretty.direct/statement

To see the “community” rally around the destruction of an individual more enthusiastically than they rally around the language itself - that is what convinced me that Scala is a dying language. A language cannot survive with such a toxic ecosystem.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-12-07 09:15:08+00:00
If I don't misunderstand you, you're suggesting the Pixel 8 line is shown red/discontinued? If that's it, you're probably on a mobile browser which might cut off right after the Discontinued column. The table goes on next to that where you'll see that all Pixels since 6 are currently still supported.

Pixel 8 line:

> Ends in 4 years and 10 months (01 Oct 2030)
by refurb | 2025-12-07 09:15:50+00:00
Holy population pyramid Batman!!

87% of the overall population, yet only 13% of the child. That’s a stark difference.

But the comment reminds me of an observation in SE Asia - go to Singapore and very few kids and tons of senior citizens.

Then go to Vietnam and its most people in their 20’s and younger. It’s a difference you can’t help but notice.

And since Singapore is extremely selective about who they give citizenship too, they’re really struggling with the age pyramid. I believe the estimate is it will be 2 workers for every retired person by 2030.
by scott_w | 2025-12-07 09:16:43+00:00
Trads: reference to “tradwife.” Follow an idealised 1950s lifestyle that they saw on Mad Men where the wife submits to the man. But they don’t want a conservative woman, they want to force liberal women into it instead.

Neo-monarchist: wants a dictator to replace democratic rule, where that dictator is a tech CEO like Elon Musk or Sam Altman (used to be Zuckerberg).

Greens: environmentalists.

Anarcho-primitivist: wants to end all technological advance and return to hunter gatherer society while miraculously somehow maintaining all the benefits of technology (medicine, relatively comfortable lifestyle).
by netsharc | 2025-12-07 09:16:44+00:00
Hah, Kim Dotcom is still around? In the 90s he was bragging that he's this super hacker that made millions, his website posted pics of parties, cars, girls, and yachts, and it turned out those were bought/rented using swindled investor money (ironic that he's accusing Zelensky of the same crime). Then he became a sort of hero when the US/NZ governments Team 6-ed his house for the crime of aiding copyright infringement.

Now he's a Putin/Trump apologist...
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-07 09:17:00+00:00
To me the definition of literate programming is much less interesting than the spirit: for complicated logic / parts of code, I try to take the reader through the whole top-down plan / approach, as if it’s a story I’m writing to my colleagues about what’s going on and why. In those parts of code I can easily have 10 times as much lines of comments than code, but it’s important to use it sparingly: people tend to start to ignore comments if they’re low value. But it’s much more effective to have good comments than external documentation, as external documentation has a tendency to go out sync with the code.

As with most things, don’t be dogmatic.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-07 09:17:07+00:00
As somone that switches between both roles, when doing DevOps (aka sysadmin in 21st century) even though there is more stress regarding dealing with infrastructure, there is a certain peace of mind being away from Scrum, Jira, milestones, and other stuff, versus plain shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs, VMs up and down.

Or doing a plain set of scripts into a repo, instead of endless arguments how fit a module implemenents the onion and hexagonal architectures, clean code, or whatever is the trend in this year's architecture conferences.
by mawadev | 2025-12-07 09:18:46+00:00
The case against complex UI hides the fact that nobody wants to take their time to learn a piece of software anymore. Attention spans are so short, if the system doesn't do all the thinking for you, why bother with it? We are just moving the human laziness through another layer of indirection. The fact never changed in the past 30 years: some domains are complicated and you need smart people on both ends who can bridge the gaps. The dream has always been the same with nocode, lowcode and whatever, it doesn't change this fundamental flaw.

Consider building your own blender software. If you know nothing about 3D you start off in your language and the LLM will happily produce UI for your level of understanding, which is limited. Over time you will reach an understanding that looks just like the software you were trying to replicate.

Currently the ecosystem around UI changes so much, because its always been a solved problem that people just keep reinventing to have... something to do I guess?
by adrian_b | 2025-12-07 09:19:07+00:00
You could make in a garage some decent analog integrated circuits, e.g. audio amplifiers or operational amplifiers or even radio-frequency circuits for not too high frequency ranges.

However you cannot make useful digital circuits. For digital circuits, the best that you can do is to be content to only design them and buy an FPGA for implementing them, instead of attempting to manufacture a custom IC.

With the kind of digital circuits that you could make in a garage, the most complex thing that you could do would be something like a very big table or wall digital clock, made not with a single IC like today, but with a few dozen ICs.

Anything more complex than that would need far too many ICs.
by superposeur | 2025-12-07 09:19:08+00:00
The Maple syntax may superficially seem easier but actually leads to more problems in practice. The point of the [ ] is that argument of a function is logically distinct from algebraically grouping terms in an equation. Also, Mathematica is a camel case language since underscore is for pattern recognition, hence the capitalization of function names. Personally, I’ve found every little Mathematica design feature to be incredibly well thought out, logical, and consistently implemented over the whole of the language.
by tyami94 | 2025-12-07 09:22:47+00:00
I agree with you in principle here, but to play devils advocate, $1,000,000 isn't a whole lot of money. A worker will make around that much at $25,000 a year over 40 years. If we have to keep money/capitalism, the limit should probably be around 10-15 million. That's still pretty high, but not egregious. Give or take ~40yrs on a high FAANG salary ($375k/yr). Still firmly upper middle class IMO.
by Etheryte | 2025-12-07 09:23:44+00:00
A small nitpick that doesn't take away from the rest of your comment: staying alive and fed was not necessarily a laborious activity for hunter-gatherers living in good climates [0]. It's our expansion into less hospitable environments that made it so.

> Woodburn offers this “very rough approximation” of subsistence-labor requirements: “Over the year as a whole, probably an average of less than two hours a day is spent obtaining food.”

> Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present--specifically on those in marginal environments--suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production.

[0] https://fifthestate.anarchistlibraries.net/library/370-fall-...
by jimnotgym | 2025-12-07 09:24:46+00:00
>"It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."

It is no surprise to me that Network rail are so understaffed that any special event disrupts their work schedules for days. That is what they call 'efficiency' these days.

Edit: Aside. During a set of fire service strikes it was a relatively common opinion to say something like, 'of course they have an easy job, they get paid to just sit/lie down at the station'. I used to ask, 'what would you like them to do while waiting in case you need rescuing?'. No answer. I spoke to a fireman and he told me that in response to this kind of nonsense a bunch of pointless busy work was invented for them. When real was privatised in the UK they fired a lot of these 'inefficient' workers. After a string of rain crashes, the government had to renationalise Network Rail (the bit that maintains the infrastructure). Another case where 'efficiency' means harming people for profit.
by ascorbic | 2025-12-07 09:24:47+00:00
Well, yes if you're a retiree then thing are always a bit different, but the cottagecore lifestyle is about raising a family, not retiring. Ironically, the Isle of Wight is still a great example. It's a lovely place for a holiday, and a great place to retire. I spent a weekend there a few weeks ago and had a great time. Lovely landscape, beaches with dinosaur footprints and loads of fossils, great pubs. I recommend it! But it's really not a good place for a working age family. I'd never choose to live there.

There's a reason it's among the most deprived areas in England. It's badly isolated, with a crazily-expensive ferry the only connection to the mainland. The jobs are working in tourism, agriculture, or at the prison. Housing is totally unaffordable, because of all the second-homeowners, holiday cottages and – yes – retirees. The story is the same in many tourism areas.
by groestl | 2025-12-07 09:25:11+00:00
Yes, but in that story, parent only has the word of that Journalist. I personally don't even have that, I only have a post about it.

My deeper point is that it's arguably very difficult to establish a global, socially acceptable lower threshold of trust. Parent's level is, apparently, the word of a famous Journalist in a radio broadcast. For some, the form of a message alone makes the message worthy of trust, and AI will mess with this so much.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-07 09:25:17+00:00
Yes and the question is who does the German state really target to enroll in their "new" army. Because "This generation" has a lot of clearly distinct groups.

So it could be:

- the native young population who are now flocking in the AfD

- the people fighting the AfD in the street

- the second generation immigrants born there

- the very recent immigrants

- a mix of all

Because the alchemy of creating a working army and "esprit de corps" is much harder than in a corporation. You cannot just take a modern managerial approach to creating an army.

A mix of all will end up obviously in a disaster but selecting on any group will end up in a civil war or coup.
by anovikov | 2025-12-07 09:25:26+00:00
But this is a rare case where Russians are put into a fight in a situation where they are deprived of their only advantage: low value put on a human life in Russia both for cultural reasons (it's a political, and thus cultural, descendant of the steppe nomads of the Golden Horde) and economic ones too (petrostate does not need too many people and is not dependent on consumption of the masses for its economic survival). In Africa, they face enemy where value of a human life is even lower and unlike in Russia, they can actually sustain this approach due to their insane birth rate.
by discreteevent | 2025-12-07 09:26:39+00:00
> "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer

Reading books was never about knowledge. It was about knowhow. You didn't need to read all the books. Just some. I don't know how many developers I met who would keep asking questions that would be obvious to anyone who had read the book. They never got the big picture and just wasted everyone's time, including their own.

"To know everything, you must first know one thing."