MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steffoz | 2025-12-23 17:04:04+00:00
> I think you're leaving a lot of money on the table

100% agree. Also, I'm completely fine with it. Money is not the end goal to me.

> you’re adding existential risk to the business with your current strategy.

There's risk in any strategy. The VC playbook of "grow quickly" carries its own dangers: product enshittification, cultural rot, jeopardizing the very thing that made the business work in the first place...

> I’ve noticed over the years that as a general rule some European founders proudly care less about growth than American ones

I don't know if it's a Europe/America cultural difference. Probably, to some extent. We do care a lot about how we spend our lives outside of business. There’s a whole world beyond work that’s worth protecting :)

> If any mid-size company with functional distribution and tech wanted to take your business away, they could.

But why would they? For a "mere" €6.5M/year? We can optimize for the niche that the big players aren't even interested in. Being small and "ignorable" is its own form of defense.

> "in software it's grow or die."

I’m fine with this framing too, honestly. If this business ever runs its course, we have enough runway, experience, and optionality to start something new. There’s no inherent value to me in making a piece of software last for centuries.

What does matter is having a clear and fair exit plan for customers when that moment eventually comes.

> I hope you are writing the 20 year retrospective happily in 10 years from now

We'll see! :) Thanks for a genuinely thoughtful reply — I can tell where you're coming from. These are doubts I've wrestled with for years, and still do. I just keep landing in the same place (for now!).
by like_any_other | 2025-12-23 17:04:05+00:00
> "SNHU takes data privacy seriously and remains committed to protecting the privacy of our students, faculty, and staff" [..] SNHU uses a suite of analytics tools, including Google Analytics and TikTok Pixel on its portal, according to the lawsuit.

Every time. They care about privacy, just not enough to not sell all your data for a pittance.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-23 17:04:15+00:00
I had to help a friend with a small business through a "cyber insurance" policy compliance questionnaire once and it was an incredible exercise in frustration. I would have felt certain the policy was a scam if it wasn't being mandated by a real insurance company the small business did other policies through. The questions didn't seem to have been written by someone with technical experience. Many of the questions wanted Yes/No binary answers for things that are complex technically. Some of the questions led to good discussions about security improvements for a small business, but most of them seemed "cargo culted" from large enterprises without real application to a small business.

That did not leave me a strong impression of "cyber insurance policies". I suppose it also did leave me wondering how much we've left very small businesses behind in security as a culture.
by jambutters | 2025-12-23 17:04:20+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hong_Kong/comments/u8692j/jimmy_lai...

Sidenote:
The riots went too out of control and one of em threw a brick which hit an old street cleaners head.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hong_Kong/comments/dwmc76/rioters_t...
by tracker1 | 2025-12-23 17:04:28+00:00
Doing something once in a lifetime is far different than being able to regularly or even every few years. Also, $150 ea is just for the ticket into the park... you still need quite a bit more for food and drinks for the day and souvenirs. That also doesn't cover travel and hotel arrangements... For a family of 4, I'd be surprised if it didn't cost closer to $2500 for a Disney trip, if your family only earns the average national family income, that's a significant expense after housing, car(s), food and other bills.

So a family might have gone once, but that dpesn't mean they can do it anything resembling regularly. I went to Disneyland once as a kid (around 8yo)... th eonly time my family went growing up, and I haven't ever been back... My sister went as a young adult every year until she had kids, then it's been every few years... but she and her husband are doing much better than the typical American family.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-23 17:04:49+00:00
Well someone else mentioned llama.ttf which is a font that embeds an llm, using Harfbuzz's WASM engine.

So, you could absolutely write a WASM Z80 emulator and embed it in a font. Whether or not you could make it do anything useful, or how strong your grip on reality would remain after? I don't know.

But it wasn't like you were doing anything else on the days between Christmas and New Year, right?
by jonstewart | 2025-12-23 17:04:52+00:00
Not corporate, but two of the best individual developer blogs are Eli Bendersky's and Rachel by the Bay. They've both been blogging prolifically for a decade+, Eli with a focus on, broadly, compilers and Rachel on SRE/debugging.

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for anyone that works with Windows.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
by gaogao | 2025-12-23 17:05:22+00:00
Yeah, Rust has been pretty good for formal verification so far. Hoare spec contracts I think are the way forward, especially since they fairly naturally flow from unittests. I've been using Hax to pretty good effect so far. I'm generally suspect that advances in Lean proof solving by dedicated models are that useful for program verification, compared to generalist models, though it could help lower costs a good bit.
by while_true_ | 2025-12-23 17:06:44+00:00
CATO gets it wrong too. Social Security is an insurance program. Employer and employee payments function as insurance premiums. Like most insurance policies if you don't qualify for a disbursement you don't get your premiums back (e.g., you die before 62). Unlike normal insurance, Soc Sec has no coverage limit, so if you live to 105 you can collect far more than you paid in.

Since Soc Sec is income insurance, I am opposed to the flat benefit concept. Higher incomes pay higher premiums so they should get higher payouts. We already have some benefit flattening now because Soc Sec benefits are partially taxable above $25K single/$32k married.
by wibbily | 2025-12-23 17:06:46+00:00
It bothers me that so many programmers I know, here and in real life, seem to never actually have cared about the craft of software development?
Just about solving problems.

I like problem solving too. But I also like theory and craft, and in my naïveté I assumed most of us were like me. LLMs divorced craft-programming from tool-programming and now it seems like there were never any craft-programmers at all.

It feels like the group I was part of was just a mirage, a historical accident. Maybe craft-painters felt the same way about the camera.
by foltik | 2025-12-23 17:06:50+00:00
Agree that just being hand-written doesn’t imply quality, but based on my priors, if something obviously looks like vibe-code it’s probably low quality.

Most of the vibe-code I’ve seen so far appears functional to the point that people will defend it, but if you take a closer look it’s a massively over complicated rat’s nest that would be difficult for a human to extend or maintain. Of course you could just use more AI, but that would only further amplify these problems.
by INTPenis | 2025-12-23 17:07:03+00:00
I briefly owned one of the first Loongson netbook laptops, the Lemote I believe it was nicknamed. I've always been very much into open hardware, so I picked one up as soon as I could.

And I believe Debian was the only distro I was able to run on it back then too. Also NetBSD.

I ended up giving it to someone at the local hacker space. It's fun to try but it's not a daily driver.

Didn't Stallman use one as daily driver for a while?
by losvedir | 2025-12-23 17:07:19+00:00
The original point was that the previous SotA was a "heavily harnessed" agent, which I took to mean it had more tools at its disposal and perhaps some code to manage context and so on. The fact that the model can do it now in just 100 LoC and a terminal tool implied the model itself has improved. It's gotten better at standard terminal commands at least, and possibly bigger context window or more effectively using the data in its context window.

Those are improvements to the model, albeit in service of agentic workflows. I consider that distinct from improvements to agents themselves which are things like MCP, context management, etc.
by xp84 | 2025-12-23 17:07:28+00:00
The funny thing is that, at least for American consumers, there’s a good chance you’ll get mildly scammed by using your card in a foreign currency due to a 3%—4% junk fee that is common (I’d estimate 80% of non-premium cards have it). So the discovery of the “let us, the merchant, convert for you” scam has allowed merchants/payment networks to in some cases “steal” the scam from the card issuer (the card issuer then won’t take a fee if it’s in USD, but someone takes a fat margin on the currency). They’re all scumbags, all looking for ways to grift.
by jonahx | 2025-12-23 17:07:43+00:00
> but ijk I will rail against until I die.

> There's no context in those names to help you understand them, you have to look at the code surrounding it.

Hard disagree. Using "meaningful" index names is a distracting anti-pattern, for the vast majority of loops. The index is a meaningless structural reference -- the standard names allow the programmer to (correctly) gloss over it. To bring the point home, such loops could often (in theory, if not in practice, depending on the language) be rewritten as maps, where the index reference vanishes altogether.
by hackyhacky | 2025-12-23 17:07:55+00:00
The answer to your question "are these last 80 years really peaceful?" is yes, in context. Look at the horror of the world wars, or the preceding ~1000 years of barbarity and wide-scale religious wars. The US does not always use its power wisely, but the alternative is to cede that power to someone else: nature abhors a power vacuum.

Modern anti-vaccine nuts have spent so long living without measles that they've forgotten the good that vaccines do and take their good health for granted. Anti-US-power nuts have lived in a world largely without large-scale conflicts, held in place by our NATO allies and the credible threat of force, and you've forgotten what a world without that stabilizing effect looks like. Spoiler: it looks like the 30 year war but with nukes.
by SlavikCA | 2025-12-23 17:07:58+00:00
The HuggingFace link is published, but not working yet: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.1

Looks like this is 10 billion activated parameters / 230 billion in total.

So, this is biggest open model, which can be run on your own host / own hardware with somewhat decent speed. I'm getting 16 t/s on my Intel Xeon W5-3425 / DDR5-4800 / RTX4090D-48GB

And looking at the benchmark scores - it's not that far from SOTA (matches or exceeds the performance of Claude Sonnet 4.5)
by f1shy | 2025-12-23 17:08:21+00:00
>> Every comment is a line of code, and every line of code is a liability, and, worse, comments are a liability waiting to rot,

This is exactly my view. Comments, while can be helpful, can also interrupt the reading of the code. Also are not verified by the compiler; curious, in the era when everyone goes crazy for rust safety, there is nothing unsafer as comments, because are completely ignored.

I do bot oppose to comments. But they should be used only when needed.
by tyre | 2025-12-23 17:09:04+00:00
I remember when they were seeking approval to provide blow jobs on flights (free in business class iirc.) The only thing that they won’t up charge. They even tried to get approval to charge for bathroom access.

Wild company, but they are entirely on brand.

To be fair, consumers have driven airlines this way. They’ve shown that they’ll buy based almost entirely on price and suffer any amount of agony in exchange.

I just don’t find basic economy or early flights or shitty airlines worth the bad stress.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-23 17:10:18+00:00
Think of it like loading a moving truck where:

- The house is the disk

- You are the RAM

- The truck is the VRAM

There won't be a single time you can observe yourself carrying the weight of everything being moved out of the house because that's not what's happening. Instead you can observe yourself taking many tiny loads until everything is finally moved, at which point you yourself should not be loaded as a result of carrying things from the house anymore (but you may be loaded for whatever else you're doing).

Viewing active memory bandwidth can be more complicated than it'd seem to set up, so the easier way is to just view your VRAM usage as you load in the model freshly into the card. The "nvtop" utility can do this for most any GPU on Linux, as well as other stats you might care about as you watch LLMs run.
by atrettel | 2025-12-23 17:11:07+00:00
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. This is not legal advice.

In the United States, the only patentable subject matter is processes, machines, manufactures, or compositions of matter [1]. Anything outside of those areas is not directly patentable. Some subject matter like mathematics and "mental processes" generally are categorized as "abstract ideas" that therefore are not directly patentable [2]. It is possible to patent something that contains an abstract idea, but it also has to have some "additional elements" that elevate it beyond merely claiming an abstract idea.

I suggest reading MPEP § 2106 [2] and looking at the first diagram given there titled "Subject Matter Eligibility Test for Products and Processes". That is the exact analysis that a patent examiner would use to determine if something is patentable subject matter or not (including for any claim with a prompt).

I strongly suggest that you talk to a lawyer if you want specific advice that answers your question directly. I'm not commenting on any copyright aspects.

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2104.html

[2] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2106.html
by chrisfinazzo | 2025-12-23 17:12:03+00:00
As the platform owner, they explicitly reserve the right to do this - see also Meta, Google, Amazon, etc.

Apple collects data, but they usually keep it for their own use, that's the difference.

Third parties trying to do the same level of collection and also share it with partners is the issue. As such, the platform owner putting constraints on them by applying rules related to privacy shouldn't surprise anyone.

If it does, you're not paying enough attention.
by paulsutter | 2025-12-23 17:12:39+00:00
For serving web pages, TCP is only used by legacy servers.

The fundamental congestion control issue is that after you drop to half, the window is increased by /one packet/, which for all sorts of artificial reasons is about 1500 bytes. Which means the performance gets worse and worse the greater the bandwidth-delay product (which have increased by tens of orders of magnitude). Not to mention head-of-line blocking etc.

The reason for QUIC's silent success was the brilliant move of sidestepping the political quagmire around TCP congestion control, so they could solve the problems in peace
by crazygringo | 2025-12-23 17:13:04+00:00
No. What you are describing is exactly the myth that needs to die.

> comments are a liability waiting to rot, to be missed in a refactor, and waiting to become a source of confusion

This gets endlessly repeated, but it's just defending laziness. It's your job to update comments as you update code. Indeed, they're the first thing you should update. If you're letting comments "rot", then you're a bad programmer. Full stop. I hate to be harsh, but that's the reality. People who defend no comments are just saying, "I can't be bothered to make this code easier for others to understand and use". It's egotistical and selfish. The solution for confusing comments isn't no comments -- it's good comments. Do your job. Write code that others can read and maintain. And when you update code, start with the comments. It's just professionalism, pure and simple.
by robocat | 2025-12-23 17:13:06+00:00
> The top spots are reserved for Sociopaths

How many people think the first step is to become a sociopath?

And then try to act like they think a sociopath acts? Few people are ruthlessly cunning in the right way.

Even worse, do people try and model their behaviour based on The Apprentice or the worst of the shows about chefs?
by xp84 | 2025-12-23 17:13:13+00:00
Yup. Reminds me of how my dad would do his taxes at H&R Block, and then every year take out their “refund anticipation loan” (despite not having some big urgent expense). They deduct their overpriced tax prep fee and a healthy 150%APR interest payment from the proceeds but you get the money same day. You could just not do that and still have your refund in like a week. The APR is unconscionable given they did the taxes — they can be nearly certain your refund will arrive. But they just gloss over those details, probably by saying “Do you want your refund today, or wait on the IRS? With the Today option you can also just deduct your tax prep fee from the refund and not pay out of pocket.” I have a feeling they get a LOT of people with that scam.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-23 17:14:15+00:00
My one and only experience with Ryanair was that they were rude and hostile even in places where they weren't trying to fleece you. From in-your face rude signs (official, corporate designed ones, not something printed from Word by a random employee), to a UI where you needed to concatenate strings in order to craft a valid input (something like "enter your credit card number, followed by #, followed by the MMYY validity date"). Maybe that was to make people fail checkin and force them to pay for checkin at the counter, but I think it was early in the booking flow, i.e. where they had no incentive to make it hard.
by tarasyarema | 2025-12-23 17:14:31+00:00
Hi there HN!

We built an MCP server that coordinates multiple Claude Code instances running in Docker containers. It follows a lead/workers pattern, and the MCP glues the agents together.

They get a full ubuntu with sudo (YOLO) and a way to spawn services with PM2 (so they are persisted and restarted on container restarts).

Also, they have persistent workspaces, both for personal and shared across the whole swarm, so the lead can micromanage the workers more easily :D

It's super easy to setup and deploy. You can run it locally, really the only thing required is running `claude setup-token` and good to go.

WIP:

- Only tested with Claude Code, though architecture should support other CLI agents (Gemini CLI, Codex, Opencode).
- Horizontal scaling works but coordination gets chatty with many workers (needs prompting)

Open to feedback on the architecture, or similar projects!
by lelanthran | 2025-12-23 17:14:44+00:00
I've always hated Python. Could never enjoy it at all. Pretty much the same poor DX as PHP, Javascript, Ruby, etc.

Finally set up neovim with pyright; use types on every single fucking thing, and now I love Python[1].

Can't wait to see TC39 become a reality (learned about it just this past week on HN, actually). Maybe I'll enjoy Javascript too.

--------------------

[1] Within reason; the packaging experience is still extremely poor!
by rakoo | 2025-12-23 17:15:01+00:00
If it's a common enough occurrence to have _all_ your nodes down at the same time maybe you should reevaluate your deployment choices. The whole point of multi-nodes clustering is that _some_ of the nodes will always be up and running otherwise what you're doing is useless.

Also, garage gives you the possibility to automatically snapshot the metadata, advices on how to do the snapshotting at the filesystem level and to restore that.
by nullc | 2025-12-23 17:15:07+00:00
There is already lots of surveillance and was even before modern technology. I'd agree that having some at all is of value, my argument was that you don't need much past that to get what we need and certainly don't need the kind of pervasive surveillance that some want: It won't move the needle on crime much past a baseline level but it will enable abuses that are much worse than the level of property crime we see today. Authoritarian governments are the number one mass murderer throughout human history by a wide margin.

Low clearance rates for property crime are significantly because nothing is even done much of the time -- police just take a report and often won't even follow up on an obvious lead (including stuff like "find my phone says my thousand dollar phone is in that house over there").

But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.
by ankit219 | 2025-12-23 17:15:33+00:00
Are we learning the wrong lessons? Integrated always works better than modular components. Here, Apple is being asked to enable their versions of software for third party devices, which do not have the same hardware assumptions as Apple did. (Apple will not release the exact hardware spec for airpods anyway). This means the newer version will be designed modularly, with some tradeoffs to enable the "same" kind of access to third party. Then there is a caveat that it there is even a bit of experience change from 1st party to third party access, it will be complained about and investigated. so, the way fwd is designing with third party in mind, and that almost always leads to bloat and substandard experience for end user.

Probably better would have been just simpler access, even if not the integrated experience like. But that would lead to complains from third party manufacturers.
by BizarroLand | 2025-12-23 17:15:51+00:00
You cannot patent a prompt.

Anyone who attempts to do so will either need to be secretive and bribey to pull it off and will then also have to hope that no one ever finds out because if they did, then in any legal proceedings that come due to said patent, (which is the entire point of a patent), the outcome will be that their patent is invalidated by the court and the case thrown out.

The point of a patent is to make it so that, while the patent lasts, no one else can use said patent without licensing it from you, and if they do so without the license they open themselves up to civil penalties that can exceed any potential profits from the illicit licensing.

1: Prompts have no value in and of themselves.

2: The ownership of raw AI generated materials is in a grey area. It might be public domain, it might be owned by the person who prompted it, we don't have clear hard guidelines on that.

3: AI is trained on a dataset of billions of pieces of other peoples work. Any novelty (novelty is a requirement for a patent) that comes from AI is at best an accident of the same variety as the colors produced by spilling paint, where it has taken a slice from one person and a slice from another person and mixed them together.

So, all in all, AI prompts and their output are almost certainly not patentable, at least as long as one sane person is in the pipeline somewhere.