MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-18 19:42:23+00:00
> The actual science is unimaginably boring. Do not be overweight on the BMI scale and do some moderate exercise for around 2 hours every week.

Don't be depressed is also excellent advice for people with depression: if they can manage that, it improves their mood tremendously. Not catching colds also greatly reduces your chances of cold-like symptoms.

By which I mean, what you're saying is a truism, not medical advice. Keeping your BMI under control is a natural no-effort thing for some people, and a grueling lifelong struggle for others. Telling fat people to stop being fat is not "advice", it is exactly as helpful as telling sick people to stop being sick.
by chlodwig | 2025-12-18 19:42:23+00:00
Except the definition used in the article, a ban is when a parent group disagrees with the authorities (the librarians) and does not want the book in a tax-payer funded library: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."

So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.
How do you find early users for an MVP dev tool?
by yashwantphogat | 2025-12-18 19:42:24+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some perspective from people who’ve been through this.

I’ve been working on a pull request reviewer for the last couple of months and recently got it to an MVP stage. Building it was exciting, but once I launched, I ran into something I didn’t expect: getting even a handful of real users has been surprisingly hard.

Now I’m stuck in a bit of a loop. I want to keep improving the product, but without users it’s hard to know what actually matters or stay motivated. At the same time, I worry that if people do try it, they’ll bounce quickly because it’s still an MVP with limited features.

For those who’ve built developer tools before:

How did you find your first few real users?

Did you focus on distribution early, or keep iterating quietly?

How do you balance “it’s too early” vs “it’ll never be ready without users”?

Curious how others have handled this stage.
by robocat | 2025-12-18 19:42:34+00:00
I always thought it was parents being competitive - especially for unobvious social status signals.

We notice competitive behaviours at our jobs - we expect to see it, and in many work situations competition is admissible.

It is harder to notice competition in our social lives because we deceive ourselves with rationalisations (that appear reasonable) and the games are less obvious.

Just a personal theory (I'm a late learner for even simple status signaling).
by tiazm | 2025-12-18 19:42:35+00:00
I like the analytics vs LoB oriented framing. In my experience, analytics is necessary to evaluate quality and guide change, but value only materializes once decisions are executed in the LoB systems. That mismatch makes analytics easy to layer on, but hard to own.

What I keep wondering is whether there will ever be a point where analytics is perceived as first order value from day one, rather than as something you add later once the system already exists.
by codingdave | 2025-12-18 19:42:50+00:00
I did do web work for a long time, but I grew tired of it, so these days I just do contract work on legacy systems and platform modernizations. Some of those systems may have a web UX, some do not. But the work is more about refactoring architectures to get off brittle tech that nobody knows anymore, and move on to tech stacks where you can actually find talent to run it.

It is a different experience to be sure - I work on stuff that nobody likes and where most people are surprised it still exists. And my goals tend to be about shutting down, not growing. I succeed with every server we kill, every product we turn off, every customer we get rid of.
by onraglanroad | 2025-12-18 19:43:23+00:00
Well, no, you're the one that is "wrong, anti-science, or lying".

The very first sentence of the article you linked to says, "Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood."

So claiming that its for biological reasons is bullshit. You have no idea whether it is or not. And neither does Blow.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-12-18 19:43:35+00:00
I've not seen the latest Jurassic Park movie, but I've seen a clip with velociraptor's with feathers, and maybe quetzlcoatalus too? Along with colourful skin on eg compsagnathus.

They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-18 19:43:41+00:00
I have a few qualms about this standard:

1. For an experienced Claude Code user, you can already build such an agent persona quite trivially by using the /agents settings.

2. It doesn't actually replace agents. Most people I know use pre-defined agents for some tasks, but they still want the ability to create ad-hoc agents for specific needs. Your standard, by requiring them to write markdown files does not solve this ad-hoc issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the standard, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
by mkagenius | 2025-12-18 19:43:51+00:00
If anyone wants to use Skills in Gemini CLI or any other llm tool - check out something I have created, open-skills https://github.com/BandarLabs/open-skills

It does code execution in an apple container if your Skill requires any code execution.

It also proves the point that Skills are basically repackaged MCPs (if you look into my code).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-18 19:44:32+00:00
US labor needs organizing and unions to push wages up faster, there is no other way to push up wages faster to reach wage-price affordability. Companies will do whatever possible to constrain labor costs. Price levels will not decline without a depression level macroeconomic event. Derived from first principles.

> We need years of income and wages rising faster than prices to undo the damage done during the pandemic. It’s more than restoring the ability to pay—the level of real compensation is already above pre-pandemic levels. It’s about improvements large enough to inspire confidence. It’s about consistency, too. The pandemic set off a series of shocks that destabilized people’s daily lives and the global economy. The challenge for policymakers now is to support stable, sustainable growth. No quick fixes or gimmicks. We need “some years” of good policy.
by mtrovo | 2025-12-18 19:44:40+00:00
Loved your description of the class system. There's a general theme of old money wealthy people not caring about vanity purchases because they don't know how much stuff costs nor if that is a too much money or not.

It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.
by bigfishrunning | 2025-12-18 19:44:44+00:00
https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/ https://cdn.openai.com/gpt-5-system-card.pdf

according to openai, the least likely model to hallucinate is gpt-5-thinking-mini, and it hallucinates 26% of the time. Seems to me the problems of LLMs boldly producing lies are far from solved. But sure, they lied years ago too.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-18 19:44:54+00:00
> Who pays for this?

Initially, the user requesting the hearing (this discourages the scammers).

When the appeal is won, the company (this encourages doing a really good job at not banning legit users and enabling lower-friction ways for them to appeal).

> You are suggesting we socialize the cost of private customer service disputes.

No, it can just be a dedicated body, funded as described above. Yes, this might mean that free accounts cease to exist, although I suspect in practice it would just result in a fraction of the profit from free accounts going into better (less user-hostile) abuse management rather than profit.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-18 19:45:16+00:00
I was.. precocious as a youngster and read books that were far above my grade level and what most adults would consider to be "safe" for children.

The first time I tried to check out one of those very adult books the librarian called my parents and asked if it was OK. My parents said "Yes. Let him have whatever he wants." They made a note in my account and the next day they let me have have whatever I wanted.

If that hadn't happened I would be a very different, and much dumber, person now.

I don't understand what the issue is with just asking the parents?

I suspect that most of the people responsible for these "bans" don't want that to happen because some parents will approve of things they don't. Most of this really IS an attempted ban rather than just "appropriate age related content" issue. They don't want to control what THEIR kids can see. They want to control what YOUR kids can see.
by dllu | 2025-12-18 19:45:33+00:00
The fact that SVG files can contain scripts was a bit of a mistake. On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand, it opens up a serious can of worms of security vulnerabilities. As a result, SVG files are often banned from various image upload tools, they do not unfurl previews, and so on. If you upload an SVG to discord, it just shows the raw code; and don't even think about sharing an SVG image via Facebook Messenger, Wechat, Google Hangouts, or whatever. In 2025, raster formats remain way more accessible and easily shared than SVGs.

This is very sad because SVGs often have way smaller file size, and obviously look much better at various scales. If only there was a widely used vector format that does not have any script support and can be easily shared.
by bobjordan | 2025-12-18 19:45:39+00:00
The way I'm keeping up with it (or deluding myself into believing I am keeping up with it) is by maintaining rigorous testing and test standards. I have used LLMs to assist me building C firmware for some hardware projects. But the scale of that has been such that it can also be well tested. Anyway, part of the reason I was so much slower with python is I'm an expert at all the tech I used, spending literal years of my life in the docs and reading books, etc., and I've read everything the LLM wrote to double check it. I'm not so literate with go but its not very complex, and given the static nature, I just trusted the LLM more than I did with python. The react stack I am learning as I go, but the tooling is so good, and I understand the testing aspects, same issue, I trusted the LLM more and have been more productive. Anwyay, times are changing fast!
by AuthAuth | 2025-12-18 19:45:40+00:00
I'm new to HN so I am just taking a guess based on what i've observed so far.

HN works by posting things you are genuinely interested in and that the other people here are genuinely interested in.

You have to be honest, people arent interested in your chatgpt wrapper or whatever flavour of the month tech is being pushed. There is more interest in someone showing off an pi project they spent a few weeks working on than someone showing a fully working ready to ship product.

So show us the product in a real and interesting way. If you are working on an app dont just post a link to the web page with some SEO slop written, write a blog where you talk about how you solved a specific technical problem.
by motbus3 | 2025-12-18 19:46:12+00:00
If you are in the industry for enough time you certainly crossed with a boss who said that it needs to be fixed in 5 minutes or else even if the problem was not caused by you and the solution clearly needs more than 5 minutes. (The root cause was because someone had only 5 minutes to do something too)

I once had a job that my boss ordered (that's the word he used) me to do the wrong thing. Me and the rest of the team refused except for one guy who did it because he was certain that 9 out 10 people were wrong while he was the only right one) The company spend 2M USD in returns, refunds and compensations in a project that probably didn't cost that. It was just a patch! How he could've possibly know - said the dismissed manager.

(Now he works for oracle, why not right)
by btilly | 2025-12-18 19:46:26+00:00
Given the First Amendment, the only thing that I can think of as banned is copyright violations.

The Pentagon Papers case says that, once revealed, classified information can be published.

How about dangerous information. Want to know how to make a fusion bomb? Start at https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/fusion/index.html. More detailed schematics are easy to find.

All that said, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
by general1465 | 2025-12-18 19:46:38+00:00
Self reliance is very important as we can see with USA temporarily not updating Ukrainian F16's radars and jammers and degrading them in the process. Then it is better to have a weapon with worse performance than the best thing on the market but not being subjected to whims of same random leader on the other side of the world who things that your struggle for independence is inconvenient for his business.

Sooner or later people will figure out that it is working exactly the same with nuclear weapons and then non-proliferation treaty will be null and void.
by phaser | 2025-12-18 19:46:42+00:00
Microlandia - The Brutally honest city builder.

I started making this game several years ago, sporadically, abandoning it for month-long periods, but after posting it here a few times in Show NH I got the encouragement I needed to publish it to itch.io, then to Steam.

This month it crossed the $500/month mark by far, but it was a long road to get it to a state where it can actually be an interesting enough game to make money.

https://microlandia.city
by madars | 2025-12-18 19:47:20+00:00
It's quite easy to do it yourself - just open archive.is and paste the original URL in.

https://archive.is/tKZmn

FWIW, this seems to be a Reuters report reprinted in Japan Times. Previous HN discussions got just a couple comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307819
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-18 19:47:28+00:00
> You could do a revenue threshold or something but seems tricky.

That's what countries regulating this tend to do (often user count instead of revenue thresholds, but similar).

It also makes sense, because if the podcast guy bans you, you can pick a different podcast player or just not listen to podcasts. If both Google and Apple ban you, you're also effectively debanked because you can't use their app stores to install the banking authenticator app that is required to use online banking, possibly excluded from using public transit, etc.
by liampulles | 2025-12-18 19:47:33+00:00
I'm curious about the `license` field in the specification: https://agentskills.io/specification.

Could one make a copyleft type license such that the generated code must be licensed free and open and under the same license? How enforceable are licenses on these skills anyway, if one can take in the whole skill with an agent and generate a legally distinct but functionally close variant?
by acyou | 2025-12-18 19:48:07+00:00
I'm not sure if people realize this, but Iran suffered more than any other nation during WW2, including Poland, Japan, the Philippines, China, and that's saying something. As a neutral country, I believe they have had something like 25% fatality rate during the war.

This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.

Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-18 19:48:16+00:00
> It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links.

Not in the example I mentioned. It can imagine the links, and the content of the links, and be very confident about it. It literally invented an obituary that didn't exist, gave me a link to a funeral home that 404'd, came up with "in-memoriam" references from regional newsletters that never contained her name. It's actually really scary how specifically fake it was.

I asked it to produce verbatim references from any sources and the links to them, and none of the text it produced could be searched with quotes on any search engine.
by strangattractor | 2025-12-18 19:48:19+00:00
I do not know specifics of bundling agreements (shocker that I admit not knowing something:). I do know that libraries at some Institutions have started to provide funds to their researchers to pay the APCs. The library then goes to the Open Access publisher and negotiates bulk APC deals if they commit to a certain number of publications. Sort of a win win grant wise. This does not necessarily guaranty publication but if it does not get published you don't pay (processing submissions is an expense Open Access publishers incurs).

I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts access to information.

I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and research money.

I would also argue that there are other problems within research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you for the honest discussion.
by mattmaroon | 2025-12-18 19:48:41+00:00
It’s Hacker News, not an essay. It isn’t fallacious, it’s an abbreviation.

It would be possible for us to continue propping up our allies who seemed (until Trump made it clear we might just take our ball and go home) completely uninterested in meeting the defense obligations agreed to, but it would come at a cost that would bankrupt us without us making other major sacrifices. We shouldn’t have to make those sacrifices to ensure the security of people who claim to be allies but don’t meet their own contractual obligations. I don’t find myself agreeing with Trump on very much, but on this one, he’s not only right, he’s the only person who could have caused any change. No other politician of either party was ever going to convince Europe to significantly increase military spending, even with the threat of Russia at their door.

It’s fairly obvious that was meant, and your comment is basically just the standard hacker news “aaaaactually”
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-18 19:49:02+00:00
My impression (possibly wrong) is that in Germany, there is just "court" and trying to enforce a $500 judgement will be difficult because every lawyer will tell you to just eat the cost rather than taking the case, and the case would cost thousands to litigate (to be reimbursed by the company if you eventually won, 5 years later).
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-18 19:49:17+00:00
He makes a valid distinction, in a very specific sense. As long as we understand a program correctly, then we understand its behavior completely [0]. The same cannot be said of spherical cows (which, btw, can be modeled by computers, which means programs inherit the problems of the model, in some sense, and all programs model something).

However, that "as long as" is doing quite a bit of work. In practice, we rarely have a perfect grasp of a real world program. In practice, there is divergence between what we think a program does and what it actually does, gaps in our knowledge, and so on. Naturally, this problem also afflicts mathematical approximations of physical systems.

[0] And even this is not entirely true. Think of a concurrent program. Race conditions can produce all sorts of weird results that are unpredictable. Perfect knowledge of the program will not tell you what the result will be.
by johng | 2025-12-18 19:49:28+00:00
This behavior is disgusting. So many entitled people. I'm of the belief that even if you have a handicap sticker but don't truly need a close parking spot, you don't take it. Leave it for those truly in need. I was raised that way, and to open doors, give up your seats for the elderly, women, especially pregnant women. Just old school respect I guess, that you really don't see too much of now a days. Just common decency and concern for your fellow human goes a long way I think.
by quesera | 2025-12-18 19:49:32+00:00
Not exactly. The iPhone launched with no App Store at all. No exceptions for financial institutions. I allow financial institution apps on my phone because I believe that the security guarantees on iOS are stronger than on my desktop OS, and also that the customer relationship with the banks/etc are more valuable (to the bank) when their apps are not infected with tracking and ads, etc. And of course, the bank knows a lot about me anyway due to transaction history, and they're well-regulated, understand privacy, etc.

Also, I have trouble believing that the App Store and public SDKs went from "not on the roadmap" to "released" in one year. I know it's the popular narrative, but I feel like there must be more to the story. It's plausible that they were being worked on but a final management decision hadn't been made to launch them?
by bgwalter | 2025-12-18 19:49:42+00:00
They found one React bug and spend pages on "frontier" "cyber" nonsense. They make these truly marvelous models only available to "vetted" "security professionals".

I can imagine what the vetting looks like: The professionals are not allowed to disclose that the models don't work.

EDIT: It must really hurt that ORCL is down 40% from its high due to overexposure in OpenAI.
by archagon | 2025-12-18 19:50:02+00:00
Like I said, I find the majority of European art before 1800 or so to be fairly dull, so I can't really answer this question. The prevailing technique improved remarkably post-Renaissance, and that's enjoyable to an extent, but the same themes get repeated over and over and over again.

If you're looking for art with an impact, the iconography of Andrei Rublev (and other icon painters during this period) is still massively influential in the Russian Orthodox Church today. 600+ years of direct use and inspiration! The lack of naturalism is not a deficiency.