MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Franklinjobs617 | 2025-10-13 02:45:50+00:00
I’m the maker of ConnectTheDotsPrintable. Thanks for checking it out!

A common question I anticipated was the complexity. It’s tricky to balance enough detail for the final image to be recognizable, while keeping the dot count manageable for a fun puzzle. The contour simplification algorithm handles this by focusing on areas of high contrast and ignoring fine texture noise.

A technical detail: I spent significant time optimizing the dot sequencing step. It’s not simply linear. For complex shapes, the algorithm dynamically determines the shortest Eulerian path that touches all necessary contour points, ensuring the final numbered puzzle remains logical and solvable for the user.

I know the printable market is saturated, but I believe the focus on hyper-personalization is the necessary differentiator. I'm especially interested in feedback on the algorithm's performance on photos versus line art. Let me know what you think!
by nine_k | 2025-10-13 02:46:36+00:00
This is a valid take. I do not agree with it in general: if we look beside the consumer devices, FOSS software us everywhere. and powers almost everything consequential.

But the mobile phones specifically turned from phones into trusted terminal which institutions like banks and governments use to let users control large amounts of money and responsibility. And the first rule of a secure device is to be limited. In particular, the device should limit the ability of its owner to fake its identity, or do unauthorized things with networking, camera, etc.

This junction of a general portable computer and a secure terminal is very unfortunate, because it exerts a very real pressure on the general computing part. Malicious users exist, hence more and more locking, attestation, etc, so that the other side could trust the mobile phone as a secure terminal.

It would be great to have a mobile computer where you can run whatever you please, because it's nobody's business. And additionally there'd be a security attachment that runs software which is limited, vetted, signed, completely locked-up and tamper-proof on the hardware level (also open-source), which sides of the communication would trust. Think about a Yubikey, or a TPM, but larger and more capable. The cellular modem and a SIM card are other examples, even though they may be not as severely hardened. They are still quite severely limited, and this is good.

If I were to offer an open-source phone (and, frankly, any mobile phone), I would consider following this principle. Much like the cellular modem, it would carry a locked up and certified security block, which would not be user-alterable. It would be also quite limited, unable to snoop into the rest of the phone. The rest of the phone would be a general-purpose computer with few limitations. Anything that would want to run on it securely would connect to the unforgeable interface of the security module, and do encryption / decryption / signing / secure storage that other parties, local and remote, would be able to verify and thus trust.

One can dream.
by paulcole | 2025-10-13 02:47:11+00:00
I’m not interested in any software, open source or otherwise.

I have to use software to do the things I want to do. I pick an option that’s good enough, use it, and go about my day.

Fiddling with and thinking about software isn’t a hobby I want any part of.

It feels like you’re asking why people don’t care about their forks and spoons. It’s the food they care about!
by godelski | 2025-10-13 02:47:12+00:00
> In a sense you can do the same thing to yourself.

Of course. I said you can do it unknowingly too.

> The degree to which it's a problem is proportional to the size of the bureaucracy.

Now take a few steps more and answer "why". What are the reasons this happens and what are the reasons people think it is reasonable? Do you think it happens purely because people are dumb? Or smart but unintended. I think you should look back at my comment because it handles both cases.

To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong. We're just talking about the concept at different depths.
by greentfrapp | 2025-10-13 02:48:40+00:00
I've been working on https://booplet.com. It's like Lovable but for desktop apps and heavily inspired by Robin Sloan's home-cooked app essay [1][2]. The idea is to let anyone, especially non-technical folks, build and use personal apps. Instead of cloud deployment, we focused on a local-first setup so that users can fully own their apps and data.

[1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ [2] https://booplet.com/blog/anyone-can-cook
by ndiddy | 2025-10-13 02:49:13+00:00
Google recently changed their security policy regarding Android, where there's now a 3-4 month delay between when OEMs get access to security patches and when they're posted to AOSP (it was previously 1 month). The patches are broadly distributed to OEMs, so there's no significant barrier to attackers and companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite obtaining them. GrapheneOS has access to the patches, but the embargoed nature means they're not able to publish the patch source code or any details about what vulnerabilities are being patched. This means that GrapheneOS users are forced to choose whether to opt into the closed source patches and get recent vulnerabilities patched, but lose out on having an open OS.
by olooney | 2025-10-13 02:49:15+00:00
Yes, I'm planning out-of-the-box support for nomic[1] which can run in-process, and ollama which runs as a local server and supports many free embedding models[2].

[1]: https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/nomic-embed-text-v1

[2]: https://ollama.com/search?c=embedding
by culi | 2025-10-13 02:49:25+00:00
Thanks for the corrections/added context and the fun link. The whole blog post feels like an attempt to name-drop as many related languages as possible

> We want a language that's open source, with a liberal license. We want the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that's homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar mathematical notation like Matlab. We want something as usable for general programming as Python, as easy for statistics as R, as natural for string processing as Perl, as powerful for linear algebra as Matlab, as good at gluing programs together as the shell. Something that is dirt simple to learn, yet keeps the most serious hackers happy. We want it interactive and we want it compiled. (Did we mention it should be as fast as C?). While we're being demanding, we want something that provides the distributed power of Hadoop — without the kilobytes of boilerplate Java and XML

> We are power Matlab users. Some of us are Lisp hackers. Some are Pythonistas, others Rubyists, still others Perl hackers. There are those of us who used Mathematica before we could grow facial hair. There are those who still can't grow facial hair. We've generated more R plots than any sane person should. C is our desert island programming language.
by jacobmarble | 2025-10-13 02:51:25+00:00
I’m creating an electronic avionics sensor and display for experimental aircraft. I’m having a fantastic time learning about circuits and MCUs (I have a pure CS degree, zero background with EE stuff). I’ve been working on this in my off hours for over a year now, maybe someday it will be a product that people buy!

The current challenge is the display. I’ve struggled to learn about this part more than any other. After studying DVI and LVDS, and after trying to figure out what MIPI/DSI is all about, I think parallel RGB is the path forward, so I’ve just designed a test PCB for that, and ordered it from JLCPCB’s PCBA service.
by ip26 | 2025-10-13 02:51:42+00:00
I mean to ask both: "checking whether X is true and crashing the program if not", like the assert macro, OR assert as in a weaker check that does not crash the program (such as generate a log event).

When crashing the program is acceptable and correctness preconditions can be efficiently checked, postconditions usually can be too.

What's interesting to me is the combination of two claims: formal verification is used when crashes are not acceptable, and crashing when formal assumptions are violated is therefore not acceptable. This makes sense on the surface - but the program is only proven crashproof when the formal assumptions hold. That is all formal verification proves.
by Ameo | 2025-10-13 02:52:09+00:00
I'm working on a DSL and browser-based playground for procedural 3D geometry called Geotoy: https://3d.ameo.design/geotoy

It's largely finished and functional, and I'm now focused on polish and adding additional builtin functions to expand its capabilities. I've been integrating different geometry libraries and kernels as well as writing some of my own.

I've been stress-testing it by building out different scenes from movies or little pieces of buildings on Google Maps street view - finding the sharp edges and missing pieces in the tool.

My hope is for Geotoy to be a relatively easy-to-learn tool and I've invested significantly in good docs, tutorials, and other resources. Now my goal is to ensure it's something worth using for other people.
by anon291 | 2025-10-13 02:53:15+00:00
Of course they will. The main investors in these high-risk ventures is government defined-benefit pensions. There is no way government will let its own pensions fail.

If you look at the entire market you will find that the private sector actually does not demand high returns. Instead, the government needs high returns because it has not properly funded its pension liabilities. Thus, it floods the market, and then unscrupulous financiers take the money with promise of high returns. The entire thing is messed up.

For example, public employee retirement systems constitute 30-40% of all hedge fund investments. They need more than the 7% real return from the S&P. CalPERS needs a 13% return to meet its obligations.

There is no investment on the market that can return 13%. Thus, CalPERS (and others) give money to these 'hedge funds' and private capital banks who promise them these money. Eventually, the banks go bust. THe government realizes that letting them fail makes their situation even more precarious and bails them out. Of course, the reason the government is incentivized to do this is because public sector unions hold disproportionate influence and will oust them if they don't get paid.
by khimaros | 2025-10-13 02:53:25+00:00
this was my first time speaking publicly about my opinion on this after reading as much of the history as i could with an open mind. i was really looking forward to bcachefs landing in the mainline kernel because btrfs doesn't meet my needs. i was and still am rooting for you, but your social skills really are comically bad and it's impacting the potential of the project. it makes me sad. P.S. your response here doesn't surprise me at all and is completely in character based on everything else i've seen from you.
by troad | 2025-10-13 02:54:20+00:00
> However, unlike TFA and other comments, I don't suggest `Locale.US`. That's a little too US-centric. The canonical locale is in fact `Locale.ROOT`. Granted, in practice it's equivalent, but I find it a little bit more sensible.

Isn't it kind of strange to say that Locale.US is too US centric, and therefore we'll invent a new, fictitious locale, the contents of which is all the US defaults, but which we'll call "the base locale of all locales"? That somehow seems even more US centric to me than just saying Locale.US.

Setting the locale as Locale.US is at least comprehensible at a glance.
by yongjik | 2025-10-13 02:55:16+00:00
That could happen. But on the other hand, all those new housing will create more people living around stations, providing more ridership and more revenue for public transportation, and hopefully more stations along the way.

Also, these new people would vote. The old NIMBYs are already opposing everything; how harder can they go? The demographic change might be enough to change local politics in some places.
by sdwr | 2025-10-13 02:55:23+00:00
I'm no apple enthusiast, but digital knobs solve a real UI problem. They:

- display a value compactly

- show that the value is modifiable by the user

- allow changing the value to use more screen real-estate than the knob itself

An abstract slider that works like a knob is jumping a knights-move away in design space from a traditional control. The user has to understand 2 things about the widget:

1. It's user-modifiable

2. It's manipulated by clicking on the widget, then dragging away

A knob is only 1 step away from a traditional control. You get the "user-modifiable" knowledge for free, because everyone knows what a knob is already.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-10-13 02:56:25+00:00
Okay… even if things worked exactly as you say. Is the repeal going to fix education? Is it going to result in home prices going down or up? Will the change in home prices that you predict cause more or fewer homes to be built? I hate Prop 13 but I hate it for reasons of justice and equity, not because I think it will have effects that it will not.
by manquer | 2025-10-13 02:57:21+00:00
There were long series of missteps at Sun not just one, those started well before the bubble and continued till the end.

The dot com crash helped none of course, the $2Billion Cobalt Network acquisition was particularly dumb. However by 2007 they were no longer in red, they had just spent a billion on MySQL that year and were in decent financial shape.

Sure they weren’t growing, but there was no urgent need to sell . They could have stuck around and who knows MySQL or Open Office could have grown or even Java Licensing from Android adoption or be selling hypervisor or core tech to then emerging cloud tooling OpenSolaris had ZFS , Containers, DTrace and some really cool software that Linux simply lacked. Sun had developer mindshare and ton of goodwill which would have quite valuable to just anyone not named Oracle particularly so around the Ballmer years.

Oracle itself is a testament that sticking around pays eventually, for that matter NVIDIA stuck around to twice ride a hype cycle first the crypto one and now AI.

The board and management just didn’t have any vision so jumped at the second offer, that is hardly attributable to dot com burst, just poor management.

Even selling to Big Blue, when IBM came knocking first would have been better for everyone(including arguably also Oracle). Oracle was and is not to be equipped to engage with the developer community.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-10-13 02:58:09+00:00
Banning VSCode — instead of the troublesome features/plug-ins — seems like a step too far. VSCode is the only IDE that supports a broad range of languages with poor support elsewhere, from Haskell to Lean 4 to F*.

I work at a major proprietary consumer product company, and even they don’t ban VSCode. We’re just responsible for not enabling the troublesome features.
by vednig | 2025-10-13 02:58:15+00:00
I think being a programmer we must understand that there's never a one size fits all needs.

Each project has different needs having an option never hurts, as long as there is competition, there will exist a chance of open sourcing the source.

Because, closed source softwares die faster in their lifetimes, while open source remain remembered even after being unmaintained.

Had it not been for GitHub(a closed source software) we'd had never reached this stage of open source expansion and understanding, because hosting a git to open source a project was and still isn't cost effective solution. Meanwhile torrents are mildly successful with this, yet faced by the lawful resistance in many regions.

Basic goals, should be to always have a choice, if there isn't much then create one if you can. Rest is just fog in hindsight, I'd say.
by coderenegade | 2025-10-13 02:58:32+00:00
More likely businesses than robots, but robots will consume on behalf of the business that owns them, same as currently happens with procurement.

If people don't have the money to pay for shavers, shavers either won't be made, or they'll be purchased and owned by businesses, and leased for some kind of servitude. I'm not sure what kind of repayment would work if AI and machines can replace humans for most labor. Maybe we're still in the equation, just heavily devalued because AI is faster and produces higher quality output.

Alternatively, government might have to provide those things, funded by taxes from businesses that own machines. I think, realistically, this is just a return to slavery by another name; it's illegal to own people as part of the means of production, but if you have a person analog that is just as good, the point becomes moot.

I think it gets scary if the government decides it no longer has a mandate to look after citizens. If we don't pay taxes, do we get representation?
by Franklinjobs617 | 2025-10-13 02:58:43+00:00
I’m currently building YTVidHub—a tool that focuses on solving a very specific, repetitive workflow pain for researchers and content analysts.

The Pain Point: If you are analyzing a large YouTube channel (e.g., for language study, competitive analysis, or data modeling), you often need the subtitle files for 50, 100, or more videos. The current process is agonizing: copy-paste URL, click, download, repeat dozens of times. It's a massive time sink.

My Solution: YTVidHub is designed around bulk processing. The core feature is a clean interface where you can paste dozens of YouTube URLs at once, and the system intelligently extracts all available subtitles (including auto-generated ones) and packages them into a single, organized ZIP file for one-click download.

Target Users: Academic researchers needing data sets, content creators doing competitive keyword analysis, and language learners building large vocabulary corpora.

The architecture challenge right now is optimizing the backend queuing system for high-volume, concurrent requests to ensure we can handle large batches quickly and reliably without hitting rate limits.

It's still pre-launch, but I'd love any feedback on this specific problem space. Is this a pain point you've encountered? What's your current workaround?
by troad | 2025-10-13 02:58:54+00:00
> Really, this bug is nothing but programmers failing to take into account that not everybody writes in English.

This bug is the exact opposite of that. The program would have worked fine had it used pure ASCII transforms (±0x20); it was the use of library functions that did in fact take Turkish into account that caused the problem.

More broadly, this is not an easy issue to solve. If a Turkish programmer writes code, what is the expected behaviour for metaprogramming and compilers? Are the function names in English or Turkish? What about variables, object members, struct fields? You could have one variable name that references some government ID number using its native Turkish name, right next to another variable name that uses the English "ID". How does the compiler know what locale to use for which symbol?

Boiling all of this down to 'just be more considerate' is not actually constructive or actionable.
by pglevy | 2025-10-13 03:01:36+00:00
For context, I'm a UX Designer at a low-code company. LLMs are great at cranking out prototypes using well-known React component libraries. But lesser known low-code syntax takes more work. We made an MCP server that helps a lot, but what I'm working on now is a set of steering docs to generate components and prototypes that are "backwards compatible" with our bespoke front end language. This way our vibe prototyping has our default look out of the box and translates more directly to production code. https://github.com/pglevy/sail-zero
by computerbuster | 2025-10-13 03:01:52+00:00
I'm a big fan of JPEG XL, but even its most dedicated fans have given up the argument that it is the best for compression efficiency. AVIF's generational leap took place in August 2024 with Tune Still Picture in SVT-AV1-PSY, so much so that Google integrated it into their own encoder and has done very impressive work optimizing it further for the human visual system. JPEG XL's strongest quality is its featureset; lossless JPEG recompression, for example, is really incredible
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-10-13 03:02:29+00:00
The funny thing about disembodied superintelligence-- what if a collection of normal intelligences are fundamentally unable to extract net value from it?

The first example that comes to mind is OpenAI's Sebastian Bubeck (& others) giving underwhelming examples to illustrate that GPT has surpassed human mathematicians. Or earlier, when SamA says that he has seen things you wouldn't believe, whereas the top replicant in a proper sci-fi will at least be specific about the I-Beams.

Another parallel which you would be familiar with is nuclear power. Humans can plainly see it's an unworldly tech, but I'd say the value extracted so far has been a net negative-- mainly because our collective engineering chops are just too.. profane. And SamA/Musk/Thiel/Luckey just don't seem as wise as Rickover (who is the Rickover of our age? I think the Rickover pipeline is broken, tbh)

From my vantage point, I agree with you: China sees AI as less important as solar, so charitably, I'd say that Thiel's contrarian strategy is actually to get the Chinese so riled up they zuzwang themselves into providing the progress but keeping the whirlwind for themselves (so proving he has learnt the post-mimetic game from the atomics opening)

There could be another interesting post-mimetic line exploring how a hybrid chabuduo-"festina-lente" culture is required for developing supertech.. which.. only a Rickover can play

(I don't know if you're army or navy but there's this millenniums old cultural divide between a conservative army engineering culture -- that develops atomics -- and a progressive naval engineering culture -- that makes headway harnessing it. AI bulls smell like they are more aligned with land-forces
by zdragnar | 2025-10-13 03:02:40+00:00
Duh? The US has a lot of easy and cheap access to fossil fuels. With Russia cut off, solar is a really easy part of the equation for a lot of countries.

Here in the US, I'd expect we wouldn't be adding much new coal or nat gas either if it weren't for all the data centers going up everywhere. The amount of electricity going into the Internet and AI is wild.
by schrodinger | 2025-10-13 03:02:52+00:00
In my experience the em dash is still correctly used, the modern style has just evolved to put a space around it.

So:

* fragment a—fragment b (em dash, no space) = traditional

* fragment a — fragment B (em dash with spaces) = modern

* fragment a -- fragment b (two hyphens) = acceptable sub when you can’t get a proper em to render

But en-dashes are for numeric ranges…
by huedaya | 2025-10-13 03:02:58+00:00
Currently working on Note Cargo, basically self-hosted Markdown note-taking app, but I tried to not using database. So similar to Obsidian/Logseq but its web-based.

And currently working to make things shareable, also don't want to use database.

Here is the demo https://notecargo.huedaya.com/
by Dwedit | 2025-10-13 03:03:35+00:00
In C# programming, you are able to specify a culture every time you call a function such as numbers <-> strings, or case conversion. Or you specify the "Invariant Culture", which is basically US English. But the default culture is still based on your system's locale, you need to explicitly name the invariant culture everywhere. Because it involves a lot of filling in parameters for many different functions, people often leave it out, then their code breaks on systems where "," is the decimal separator.

You can also change the default culture to the invariant culture and save all the headaches. Save the localized number conversion and such for situations where you actually need to interact with localized values.
by vednig | 2025-10-13 03:03:51+00:00
Gaming is one such usecase that requires and works well, currently, with proprietary software.

As such, gaming is a sport and as long as a game is competitive, there's always a chance to bypass a n obstacle with a hack, just as there was misconceptions with OSes.

But unlike OSes, games don't have a commercial application yet, we still have a long time before the realisation of freeware gaming.