MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: NameGrid – a daily quiz game based on 150 years of US naming data
by murph314 | 2025-11-21 14:02:54+00:00
I built a once-a-day quiz based on US naming data back to 1880 to share my (potentially unhealthy) obsession with everything related to names.

Before my kids were born, my wife and I went through an over-the-top name evaluation process using data from the US Social Security Administration. I recently wrote about that project here:

https://three-things.medium.com/the-most-thorough-way-to-nam...

After revisiting the topic, I realized I could do a much better job of data analysis now than I did all those years ago. So I started doing some recreational SQL to answer random questions about history, gender split, and spelling (Bryan vs. Brien vs. Brian).

The results were really interesting! I figured the best way to share this information was by making it interactive, so I spent a few weeks whipping up this game.

No sign-up, no ads, no stored PII. Just a fun little distraction that hopefully makes you say “Huh, I didn’t expect that.”
by mjaniczek | 2025-11-21 14:03:18+00:00
In my case, I can't share them anymore because "the conversation expired". I am not completely sure what the Cursor Agent rules for conversations expiring are. The PR getting closed? Branch deleted?

In any case, the first prompt was something like (from memory):

> I am imagining a language FAWK - Functional AWK - which would stay as close to the AWK syntax and feel as possible, but add several new features to aid with functional programming. Backwards compatibility is a non-goal. > > The features: > * first-class array literals, being able to return arrays from functions > * first-class functions and lambdas, being able to pass them as arguments and return them from functions > * lexical scope instead of dynamic scope (no spooky action at a distance, call-by-value, mutations of an argument array aren't visible in the caller scope) > * explicit global keyword (only in BEGIN) that makes variables visible and mutable in any scope without having to pass them around > > Please start by succintly summarizing this in the README.md file, alongside code examples.

The second prompt (for the actual implementation) was something like this, I believe:

> Please implement an interpreter for the language described in the README.md file in Python, to the point that the code examples all work (make a test runner that tests them against expected output).

I then spent a few iterations asking it to split a single file containing all code to multiple files (one per stage, so eg. lexer, parser, ...) before merging the PR and then doing more stuff manually (moving tests to their own folder etc.)

EDIT: ah, HN screws up formatting. I don't know how to enforce newlines. You'll have to split things by `>` yourself, sorry.
by flohofwoe | 2025-11-21 14:03:40+00:00
In VSCode extensions this is trivial, this is how you create the 'executable':

https://github.com/floooh/vscode-kcide/blob/main/src/wasi.ts

...and this is how you run it:

https://github.com/floooh/vscode-kcide/blob/2dfc621aade4a2be...

The asmx.wasm file is a vanilla POSIX cmdline tool which loads and saves files via fopen/fread/frwrite/fclose, and the tool has been compiled with the WASI SDK: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk

The resulting VSCode extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.v...) then even runs in the VSCode browser version (https://vscode.dev/)

But AFAIK there's currently no easy way to get a similar easy to use WASI wrapper in browsers (it's definitely possible though because the VSCode browser version does it - VSCode basically has a filesystem abstraction which works for native filesystems as well as virtualized web filesystems like github repositories).
by array_key_first | 2025-11-21 14:04:03+00:00
How the fuck would de-densifying cities help with housing costs? The denser housing is, the cheaper it is per unit.

Also, remote work doesn't work like that. You, yes YOU, rely on actual real people to do stuff for your community to make your life worth living.

That means construction, food service, sanitation, etc. Already, this type of work is not very viable in suburban or rural areas because they're too inefficient. Many rural areas are essentially subsidized by the cities around them - they couldn't afford to have roads or electricity otherwise.

If everyone is spread out everywhere, how do you provide them with the stuff they need in an economically viable way? That's the entire reason urbanism exists!
by orliesaurus | 2025-11-21 14:04:30+00:00
i love seeing experiments that make this stuff run locally… bridging an MCP client into a Deno sandbox feels like a natural step if you want the same ergonomics offline.

ALSO there's a bunch of interesting questions around security and permission models when code is pulled on demand. Running arbitrary tools in a sandbox is neat, BUT you still need to think about what those tools can access… environment variables, network, local file system… limiting that scope could make these experiments more viable for larger teams.

i'd be curious to see benchmarks for cold starts and memory usage in this model… as well as patterns for caching compiled tools so they aren't reloaded every time. Discovering tools on demand is one thing, making them feel instantaneous is another. HOWEVER it's exciting to see folks pushing on this area and sharing their work.
by BellLabradors | 2025-11-21 14:04:37+00:00
Do you think your points are applicable to the specific examples he gives? e.g.:

>As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone.

And that $27M dollar cost doesn’t include the cost to society. This over-regulation will delay deployment of EV trucks by years, increasing NOₓ and PM 2.5 air pollution exposure for many of society’s least well-off who live near freeways
by cassepipe | 2025-11-21 14:05:33+00:00
Different cultures have access and then value different cultural expressions. Asking why there isn't the japanese Bach is a bit like asking why there is no spanish Lee Changho

You could make the argument of how elaborate is a piece of art but in the case of individuals like that they are so far off from the median person in their culture that it'd be quite hard to see their achievement as coming from their culture instead of their own cognitive abilities. The societies they grew into either fought them or allowed them to strive but that's about it.
by specproc | 2025-11-21 14:05:51+00:00
Downvoted, so I'll expand:

- The twin Y axes run to different ylims (50, 100 on left, 30, 80 on right). This is misleading in itself, as you're measuring two different things, but unforgivable when points are connected across the two subplots. This implies continuity in measurement, which does not appear to be the case.

- No x axis label, what is the time series supposed to represent? Is it even a time series?

- It doesn't even have a chuffing title, or the slightest or the slightest explanation of what it's supposed to represent.

Charts should explain and explore, not confuse and mislead. See me after class.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-21 14:06:35+00:00
That is impressive, but it also looks like a babelfish language. The |> seems to have been inspired by Elixir? But this is like a mish-mash of javascript-like entities; and then Rust is also used? It also seems rather verbose. I mean it's great that it did not require a lot of effort, but why would people favour this over less verbose DSL?
by triceratops | 2025-11-21 14:06:54+00:00
I mean you're just here repeating the lazy old anti-union talking points with 0 thought. I offered some examples that contradict them. The burden of proof is on you at this point.

If not having unions leads to high wages and good working conditions, why aren't retail and fast food workers making bank? Why do they get treated like shit? Please tell us.
by strogonoff | 2025-11-21 14:06:57+00:00
“Audio interactions with Google Assistant” is pretty conclusive, because when the assistant is voice activated it has to be listening to be useful, and it will do so even when the device is locked. Activating the feature (or not deactivating it, depending on defaults) implies consent.

The wording is also unambiguous about what you say being “activity”.

The part where it says that this activity is saved as part of your Google account is also pretty conclusive.

I can’t see how you can infer from that KB that the device would not be listening or that the recordings do not become part of your Google account history. What you could claim is that they are scrupulous as to when exactly your words become “activity”, or what exactly activity they save and share for the purposes of ad personalisation, which is your right to believe.
by saurik | 2025-11-21 14:06:58+00:00
I dunno: I have never ever wanted to make a compositor -- which, to me, feels like a really boring piece of graphics infrastructure -- and yet I have used multiple window managers over the years and have absolutely wanted to make my own window manager? In X, making your own window manager was so popular of an activity that it honestly felt kind of unreasonable just how many window managers existed, and yet everyone used one of a handful of compositors and I'm honestly not sure why anyone in their right mind would bother making their own display server?
by shevy-java | 2025-11-21 14:07:45+00:00
Although I dislike the AI hype, I do have to admit that this is a use case that is good. You saved time here, right?

I personally still prefer the oldschool way, the slower way - I write the code, I document it, I add examples, then if I feel like it I add random cat images to the documentation to make it appear less boring, so people also read things.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-21 14:07:54+00:00
Have you ever heard about someone who was laid off from a major tech company complain about the severance amount? My n=1 experience at BigTech is that I got $40K severance after 3 years (and anecdotally had 3 offers within two weeks of looking in 2023. But I realize the market is worse now than then)

And that severance was from Amazon.
by Arch-TK | 2025-11-21 14:08:07+00:00
You are throwing around anecdotes. They're not that helpful.

It's worth noting that success in life (for whatever that is defined as) is not the same thing as intelligence. And being intelligent isn't even enough for you to be successful in intellectual pursuits either.

You can be highly intelligent and receive no education, have no access to books (or be unable to read) and then you might be able to intelligently solve the problem of eating a sandwich but that wont get you anywhere.

Likewise, you can be intelligent and have access to the right tools but you might be too anxious to try to excell. Maybe you're intelligent and have unmedicated ADHD causing you to constantly fail to actually get anything completes in a timely manner.

There are a lot of things between IQ and success in life. But we do know for a fact that when controlling for other factors, we see positive trends between IQ and life success. That doesn't mean that IQ is the only factor.

Certainly the fact you can pull out a handful of anecdotes about high IQ individuals and talk about how uninspiring their lives are doesn't mean that all high IQ people are living uninspiring lives, or that living an inspiring life is uncorrelated with IQ, or that there is even a meaningful definition of an inspiring life.

Lastly, please note that there are lots of successful people who had an IQ test where they scored really low, and lots of unsuccessful people who had an IQ test where they scored high. This will in part be due to the fact that IQ doesn't corelate at 100% with anything, but also due to the fact that IQ doesn't correlate with itself over time at 100%. You can do an IQ test on an exceptionally bad day, or an exceptionally good day, you might get an IQ test which is not good at measuring you in particular. That's why when we do research on this topic we apply multiple different tests, we control for variables, and we run these on large groups of people.

Whether intelligence is useful for a model or not, who knows. All I can tell you with relative confidence is that IQ tests are designed with humans in mind, and when you apply them to models, it is no longer clear what they measure.

One thing models don't have (yet) is lives which they can live and which we can study.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2025-11-21 14:08:17+00:00
Exaclty. And this is fucking wrong and insane because the goal of a human should be not to die, not to avoid a particular type of death (eg. aviation death) . It's not like if you die on the car drive to the airport or because you are stabbed in the subway it's okay because you respawn

This is the same cognitive failure that happens with

Sharks v. Mosquitos and

Nuclear v. Fossil fuels

It seems to me you are defending the cognitive failure instead of arguing for the re-establishment of risk/reward parity also considering the enormous benefits of aviation which enables us to get from one point of the globe to the opposite in less than a day
by ovo101 | 2025-11-21 14:09:28+00:00
What’s frustrating here is how predictable these issues are. Next.js isn’t some niche framework, yet Okta’s SDK still struggles with basic OAuth flows like redirect handling, cookie persistence, and SSR quirks. That’s not just a bug — it’s a sign of weak integration testing.

The bigger problem is trust. If an identity provider can’t reliably support mainstream frameworks, it undermines confidence in their entire platform. Developers end up spending more time debugging the SDK than building features.

This is why many of us lean toward smaller, well‑maintained libraries (Auth.js, Supabase Auth, etc.). They don’t try to abstract away everything, but they do the fundamentals well — and that’s what matters most in security.
Ask HN: Is there a name for the study and patterns of software extensibility?
by deanebarker | 2025-11-21 14:10:16+00:00
I'm interested in the patterns and practices behind extending software. You know: extensions, plugins, add-ons, etc. -- the systems and features that software (usually enterprise software) provides so that users and extend it to do things it wasn't originally intended to do.

Is there a generally accepted name of category for this? I searched Amazon for some books on "software extensibilty" or "extending software," but didn't find anything outside of platform-specific books.

Ink and Switch has done a lot of research lately on what they called "malleable software," but that's a new term they invented, and doesn't have much traction.

I wrote this article for my work -- this is type of thing I've talking about: is there a name for the body of work/study around this type of thing?

https://staffbase.com/blog/integration-patterns
by lukan | 2025-11-21 14:10:35+00:00
Yes, I agree with that. I mean, ohh, how dramatic. So what will it be?

A forked FF?

A forked (proprietary) chrome, like vivaldi?

The best idealistic option, Ladybird and not be able to use most of the internet (yet)?

Well, I likely also won't find out. But I doubt it will be mindblowing, as the real choices (if you care for open source, but also to get stuff done) are limited.
by coffeefirst | 2025-11-21 14:11:03+00:00
Let me insert one more: you have to spend some time with your own thoughts.

Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.

And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.
by robtherobber | 2025-11-21 14:11:36+00:00
Interesting project and approach. I would like to host the captures locally though, otherwise I'd risk potentially losing years of captures and other useful information that is works on PageStash only if PS goes under.

Not a fan of subscriptions either, but I guess hosting and LLM analysis is a recurrent cost to PS as well.

I don't care much for the knowledge graph. Pricing-wise, I see it more like $5/m considering that a number of capturing solutions exist (Zotero, SingleFile, Save to Epub etc.).
by rPlayer6554 | 2025-11-21 14:11:38+00:00
You need both in the world. Blockers are almost useless for adults with an addiction who can easily just buy a new device or figure out a way around.

Kids can’t really join addiction recovery groups, at least not in the same way adults can because it takes a full understanding of the impacts of porn addiction on life and a desire to stop. I can only speak for myself but even with parents who tried to communicate this, I didn’t have that level of maturity then.

Blockers at least can stop them from accidentally finding it, or generic curiosity. At least until the parents decide they are mature enough to handle the unfiltered internet
by Hamuko | 2025-11-21 14:11:51+00:00
>Right so I need to buy new hardware for something I used to do for free?

>With the old devices a lightning to usb converter was needed

So it wasn't for free. You still had to get dongles.

Personally, I just need an audio interface to plug in a guitar, a headphones and speakers into my iPad. I need to buy something, but nothing that I wouldn't have had to buy with a PC either.
by wiedymi | 2025-11-21 14:12:27+00:00
I wanted a simple natural language calculator for my terminal (Ghostty) without paying for existing solutions. So I built one and made it free.

300+ currencies (cached, auto-update online) 40+ units, variables, history, 9 languages

CLI/TUI completely free & open-source: curl -fsSL https://numby.vivy.app/install.sh | bash

The macOS version costs $5.99 as a symbolic thank-you if you find it useful and want to support the project.

GitHub: https://github.com/vivy-company/numby Site: https://numby.vivy.app
by pjc50 | 2025-11-21 14:12:47+00:00
The simple explanation is there was no plan. There was no list of named regulations, just a handwave against the concept of regulation to begin with. Then comes the reality that, for physical products, deregulation in the UK market limits you to the UK market - for a global exporter, you have to comply with CE rules anyway for your EU customers, and you aren't going to make a separate cheap/worse product for UK customers.

Not to mention the NI question.

Physical reality bites as well: you can deregulate fish https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-fishin... , but that doesn't solve the underlying environmental issues and at best allows fishermen to collapse stocks sooner.
by fsloth | 2025-11-21 14:12:53+00:00
"but don't share the prompts."

To be honest I don't want to see anyone elses prompts generally because what works is so damn context sensitive - and seem to be so random what works and what not. Even though someone else had a brilliant prompt, there are no guarantees they work for me.

If working with something like Claude code, you tell it what you want. If it's not what you wanted, you delete everything, and add more specifications.

"Hey I would like to create a drawing app SPA in html that works like the old MS Paint".

If you have _no clue_ what to prompt, you can start by asking the prompt from the LLM or another LLM.

There are no manuals for these tools, and frankly they are irritatingly random in their capabilities. They are _good enough_ that I tend to always waste time trying to use them for every novell problem I came face with, and they work maybe 30% - 50% of time. And sometimes reach 100%.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-21 14:13:33+00:00
Yep, YTM is/was so clearly the inferior product it's laughable. Even as a Google employee with a discount etc (I can't remember what that was, but) on these things I switched to Spotify when they dropped it.

I worked on a team that wrote software for Chromecast based devices. The YTM app didn't even support Chromecast, our own product, and their responses on bug tickets from Googlers reporting this as a problem was pretty arrogant. It was very disheartening to watch. Complete organizational dysfunction.

I think YTM has substantially improved since then, but it still has terrible recommendations, and it still bizarrely blurs between video and music content.

Google went from a company run by engineers to one run by empire-building product managers so fast, it all happened in a matter of 2-3 years.
by linsomniac | 2025-11-21 14:13:40+00:00
>a codex subagent in Claude Code

That's a really fascinating idea.

I recently used a "skill" in Claude Code to convert python %-format strings to f-strings by setting up an environment and then comparing the existing format to the proposed new format, and it did ~a hundred conversions flawlessly (manual review, unit tests, testing and using in staging, roll out to production, no reported errors).
by rbanffy | 2025-11-21 14:14:13+00:00
> you want hundreds of nukes in orbit?

If you think about that, a lot of fuel for in-space nuclear reactors will already have been launched, so, if a new peace treaty outlaws them, it'll be a boon to whoever operates fission reactors in space. Or wants to use them for propulsion.

Once in space, they can't be disposed of - deorbiting is a big no-no, as it's blowing them up.
by low_tech_love | 2025-11-21 14:14:15+00:00
Slightly off-topic: I have an honest question for all of you out there who love Advent of Code, please don't take this the wrong way, it is a real curiosity: what is it for you that makes the AoC challenge so special when compared with all of the thousands of other coding challenges/exercises/competitions out there? I've been doing coding challenges for a long time and I never got anything special out of AoC, so I'm really curious. Is it simply that it reached a wider audience?
by rzerowan | 2025-11-21 14:14:35+00:00
Im going to go ahead and predict that the EU will not risk it.If it were China ? maybe they would pull the lever to activate this counter.

Previously when the US reneged on the JCPOA viz Iran , they had a similar law/faclity that theoreticall could have been used but never was.

As an addition the EU Commission is currently imposing pretty similar sanction on a Journalist [1] so yeah i dont see much movement on that law being used.Most likely they will try to wait it out.

[1] https://www.public.news/p/eu-travel-ban-on-three-journalists
by surgical_fire | 2025-11-21 14:14:35+00:00
> The EU is undemocratic,

Elaborate how exactly it is undemocratic.

I always ask imbeciles that repeat this bullshit, and they can never articulate this point. They either never reply or change the subject.

Typically they gesture at the EU commission being unelected, but they ignore that the commissioners are nominated by each member state (and all member states are supposedly democracies. And I say supposedly because Hungary exists). The nominees then have to be approved by the EU parliament (which is elected).

Saying that EU is undemocratic is like saying that a country with a prime minister is undemocratic because he was not directly voted for. Which is not an argument that can be taken seriously.

And I say this as someone that dislikes that EU commission is appointed by the member states government. The problem with this is that it mixes internal politics with EU politics - for example, in national elections I may vote for parties based on national issues, but I would vote for a different party in an explicit EU election.