MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A living wall of life goals and deathbed regrets
by jamespetercook | 2025-11-05 15:32:53+00:00
Answer the question "Before I die, I want to..." and post it to the wall.

I built this as part of a journaling app I’m working on as a side project. Personally I find life goals fascinating - they're the things we think will make us feel the happiest and the most fulfilled, yet often people think they won't achieve them.

I have tried to make it feel atmospheric with the goal of making you stop and think about your own life for a second.
by ak217 | 2025-11-05 15:33:05+00:00
Take a look at this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64679-2 - the limits at "normal visual acuity" (18 observers ~25 years old) are far beyond what you imply. You need over 95 ppd to exhaust normal visual acuity.

> For a 32" monitor, if your eyeballs are 36" away from the monitor's surface

Why are you assuming 36"? Nobody I know uses 32" monitors at 36" away. Most people use less than half that distance for their laptops, and just over half for desktops.

> the 210 PPI figure often quoted is for smartphone displays

The 210 PPI figure is a minimum, it was used as marketing when Apple first started offering Retina displays. Apple's modern iPhone displays have far higher PPI. Apple's own marketing was challenged by critics who noted that visual acuity may top out closer to 200 ppd.

Perhaps Retina doesn't matter to you - that's OK. But for most of us, 32" 4K is nowhere near the limit of our vision, and by staring at these monitors all day, we are slowly degrading it.
by agumonkey | 2025-11-05 15:33:25+00:00
it's a large human behavior question for me, the notion of work, value, economy, efficiency .. all muddied in there

- i used to work on small jobs younger, as a nerd, i could use software better than legacy employees, during the 3 months, i found their tools were scriptable so I did just that. I made 10x more with 2x less mental effort (I just "copilot" my script before it commits actual changes) all that for min wage. and i was happy like a puppy, being free to race as far as i want it to be, designing the script to fit exactly the needs of an operator.

(side note, legacy employees were pissed because my throughput increase the rate of things they had to do, i didn't foresee that and when i offered to help them so they don't have to work more, they were just pissed at me)

- later i became a legit software engineer, i'm now paid a lot all things considered, to talk to the manager of legacy employees like the above, to produce some mediocre web app that will never match employees need because of all the middle layers and cost-pressure, which also means i'm tired because i'm not free to improve things and i have to obey the customer ...

so for 6x more money you get a lot less (if you deliver, sometimes projects get canned before shipping)
by mamonster | 2025-11-05 15:33:33+00:00
Eisman, Burry and Paulson all got their brain broken by that.

With Burry I think the redeeming part is that he is mostly, AFAIK, running his own capital since that time so there's no point criticizing him for his weird picks.

Paulson spent the last decade burning investor capital using the reputation, good for him I guess.

Eisman didn't do so well the last decade either, but at least his Youtube / podcast is light years ahead of the garbage that rich VCs are doing in terms of education.
by vidarh | 2025-11-05 15:33:46+00:00
I sympathise with the motivations for this, though I don't use Python much. I occasionally work on a toy Ruby compiler that started as a long blog series. More recently I've picked it up again with heavy AI use - I set Claude working on improving Rubyspec pass rates (which are atrocious). It's chugging along right now, actually.

One of the things I've spent a lot of time thinking about are the ways to avoid a lot of the dynamic features of Ruby without affecting actual, real code much.

There's a lot that can be done there - e.g. all of the research on Self and JS VMs is highly applicable.

But I say "real code" because a lot of the "worst" dynamic features of Ruby (and Python) either doesn't appear in production code very often, or at all (there are still aspects of Ruby I have never seen used in real-life use despite having used Ruby for 20 years), or could be mitigated trivially, so I still believe you can do quite decently without a lot of the more complex optimisations.

As an example (from Ruby): You can re-open the Integer class and override +:

ruby -e 'class Integer; def +(other); 42; end; end; p 2 + 2'

(don't do this in IRB; it crashes)

But nobody does that. The problem with a lot of these features isn't that people use them, but that people might use them.

That leaves two main avenues: We can do like the author of thise post and strip away the costly features that are rarely used.

Or we can provide ways of promising not to use them through code or options.

The first option is perfectly valid, but I quite like the second:

In Ruby, it turns out a lot of the optimisation challenges goes away if you get an app to freeze the most important system classes after setup, because even most of the most horrific examples of Ruby monkeypatching tends to do most of it only during startup, and you then tend to get to a stable state where you can let applications opt in to additional optimisations just by calling "freeze" on a number of objects.

Ruby programs will also do things like dynamically decide which files to load based on reading the directory, but if you compile an application, most of the time you want that to happen ahead of time with a few exceptions (e.g. plugins), and so similarly, if you freeze as many classes as possible at a given point, you can partially evaluate manipulation of the runtime up until that point, and treat it as mostly static afterward, and fall back to slow paths for anything you can't statically resolve the names of, and still end up with lots of optimisation potential for most of the low level code.

I think a lot of the same would work for Python, and might bridge the gap between the categories of alternative implementations the author mentions with more predictability than relying on a JIT doing the right analysis.

E.g. your compiler can eat least potentially guarantee under which circumstances it can statically determine that an Integer can inline the fast path if Integer is frozen so that you can in fact reason about the code.
by cxr | 2025-11-05 15:34:12+00:00
> They all agreed to remove it.

All those people suck, too.

Were you counting on a different response?

> XSLT is extremely unpopular and worse than JS in every way

This isn't a quorum of folks torpedoing a proposed standard. This is a decades-old stable spec and an established part of the Web platform, and welching on their end of the deal will break things, contra "Don't break the Web".
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-05 15:34:28+00:00
Yeah I even had multiple fido point numbers. Because there were some alternative networks. I kinda miss it.

I also used uucp for a few years though it soon got replaced with full internet. We were bit behind in Europe and we caught up fast. In the beginning I also had to use bang paths to avoid some misconfiguration upstream. Fido was actually better at this and the tool chain much more user-friendly. Though you still needed multiple. There was one to do the dial up and one to sort the retrieved mail, a "tosser" :)
by jsheard | 2025-11-05 15:34:35+00:00
> most graphics drivers didn’t support true integer scaling

https://www.nvidia.com/content/Control-Panel-Help/vLatest/en...

https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH3-0...

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

I don't know what the situation is on Mac and Linux, but all of the Windows drivers offer it.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-05 15:34:35+00:00
I guess most if not all QUIC endpoints you come across the internet will have encryption, as the specification requires as such. But if you control both ends, say you're building a P2P application that happens to use QUIC, I don't think there is anything stopping you from using an implementation of QUIC that doesn't require that, or use something else than TLS, even if the specification would require you to have it.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-05 15:34:37+00:00
> Are you saying higher prices would lead to better safety?

Higher prices and regulations.

With no floor on pricing, there will always be enough greedy executives who are willing to cut corners to make money in a ruthlessly competitive environment, fully knowing that it is very hard to prosecute a C-level executive personally.

The other possible result will be that eventually the market "agrees upon" a minimum price floor while being in compliance to regulations - but that usually means that the company will be as bare-stripped of assets and reserves as possible, which means in turn that the slightest external shock can (and will) send not just one but multiple companies crashing down hard. We've seen this with Covid - an economy that has optimized itself for decades on running as lean as possible is very sensitive to all sorts of external interruptions. Of course, that's not directly relevant to safety... but indirectly it is, as the inevitable result of that is an oligo-, duo- or monopoly and then, we've seen with Boeing where that ends, incentives aligned too much to cut corners.
by toprerules | 2025-11-05 15:34:49+00:00
DPDK is a framework with multiple backends, on the receive side it can use XDP to intercept packets.

You can't compare the efficiency of the frameworks without talking about the specific setups on the host. The major advantage of XDP is that it is completely baked into the kernel. All you need to do is bring your eBPF program and attach it. DPDK requires a great deal of setup and user space libraries to work.
by fundatus | 2025-11-05 15:35:18+00:00
This is technically possible in the EU (through web distribution[1] of Apps), but intentionally made impossible to actually use by Apple. They require the developer to have had an Apple Developer account for at least 2 years and at least one App with more than 1m annunal downloads in the App Store.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/
by runjake | 2025-11-05 15:35:39+00:00
You install drivers by sticking to the drivers Microsoft installs as part of Windows (WHQL drivers[1]). The only exceptions I generally run into is that I have to download discrete GPU drivers from the card vendor.

If it's some janky hardware that requires a driver that came on a CD or something, I avoid using that janky hardware. Most of the time I'm on Linux anyway, and there's some open source driver already there.

I would definitely not use random crap like "Snappy Driver Installer Origin", which will get you pwned, as you're finding out.

Drivers generally have complete control over your computer and can bypass several security mechanisms. Avoid suspicious or low quality drivers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing
by shivanshvij | 2025-11-05 15:35:39+00:00
As far as we can tell, it’s a mixture of a lot of things. One of the questions I got asked was how useful this is if you have a smaller performance requirement than 200Gbps (or, maybe a better way to put it, what if your host is small and can only do 10Gbps anyways).

You’ll have to wait for the follow up post with the CNI plugin for the full self-reproducible benchmark, but on a 16 core EC2 instance with a 10Gbps connection IPtables couldn’t do more than 5Gbps of throughput (TCP!), whereas again XDP was able to do 9.84Gbps on average.

Furthermore, running bidirectional iPerf3 tests in the larger hosts shows us that both ingress and egress throughput increase when we swap out iptables on just the egresss path.

This is all to say, our current assumption is when the CPU is thrashed by iPerf3, the RSS queues, the Linux kernel’s ksoftirqd threads, etc. all at once it destroys performance. XDP is moving some of the work outside the kernel, while at the same time the packet is only processed through the kernel stack half as much as without XDP (only on the path before or after the veth).

It really is all CPU usage in the end as far as I can tell. It’s not like our checksumming approach is any better than what the kernel already does.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-05 15:35:40+00:00
Exactly. Fundamentally, I want my computer's computations to be deterministic, not probabilistic. And, I don't want the results to arbitrarily change because some company 1,500 miles away from me up-and-decided to "train some new model" or whatever it is they do.

A computer program should deliver reliable, consistent output if it is consistently given the same input. If I wanted inconsistency and unreliability, I'd ask a human to do it.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-05 15:35:41+00:00
> A wave editor window or panel separate from the main project timeline is however the industry standard, and as such it might be exactly the sort of feature which would be very at home in Ardour.

Already landing in Ardour 9. However, at present, since our editing is always non-destructive, you can't do much there other than move start/end markers. We'll likely be doing more work on variable realtime time stretching in the march towards v10, and that will likely be accessible from both the main timeline and dedicated editors (but we'll see).

And yeah, Ardour's current goal is much more focused on being a powerful tool for people who do this stuff a lot, but there are a variety of arguments that support the idea that we need to do something/more to support beginners. We'll see about that too.
by BirAdam | 2025-11-05 15:36:16+00:00
You'd colo if you didn't want to use public cloud. The savings are good over time, but the upfront cost can be huge depending upon how much disk space you need. The setup/config can also be rough (many 4U boxes packed with tons of disks each, then CephFS + Rados for S3 api). You also want to have a few configured nodes on cold stand by, and many extra disks. Because of this, I've seen some companies take compute off the cloud but leave bulk data storage on the cloud.
by vidyanshu | 2025-11-05 15:36:18+00:00
1. Cool but very ambitious idea. Will I use it? Yes, if it really works. But I'm not really optimistic about Vance working because when humans intro someone, they’re putting reputation on the line which in this case Vance don't have. 2. The explanation on the applications about not storing or selling data helps, but in Vance's case, it might be worth surfacing how context is inferred, e.g is the matching based on declared intent ("I’m raising for X") or behavioural data (if yes, how are you getting it?)
by superkuh | 2025-11-05 15:36:35+00:00
Just as long as you statically build and ship your application. Because I guarantee the QUIC libs in $distro are not going to be compiled with the experimental flags to make this possible. You're going to be fighting QUIC all the way to get this to work. It's the wrong choice for the job. Google did not design QUIC for human use cases and the protocol design reflects this.
by nodesocket | 2025-11-05 15:37:14+00:00
- In late 2020, Scion sold its entire stake in GameStop. Scion missed out of the GameStop short squeeze which occurred only a few months later. Its 5.3% stake would have been worth over $1.5 billion at its height.

- In May 2021, Scion disclosed it acquired put options on Tesla shares.

- In August 2023, it was reported Scion anticipated a stock market crash and acquired $1.6 billion worth of put options to bet against the ETFs that tracked the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100.

- Scion also was noted to have held a large put option against the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
by vidarh | 2025-11-05 15:37:52+00:00
> Granted what messes up Python, or better said CPython implemenation, is that C extensions are allowed to mess up with its internals thus making void many possible optimizations that would be otherwise available.

I'm doing a Ruby compiler (very, very slowly, though faster again now with Claude Code doing most of the heavy lifting), and the same issue with Ruby has made me seriously toy with the idea of one day embedding a C compiler so that the Ruby compiler can optimise across both (it'd still have to deal with linking to third party C code, of course, which is one reason I'm hesitating) as a simple not-so-optimizing C compiler is like a trivial toy compared to compiling Ruby where just the parser makes you want to claw your eyes out, but it'd at least widen the surface a bit.
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-11-05 15:37:53+00:00
Funny you say this. Just two days ago, my wife was telling me a little history about her country, and suggested a movie based on those events. I couldn't find it on Google, DDG, Bing, Brave, etc. So I tried it on Yandex and it appeared as a top 3 result.

Btw, DDG basically looked exactly like Google. And now they have "sponsored" items...
by wat10000 | 2025-11-05 15:37:56+00:00
Programs can be very close to 100% reliable when made well.

In my life, I've never seen `sort` produce output that wasn't properly sorted. I've never seen a calculator come up with the wrong answer when adding two numbers. I have seen filesystems fail to produce the exact same data that was previously written, but this is something that happens once in a blue moon, and the process is done probably millions of times a day on my computers.

There are bugs, but bugs can be reduced to a very low level with time, effort, and motivation. And technically, most bugs are predictable in theory, they just aren't known ahead of time. There are hardware issues, but those are usually extremely rare.

Nothing is 100% predictable, but software can get to a point that's almost indistinguishable.
by simoncion | 2025-11-05 15:38:27+00:00
If the game offers it [0], set the output resolution to 4K, and the render resolution to something smaller. A multiplier of ~0.66 is roughly 1440p output, and 0.5 is 1080p.

If the game doesn't offer that, then I've found that the HUD/UI uglification isn't too bad when one sets the output resolution to 1440p.

If Windows is getting in the way of doing this, and most or all of your games have been purchased through Steam, give Linux a try. I've heard good things about the Fedora variant known as Bazzite, but have never, ever tried it myself. [1]

[0] And shockingly few do! There's all sorts of automagic "AI" upscaling shit with mystery-meat knobs to turn, but precious few bog-standard "render everything but the HUD and UI with this many fewer pixels" options.

[1] I've been using Gentoo for decades and (sadly) see no reason to switch. I strongly disrecommend Gentoo as a first Linux distro for most folks, and especially for folks who primarily want to try out Linux for video gaming.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-11-05 15:38:45+00:00
I do mostly agree with you that Steam is better as a storefront than all other ones out there, but in my opinion the Battle.net launcher is still my favorite game launcher edging out Steam because of how snappy it is.

Steam just sometimes feels really slow when launching for the first time or when switching tabs/pages (I do also have it just sometimes be just a black windows, but I haven't figured out the cause yet but it is the only window that does it, so...). In comparison B.net just feels decently snappy.

They are both effectively using CEF for their launcher, but since Steam starts so slow for me I always keep it in the background and its WebHelper taking up 414MB (rn, but its always in that ballpark) is not helping its case.
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-05 15:38:47+00:00
Don't worry, Google is making the opposite move to lock down Android, whereby now app developers have to get notarized and anyone who distributes apps Google doesn't like gets fucked.

Personally, every time I hear Apple fans talk about Android users "trying to turn their iPhone into Android because they bought the wrong device", I groan. Because over the last ten years, while Apple has more or less hasn't budged on their shitty security policy[0], Google has been stumbling head over heels trying to turn every Android into a shittier iPhone.

As for the "race to the bottom malware ecosystem", you don't need to sideload at all to get pwned on Android. That's enabled by Google themselves, because Google Play - what is supposed to be the vetted and secure place to obtain software - is absolutely chock full of scamware. If the app store is the "default", or only option, its business model doesn't actually punish the store for failing its users' trust.

In fact, while Google is demonstrably worse at every aspect running an app store, Apple's own store isn't much better. Sure, Apple can stringently review and deny app submissions from a new developer, but large established megacorporations get all sorts of special treatment on Apple devices. Think about how they made an example out of Tumblr, compared to how they manage Reddit, Twitter, or any Facebook-owned[1] app. Or how Apple blatantly violates their own ATT guidelines by not letting us turn off their own first-party tracking[2]. Or worse, how Roblox's core business model violates basically all the App Store rules and nobody at Apple seems to care, even though that app is basically a child predator's best friend. The iOS App Store is also a race-to-the-bottom malware ecosystem.

[0] To paraphrase, "Users can't be trusted not to fall for scams, and also they will rape developers, so we should have total control over their phones".

For the record, "rape developers" means "modify software in a way those developers don't like", which is "rape" in the same sense that your VCR is a home-invading rapist.

[1] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

[2] In fact, this is so blatantly anti-competitive, the EU is mulling over - I shit ye not - forcing Apple to get rid of opt-in consent to level the playing field. Which itself sounds like a GDPR violation.
Show HN: VerifiedProxy – Identity verification for AI agents
by moonlightdavid | 2025-11-05 15:38:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm building VerifiedProxy - an identity and authorization layer for AI agents.

The problem: As AI agents become autonomous and start transacting on platforms (booking services, making purchases, executing contracts), there's no standard way to verify the agent is actually authorized to act on behalf of a user or business.

Right now platforms either: - Trust agents blindly (high fraud risk) - Block agents entirely (miss the opportunity) - Build custom auth flows (expensive, inconsistent)

VerifiedProxy provides: - Identity verification for users/businesses (one-time KYC) - Agent registration (link your AI agents to your verified identity) - Verification API for platforms (check if agent is authorized before allowing action) - Optional human-in-loop approval flows (user confirms before agent acts)

It's like OAuth, but for AI agents acting as your legal proxy.

I'm looking for feedback from anyone building platforms or working with autonomous agents. Also interested in early integration partners.

Live at: https://verifiedproxy.com

Happy to answer questions!
by jscd | 2025-11-05 15:39:18+00:00
Yea this seems to work great. Let's take a look at the entry on the site itself:

https://encyclopedai.stavros.io/entries/encyclopedai-artific...

> Early prototypes of EncyclopedAI emerged in 2007 when librarian Margaret Chen noticed that her pet parrot could predict which encyclopedia volumes patrons would request by observing their facial expressions. This observation led to the first algorithmic models, which attempted to replicate avian pattern-recognition through neural networks. The subsequent integration of natural language processing in 2011 marked the system’s transition from experimental prototype to operational deployment across major American public libraries.

> The system’s backbone consists of distributed servers housed primarily in repurposed bowling alleys, which Chen discovered provided optimal acoustic conditions for server cooling. EncyclopedAI’s training dataset comprises approximately 2.3 billion encyclopedia entries, supplemented by 400 million hours of recorded reference desk conversations and—controversially—dreams reported by participating librarians.