MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OisinMoran | 2025-11-14 13:34:21+00:00
If you enjoyed this you'll probably also enjoy "The Games People Play With Cash Flow" [0]

And for the classic HN comment about the site itself: I think it looks very nice, but the native justification algorithm is not very good (especially with hyphenation turned off) so it ends up looking quite sparse at parts on mobile and is a bit jarring to read. I'm a big fan of this implementation [1] of the TeX linebreak algorithm for the web, and think it would make this site look even better with minimal effort.

[0] https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/

[1] https://github.com/robertknight/tex-linebreak
by ColonelPhantom | 2025-11-14 13:35:48+00:00
Rumors of Gnome's demise seem greatly exaggerated to me. It's still the default DE in nearly all major distributions, and it doesn't seem to have incurred major mindshare or marketshare hits recently. I feel like most of the 'complainers' already abandoned the Gnome ship with the release of GNOME 3.

Really the only high-profile 'switch' in recent times I can think of is that Fedora promoted KDE to be first-class ('edition') alongside Gnome, instead of delegated to a more second-class spin. And while KDE is a bit more conservative in this regard, I believe that in the long term KDE also wants to go Wayland-only at some point.

Personally I did switch from Gnome to KDE some time after Gnome 40, since I quite liked 3.x but the UI overhaul 40 did wasn't really my thing. It also helps that KDE got a lot better in recent years.
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-14 13:35:58+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42571652

DonHopkins 10 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still ev...

EBCDIC porn really punched my cards. ;)

I had to carefully select just the characters that would punch low resolution monochrome pornographic images into the holes of the punch card.

Just joking, I'm not that old -- I started with ASCII line printer porn, like "MC:HUMOR;VICKI BODY", over the government sponsored ARPANET, at 300 baud, so it was like a nice long strip tease on taxpayer dollars. Vicki took almost 4 and a half minutes to finish at that rate, longer during busy weekday business hours. If I recall, the good stuff was all UPPER CASE, which made it much more intense.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210512025608/http://its.svenss...

Decades later, somebody on HN with a sharper eye than I noticed that Vicki's nipples were clearly labeled "A" and "B". Go figure!

HN: Should computer scientists keep the Lena picture? (lemire.me)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15671629

DonHopkins on Nov 10, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Should computer scientists keep the Lena picture?

Does "AI:HUMOR;VICKI BODY" get grandfathered in, too?

NSFW: MS C0LLINS - 0UI - FEBRUARY 1973:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210512025608/http://its.svenss...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause

mercer on Nov 11, 2017 [–]

Is the nipples being marked 'A' and 'B' part of the joke?

DonHopkins on Nov 11, 2017 | parent [–]

As far as I know, those were not the points of the joke. I noticed them for the first time yesterday too, after not noticing them for decades!

As a teen, I'd printed it out, pinned it up on my wall next to the Cray-1 centerfold, and scribbled a bunch of modem phone numbers, user names and passwords all over it, and never even noticed.

I did a quick search for other A's and B's and found that it used those characters as much as any other character for shading, but that sure seems like something some mischievous student, lab member, turist or sentient TECO script at the MIT-AI Lab might have done.

There was no file security so anyone could have edited them in.

Maybe one of Minsky's grad students was performing some A/B testing or eye tracking experiments.

Somebody should ask RMS if EMACS had some special mode for editing line printer porn.
by demetris | 2025-11-14 13:36:25+00:00
I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things.

One carousel there had 16K slides.

On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen.

On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome.

I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.
by krapp | 2025-11-14 13:36:45+00:00
They work in tech, they have a tech blog with articles about AI, so it's reasonable to assume they use an LLM to generate their content.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they ever actually tried learning Sumerian, but to be maximally cynical they never provide any specific personal details about that. It could literally just be a prompt.
by myrmidon | 2025-11-14 13:36:45+00:00
> Getting serious in 2014 (after Crimea) would have given Europe options.

Realistically, what options? The only thing that could have really helped in my view in hindsight was either massive visible arms-deliveries to the Ukraine before 2022 (to discourage Russia), or to demonstrate willingness to join the fight (with soldiers). That willingness is and was not there (in neither US/EU), and spending more would not really have helped that.

> you'd think that the annexation would have caused some rethinking of "soft power".

You mean giving up on Russian gas early? It's a much harder call without hindsight in my view if Crimea is the main focus. The whole second Chechen war was much more problematic than that annexation in my view, and if you're not drawing the line for that, than why'd you change your opinion for Crimea?`

I do fully agree with you though that there should have been harsher consequences after 2014, and that those might have actually helped more than anything else (by making the "happy path" for the 2022 invasion worse): I think Putin considered the 2022 invasion as "quick regime change, some yapping from the west and then business as usual in a few years"; the west/EU demonstrating willingness for self-sacrifical sanctions to punish expansionism in 2014 might have discouraged this strongly.

> BTW - do Europeans know how "But we have better work/life balance" comes across? The reaction by many Americans is "Why am I paying to defend their work/life balance?"

I'll give you my European perspective:

1) Yes the US is overspending on its military, but that is entirely their own decision

2) American military spending profits itself first and foremost, because spending mainly goes to domestic industry, and forces are mainly used to further domestic interests

3) Europe is already paying for the humanitarian fallout of ill-advised US interventionism in the middle east, and indirect costs from this alone are in the "percent GDP" range as well

Don't get me wrong, I think it is a really good thing that the US did provide substantial aid during the Ukraine invasion. I personally wish that "the west" did even more, but the sad reality is that a good part of the population considers the Ukraine conflict a "not my problem", and is simply unwilling to pay more to defend human rights abroad (and the attitude is very similar between especially western Europeans and US-americans in my view).
Show HN: Fun, Open-source Japanese learning Platform inspired by Monkeytype
by aladybug | 2025-11-14 13:37:27+00:00
As a long time Japanese learner, I've always wanted there to be a simple, free online trainer for learning and grinding Japanese kanji and vocabulary - like Monkeytype in the typing community (fun fact: we actually have 2 Monkeytype devs on our team now!).

I'm doing this because I grew tired of all the subscriptions and paywalls, which are unfortunately very common in the Japanese learning apps market. That's why I want to make the most fun, user-friendly and customizable platform for learning Japanese currently available, and the first one that is (and will be, forever) completely free, ad-free and open-source - driven not by profit, but made by the community, for the community. We already managed to get around 600 stars on GitHub and about 7k monthly users for the app. That being said, I recognize that the app is still in its very early alpha stages and is, objectively speaking, behind paid Japanese learning solutions (at least for now) - which is why I want to change that and make it the first entirely free and open-source platform for learning Japanese to provide a real, high-quality alternative to all the current paid Japanese learning resources, which I believe we can achieve with the open-source community's help. Why am I doing this? Because weebs deserve to have a free, open-source learning platform too (I'm one of them, don't judge...)

どうもありがとうございます!
by flohofwoe | 2025-11-14 13:38:06+00:00
The one great feature of Emscripten is that you can do:

emcc hello.c -o hello.html

...and it produces an output that's immediately runnable in a web browser instead of just a bare .wasm file which needs to be wrapped in a html with additional steps.

E.g. emcc is a drop-in replacement for gcc/clang which can be used directly in a C/C++ build tool as a C/C++ compiler and linker while still doing the right thing (producing a runnable .html).

The NDK equivalent would be a gcc-compatible compiler wrapper which can do this:

ndkcc hello.c -o hello.apk

...such a simple and obvious thing to do, yet it doesn't happen because the Android SDK/NDK developers have no clue about developer workflows outside of their precious Java ivory tower.

> and is a pain to prevent it from downloading the Java tooling and everything else that is already downloaded,

That's a feature, not a bug. It's trivial to install different emsdk versions side by side, each entirely self-contained and without polluting the system or requiring external dependencies.

The separate Java dependency also has been dropped a while ago, since the only remaining component that depends on Java is the optional Closure compiler step, and that comes now with an embedded Java runtime (as far as I'm aware at least).
by mystraline | 2025-11-14 13:38:11+00:00
> Until then, the “one transmission at a time on the air” in these very low baud networks is severely limiting.

Semtech announced recently that their new chips will be able to decode all spread factors on a specific bandwidth and center.

That being said, that would allow new LoRa nodes being capable of listening on effectively 8 different channels (that dont conflict) and transmitting on 1.
by Sophira | 2025-11-14 13:38:16+00:00
About 10 years ago, I got an email from Microsoft of all people(!) which to any reasonably security-trained person would look entirely like a phishing email:[0]

1. It said "Dear User" instead of a name/username;

2. It talked about how they were upgrading their forum software and as such would require me to re-login;

3. It gave me a link to click in the email without any stated alternative;

4. It warned me that if I didn't do this, I would no longer be able to access the forum;

5. The domain of the URL that the link went to was not microsoft.com, but a different domain that had "microsoft" in it.

It was a textbook example for how a phishing email would look, and yet it was actually a legitimate email from Microsoft!

I haven't had any others like it since, but that was an eye-opener for sure.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/32ou4z/microsoft_what...

[Edit: Fixed a detail I misremembered.]
by andout_ | 2025-11-14 13:38:22+00:00
SST is AWS-specific and focuses on infrastructure-as-code for serverless apps (CDK wrapper). Encore is cloud-agnostic and works by parsing your application code to understand what infrastructure you need, then provisions it automatically on AWS, GCP, or locally. SST gives you more control over AWS-specific resources, Encore optimizes for development speed and portability. Different trade-offs depending on whether you're locked into AWS or want flexibility.
by iamnothere | 2025-11-14 13:38:35+00:00
Makes sense to move to something actively maintained. I don’t use GNOME, but I have been on Wayland for years in both KDE and tiling WMs. It works great while on X11 I would often get weird flickering and stuttering issues (some NVIDIA bug I could never track down). Anyway, if the X11 die-hards want it to survive, they need to organize an effort to maintain it, not yell at everyone who wants to build something better.

I am sympathetic to people who have a working setup and just don’t want to mess with their configuration anymore. Unless you’re on OpenBSD, though, that ship has long sailed in most *nix distros (even “stable” Debian). Long-term stability is underrated but hard to achieve.
by Twelveday | 2025-11-14 13:38:37+00:00
Great post with some nice insights I could've used a few days ago!

I was trying to create a simple "mascot logo" for my pet project. I first created an account on Kittl [0] and even paid for one month but it was quite cumbersome to generate images until I figured out I could just use the nano banana api myself.

Took me 4 prompts to ai-slop a small python script I could run with uv that would generate me a specified amount of images with a given prompt (where I discovered some of the insight the author shows in their post). The resulting logo [1] was pretty much what I imagined. I manually added some text and played around with hue/saturation in Kittl (since I already paid for it :)) et voilà.

Feeding back the logo to iterate over it worked pretty nicely and it even spit out an "abstract version" [2] of the logo for favicons and stuff without a lot of effort.

All in all this took me 2 hours and around 2$ (excluding the 1 month Kittl subscription) and I would've never been able to draw something like that in Illustrator or similar.

[0] https://www.kittl.com/ [1] https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/publ... [2] https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/publ...
by pessimizer | 2025-11-14 13:38:58+00:00
> It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy.

It definitely was. There's nothing more annoying than the "of course all of this is true, but only crazy people think that people planned and did it on purpose."

The real conspiracy, it always seems, is that intelligence agencies ever do anything on purpose, or have any goals. They were supposed to fight the Soviets, but who decided on that? It is a mystery. Did they come up with plans? No, everybody just blundered around and did their own thing.

People are claiming that there were no plans and no coordination in offices where the same people sat at the same desks for 40 years, and were replaced by their children. It would be bizarre if you were talking about any other subject other than praise for authority and the diagnosis of people who deny its selfless goals.

> Not saying it was great.

How generous of you.

> There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.

You don't know that there are offices that deal with this in the military all day, and that they both help finance films and deny access to equipment and depictions of equipment to productions who don't agree to their terms? The military provides soldiers and equipment to films. This is true for all military divisions and intelligence agencies, and to my knowledge has been true since the FBI started funding and working productions in the 50s.

If you think all this stuff just sort of happens through random collisions, it's going to distort your perceptions of the world. Or specifically in my experience, to ascribe magical qualities to "the market."

One of the current funny clips is Claire Danes being silenced on the Colbert show when talking about the relationship of the show Homeland's creators to the CIA (one's father and cousin), how all the actors were invited to "spy school" every year, and how it was explained to her by somebody at CIA school that the CIA was having to deepen its similar partnerships in media to bolster support for itself against Trump (during the first term) before being quickly silenced by Colbert. She's a perfect example of people participating in every aspect of this process, yet still being unaware that it really exists. She'd call you a conspiracy theorist for mentioning it.

https://youtu.be/d6mBbyb-vIA?t=360
by sevensor | 2025-11-14 13:39:34+00:00
What I remember from those days was saving my work reflexively because the chances of the window manager or text editor crashing at any given moment were quite high. Also, emacs came in for lots of grief for being so slow. Remember “Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping?”

This is not necessarily to endorse Zed; I’m ecstatically happy with my current text editor. However, “we peaked 25-30 years ago” is just not true. Things have gotten better and they continue to do so.
by ColonelPhantom | 2025-11-14 13:41:43+00:00
Anecdotally, I strongly doubt this is true, although my environment is probably quite biased. I know a ton of people who use Gnome, some who use KDE, and I think roughly all of these people use them with Wayland. The standalone-WM users I know are also mostly on Sway or other Wayland ones. The only real X11 holdouts seem to be people using X11-only DE's, such as Xfce or Cinnamon.
Show HN: Neo4j SDK with minimal cognitive load for an LLM
by morisil | 2025-11-14 13:42:13+00:00
I just released version 1.0.0 of this library:

https://github.com/xemantic/xemantic-neo4j-kotlin-driver

There is also associated demo project showing how to use this driver with Ktor, in fullstack asynchronicity and structured concurrency of coroutines:

https://github.com/xemantic/xemantic-neo4j-demo

I use Neo4j a lot with my AI agents, letting them store private memory as a knowledge graph, but also research this graph in auto-scientific process. I've discovered that reducing cognitive load on an LLM is crucial for the quality of machine reasoning. And this is intention behind this library - no explicit "async", DSLs for idiomatic resource management, automatic mapping of Cypher input and output data to multiplatform data classes. All of this can be executed as a script, while being strongly typed and compiled giving additional feedback to the autonomous chain-of-code style agent. This allows agents to define ad hoc data ingestion and retrieval schemas, while avoiding double-task inference challenge of encoding intents while comprehending own intents.
by zzzeek | 2025-11-14 13:42:31+00:00
as an American I will note you are breathtakingly incorrect about there not being policy differences between Republicans and Democrats, and the "cave in" over the government shutdown is strictly one of tactics, not ideology.

> many Democrats do support the Trump administration policies on healthcare

citation needed

> Or how the core Democrat party

The phrase "the Democrat party" is a well known right wing slur against the Democratic party; this term is used exclusively by right wing activists and party members and you'd only see it by reading lots of right wing sources.
by ritcgab | 2025-11-14 13:43:23+00:00
> Yes all the normal Hetzner servers use ECC

This is wrong - or define "normal"? In their current product line, at least the default configuration of AX52/EX44/EX63/GEX44 doesn't have ECC. It is an upgrade option only.

The blog post says their server has "8 cores Intel Xeon W-2145", which is PX92 or its variant and its base configuration can be without ECC.
by throw_away_341 | 2025-11-14 13:43:48+00:00
You had PR merge and automatic release before Kubernetes too, and it's not that hard to configure.

If one has a small project where a few seconds of downtime is acceptable, you can just setup a simple Github action triggered on commit/merge. It can scp the file to the server and run "sysctl restart" automatically. I have used this approach for small side projects (even with external paying users)

And if you need a "no downtime" release, a proper CI/CD pipeline can handle a blue/green switch. I don't think you would spend much more time setting that up, than Kubernetes from scratch unless you have extensive experience with Kubernetes.
by irthomasthomas | 2025-11-14 13:44:18+00:00
Ha I created a Van Halen M&M test for text prompts. I would include an instruction demanding that the response contain <yellow_m&m> and <red_m&m> but never <brown_m&m>. Then I would fail any llm that did not include any m&ms, or if they wrote anything about the <brown_m&m> in the final output.
by belorn | 2025-11-14 13:44:46+00:00
Converting a raw 8k video down to 1080p is a full of creative solutions and its perfectly fine to see it as the machine doing some form of creativity when optimizing performance and file size. In similar way, compilers are marvelous and in many cases ingeniously when building and compiling binaries from source code.

It is however general agreed on those do not create independent original works. At the most generous interpretation they get defined as derivatives, and at the more common interpretation they are plain copies. The creativity is also usually not given to the machine, but those who built the machine. Even if the programmer is unable to predict all outcomes of creative written code, a unpredictable outcome is still attributed to the programmer.
by yubblegum | 2025-11-14 13:45:19+00:00
Sorry, your comparative analysis (beyond its rather strange disconnect with your fellow Human beings) ignores the fact that a "stellar" model will fail in this way whereas with us humans, we do get generationally exceptional specimens that push the envelope for the rest of us.

To make this crystal clear: Human geniuses were flawed beings but generally you would expect highly reliable utility from their minds. Einstein would not unexpetedly let you down when discussing physics. Gauss would kick ass reliably in terms of mathematics. etc. etc. (This analysis is still useful when we lower the expectations to graduated levels, from genius to brilliant to highly capable to the lower performance tiers, so we can apply it to society as a whole.)
by dzaima | 2025-11-14 13:45:35+00:00
A sanitizer or static analysis or any other tool can unconditionally give you a warning/error on signed integer overflow. Whereas that's invalid for unsigned integers as they have well-defined behavior, and things depend on said overflow (hashing, bitwise magic, temporary wrapping that unwraps later, etc).

Ideally there'd be a third type for unsigned-non-wrapping-integer (and llvm even supports a UB-on-unsigned-wrapping flag for arith ops in its IR that largely goes unused for C/C++), but alas such doesn't exist. Half-relatedly, this previously appeared as a discussion point on Linux (though Linus really did not like the concept of multiple unsigned types and as such it didn't go anywhere iirc).
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-14 13:45:45+00:00
What?! That statement is self contradictory. If you have economic incentives then somebody or a group of people put those incentives into place in order to reach a desired outcome(typically accumulation of wealth and/or power for a target group).

We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.