MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-25 21:37:03+00:00
But you still believe that quantum computers have a likelihood of being possible to build AND that they can accomplish a task faster than classical? I feel like it’s going to get exponentially harder and expensive to get very small incremental gains and that actually beating a classical computer isn’t necessarily feasible (because of all the error correction involved and difficulty in manufacturing a computer with large number of qbits). Happy to be proven wrong of course.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-12-25 21:38:07+00:00
… by adding a check to builds that anyone, using the source code, can easily patch out?

FOSS never came with any guarantee of “builds must arrive in format most convenient for users.” That’s not in the license. Also not in the license, “FOSS companies can’t charge money for their builds.” Also not in the license, “FOSS companies must provide builds at all.”

If anything, it’s quite a bit of entitlement that “FOSS companies must provide free code, and free builds, forever, or they are evil.” Especially when they are getting VC money to presumably add features that otherwise would not exist and would have no code available at all.
by crote | 2025-12-25 21:39:11+00:00
I would rather read succinct English written by a non-native speaker filled with broken grammar than overly verbose but well-spelled AI slop. Heck, just share the prompt itself!

If you can't be bothered to have a human write literally a handful of lines of text, what else can't you be bothered to do? Why should I trust that your CVE even exists at all - let alone is indeed "critical" and worth ruining Christmas over?
by tshaddox | 2025-12-25 21:40:22+00:00
It would take a very large number of routes before linear search would become a noticeable performance problem.

At that point, you’d probably be splitting the router itself into multiple client bundles, with something at the root to quickly match the URL with a bundle of routes (maybe a hash table on the first URL segment, or even a trie).

This URLPattern library and linear search would still be a reasonable choice for implementing each individual route bundle. And in practice, just do it the naive way until it actually becomes a problem.
by cxplay | 2025-12-25 21:43:22+00:00
The sheer breadth of Nostr's current development is overwhelming at times. I often find myself exclaiming, "What? Nostr can be used like that?"
At present, Nostr appears to be merely a protocol operating within a social media framework. Its capabilities are vast, yet it fundamentally only requires "sending JSON via WebSocket and signing it using the specified algorithm."
by fragmede | 2025-12-25 21:44:23+00:00
I get why it feels frustrating when someone snaps "just google it." Nobody likes feeling dumb. That said, there’s a meaningful difference between asking a genuine question and demanding that every discussion be padded to accommodate readers who won’t even type four letters into a search bar. Expecting complete spoon-feeding in technical threads isn’t curiosity; it’s a refusal to engage. Learning requires participation.
by arcade79 | 2025-12-25 21:44:38+00:00
Been a kubuntu user since .. 2006? 2007? Don't remember when kubuntu became a thing, but as soon as I tried Ubuntu, I went kubuntu. I believe it was 5.10 or 6.04 or something. :-)

Am growing tired of Ubuntu though. Just not sure where I should turn. I want a .deb based system. Ubuntu is pushing snaps too heavily for my liking.
by layer8 | 2025-12-25 21:44:52+00:00
You can use java.lang.ClassValue to store per-(enum-)class state generically.

Meaning, instead of having to instrument each enum class, you could have

MyEnumHelper.of(AnyEnum.class)
.whateverFunctionalityYouWant()

where the of() implementation uses ClassValue to store the cached data.
by fylo | 2025-12-25 21:45:34+00:00
I liked Ubuntu and variants back when it first came out and I was newer to Linux but it didn't take long for me to realise there always seemed to be a better option for me as a daily driver. To me its like an new Linux user OS where a lot of stuff is chosen for you to use basically as is. Even the name Kubuntu where the K is for KDE but on other distros you would just choose your DE when you install.
by jpster | 2025-12-25 21:46:06+00:00
I agree there are associations between effort and outcomes, and merit and outcomes, and integrity and outcomes. But timeframe is never guaranteed. The Beatitudes have not yet happened, the just have not yet inherited the earth, a casual glance at world leaders and recent current events will tell you that much!

IMO the questions you pose are not important qt all, and not worth your energy. What practical difference does it make to you and her if it’s due bad timing or something else? Some junior devs are being hired somewhere and you both should focus your energy on making sure she’s part of that number. Have you shaken all the trees in your network? Does she do side projects that can get her noticed? What about the MIT alum network? That’s what LinkedIn messages and X dms are for? What abt throwing wide the aperture of industry sectors and locations she considers? Is she going to all the meetups? What abt pursuing her own startup idea? I agree with someone else here: AI and YouTube (and X, tbh) make this the very best time to learn or build or promote anything that has ever existed.

I went through an identical experience as your daughter when I graduated in 2000. The only solution is perseverance.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-12-25 21:46:43+00:00
Being able to partial index into JSON has made this much more straight forwards now than ever before, but historically pre-creating empty indexed custom columns was somewhat common (leading to hard limits like max 20 custom tags), as was EAV (which arguably is inner-platform).

There are more solutions than these, but until you're at truly custom DB scale with a specific problem here, these will solve it for you.
by anotherevan | 2025-12-25 21:47:37+00:00
We've been using Element/Matrix for quite some time now and are fairly happy with it for the most part. The only major hiccup was hosting providers, not the software itself, per se.

We originally signed up with element.io back when they were called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this, gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA at the time.)

We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to otherwise think about.

The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story, I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in the years since.

If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).
by recursivetree | 2025-12-25 21:48:26+00:00
One place where I genuinely believe LLMs could be beneficial is correcting spellign mistakes. I just don't think the interface is there yet. I want to keep control over my writing. After feeding it through an LLM, it doesn't sound like me anymore and changes random stuff. Rather, i'd like something like a diff viewer that shows you your sentence and the LLM's corrected sentence right next to each other. You can review each suggestion individually and decide whether to incorporate it yourself.
by GianFabien | 2025-12-25 21:49:57+00:00
I see you having a unique opportunity. There is a scarcity of strong SWE skills in the earth sciences related industries/businesses. You could refresh your reasons, motivations and interests for choosing earth sciences for your PhD. Perhaps your thesis and research connections reveal further dimensions.

In any earth sciences based work, there would be requirements for either data sciences or AI related processing, improvements, etc. Those are the sorts of areas that you might want to peddle your SWE skills as delivering.
by vector_spaces | 2025-12-25 21:52:45+00:00
> If MAA does not understand that there is huge market for Mathematics targeted towards Computer Programmers, they are just dumb.

Presumably a large math textbook publisher that has been publishing math books for literally one hundred years is very tapped into what books likely will and won't sell. I find it unlikely that a layperson where it concerns math book publishing would have some unique insight that MAA does not have. Even if there is a substantial enough market, there are likely unique considerations that MAA is beholden to which we aren't privy to

I don't know what the calculus is like to get an extended version of an existing book published by another publisher, but Dover's Aurora series consists of modern original texts as opposed to their usual republications of classic out of print texts -- this is how Emily Riehl had her "Category Theory in Context" published
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-25 21:53:44+00:00
Intellij kinda supports Wayland, but it gets confused when using scaling, at least when not all screens have the same factor. It's not blurry or anything, but it's slower, and the menus sometimes appear in random places.

When I only use a scaling factor of 1 on all the screens, it's usable enough, although it still feels sluggish.
by prodigycorp | 2025-12-25 21:54:14+00:00
No dig at you, but I take the average langchain user as one who is either a) using it because their C-suite heard about at some AI conference and had it foisted upon them or b) does not care about software quality in general.

I've talked to many people who regret building on top of it but they're in too deep.

I think you may come to the same conclusions over time.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-25 21:56:43+00:00
> I didn't think my explanation implied how you interpreted it.
>
> I thought everybody knew Wayland was started by some people working on Xorg already; I did not mean to imply otherwise. Many or all were paid for their work. They believed Wayland was a better approach, and, AFAIK, at some point switched to be paid full-time to work on Wayland instead of X. Which, sounds a lot like they convinced their employer (or a new employer) to pay them to work on Wayland instead of X. Do you believe this is a fair summary of the situation?

Sorry for my combatitive before. I definitely interpreted your previous post differently and I think your clarification is a fairer assessment of the situation. I would still argue that the majority of people implementing the wayland protocol are not paid by their employers to do so (this might now have changed a bit with smithay, which is sponsored by system76 I believe).
by rfmoz | 2025-12-25 21:57:36+00:00
I reply myself because I've found that idea already porposed:

"Origin policy was a proposal for a web platform mechanism that allows origins to set their origin-wide configuration in a central location, instead of using per-response HTTP headers." - https://github.com/WICG/origin-policy

But their status is "[On hold for now]" since, at least, three years ago.
Show HN: FIDO2 PRF with TPM and Fingerprint Auth for Confer on Linux
by vpb | 2025-12-25 21:57:43+00:00
I wanted to try Confer — Moxie Marlinspike’s private AI chat — but I don’t have a Mac lying around.
Since it requires isUserVerifyingPlatformAuthenticatorAvailable(), and most Linux setups don’t qualify, I put together a minimal platform authenticator that works with what I have: a TPM and a fingerprint reader.

It’s a small bridge: Chrome extension + Go backend, using the TPM for key storage and fprintd for user verification.

Write-up: https://vitorpy.com/blog/2025-12-25-confer-to-linux-tpm-fido...
Code: https://github.com/vitorpy/tpm-fido2-prf

Nothing fancy. No guarantees — it was a quick hack.
But if it helps someone else get Confer working on Linux :)
by jdujfkhllhl | 2025-12-25 21:58:14+00:00
China and EU have mandated usb-c for all rechargeable devices, for many years. Usb-a is legacy, together with vga, parallel printer ports and other old and bulky connectors, such connectors should require adapters. This is a good thing.

That’s why apple laptops are using usb-c.
by HocusLocus | 2025-12-25 21:59:16+00:00
I would be curious about this comment at the OP site from yesterday as a proposed or contributing cause for such a mysterious limit, it does carry a ring of adversity via absurdity. I do remember the early days of gzip encoding, many apps suffered from confusion over transport vs. delivered content-length.

"[cratermoon] I did a bit of testing using curl and found that with -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd' the resulting content-length: 6216 matches the gzipped response. However, without that header the result is not compressed and the response is content-length: 22411. The same difference applies to your other site.

"I wonder if whoever emailed you has crossed up their query and whatever tool they are using is mistakenly complaining because it's expecting 22411 bytes and only getting 6216."
by ay | 2025-12-25 21:59:17+00:00
Fixing a non-trivial bug is a great way to learn - assuming they don’t give up.

By virtue of being generators subtly broken stuff, LLMs are well positioned to create very nice learning material.

Same thing about growing the project - having to deal with something too big for AI is a very valuable experience.

And, in my experience, some of the purely human made codebases are strictly worse than LLM-made :-)
by gldrk | 2025-12-25 22:00:30+00:00
Core fonts absolutely support Unicode. My xterm windows are full of Unicode characters right now. It is true that anti-aliasing is not supported by the X.Org server, although scalable fonts have been for a while (https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/fonts/fonts.html#AEN49...). But you don't need anti-aliasing on a high-DPI display, and on a low-DPI display you can use any of the many beautiful bitmap fonts.
by wk_end | 2025-12-25 22:00:52+00:00
If you want to make your writing appear non-AI generated, the easiest way is to write it yourself. No typos necessary.

I’m sure with enough cajoling you can make the LLM spit out a technical blog post that isn’t discernibly slop - wanton emoji usage, clichés, self-aggrandizement, relentlessly chipper tone, short “punchy” paragraphs, an absence of depth, “it’s not just X—it’s a completely new Y” - but it must be at least a little tricky what with how often people don’t bother.

[ChatGPT, insert a complaint about how people need to ram LLMs into every discussion no matter how irrelevant here.]
by habosa | 2025-12-25 22:03:07+00:00
With every passing year the New Yorker stands out even more. High quality long-form journalism and short fiction with minimal advertising (in the print issue it’s just a few at the front and one at the back) is very hard to find. I love getting my issue in the mail every week and I’ve never once thought that reading it was a waste of my time.

I’d highly encourage anyone who loves great writing to subscribe.
by ryukoposting | 2025-12-25 22:03:21+00:00
I think I see your reading, but I'd add an apostrophe:

The First Photographs of Snowflake's Discover the Groundbreaking Microphotography

i.e. the first photographs on Snowflake's part. Though that still doesn't resolve how a guy's pictures discovered microphotography, rather than the guy himself.
by beeflet | 2025-12-25 22:04:16+00:00
I don't really use ethernet, or an audio jack, or an SD card reader regularly. I just use wifi and bluetooth, and I suspect most people do as well.

You can also just keep the extra dongles in your backpack and plug them into any open USB-C ports, or just unplug the dongles to free up more USB-C ports as needed.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-12-25 22:04:21+00:00
I feel like this list says a lot more about what the author wants her kids to be interested in than a real survey of the whole toy market. There are a few stuffed animals that get tons of love, and the magnet blocks were a hit for a couple months but then they got old. This is going to trigger a deluge of unsolicited admonition, but the television and the Nintendo switch have by far the highest entertainment value per dollar spent.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-12-25 22:04:28+00:00
That doesn't make sense : Signal is slightly older (both 2014), and was end-to-end encrypted from the start, while Matrix only got it officially in 2020 ?

Isn't it more that they have different use-cases : Matrix is PC-first, while Signal (and Telegram, WhatsApp) are mobile-first, to the point of requiring a phone number ?
by enduser | 2025-12-25 22:04:29+00:00
I bought a new camera recently for a trip to Bhutan. I ended up getting a Nikon Zf which is great for shooting in full manual mode. There are some exceptional third party manual focus lenses.

It’s all very tactile and gets me out into the world. I really treasure the photos from it in a way I never did with smartphone photos. It’s also really nice to just leave the phone at home.

Sometimes I go for photo walks with a friend. We play with light and composition and just generally have a great time being present and creative.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-12-25 22:04:50+00:00
I just tried to match a URL against about a hundred patterns of various types (thanks to Claude code), expecting it to be a non-issue.

A hundred regex tests, for example, is generally very fast. A quick Python script made them run in 0.85ms. A hundred Flask router tests is 2.64ms.

So I had no reason to think this API would be slow. Surely matching a URL is a subset of generalized regexes and can only be fast? And given that routing is not an activity you do a lot, why would it matter anyway?

But the performances were atrocious: it took 8 seconds to resolve the worst-case scenario on Firefox, and it locked the entire browser UI.

Ok, note to self, stay away from the URL Pattern API.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-25 22:07:18+00:00
I know what you mean! I've lived through those myself.

However, for a beginner, specially if said beginner never worked in a larger company with resources to produce an internal framework, they might think you're referring to Flask or something like that (btw Flask-style microframework use can go very wrong but it's another completely different issue).

That's why I'm being nitpicky. The people who'll get the post are likely already experienced enough to evaluate those frameworks themselves.
by ndiddy | 2025-12-25 22:07:56+00:00
Given that they're fine with adding breaking changes to the protocol, I think it's a shame that they're not supporting multi-screen. This will lead to the same problem with Xrandr based multi-monitor where you get screen tearing with mixed refresh rate displays. I would prefer to see "traditional X11 multihead but you can move programs between screens" as the solution for multiple monitors. Even if it worked like Mac OS X where you can't have a single window span across multiple monitors, it would still be better than the current state of X11.
by nytesky | 2025-12-25 22:08:31+00:00
This is so useful. a Gmail account is so much more than just an email account at this point. my first gmail account was made when anonymity and cool email was more of trend than your actual name - so i based upon my favorite book in 2006. 20 years later the account is tied to my oft used primary google voice number so lingers even with obscure and hard to spell email.

i could gave moved my google voice number, but it seems like a convoluted process and have had my number since about Grand Central acquisition.
by ANighRaisin | 2025-12-25 22:08:40+00:00
Binary Space partitioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning) is an elegant algorithm that solves this issue. This has fallen out of popularity due to the invention of the depth buffer and the power of modern GPUs, but it was used in DOOM and Quake.

This technique, due to the unique limitation of the children's drag-and-drop coding platform, Scratch, has made it proliferate in the 3D community. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1203675921 is an example of such a project.
Show HN: Picunic – convert image to Unicode art using ML
by mntalateyya | 2025-12-25 22:08:53+00:00
I built Picunic, a web-based port of a terminal image viewer that converts images to Unicode art using a CNN.

*Demo:* https://mnur.me/picunic/

*GitHub:* https://github.com/mohammed-nurulhoque/picunic

*How it works:*
- Splits images into 8×16 pixel chunks (matching terminal cell aspect ratio)
- Runs each chunk through a CNN encoder to get a 64-dim embedding
- Finds the Unicode character with the most similar embedding (cosine similarity)
- The CNN was trained on ~2000 Unicode characters rendered in DejaVu Sans Mono

Everything runs client-side via WebAssembly - no server needed. Features include adjustable width, dithering for photos, and ASCII-only mode.

Built with Rust (compiled to WASM), ONNX Runtime Web, and vanilla JavaScript. The original terminal version is also available in the repo.

Currently works best for images with clear dark/light distinction. Would love feedback on the improving quality!
by accrual | 2025-12-25 22:09:37+00:00
I liked this, it was a nice touch from Anthropic. I noticed the Claude pixel character in Claude Code was updated for the holidays too.

I pay for the Pro plan and I find it totally sufficient for personal use, I've never run into limits. However after using ChatGPT free for a while before paying for Claude, I already got quite good at batching requests, making sure they're clear, referencing exact filenames and line numbers, etc. to keep my usage down.

Personally optimizing requests is kind of fun for me, it's like a game - trying to get the best output with the fewest input tokens.

Anyway, thanks Anthropic, happy holidays!
by derriz | 2025-12-25 22:10:33+00:00
> Important note: the strange magic requires the official git completion script.

I dislike the official git completion script because it’s so slow when working with large repos. On macOS - because of vagaries of the way its file system works - with large repos it’s effectively unusable. Hint to completion script writers: if your “smart” completion ever takes seconds, it’s worse than useless and far worse than “dumb” filename completion.
by crote | 2025-12-25 22:10:44+00:00
> I prefer reading the LLM output for accessibility reasons.

And that's completely fine! If you prefer to read CVEs that way, nobody is going to stop you from piping all CVE descriptions you're interested in through a LLM.

However, having it processed by a LLM is essentially a one-way operation. If some people prefer the original and some others prefer the LLM output, the obvious move is to share the original with the world and have LLM-preferring readers do the processing on their end. That way everyone is happy with the format they get to read. Sounds like a win-win, no?