MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-26 14:07:52+00:00
I still do have a few USB-A: Yubikey, mouse receiver, Streamdeck, USB sticks, webcam, old HDD hard drives I use for backups...

I guess I could, but I would rather not upgrade all of those to USB-C and I really tired of having to carry dongles everywhere.

I even like that if I were consistently using HDMI, I could actually just put an HDMI extension card into my laptop and still not need a dongle. It's customizable to my usage at any point in the laptop's life.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-26 14:08:23+00:00
OLEDs have a lot of great properties, but I’m still on the fence when it comes to building them into laptops. On phones and tablets where usage is intermittent, usually shortish, and content is constantly moving they’re well suited, but with a laptop screen that in some cases can be turn on for 12+ hours and is displaying the same static content for large chunks of that, I’d be worried about burn in.

Maybe it’s not an issue with tandem OLED and strict binning though.
by mentos | 2025-12-26 14:08:26+00:00
Actually no when I asked I hadn't even made that obvious connection. I think main reason to avoid that is Wii motes had wrist slings, no doubt if you implemented phone gyroscopes it'd end with a social media post of someones damaged phone and tv.

Reflecting on my time playing Wii the sports games were ok but nothing screams 'gotta have this' to me.

If I could give one unsolicited piece of inspiration it'd be to watch this episode of Community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOueERJzjrU

There is definitely an awesome couch multiplayer game in there somewhere
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-26 14:08:34+00:00
> The linked surveillance talk has nearly 0 references to computers and is all about media/reporting

(link to the talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8969-die_sprache_der_uberwacher )

Surveillance has relevance to core CCC/hacking topics (privacy is a central topic against which hackers fight), so I can understand why the organisers decided to include this talk in the schedule: they considered it to be a good idea that the audience should also get a "non-computer perspective" on a topic that is highly relevant to hackers.

But I agree that for the decision to include or not include this specific talk, the organisers have to apply an exceptionally good judgement: if they make a "wrong" decision here, people will immediately (rightfully) complain that the talks are too political (or if they "wronged" by non-inclusion of this talk, the other side will complain that important topics are omitted).
by derriz | 2025-12-26 14:08:46+00:00
> Most local hackerspaces I visited are basically green and leftist queer safe spaces where adults run around with stuffed animals.

So what? You’re not being asked or expected to feel empathy - just show tolerance. Which is the easiest virtue to develop - just ignore behavior which doesn’t threaten you.

If someone is doing their own thing - wearing a MAGA hat, a rainbow t-shirt or carrying a fluffy toy - it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Why does it bother you unless they’re getting in your face?
by harshreality | 2025-12-26 14:08:49+00:00
One might also argue that The Little Prince is "far more complex" and deeper than anything written at a typical adult reading level. That lower linguistic surface complexity allows more space for the reader to explore ideas and themes.

I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.
by fweimer | 2025-12-26 14:09:12+00:00
I dislike Java's abstraction-through-indirection approach, which is related to the non-representable invalid states you mention. But I think it's more of a matter of taste.

Somewhat controversially, I think Java is actually doing fine on null safety: it uses the same approach for it as it does for array index safety. The latter is a problem for any language with arrays without dependent types: out-of-bounds accesses (if detectable at all) result in exceptions (often named differently because exceptions are controversial).

Java's advantage here is that it doesn't pretend that it doesn't have exceptions. I think it's quite rare to take down a service because handling a specific request resulted in an exception. Catching exceptions, logging them, and continuing seems to be rather common. It's not like Rust and Go, where unexpected panics in libraries are often treated as security vulnerabilities because panics are expected to take down entire services, instead of just stopping processing of the current request.
by falafio | 2025-12-26 14:09:54+00:00
TL;DR: I built an open source app that runs 100% locally, it provides a TUI to index repos, private or public and make them searchable via an MCP. The primary use case for me was to be able to quickly reference the libraries I care for, such as effect-ts, ai-sdk and others. I didn't want to just reference documentation, I wanted to allow my coding agents to search through their code and learn deeply the best patterns of usage and what sits behind their APIs.
One can achieve similar results by allowing the agent to search directly in the file-system. However, it is clunky, the discoverability of repos insn't good and the agent is limited to 'grep'.

WIth repobase, the agents can discover all the repos you have indexed, it can search them semantically (e.g "How do I do image generation using ai-sdk using grok as the provider?").

To use it, you just need to

1. 'npm install -g repobase'
2. run 'repobase' to access the TUI and view and index repos
3. Add the MCP server to Cursor, Claude Code or any other tool you use for coding/chatting.

Posting here to see if I find other with a similar pain that could benefit from the app. I'd love to explore how to evolve this tool as I see it could be also beneficial for teams working with many micro-frontends or micro-services. Where unifying the context and discoverability of repos could be valuable.

Looking forward to any ideas, suggestions or folks just wanting to give it a go :)
by phantasmish | 2025-12-26 14:09:57+00:00
Yeah, a matter of preference I’m sure. I prefer not having to scrunch a little at the waist to reach e.g. “cargo” pockets, and there’s nothing like interior breast pockets on jackets, for pants (various sorts of hidden pants pocket exist, yes, but they’re hard to get at). No extra weight pulling pants downward, requiring a tighter belt (or suspenders—which, that part I’m on board with as long as the pants have actual suspender buttons!). Can take the jacket off and remove all burden, put it back on and be ready to go again. No sitting on things, having things pinch or poke your leg or hip when you sit.

It’s basically a looser way of wearing your stuff on you, than pants pockets. Less welded-to you. At some point I realized I disliked summer starting because coats and front-pocket/pouch hoodies went away and I had to start carrying things in my pants again. Later, I came to like the standard pocket systems on blazers & friends way more than hoodies and (modern casual) coats, and discovered that with the right fabric and (lack of) lining choices I could wear them in almost any weather if I wanted to (I don’t, every day, but weather’s no longer a major reason not to)

(I am not saying I’m right, just explaining what I get out of it over extra pants pockets)
by journal | 2025-12-26 14:10:06+00:00
You only need that info if you know you need it in your rag. Over the last two years of usage I don't recall where I'd need those timestamps but I know there are cases. Still, this would have to be an option because otherwise it would be waste of tokens. However, we have to consider they are competing for the quality AND length of the response even if a shorter response is better. There's a pretzel of considerations when talking about this.
by cube2222 | 2025-12-26 14:10:17+00:00
I’ve checked out codex after the glowing reviews here around September / October and it was, all in all, a letdown (this was writing greenfield modules in a larger existing codebase).

Codex was very context efficient, but also slow (though I used the highest thinking effort), and didn’t adapt do the wider codebase almost at all (even if I pointed it at the files to reference / get inspired by). Lots of defensive programming, hacky implementations, not adapting to the codebase style and patterns.

With Claude Code and starting each conversation by referencing a couple existing files, I am able to get it to write code mostly like I would’ve written it. It adapts to existing patterns, adjusts to the code style, etc. I can steer it very well.

And now with the new cheaper faster Opus it’s also quite an improvement. If you kick off sonnet with a long list of constraints (e.g. 20) it would often ignore many. Opus is much better at “keeping more in mind” while writing the code.

Note: yes, I do also have an agent.md / claude.md. But I also heavily rely on warming the context up with some context dumping at conversation starts.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 14:10:45+00:00
> needed to fetch each dependency’s source code just to read its go.mod file and resolve transitive dependencies.

Python used to have this problem as well (technically still does, but a large majority of things are available as a wheel and PyPI generally publishes a separate .metadata file for those wheels), but at least it was only a question of downloading and unpacking an archive file, not cloning an entire repo. Sheesh.

Why would Go need to do that, though? Isn't the go.mod file in a specific place relative to the package root in the repo?
by hogrug | 2025-12-26 14:10:49+00:00
The facts are interesting but the conclusion a bit strange. These package managers have succeeded because git is better for the low trust model and GitHub has been hosting infra for free that no one in their right mind would provide for the average DB.

If it didn't work we would not have these massive ecosystems upsetting GitHub's freemium model, but anything at scale is naturally going to have consequences and features that aren't so compatible with the use case.
Show HN: TocToc – Write your PDF table of contents in plain text
by imaginaryapps | 2025-12-26 14:11:20+00:00
Most of the time, I am viewing a PDF file, not editing one. Hence, I only have PDF viewers installed on my computer (Preview and Skim do the job for me).

Unfortunately, sometimes I deal with a PDF that does not have a table of contents for the sidebar of my viewer. That is why I made TocToc.

TocToc is a client-side web app for creating/editing a PDF's table of contents.

Check it out at: toctoc.imaginaryapps.com

There are no distracting menus. Instead, you write the table of contents in plain text on the left while a live preview is shown on the right. The format is super simple (Page number: Page title + indentation for nesting). A nice bonus of using plain text is that it makes it easy for you to ask your AI assistant to auto-generate the table of contents for you.
by subdavis | 2025-12-26 14:11:47+00:00
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee stuck with me more than anything else I read this year. It is a work of simple beauty.

It’s a story of several generations of poor Korean women who eventually immigrate to Japan. The front half of the book is wonderfully paced to spend time with the characters. The back half can feel a bit rushed, but it becomes more of a page turner.

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter is another period novel about union organizing in the Pacific Northwest around the turn of the century, and follows two brothers. The depth of research makes this book wonderfully vibrant.
by checker659 | 2025-12-26 14:13:05+00:00
See that's the problem. Unless this is government mandated, no sane vendor is going to pay for the performance penalty.

> Doing the same thing in software on a contemporary commercially established CPU is going to be much, much faster.

In what sense? Do you know if there's been proper research done in this area? Surely implementing the bounds checking / permissions would be faster in hardware.
by baq | 2025-12-26 14:13:09+00:00
I’ve been using frontier Claude and GPT models for a loooong time (all of 2025 ;)) and I can say anecdotally the post is 100% correct. GPT codex given good enough context and harness will just go. Claude is better at interactive develop-test-iterate because it’s much faster to get a useful response, but it isn’t as thorough and/or fills in its context gaps too eagerly, so needs more guidance. Both are great tools and complement each other.
by ChaosOp | 2025-12-26 14:13:38+00:00
Haha that's also very true. The games were ok and fun but really I think what made Nintendo games special was the 'magic' of it all. In a similar sense as their Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is not the best game but damn do I appreciate the engineering and 'magic' that the game offers, it's just so cool.

Thanks for the link, need to start ideating new games ;)
by g947o | 2025-12-26 14:13:43+00:00
I think "thank you" are used for inference in follow-up messages, but not necessarily timestamps.

I just asked ChatGPT this:

> Suppose ChatGPT does not currently store the timestamp of each message in conversations internally at all. Based on public numbers/estimates, calculate how much money it will cost OpenAI per year to display the timestamp information in every message, considering storage/bandwidth etc

The answer it gave was $40K-$50K. I am too dumb and inexperienced to go through everything and verify if it makes sense, but anyone who knows better is welcome to fact check this.
by cheese_van | 2025-12-26 14:13:49+00:00
Many thanks for this entry. Knowing the reason for the shutdown hang is very valuable. It prevents me futzing my brains out and doing damage whilst trying to repair it.

I did experience something odd however. At some point during tweaking various settings, both in the new OS (linux) and BIOS, I was unable to F2 access the BIOS during start. I thought to find the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS but I COULD NOT FIND THE DAMNED THING. So before sending it back to ASUS, I removed the PCIe drive since it had personal info on it.

But booting AFTER removing the PCIe drive gave me access to the BIOS. I thought BIOS boot was independent of hard drive presence?

Anyway, after booting the BIOS I rescued my new machine and only had two screws left over after taking the darn thing apart!

trivia: first boot into linux resulted in "no hd found". Turns out this ASUS BIOS won't detect the linux hd unless you set VMD to disabled which enables AHCI. Thanks for the obfuscation ASUS!
Show HN: Xctbl – a system built around records, tools, and context (no signup)
by promptfluid | 2025-12-26 14:14:04+00:00
I’m building a side project called XCTBL.

Instead of starting with features, dashboards, or growth loops, it starts with context. The idea is simple: systems should explain themselves as they evolve.

XCTBL is structured around:

• Records (not blog posts)
• Tools that work independently
• Context as a first-class feature

No signup required. No funnel. You can explore at your own pace.

Early feedback was consistent: the entry point was confusing. Too much, too fast. So I stripped it back and created a single public starting page that explains what this is before anything else.

New public entry point:

https://RCRDBL.com/context

I also rewired the entire experience to be exploitable without signing up for anything at all, thanks to your feedback.

I’m not optimizing for conversions yet — just clarity.

Curious whether this feels understandable or still too abstract.

Feedback welcome.
by fullstop | 2025-12-26 14:14:11+00:00
I was hoping that this is how it would work for System76 -- when I bought the laptop they sold replacement batteries. Five years later I find myself needing a battery and they are unavailable -- not on System76's website, not online, nowhere. My only option is to either replace the laptop or buy a used one and take the battery from that, hoping that it's good.

For the last six months I've just been using a laptop as a mini pc with no battery.
by serf | 2025-12-26 14:14:26+00:00
one of the few guardrails that I would hate to get rid of as someone using one of the CLI agentic programs (claude-code/codex/gemini-cli/whatever) is the ability to spam ctrl-c/esc when I see it begin to do something braindead.

or, in other words, i'd hate to get the email response confirming a successful rm -rf somewhere it shouldn't be.

(yes, I know -- isolation, VCS, and snapshots -- it's still a bummer to need to use any of that.)
by amitav1 | 2025-12-26 14:14:33+00:00
Not trying to downplay your grievances, but isn't this what [Skills](https://claude.com/skills) are for? After going back and forth on something like that, create a skill that's something along the lines of

`database-query-speed-optimization`
"Some rules of thumb for using database queries:

- Use joins
- Streaming results is faster
- etc.
"

That way, the next time you have to do something like this, you can remind it of / it will find the skill.
by intellush-bot | 2025-12-26 14:14:35+00:00
Video Summary by Intellush

Trump's AI Deregulation Order Overrides State Regulations for Big Tech Expansion

29:28 | Negative

TL;DR: President Trump's December 11 executive order establishes a national AI policy framework to minimize regulations and prevent states from enacting conflicting AI laws, prioritizing U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence. The order directs federal agencies to identify public lands for data center construction and power infrastructure, while expediting environmental permits by easing Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act restrictions. This move, lobbied by AI giants like OpenAI, NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft, aims to accelerate AI development amid complaints from CEOs about power shortages and state-level hurdles slowing expansion.

Critics argue the deregulation favors large corporations, enabling unchecked data center buildouts projected to reach 3,000 new facilities across hotspots like Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Great Lakes states. Environmental concerns mount as the policy reduces safeguards, potentially increasing pollution and straining resources, while overriding states' rights in favor of a unified federal standard. Tech executives, including NVIDIA's Jensen Huang and OpenAI's Sam Altman, warn that a '50-state patchwork' of regulations would hinder innovation and national security, though the approach benefits established players over startups and disregards broader societal impacts like rising energy costs and misinformation spread by AI.

Key Takeaways:
• Trump's executive order revokes Biden-era AI safeguards and GPU export controls to boost U.S. AI leadership.
• Federal policy makes public lands available for data centers and streamlines environmental permitting.
• AI CEOs lobby against state regulations, citing power constraints and compliance burdens as major issues.
• Projected 3,000 new U.S. data centers will impact communities in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Great Lakes regions.
• Deregulation criticized for benefiting big tech at the expense of environmental protections and smaller competitors.
• Order establishes an AI litigation task force to challenge inconsistent state laws.
• Biden's 2023 executive order focused on AI risk mitigation, contrasting Trump's minimal-regulation approach.

—
Summarized by Intellush - intellush.com
by ketzu | 2025-12-26 14:14:40+00:00
Technically last year, but less than 365 days ago:

* The Mom Test

* The SAAS Playbook

Actually in this year, the ones I remember the most:

* Start Small, Stay Small

* From Yao To Mao (more a series of lectures on chinese history)

The most recent one I haven't finished yet but was surprised I liked:

* Software Engeineering at Google

Many more things described ring true or feel desireable, and I recognize too many of the anti-patterns from companies I worked for. Although, I also recognized the good things people were doing and started to appreciate them more.
by card_zero | 2025-12-26 14:16:44+00:00
I read Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy L Sayers. Quote:

All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling on the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING—NUTRAX FOR NERVES—CRUNCHLETS ARE CRISPER—EAT PIPER PARRITCH—DRINK POMPAYNE—ONE WHOOSH AND IT'S CLEAN—OH, BOY! IT'S TOMBOY TOFFEE—NOURISH NERVES WITH NUTRAX—FARLEY'S FOOTWEAR TAKES YOU FURTHER—IT ISN'T DEAR, IT'S DARLING—DARLING'S FOR HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES—MAKE ALL SAFE WITH SANFECT—WHIFFLETS FASCINATE. The presses, thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER—ASK YOUR DOCTOR—ASK THE MAN WHO'S TRIED IT—MOTHERS! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN—HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY—HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES—WOMEN! DO YOU REALIZE?—DON'T SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you're doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you're buying, pause and buy something different! Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going—and if you can't, Try Nutrax for Nerves!

Intriguingly familiar cynicism, vintage 1933.
by cj | 2025-12-26 14:16:50+00:00
It’s an incredible tool for weightlifting. I use it all the time to analyze my workout logs that I copy/paste from Apple Notes.

Example prompts:

- “Modify my Push #2 routine to avoid aggravating my rotator cuff”

- “Summarize my progression over the past 2 months. What lifts are progressing and which are lagging? Suggest how to optimize training”

- “Are my legs hamstring or glute dominant? How should I adjust training”

- “Critique my training program and suggest optimizations”

That said, I would never log directly in ChatGPT since chats still feel ephemeral. Always log outside of ChatGPT and copy/paste the logs when needed for context.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-12-26 14:17:40+00:00
While I agree that Python is where most of the implementation action is, one of the great things about building applications with LLMs is that almost all API providers offer a rich REST interface, and I have found it simple to use LLM services in Haskel, various Lisp languages, etc. It is nice having very old code in various languages and be able to add new functionality with LLMs.

Not all cool code is in new greenfield projects.
by belter | 2025-12-26 14:17:47+00:00
The first one is indeed fascinating...almost deserving of its HN post :-)

It has been submitted six times in the last 10 months, with a grand total of 1 comment...I though this site had Hacker in the title...

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgfw.report%2Fpublica...
by aniou | 2025-12-26 14:18:36+00:00
As side note. Maybe someone knows, why rust devs chose an already used name for language changes proposal? "RFC" was already taken and well-established and I simply refuse to accept that someone wasn't aware about Request For Comments - and if it was true and clash was created deliberately, then it was rude and arrogant.

Every, ...king time, when I read something like "RFC 2789 introduced a sparse HTTP protocol." my brain suffers from a short-circuit. BTW: RFC 2789 is a "Mail Monitoring MIB".
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-26 14:19:03+00:00
Since ~2002, Macports has used svn or git, but users, by default, rsync the complete port definitions + a server-generated index + a signature.

The index is used for all lookups; it can also be generated or incrementally updated client-side to accommodate local changes.

This has worked fine for literally decades, starting back when bandwidth and CPU power was far more limited.

The problem isn’t using SCM, and the solutions have been known for a very long time.