MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hibikir | 2025-12-25 00:47:39+00:00
The problems of lack of independence are rarely the kind of thing you decide in a big leveling meeting though: Someone working in near the project has to be providing the feedback regarding the employee needing more supervision. If that's the reason someone fails to uplevel, the manager and the dev lead are failing you, or outright saying something different for your packet than they say to your face.
by Guestmodinfo | 2025-12-25 00:49:04+00:00
Librarians do hide books. But not as a way of hiding from public but as a way of not throwing them away. Let me explain. Even though libraries are very big still they run out of space and regularly throw out (in India because most don't care) / ( or in Texas sell out books cheaply) and it pains the librarians deeply so they kind of stash books secretly from being thrown away. And if you really show interest in a particular book and request it nicely then the librarian will give it to you and tell you not to tell anyone. Why I know this because it happened to me in my college library in India. I can still after decades remember the love of books on that librarian's face
by Someone1234 | 2025-12-25 00:49:40+00:00
Yes, and what a mess it has been.

Intellisense + Intellicode + Roslynator (extension) combined were really the height of productivity in Visual Studio. Now they've driven a steam-roller over all of that, forced CoPilot down our throats.

I LIKE CoPilot's "chat" interface, and agents are fine too (although Claude in VS Code is tons better), but CoPilot auto-complete is negative value and shouldn't be used.
by Mawr | 2025-12-25 00:50:40+00:00
Oh, who cares.

> Over the last year, I've secretly surveilled the Waymos alone at night, at some personal risk of injury.

I got excited reading this, I'd assumed this meant he'd go out at night to test the safety of the cars by jumping in front of them or something. That'd be interesting.

But this is just boring, mundane drone footage anyone can get.
by albert_roca | 2025-12-25 00:50:41+00:00
The model identifies the proton mass stability at the 64-bit limit (2^64). Since gravitational interaction scales with m_p^2 , the hierarchy gap corresponds to the square of that limit:

(2^64)^2 = 2^128

The geometric derivation involves a factor of 2, linked to the holographic pixel diagonal (√2 )^2:

2 / 2^128 = 2^−127

2^−127 represents the least significant bit (LSB) of a 128-bit integer.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-25 00:51:23+00:00
X has the terminology the other way around compared to all other consumer facing software.

This is because of its mainframe style history and technically it does make sense, it's just that everybody else does things the other way around.

For the people who weren't around in the ancient mainframe times who end up messing with Linux for the first time, this is confusing for a while.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-12-25 00:51:40+00:00
> German native speakers might better understand how cases work

As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.

Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
by ProofHouse | 2025-12-25 00:52:05+00:00
I am alone. I haven't seen my family in many, many years for reasons that I don't want to get into. I am a founder. I check Hacker News every day and have learned an immense amount from all the commenters, articles, and discussions over the years. I thank you all for that. I am truly grateful.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas full of joy, and I hope you can all appreciate, share, and express love for those around you, be it family, friends, or strangers on the internet. We are all very lucky to be part of the HN site and community. I have been here for about 15 years (at least that is what it feels like) with my other accounts that I don't want to dox.

Glory to God. For believers in Jesus, may the light of Christ guide you as it does me in difficult times. Wishing you all His peace and joy.
by Someone1234 | 2025-12-25 00:52:10+00:00
Windows Search requires a DNS lookup, and HTTP request to start your search, as a direct result if either one of those is slow the whole UI lags and hangs. It hasn't ever been fixed in Windows 11.

Also, there is a RegX way of disabling "bing" for-real in the search but they released and update that caused doing so to break search entirely if that was set (totally a coincidence I'm sure).
by huug156 | 2025-12-25 00:54:38+00:00
You do live in a different, underprivileged world. Many Google engineers have never not heard back from a job app.

I will never understand people who refuse to work at a big company yet complain about money of all things. For reference my last job at Google paid $450k+. It seems like it would behoove you to enter the other world.
by themafia | 2025-12-25 00:54:41+00:00
Salt is a deadly poison. The question is how much. Which is precisely why Midgely would demonstrate the "safety" of TEL by pouring some on his skin in front of reporters. He knew that in limited amounts the effect was small.

At the time when TEL was introduced gasoline engines were just _starting_ to be mass produced for personal vehicles. It was a way to take the limited manufacturing technology of the time and still produce a reliable engine. The installed base was small enough that if you didn't consider the potential exponential explosion of engines you might be convinced that it would never amount to a significant problem. Sure, it will increase lead levels, but hopefully not by that much.

Then two world wars broke out. Wars in which this technology featured significantly.

It's fun to blame Thomas Midgely for all of this but if offers no real lesson on how to prevent it from happening again.
by webdevver | 2025-12-25 00:55:04+00:00
i would like to push back a bit on this and say, it is worth working hard, but i would argue a lot of programmers get hindered by the illusion that programming is important, or even delivering results. unfortunately in software this is exacerbated by the very real world-wide impact that programming actually does have, but: it will always be subjugated by the most important job...

the most important job, that has ever existed, and that will ever exist, is politics. moving up the career ladder you have to start thinking in terms of people, or maybe even in terms of mammals and mammalian group dynamics, cos thats who youre "programming" now, not computers. and most programmers aren't cut out for that, just as most regular people aren't cut out for programming. its hard to say why, but thats the on-the-ground data i see again and again.

i also would like to push back on the "personal projects" mindset - the sentiment often being "just live in your own little world" (not saying it is here, but this is what it often implies.) if youre going to admit defeat and retreat, be honest about what youre doing. dont dress it up as a 'win'. ceding financial/social/political agency is never a victory, but sometimes a neccesity. quitting a mag7 like google is objectively a step down whichever way you slice it. you can count on two hands the number of companies that have the level of resouces that google does - it might be worth to swallow ones pride and slog it out.
by rjdj377dhabsn | 2025-12-25 00:55:55+00:00
The idea of upgrading a laptop may sound great at first, but I don't think most people really want that.

After 2-3 years, my laptop is pretty beat up from carrying it around in a bag daily. I usually buy premium laptops, but still the hinges get loose, the corners bent, scratches everywhere, ports loose. Usually superficial issues like that make me buy a replacement before I really need upgraded chips.
by dwoldrich | 2025-12-25 00:56:21+00:00
Are you arguing there are no bullshit, make-work government jobs? What a strange thing to bring up, a bit of a slip.

Then again, of course there are good, hard working people in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?

Then again, of course there are 0% contribution parasites, evil Machiavellian scoundrels, and power mad bureaucrats in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?

"Government can do some good" is, in my opinion, grug philosophy. It assumes people in government are upstanding like they insist they are, have fine intentions and won't be bought or compromised, or have ethical standards that are same as ours.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-12-25 00:56:36+00:00
I'm convinced that the win10 Start Menu was the single worst thing microsoft inflicted upon us in that OS. I imagine that particular discussion went like this:

Exec1:"We have a semi decent os with a refreshingly updated UI that should stay relevant for a decade. How can we make it better?"

Exec2: "why not replace the perfectly good start menu we have with a hideous, oddly proportioned rectangle with animated ads for our products."

I haven't used Win11 enough to discover how they have managed to further degrade the experience, but at least it looks a bit nicer.
by itissid | 2025-12-25 00:56:39+00:00
There was a time when if you edited documentation in vscode and had copilot on it would complete internal user and project names when it encountered a path on some.random LLM project we were building. I could find people and their projects by just googling the username and contextual keywords.

We all had a lot of laughs with tab auto complete and wondered in anticipation what ridiculous stuff it threw up next.
by sosodev | 2025-12-25 00:57:29+00:00
I’ve spent some time thinking about privacy and LLMs. I developed the impression that encryption isn’t meaningful in this space. It seems like end to end encryption only truly works when both ends are outside of the system and can manage their keys independently of it. In this case one end is the system. My message has to be decrypted for processing by the LLM. So is “end to end encryption” in this case any different than HTTPS? It doesn’t seem like it
by ctidd | 2025-12-25 00:58:51+00:00
CSRF exists as a consequence of insecure-by-default browser handling of cookies, whereby the browser sends the host’s cookies on requests initiated by a third-party script to the vulnerable host. If a script can fake all headers, it’s not running in a browser, and so was never exposed to the insecure browser cookie handling to be able to leverage it as a vector. If no prerequisite vector, then no vulnerability to mitigate.
by dmurray | 2025-12-25 00:59:41+00:00
I don't understand what PVS is in this context, but it seems any attempt to completely automate this would struggle with false positives.

There might be >350 polys visible from weird camera locations, but if the player is never there in normal gameplay you don't care about them. If they do end up in such a weird position in one game in a thousand (say a rocket jump lifts them up to somewhere normally inaccessible) it's not the end of the world anyway, the game will just render slower for a few frames.
by vikingerik | 2025-12-25 01:00:01+00:00
Diablo 1 had no running or speed mechanic, movement speed was always constant. Its expansion Hellfire allowed running in town but not in combat areas.

Diablo 2 (2000) added the sprinting mechanic with limited stamina, but it panned out as irrelevant for gameplay. The stamina supply easily ramps up to more than you ever deplete so you just always run. And players wanted it that way since no one wants to walk slower, and the monster speeds were later increased to be balanced against players always running.
by kace91 | 2025-12-25 01:00:07+00:00
>acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack

This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.

Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.

Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.
by cloudfudge | 2025-12-25 01:00:19+00:00
The part that is counterintuitive to most people when it comes to the "server" terminology is that, with X, your end-user workstation (which may be an incredibly dumb X terminal) is the "display server", which means you remote into a server (in the traditional sense) elsewhere, which then acts as an X client by making requests to your local machine to display windows.

The way most people think about it, "client" is your local machine and "server" is the remote machine that has lots of applications and is potentially multi-user, but X turns that backwards. The big iron is the client and the relatively dumb terminal is the server.
by vunderba | 2025-12-25 01:01:21+00:00
I’ve pointed this out before on HN, but if you want to use ChatGPT as a language partner, *you must provide a topic*. Expecting it to behave as a proactive teacher is a recipe for disappointment.

Here’s what I typically do:

- Create a custom GPT (mine is called Polly the Glot) with a system prompt instructing it to act as a language partner that responds only in Chinese or your target language of choice. Further specify that the user will paste a story or topic before beginning practice, and that this should guide the discussion.

- Start a new chat.

- Paste in an article from AP/Reuters.

- Turn on Voice Chat.

At that point, I’ll head out to walk my dog and can usually get about 30 minutes to an hour of solid language practice in.

Fair warning, you'll likely need to be at least an intermediate student by this point otherwise it'll probably be too much over your head.

Caveat: You could including a markdown file of your known vocabulary as an knowledge attachment in the custom GPT but I've no idea how well that would work in practice.
by mcv | 2025-12-25 01:01:59+00:00
I hate the time unpredictability of it. Intellij also has AI completion suggestions, and sometimes they're really useful. But sometimes when I expect them, they don't come. Or they briefly flash and then disappear.

What would be nice is if you could ask for a suggestion with one key, so it's there when I want it, and not when I don't. That would put me in control. Instead I feel subjected to these completely random whims of the AI.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-12-25 01:02:10+00:00
> I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them

The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way.
by NamlchakKhandro | 2025-12-25 01:02:27+00:00
skills are just prompts the agent can decide to use
commands are prompts you decide to use

that's all there is to it.

If you want to go deeper, then Skills are dynamically unfolding prompts.

If you want a large library of skills and don't want to fill up your context window then checkout opencode-skillful
by gerdesj | 2025-12-25 01:02:34+00:00
I remember when the pound coin was first minted and I am 55 years old.

In 1915 or so, a single pound (GBP int al) was a banknote ie paper money and was thus until the coin took over in the '80s I think it was. The pound coin is not made of gold.

A gold sov. is something completely different. However "sov" is a nickname or perhaps a euphemism for a pound (GBP).
by Janethen-14 | 2025-12-25 01:03:25+00:00
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by nowittyusername | 2025-12-25 01:03:31+00:00
There is soo much marketing bs around these things it drives me nuts. and it doesn't help that the large labs and credible individuals like denis use these terms. "world models" are video generator with contextual memory but that term is soo misplaced. when one thinks of a "world model" you expect the thing to be at least be physics engine driven from its foundation, not the other way around where everything is generated and assumed at best.
by ProfessorZoom | 2025-12-25 01:04:06+00:00
reading this while at my dads house for christmas. when I left I went in my garage and clicked dads house, then clicked “start self driving” it back out, got out the neighborhood, on the highway, merged onto another, took an exit, drove to his neighborhood and pulled in the driveway. dad needed to get something from the gas station, we clicked the destination and clicked start self driving, it backed out the driveway and chose its own parking spot at the gas station, got back to his house in the driveway. not once today have I touched the accelerator, brake pedal, or turn signal, and I’m 2 cities away from home and have been on 3 drives. just my experience today
by rvnx | 2025-12-25 01:04:52+00:00
It’s far from being impossible, the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw).

C or asm are not obscure languages or anything, they are brutal languages where you have to trace runtime from A to Z, and manage the memory.

In 1990, it was absolutely normal to code in C. Yes you had to decode images yourself, yes you had to decode audio, yes you had to raytrace, etc.

“Wait, you had to calculate all of these by hand ?

Yes my friend everybody had to do that in my time, what else could we do ?

So we took books, and did one by one.

This was the norm, just that it became some sort of archeology.”

Every year, thousands of 19-year-olds complete these tasks in low-level schools like Epita/Epita/42 or in demoscene contests. They aren't geniuses; they are just students who were forced to read the manual and understand how the computer actually works.

Free time won’t guarantee you success, but free time + obsession will (like Terry Davis).

Really, this is not alien tech.

Before FFmpeg, people had to encode the videos. Before emulators someone had to create the state machine, etc. All these people it would be insane to ignore them.

Most of the difficult problems have shifted somewhere else from low-level.

How to simulate millions of pharmaceutical molecules in short amount of time ?

How to simulate the world in GTA VI ?

Saving 2 bytes of memory by writing asm (that… won’t be portable) is not the thing going to save you. The problems are now elsewhere.

The problem now is not about “wow you read ancient manuals and mixed sand with water and got a solid foundational brick” but it is about “ok, using these bricks, how to build a skyscraper that is 1km tall”.

No doubt that these modern programmers are as good as the archeologists who like to explore handcrafted code.
by ptero | 2025-12-25 01:05:23+00:00
> university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants.

Agreed, hiring in academia is both painful and tricky. But someone running a grad program for the department and who is as overloaded as the author with other duties is well placed to advocate for a secretary or a grad assistant to lighten his non-core duties.

> And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

More than for a bus driver, nurse, cook, physical therapist, etc., etc., etc.? The world is full of people who volunteer and self-assign tasks to their breaking point; then burn themselves out. They feel that they can do X best, so they convince themselves that they must. With very few exceptions, this is BS and a non-productive path to burnout. Don't be like that.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-25 01:06:17+00:00
I’ll contest that on the screens. Mini-LED backlighting is a substantial step up for contrast, backlights in general have gotten brighter, IPS panels have gained notability better color gamuts and contrast, and OLED panels are now widely available even in budget machines. The screens on the M1-M4 MBPs look quite visibly nicer than those MBPs used up until 2019.

Those painfully awful 1366x768 TN panels that used to be commonplace have finally mostly been ousted, too. As a result, chances are that the laptop you buy at nearly any price bracket in 2026 has a screen that’s moderately to dramatically better than was found in laptops in the same bracket up until 2020-2022.

The problems with the port modules are that due to their dimensions, the number of ports you can have on the laptop at once is small and the big voids in the chassis required for them to be able to slot in greatly weakens it and makes it more prone to flexing.

With an alternative design that uses internal port boards (still hooked up via USB-C) with matching exterior side plates, you could easily do something like 3x USB-C, 1x USB-A on the left and 1x Ethernet, 1x USB-C, 1x USB-A, 1x SD/microSD on the right in the same space as would’ve been taken by the modules for half as many ports. This would suit most users perfectly out of the box, precluding the need for swapping for many, but for those who need one side to be full USB-C or multiple NICs or a cell modem or something that’s still possible.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-25 01:07:29+00:00
The way you're supposed to do that is by having laws that are actually reasonable and uniformly applied.

Having laws that tilt the playing field and then punishing anyone who admits the emperor has no clothes is just censorship. People still figure it out. Only then they get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything, which causes the corruption to spread instead of being opposed, until the rot reaches the foundation. And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-12-25 01:09:01+00:00
XLibre is a joke. They're making changes for the sake of changes: for example, commit aefde9 strips out vendoring in an ad-hoc, incomplete fashion (introducing a minor spacing bug in the process); and commit aafd986 replaces `int` with `unsigned int` (instead of `size_t`), failing to properly fix the bug that the compiler warnings identified (albeit, also removing an unrelated C footgun along the way, so this does look like a bug fix). The main author has a history of cowboy commits: 533c45e (which made it into mainline Xorg before he got kicked out) straight-up prevents ‎hw/xfree86/os-support/bsd/arm_video.c from compiling, so it's clear there's no actual testing taking place.

I doubt the XLibre authors understand the X security model, either – they never do, in forks like this – and they've alienated most of the security researchers who might otherwise clean up after them.

Phoenix and Wayback are much more interesting projects, in my book. Wayback's designed to actually work, and I expect it to be production-ready much sooner; but I expect Phoenix to be the more technically interesting project, since it's deliberately breaking from the X11 spec.