MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by baranul | 2025-12-26 13:23:59+00:00
The issue is that autofree is not a 100% solution by itself, in all circumstances. Thus it relies on the existing GC, in situations that it's not. The V developers have already hinted at using alternatives to the GC, for that remaining percentage, so memory safety without the GC is on the table for them.

Based on what I've read and hints dropped, can see them adding some type of additional DFA and borrow checker, somewhat like D, to be combined with autofree. Awareness of this possibility, might be why V's competitors have been so overly focused on them. As we are talking about combining it to an easier to use language, with cleaner syntax.
by tom1337 | 2025-12-26 13:23:59+00:00
What annoys me even more is that ChatGPT doesn't alert you, when you near the context window limit. I have a chat which I've worked on for a year and now hit the context window. I've worked around this by doing a GDPR download of all messages, re-constructed the conversation inside a markdown file and then gave that file to claude to create a summarized / compacted version of that chat...
by deepdarkforest | 2025-12-26 13:24:06+00:00
> Codex is more hands off, I personally prefer that over claude's more hands-on approach

Agree, and it's a nice reflection of the individual companie's goals. OpenAI is about AGI, and they have insane pressure from investors to show that that is still the goal, hence codex when works they could say look it worked for 5 hours! Discarding that 90% of the time it's just pure trash.

While Anthropic/Boris is more about value now, more grounded/realistic, providing more consistent hence trustable/intuitive experience that you can steer. (Even if Dario says the opposite). The ceiling/best case scenario of a claude code session is a bit lower than Codex maybe, but less variance.
by kllrnohj | 2025-12-26 13:24:36+00:00
> Will I be able to use the same mainboard for a decade?

Maybe, but you can actually just upgrade the mainboard. Framework has already done that cycle a couple of times. And they made sure the mainboard can work without a battery (not exactly a high bar, but it's better than most), so your old mainboard can pop into a small case and get a second life as a NUC
by oceanplexian | 2025-12-26 13:25:24+00:00
Denmark has a smaller population than Massachusetts, how is that a valid comparison to a massive country like the US?

Again using Massachusetts as an example, a place with a similar population to Denmark, if you instead look at fatalities per billion vkm, you would actually find MA to be about twice as safe (~1.74 vs 2.8).

The data is inherently misleading because drivers in countries in Europe don’t drive nearly as much, they travel at much lower speeds, plus cars are simply unattainable to the average person as a result of socioeconomic factors.
by kretaceous | 2025-12-26 13:25:42+00:00
Getting into reading again this year after a long break.

The most memorable read of this year was "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1846) by Alexander Dumas .

It's one of the greatest stories ever told. It's ~1250 pages but I sped through it in 3 weeks even if I'm a slow reader.

Highly recommended!

I also read The Stranger by Camus and the two top Orwells which lived up to the hype.
by tovej | 2025-12-26 13:26:33+00:00
Framework has so much potential, ehich is why it's weird that they threw away a lot of goodwill by spamming support for Omarchy and DHH on their socials, and effectively ignored customers asking about this strange direction on their support forums [1].

[1] https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...
by washadjeffmad | 2025-12-26 13:26:53+00:00
Relevant to "I'm returning my Framework Laptop" from a day or two ago (500+ comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46375174

I think the Framework model (OTC/commodity parts + mainboard) is neat, but what Beelink and others in the MiniPC space are doing is much more useful and compelling for someone who needs a modern, extensible system.

My work doesn't require a lot of local compute (or repairs), so there's nothing really a Framework offers that I'm not already getting on a 5 year old $150 4GB Chromebook.
by pitched | 2025-12-26 13:27:10+00:00
The usage limits on Claude have been making it too hard to experiment with. Lately, I get about an hour a day before hitting session/weekly limits. With Codex, the limits are higher than my own usage so I never see them.

Because of that, everyone who is new to this will be focused on Codex and write their glowing reviews of the current state of AI tools in that context.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-26 13:27:13+00:00
Lowest screen brightness and color correctness of the said screen are not trivial issues. I used to work in a dimly illuminated room during late nights, and any screen which can't do low-light properly is blinding.

Color correctness, even if you don't hit "calibrated pipeline" levels is extremely useful for seeing and/or editing photos. Even if you're doing this casually.
by motoboi | 2025-12-26 13:27:14+00:00
It's hard to compare the two tools because they change so much and so fast.

Right now, as an example, claude code with opus 4.5 is a beast, but before that, with sonnet 4.0, codex was much better.

Gemini-cli, on the other hand, with gemini-flash-3.0 (which is strangely good for the "small and fast" model), it's very good (but the cli and the user experience are not on par with codex or claude yet).

So we need to be in constant observations of those tools. Currently (after gemini-flash-3.0 came out), I tend to submit the same task to claude (with opus) and gemini to understand the behaviour. gemini is surprising me.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-12-26 13:27:39+00:00
It's unfortunate, but I agree with the comments that say asking too many of these questions (and the way they are asked) can be a red flag for the interviewing company.

In my experience, the best way to get to something closer to the truth about a work environment is to do something casual (lunch usually, but even just a group interview can work) with your prospective peers. You can observe how they interact with each other - do they seem happy and friendly with one another? Or do they seem cowed into submission, afraid to open up about anything? The stories they choose to tell you often will reveal much more than you could get out of a formal list of questions. I've actually had people tell me that the boss was a jerk in one of these situations (and the whole group agreed, not just one disgruntled employee.) Or heard about the time some employees did some wildly inappropriate (and hilarious) things in a conference room. I ran away from the first situation, but would have gladly accepted a job at the second (not _because_ of the conference room thing - these people seemed to genuinely like working together and at the company.)
by mathattack | 2025-12-26 13:27:50+00:00
The best books improve with rereading and slower reading. Tolkien fits this. I had an English teacher who reread LOTR every summer. I’m not there, but I am on a 5ish year cycle.

Most books are the other way. Zoom through and you can get most of the value. This is especially true of non-fiction, where most have a message that can be gleaned in 15 minutes. (The exceptions are the great ones)

Podcasts are similar. Most give you 80% of the value at 2X speed. Even my favorites - I’d rather speed listen to get 80% the value rather than get 100% of half the backlog. The best podcasts defy this too.

So in the end it’s a bit of a skill to both choose the right things to slow down on, and then a discipline to force the appropriate speed.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-12-26 13:28:34+00:00
Low effort projects don’t stand the test of time. The high quality ones always win out eventually.

There’s lots of creation going on right now thanks to agentic coding & vibe coding - but also lots of abandonment. It’s easy to confuse “lots of stuff is being tried right now” with “overall quality of software is going down”. But one does not lead to the other.

Even if it did, it’d still be exciting. Given a choice I’ll take a vibrant jungle where many ideas are being explored. That’s way more exciting to me than some kind of beautiful garden in which there is no room available for anything new or weird.
by saltybytes | 2025-12-26 13:28:38+00:00
I used to DJ in the 90's with vinyl on 1210s decks. A lot has changed in the industry and I'd like to spin at home for fun since I'm still a "househead".

Anyone knows a good YT channel that explains my options? Money is tight these days so I'm unable to buy the latest and greatest but I'm curious of the new technology used.
by nickcw | 2025-12-26 13:28:53+00:00
My favourite SF book this year was "Translation State" by Ann Leckie. It is set in the Imperial Radch world so having read the Ancillary trilogy is useful but not essential.

I like it because it contains the strangest aliens (the Presger) that I have come across. They are as far from humans in costumes as you could get. What the Presger do (and their proxies in the Human world the Translators) is totally unguessable.

A fabulous hard SF read and a must if you read the Ancillary trilogy.
by ethmarks | 2025-12-26 13:29:00+00:00
I read a few research papers, several textbooks, lots of documentation, many hundreds of Wikipedia articles, and the following books (not including ones I started but didn't finish):

- The Tempest (Shakespeare)

- A History of the American People (Paul Johnson)

- The Book of Dust (Phillip Pullman)

- The Secret Commonwealth (Phillip Pullman)

- Valuable Humans in Transit (qntm)

- Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

- Sunrise on the Reaping (Suzanne Collins)

- Ringworld (Larry Niven)

- The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

- Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

- Foundation (Isaac Asimov)
by goku12 | 2025-12-26 13:30:12+00:00
If the PSU is that crappy, then yes. But these things are supposed to come with over voltage protection, current limiters, resettable fuses etc at the output. Even bad ones are not supposed to cascade their failure to the rest of the system.

But let's think of a better option. What if all spare parts came with an expiry date and a service schedule? On top of giving us a baseline to retire the part, the manufacturer will also be forced to divulge an indirect quality score (useful lifetime) and compete with others on it. If this sounds too fantastic, we sort of had this in operation half a century ago. I don't think a lot of people remember that era.
by lenkite | 2025-12-26 13:30:50+00:00
Rust has double free concurrency bugs

https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...

Lockbud: project detailing memory, concurrency bugs and panics for Rust.
https://github.com/BurtonQin/lockbud

USENIX paper on model checking for Rust OS kernels uncovered 20 concurrency bugs across 12 modules in projects like Redox OS and Tock, including data races, deadlocks, and livelocks

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc25-tang.pdf
by myself248 | 2025-12-26 13:30:57+00:00
Oh, I did magnificent things to my old Toughbook CF-17 / CF-m34. (It ended up as a franken-puter with parts of both.)

First: Remove the internal CDPD wireless modem, remove the internal 56k POTS modem/10/100 Ethernet combo card. Wire the TTL-level UART from the CDPD port over to the RJ11 jack so I could now hack on embedded devices using a simple RJ11-to-bare-wires cable.

Second: The modem/ethernet card removal freed up the MiniPCI slot. Obtain a MiniPCI-to-USB2.0 card (4 downstream ports), and desolder the tall headers (it was meant for embedded machines with more internal space). Then verrrry carefully desolder the machine's external USB1.1 port pins from the mobo, and wire them over to one of the USB2.0 host ports. (Ground stayed, but D+/D-/Vbus moved.) Ta-daa, faster external devices.

This is the only bit I seem to have a photo of: https://flickr.com/photos/myself248/255205625/

Third: Carve out some stiffening ribs from under the palm-rest, shuck a USB-Bluetooth adapter, and mount it in there. The palm-rest being plastic means this puts the radio outside the magnesium shell, but still "internal" from an ergonomic perspective. Sneak some wires past the touchpad opening and solder them to the now-freed-up USB1.1 host port on the mobo, since bluetooth doesn't need 480Mbps.

Fourth: Shuck a 2GB USB flash drive and wire it to another internal USB2.0 port, and run EBoostr, a third-party implementation of Readyboost for WinXP, which gave flash-cache functionality for severely RAM-limited machines like mine (192MB mobo max, sadly!). Tuck it up by the RAM, ironically, because there's plenty of room up there.

Fifth: Shuck a USB2.0-GigE adapter (one with separate magnetics and jack, leave the magnetics but remove the jack because it's too tall, also remove the USB port), and wire it to yet a third internal USB2.0 port. Wire the Ethernet side out to the RJ45 jack freed up by the 10/100 card removal. The speed boost from 100Mbps to 480Mbps (GigE bottlenecked by USB2.0) isn't nothing, but the real benefit is that GigE is Auto-MDIX so I never have to carry a crossover cable, and that's worth it all by itself.

Sixth: Shuck a USB-Wifi dongle, and wire it to the fourth and final internal USB2.0 port. Do the world's hairiest coax splice to the CDPD modem's antenna lead, so the 2.4GHz RF now goes out to the 800MHz-tuned antenna mounted on the screen. Split the antenna open and trim the active elements to 1/3 their length, raising the resonant frequency accordingly. Without access to a VNA at the time, this was as good as I could get, and it worked just fine.

At that point, it was pretty much the perfect laptop, except for the brutally-limited RAM, which eventually forced its obsolescence as browsers bloated without bound. I used it heavily during 2006-07, and to this day I still miss that perfect little keyboard.
by wolfhumble | 2025-12-26 13:31:04+00:00
There was a company in Mallorca that tried something similar with lemons about 12 years ago: Pep Lemon. I remember hearing that they noticed huge amounts of lemons lying unused all over the island and wanted to do something worthwhile with them.

They stopped production in 2019, citing a “lack of investors.” During their operation, they were involved in a legal dispute with PepsiCo over the use of the name Pep. I’m not sure whether this was because of their cola product, Pep Cola, or simply due to the similarity of the brand names. Pep is a diminutive of Josep in Catalan and is very common, so it may have been just a coincidence.
They tried to export their products, but this turned out to be expensive, so they instead hoped for strong local support within Mallorca (see point 1 below). In that article they say that they produced 1000 bottles a year in their factory. That sounds very little; I wonder if that is correct?

1) News that they are on the verge of closing: https://ib3.org/pep-lemon-liquidara-lempresa-a-final-dany-si...

2) YouTube video attached to the news article, see 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXEsIbSkWQU

3) News that they are closing: https://ib3.org/pep-lemon-tanca-les-portes-definitivament
by paganel | 2025-12-26 13:31:12+00:00
For those interested in the subject (and who can also read French) I also heartily recommend the most recent edition of Augustin Thierry's Récits des temps mérovingiens [1]. Of course that it has most probably long been surpassed when it comes to historic accuracy, after all it was written almost 200 years ago, but it is very interesting nonetheless for being one of the first books that really put the focus on the Merovingians from a historical perspective that was "scientific", for lack of a better word.

[1] https://www.fnac.com/a21142694/Thierry-Augustin-Recits-des-t...
by VorpalWay | 2025-12-26 13:33:09+00:00
Rust does. You have editions to do breaking changes at the surface level. But that is per crate (library) and you can mix and match crates with different editions freely.

Thry do reserve the right to do breaking changes for security fixes, soundness fixes and inference changes (i.e. you may need to add an explicit type that was previously inferred but is now ambiguous). These are quite rare and usually quite small.
by alex-moon | 2025-12-26 13:33:19+00:00
The History of Medieval Europe by Maurice Keen

Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman

I had a crack at reading the first Game of Thrones novel (I think it's just called A Game of Thrones) but my brain seems to be in non-fiction mode at the moment. I think I'm drawn to a kind of sweet spot halfway between "related to my everyday experience" and "removed from my everyday experience" - not sure I could read about programming or business at the moment, though I also haven't tried.
by UncleMeat | 2025-12-26 13:33:23+00:00
The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.

Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
by LadyCailin | 2025-12-26 13:33:46+00:00
I’m writing my first sci-fi novel, and I’m using it for two main things. One, as a basic sanity check for the story, pacing, internal consistency, character development, etc, and basic copy editing. I’ve also used it to generate images for settings to go in the lore bible, so I can pin down what I see in my head into something tangible that I won’t forget. This isn’t the only step, I have human beta readers to double check the LLM, but it often tells me easily verifiable things, and it is often right, (for instance, this sentence reads funny), so it definitely adds value in that sense. Subjective things are a bit harder to trust, but that can be the same thing with subjective feedback from humans too, though of course the difference is that the LLM isn’t going to buy my book, whether or not it loves it.
by srean | 2025-12-26 13:33:54+00:00
What is fun to think about is how to simulate Lorentz contraction [0] of lengths for a fast moving object. Might be a good tool to you with special relativity simulations.

Consider a train. If I estimate it's speed incorrectly the reconstructed image will either be contracted or stretched depending on the direction of error.

Also don't miss https://trains.jo-m.ch/#/trains/list by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jo-m

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction
by BloondAndDoom | 2025-12-26 13:34:01+00:00
Not the OP, but to me audio generally x2 slower than I read, so I’m content with the speed, anything slower than that would be weird pace for many stuff.

Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks
by jokoon | 2025-12-26 13:34:30+00:00
Bought a thinkpad L450 10 years ago for about 900 euros. No GPU, which probably increased its lifespan. Replaced its HDD with a SSD.

Apart from thinkpads and maybe framework, I don't think there is any other reliable laptop brand with reasonable prices.

I was talking with my mother about buying jeans pants that would last for a long time, and a 200 euros jeans would have holes on its 6th year or something. Everything is built to last "just long enough".
by goku12 | 2025-12-26 13:34:41+00:00
> I don't think this was understood charitably. The point of the parent is that in practice, when it comes time to update one part, you'll also want to update all or most of the others. So, in practice, you will not see any of these savings.

It's frustrating to have to repeat the same point again and again. That is not correct at all. I have exercised it in practice. What you refer to as in practice are the deliberately crippled and limited options that are available in the market today.

> The potential savings may be significant, but for most people, it may be the case that the actual savings are unlikely. A modular, upgradable laptop may be a niche product for people who want to upgrade each part more frequently, not less.

Completely disagree. That's not what's seen in practice.
by kllrnohj | 2025-12-26 13:35:37+00:00
What were you comparing against? When I bought my framework it didn't really have a price premium to it relatively to comparable laptops. The main compromise was the thicker chassis and fewer options in terms of things like premium displays.

> Plus I prefer intel for TB support for an egpu.

lol you and nobody else prefer Intel in a laptop these days. But FYI framework has TB support on their Intel skus and AMD has USB 4 (aka, thunderbolt 3++)
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-26 13:35:52+00:00
I have two elderly relatives that use CGMs and both are at a stage in life now where they really cannot be expected to exercise common sense. I am pretty sure they've both been using CGMs exclusively and haven't been using finger sticks, at least not regularly, and one of them has a very hard time even understanding that apple pies are filled with sugar. No real intuition for which foods have or don't have sugar.

If CGMs are so unreliable and need double checking, I am quite confident that many patients don't understand this, even if it was carefully explained to them by their doctors.
by techjamie | 2025-12-26 13:36:39+00:00
I'd say Mullvad is on the more accessible side, since a Mullvad subscription can be obtained through a relatively small amount of cash. All you need is a few dollars and the ability to mail a letter with a few bucks to Europe.

Wisconsin is a state that's been looking at banning VPNs[1]. And they also apply laws to "companies commonly known to provide VPN services" - which makes me wonder how far that goes. Because technically I could get a free AWS instance, spin up Tailscale on it, and I have a VPN. Is AWS a VPN company since they certainly host servers that are used for VPNs? Who knows!

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
by arvid-lind | 2025-12-26 13:37:00+00:00
Not enough. Going to try to rein in some sustained attention in the new year.

- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

- Playground by Richard Powers

- Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman

I'm curious how much AI-generated stuff I read this year... likely at least a book's worth, but it would be more like one of those books with 365+ random deep dives into stuff that's not really relevant to my life.
by roenxi | 2025-12-26 13:37:05+00:00
> I hate to be that guy

I think it is more ClickHouse Marketing being that guy; they have a vaguely aggressive feel to them and slightly-questionable claims like that seem on-vibe to me. Although it is tolerable. Selling databases is hard, the specialists who actually understand the trade-offs are so specialised they usually aren't the person who makes the call on what to use. At least they're selling an interesting [0] DB, Clickhouse has a fun design. They don't mislead anyone who is interested in the details and their documentation is in the end rather detailed.

[0] https://clickhouse.com/docs/academic_overview