MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frankzander | 2025-12-26 10:26:03+00:00
I can fully relate ... back in the days there wasn't much (at least I don't remember) of "this kind" of ppl and everything was just hacking. However I can imagine what you mean.
At the end this growing craziness does not change any time soon so you are right ... "finding the folks that fit you" is maybe the best advice (and this hasn't to be the CCC).
Fortunately the interesting talks are often recorded so nobody has to attend who don't want in order to get the interesting stuff.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-12-26 10:26:46+00:00
You just gave the best example of how these interactions usually play out. You know basically nothing about me and yet you assume to know exactly "what I've become" and that I deserve to be "despised" based on 2 statements that don't tell you anything about me because I never explained my positions in depth.

I spent more than a decade in and around 2-3 local hackerspaces and some of the best practices and infrastructure I introduced/built are still in place. You really know nothing about me to arrive at this conclusion, thereby proving my point that the culture has shifted - not me.
What I learned building "comfortable" LED strip lighting
by emmasuntech | 2025-12-26 10:28:21+00:00
I built a small workspace lighting setup using LED strips and ended up learning more than I expected. On paper it was simple: stick a strip somewhere, add a diffuser, done. In practice, the stuff that mattered wasn’t the spec sheet—it was power delivery, optics, and human perception.

A few notes that surprised me:

Power planning > “just buy a bigger PSU.” Long runs behave like distributed loads. Voltage drop shows up as uneven brightness, and on RGB/RGBW it can show up as color shift (“white” gets warmer at the far end). The fix isn’t only wattage—it’s where you feed power, wire gauge, and connector losses.

Diffusion is not cosmetic. Without enough distance or diffusion, you get hotspots and glare. A cheap milky diffuser in an aluminum channel gets you most of the way there, but what helped the most was increasing LED-to-diffuser distance (depth of the channel) rather than chasing “premium” diffusers.

Indirect beats direct for comfort. Bouncing light off a wall/desk surface looked dimmer on paper but felt more usable and less fatiguing. It also hid the fact that LEDs are point sources.

Signal integrity is a separate problem (for addressable). A lot of “flicker” is actually data/ground/reference issues, not power. Short data lines, solid ground, and sometimes level shifting helped more than swapping power supplies.

Questions for folks who’ve done larger installs (10–50m) or more “production” setups:

Do you design power delivery first or physical layout first?

Any favorite diffuser/channel profiles that minimize hotspots without killing too much output?

For long addressable runs, what’s your go-to strategy for signal conditioning (buffers, differential, etc.)?
by duckydude20 | 2025-12-26 10:30:16+00:00
what advantage/disadvantages does Scala/jvm have over Elixir/otp/beam?

i am learning Elixir and liking the concepts.
i am coming from kotlin/jvm and i like kotlin, apart from kotlin-coroutines.
planning to migration all threading code to virtual threads. but biggest problem is threadlocal.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-26 10:30:38+00:00
>it's really not wierd that people thinking that using secure technologies, firewalls and privacy to defend against infections on their electronics would also strongly support using a firewall to defend themselves from disease in the physical space

On the other hand, there is a discongruency when people who are against control and surveillance start implementing control and surveillance because the particular purpose sanctified the means. Something that previously seemed non-negotiable, culturally fundamental even, was toppled.
by imron | 2025-12-26 10:32:45+00:00
I’m not faster at writing tests than AI but my own code needs fewer tests.

When I’m writing my own code I can verify the logic as I go and coupled with a strong type system and a judicious use of _some_ tests its generally enough for my code to be correct.

By comparison the AI needs more tests to keep it on the right path otherwise the final code is not fit for purpose.

For example in a recent use case I needed to take a json blob containing an array of strings that contained numbers and needed to return an array of Decimals sorted in ascending order.

This seemed a perfect use case - a short well defined task with clear success criteria so I spent a bunch of time writing the requirements and building out a test suite and then let the AI do its thing.

The AI produced ok code, but it was sorted everything lexicographically before converting to a Decimal rather converting to Decimals first and sorting numerically so 1000 was less than 900.

So I point it out and the AI says going point, you’re absolutely correct and we add a test for this and it goes again and gets the right result but that’s not a mistake I would have made or needed a test for (though you could argue it’s a good test to have).

You could also argue that I should have specified the problem more clearly, but then we come back to the point that if I’m writing every specific detail in English first, it’s faster for me just to write it in code in the first place.
by albert_e | 2025-12-26 10:33:00+00:00
Yahoo Mail had (has?) a feature that allowed you to set an alternative email address while keeping your original email address intact.

you could be first_last@yahoo.com but also have rando_waldo@yahoo.com or ymail.com receive emails in same mailbox. And you could choose the "From" address form a drop-down when sending outbound emails or replies.
Show HN: I built a tool to help small teams automate basic analytical tasks
by LunarFrost88 | 2025-12-26 10:35:03+00:00
Arka (arka.so) is a AI analytics tool that lets you get insights + charts from any (structured or unstructured) data source. I built it because I was getting tired of writing SQL queries and creating Metabase charts at my last job.

I would love some feedback on our product:

How is the landing page / website

What use cases could this unlock for you?

We have some awesome tech behind the scenes and have some initial customers, but I am really keen on expanding towards a PLG motion where folks can sign up and get insights about their data fast.

Would love brutally honest feedback!
by dangalf | 2025-12-26 10:36:03+00:00
>Plans move to Rust, with
help from AI

>“Our strategy is to combine AI and
Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s
largest codebases,” he added. “Our
North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month,
1 million lines of code.’”

Some more context https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-re...
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-26 10:36:19+00:00
I find however, that while typing it all out, my mind often continues analyzing and thinking, and that I often find a new idea, or new structure, that might be even better. Typing it out and seeing it appear in front of me. It also gives me a feeling for how tedious, brittle, or annoying the solution is.

Granted, sometimes it's really not that interesting to type the stuff. It depends what one is working on.
by DrStormyDaniels | 2025-12-26 10:36:49+00:00
Not true, the effect of high blood levels can be very unpredictable. Especially above a certain number - and largely depending on the basal insulin strategy of the patient, for instance long acting shots versus constant micro doses of short acting via pumps. In the latter case, an untreated high blood sugar could escalate in a matter of hours to a fatal level.
by slurrpurr | 2025-12-26 10:37:00+00:00
https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/... (already mentioned)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-26 10:37:18+00:00
> It turns out that having a "trainer" to "coach" you is not a coincidence: these two words evolved together from the rail industry to the gym.

This does not appear to be true.

Train (etymonline):

> "to discipline, teach, bring to a desired state or condition by means of instruction," 1540s, which probably is extended from the earlier sense of "draw out and manipulate in order to bring to a desired form" (Middle English trainen, attested c. 1400 as "delay, tarry" on a journey, etc.); from train (n.) For the notion of "educate" from that of "draw," compare educate.

[That train (n.) doesn't refer to the rail industry, which didn't really exist in the 1540s. It refers to a succession (as one railcar will follow another in later centuries), or to the part of your clothing that might drag on the ground behind you, or to the act of dragging anything generally. Interestingly, etymonline derives this noun from a verb train meaning to drag; given the existence of this verb, I see no reason to derive the verb train in the sense "teach" from the noun derived from the same verb in the sense "drag". The entry on the verb already noted that it isn't unexpected for "drawing" [as water from a well] to evolve into "teaching".]

Coach (wiktionary):

> The meaning "instructor/trainer" is from Oxford University slang (c. 1830) for a "tutor" who "carries" one through an exam

Coach might be a metaphor from the rail industry (or the horse-and-buggy industry), but trainer isn't.
by hapticmonkey | 2025-12-26 10:39:13+00:00
> We further urge the machine learning community to act proactively by establishing robust design guidelines, collaborating with public health experts, and supporting targeted policy measures to ensure responsible and ethical deployment

We’ve seen this play out before, when social media first came to prominence. I’m too old and cynical to believe anything will happen. But I really don’t know what to do about it at a person level. Even if I refuse to engage in this content, and am able to identify it, and keep my family away from it…it feels like a critical mass of people in my community/city/country are going to be engaging with it. It feels hopeless.
by slurrpurr | 2025-12-26 10:40:38+00:00
and from last year:

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/K...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/S...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/W...

In comparison, the only talk linked above was "die Sprache der überwacher", a talk about actual surveillance.
by kopirgan | 2025-12-26 10:40:48+00:00
I understand and agree with the logic of repairability and user servicability. No arguments there. Point is why should that be premium for non marketing reasons? For instance, is soldered RAM somehow cheaper than RAM slots? Same for SSD, WiFI card, battery, keyboard assembly etc. (all of which used to be perfectly replaceable not too long ago, in most laptops esp high end Elitebooks & Latitudes as well as mass market Acers)
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-26 10:40:55+00:00
> Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.

It’s slowly, but inexorably increasing. The constraints are the normal constraints of a new technology; money, time, quality. Particularly money.

Still, token generation keeps going down in cost, making it possible to produce more and more content. Quality, and the ability to obfuscate origins, seems to be on a continual improve also. Anecdotally, I’m seeing a steady increase in the number of HN front page articles that turn out to be AI written.

I don’t know how far away the “botnet of spam AI content” is from becoming reality; however it would appear that the success of AI is tightly coupled with that eventuality.
by criticalfault | 2025-12-26 10:41:17+00:00
what laptop? what hardware?

here is my state of laptops:

* Dell latitude with old Intel 8gen CPU, it works fine (Linux kernel causes problems with PSR, but this has nothing to do with Wayland and disabling it fixes the problem, same thing with cstates)

* Dell latitude with 10gen CPU, works fine.

* Huawei d15 with Ryzen 3000 Apu, works fine.

ok. for accessibility it's fair enough as a critique.
I don't use it so can't say. As far as I can tell this hasn't been in focus at all. but most of this is on the toolkit side, not Wayland (even though here one thing is mentioned as Wayland specific, just briefly went through the post)

https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the...
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-12-26 10:43:58+00:00
> stand-alone build of luatex 1.10.0

Why such an old version? The latest version is 1.24.0, which should have lots of new features and fixes relative to v1.10. And if you're starting from scratch and not planning on using any of the TeX stuff, I'd really recommend using LuaMetaTeX since it cleans lots of stuff up, and doesn't use autotools at all.
by Kwpolska | 2025-12-26 10:44:24+00:00
Trusting LaTeX to automatically distribute tables and figures produces not-very-readable documents with tables and figures interrupting content (e.g. page 12).

> The default LATEX compiler in both cases will likely be pdfLaTeX, and to make things smooth, we will stick with that. However, note that there are the more powerful XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, which can be a suitable choice for advanced users.

> XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX As a remark, if the document will be mainly in Chinese/Japanese/Korean or any other non-Latin language in general, then it may be more beneficial to just switch to the XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX compiler since they directly support UTF-8 encoded text. However, we will keep ourselves to the default pdfLaTeX compiler to avoid complications.

This is just FUD. XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX do not introduce any "complications" and are not only for "advanced users". Switching is easy, and programs without any Unicode support should simply not be used these days.
by elxr | 2025-12-26 10:44:42+00:00
Nowadays? 4+ times a week. I want to learn as much as I can now that I essentially have 24/7 mentors that can remember everything I've told them.

Sure, I could write it all by hand; but even as a decent typer, I'll never match a tenth speed of claude code or opencode just GOING. Maybe there's a better way to learn, but whatever it is, it's not obvious to me.
by notahacker | 2025-12-26 10:46:49+00:00
> Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring.

If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...

(I'm only half joking)
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-12-26 10:47:07+00:00
Excited! It's such a great event.

I'm currently on a plane towards Hamburg and will be speaking on Day 2.

"Agentic ProbLLMs - Exploiting AI Computer-Use and Coding Agents"

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/agentic...
by tannhaeuser | 2025-12-26 10:47:17+00:00
Not sure the number is up from last year (I think there are fewer O/T talks this year even) but there are many talks that have nothing to do with hacking even if some of them might pigue my interest, such as the following:

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

Then there are topics merely having "computer" in them like everything in this day and age but aren't about hacking, and it's disappointing because I know for a fact other talks had to make room for these:

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

Not everything in "Hacker News" is on-topic either I guess.

The talks by e-celebs also don't bring in anything novel, like at all.
by lpetronika | 2025-12-26 10:47:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been a software engineer for 10 years. For a long time, I viewed "application state" as just a collection of variables and logic. I was effective, but I felt like I was missing the underlying structure of why state becomes messy.

Recently, I started studying linear algebra (Axler’s "Linear Algebra Done Right"). It opened a "third eye" for me. I realized that redundant state in a React app is essentially "linear dependence." If two or more state variables always update in perfect sync, they aren't adding new information-they are just redundant dimensions in your application's state space.

I spent my holiday break building react-state-basis. It’s a real-time architectural auditor that monitors your state transitions as vectors to find these redundancies.

What the tool does:

Redundancy Detection: It identifies state variables that move in perfect synchronization (collinear) and suggests refactoring them into a single source of truth or a derived value (useMemo).

Causality Tracking: It traces useEffect chains to find "Double Render Cycles" where one state update unnecessarily triggers another.

Infinite Loop Protection: It includes a "Circuit Breaker" that detects high-speed oscillations and halts execution before the browser thread locks up.

System Health Score: It analyzes your entire state architecture to give you an efficiency score based on how many variables are actually independent.

I built a Babel plugin to handle automatic labeling, so you don't have to manually name your states. It’s designed as a development-time tool—you can easily swap back to standard React imports for your production build.

I’m a solo dev and this is my first open-source project. I’d love to hear what you think about this approach to state auditing.

https://github.com/liovic/react-state-basis
by Gibbon1 | 2025-12-26 10:47:43+00:00
My heresy is that processor ISA's aren't memory safe and so it's sort of foolish to pretend a systems language is safe. I feel things like pointer tagging are more likely to provide real returns.

Also remember a conversation with someone at netscape about JS. The idea was partly as an interpreted language it could be safe unlike binaries. Considering binaries on pre 2000 hardware, running an arbitrary binary oof. But that it wasn't as easy as assumed.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-12-26 10:48:14+00:00
> so that I don't have to deploy a directory structure

LuaTeX itself doesn't depend on any particular directory structure. kpathsea does expect a certain directory structure, but you don't need to use kpathsea—LuaTeX was primarily developed for ConTeXt, which doesn't use kpathsea at all. Without kpathsea, you'll need to supply the appropriate callbacks in a Lua initialization script, but this is fairly simple.
by 999900000999 | 2025-12-26 10:50:51+00:00
That covers the Elite, not the cheaper Snapdragon X laptops such as the ASUS Vivobook 14 (X1407QA).

I've followed that thread for almost a year. It's a maze of hardware issues and poor compatibility.

From your other response.

>but vendors usually require a firmware binary to be signed with their keys, which are burned into the SoC. As a result you cannot use Qualcomm's vanilla firmware and need to extract the original firmware as provided by the vendor, otherwise it won't load.

This makes the install process impossible without an existing Windows install. It's easier to say it doesn't work and move on.

It's going to be significantly easier to buy run Linux in an X86 laptop.

Not to mention no out of the box Linux Snapdragon Elite laptop exists. It's a shame because it would probably be an amazing product.
by hideroze | 2025-12-26 10:51:01+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful response.

I largely agree with you, especially regarding revision and redrafting. I don’t consider this a finished novel in the traditional sense, and “draft one” is a fair characterization. I’m not arguing against craft fundamentals, structure, or the necessity of rewriting — those matter a great deal.

My interest here was more limited and experimental: I wanted to explore what happens when long-form writing is driven primarily by emotional continuity rather than by an outline, particularly in sustained collaboration with an AI. In that sense, this project was more about process than product.

I also agree that strong novels are usually the result of substantial rewrites. What surprised me was simply that emotional continuity alone was sufficient to maintain a coherent narrative over this scale — even if the result clearly requires heavy refinement.

I appreciate the critique, and I see it as very much in line with how serious writing actually gets done.
by gempir | 2025-12-26 10:52:17+00:00
Very anecdotal but for me this model has very weak prompt adherence. I compared it a tiny bit to gemini flash 3.0 and simple things like "don't use markdown tables in output" was very hard to get with m2.1

Took me like 5 prompt iterations until it finally listened.

But it's very good, better than flash 3.0 in terms of code output and reasoning while being cheaper.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-12-26 10:54:04+00:00
Have you considered using ConTeXt's CLD [0]? It's still uses TeX underneath, but that's pretty well insulated from the end user. Here are some random examples that I've written [1] [2] [3].

[0]: https://www.pragma-ade.nl/general/manuals/cld-mkiv.pdf

[1]: https://github.com/gucci-on-fleek/unnamed-emoji/blob/master/...

[2]: https://github.com/TikZlings/Extravaganza2025/blob/main/max/...

[3]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/715598/270600
by whytevuhuni | 2025-12-26 10:54:13+00:00
Right. The &pin, &own, and &uninit in the article (or rather everything except & and &mut in that table) do not exist in Rust.

I have seen &pin being proposed recently [1], first time I'm seeing the others.

[1] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/11/19/project-goals-update-o...
by avhception | 2025-12-26 10:54:25+00:00
Works very well for me! YMMV maybe depending on the titles you play, but that would probably be more of a Proton issue than an AMD issue, I'd guess.
I'm not a huge gamer, so take my experience with a grain of salt. But I've racked up almost 300 hours of Witcher3 with the HQ patch on a 4k TV display using my self-compiled Gentoo kernel, and it worked totally fine. A few other games, too. So there's that!
by aidos | 2025-12-26 10:56:10+00:00
> No model should ever know Jon Snow’s phone number from a SaaS service, but this approach allows this sort of retrieval.

This reads to me like they think that the response from the tool doesn’t go back to the LLM.

I’ve not worked with tools but my understanding is that they’re a way to allow the LLM to request additional data from the client. Once the client executes the requested function, that response data then goes to the LLM to be further processed into a final response.