MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bri3d | 2025-12-30 21:05:08+00:00
At a practical level I think a thesis that "good" process isolation systems (aka, not hosted on Linux) build on years of development that unikernels will struggle to replace holds true.

At a conceptual level I really disagree with this piece, though:

> one cannot play up Linux kernel vulnerabilities as a silent menace while simultaneously dismissing hypervisor vulnerabilities as imaginary.

One can reasonably recognize Linux kernel vulnerabilities as extant and pervasive while acknowledging that hypervisors can be vulnerable. One can also realize that the surface area exposed by Linux is fundamentally much larger than that exposed by most hypervisors, and that the Linux `unshare` mechanism is insecure by default. It's kind of funny - the invocation of Linux really undermines this argument; there's no _reason_ a process / container isolation based system should be completely broken, but Linux _is_, and so it becomes a very weak opponent.

I really don't think I can agree with the debugging argument here at a conceptual level, either. Issues with debugging unikernels are caused by poor outside-in tooling, but with good outside-in tooling, a unikernel should be _easier_ to debug than a container or OS process, because the VM-owner / hypervisor will often already have a way to inspect the unikernel-machine's entire state from the outside, without additional struggle of trying to maintain, juggle, and restore multiple contexts within a running system. There is essentially an ISP/ICE debugging probe attached to the entire system end to end by default, in the form of the hypervisor.

For example, there is no reason a hosting hypervisor could not provide DTrace in a way which is completely transparent to the unikernel guest, and this would be much easier to implement than DTrace self-hosted in a running kernel!

If done properly, this way a uni-application basically becomes debugging-agnostic: it doesn't need cooperative tracepoints or self-modifying patches (and all of the state juggling that comes with that, think like Kprobe), because the hypervisor can do the tracing externally. The unikernel does not need to grow (in security surface area, debug-size, blast radius, etc.) to add more trace and debug capability.
by mdemare | 2025-12-30 21:05:13+00:00
Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project.

Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.
by mcsniff | 2025-12-30 21:05:30+00:00
Ugh. This 100% shows how janky and unmaintained their setup is.

All the hand waving and excuses around global supply chains, quotes, etc...it took pretty long for them to acquire commodity hardware and shove it in a special someone's basement and they're trying to make it seem like a good thing?

F-Droid is often discussed in the GrapheneOS community, the concerns around centralization and signing are valid.

I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's not a good look.
by aspenmartin | 2025-12-30 21:05:45+00:00
I think the issue is folks talk past each other. People who find coding agents useful or enjoyable are labeled “on the hype train” and folks for which coding agents don’t work for them or their workflow are considered luddites. There are an incredible number of contradicting claims and predictions out there as well, and I believe what we see is folks projecting their reaction to some amalgamation of them onto others. I see a lot of “they” language, and a lot of viral articles about business leadership “shoving AI down our throats” and it becomes a divisive issue like American political scene with really no one having a real conversation
by ericmay | 2025-12-30 21:05:54+00:00
If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it. It’s not necessarily about a 19th century view of 2nd century BC architectural concepts (which itself is a bit of a farce of a comment) but more so about anchoring the longevity and legitimacy of governmental institutions to a historical heritage.

Similarly I wouldn’t recommend, say, that the Afghani people or Mongolia for example build federalist or Greco-Roman style architecture for their government buildings as it wouldn’t make much sense and wouldn’t have any basis in their history.

There’s also some science to it and we know the asymmetrical buildings and buildings which make entrances and other expected features hard to find cause measurable levels of stress and anxiety in the observer. Hostile architecture.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-30 21:06:32+00:00
> what's your evidence that America isn't still the world capital for the ambitious?

It's a loose hypothesis informed by e.g. this article.

I think America remains a net attractor. If you're smart and driven, you can become a multi-millionaire in America in a way that's harder almost anywhere else. But I'm saying harder. Decades prior, that was closer to impossible. Instead, we're now increasingly the economy where political connections dominate talent. (Again, we're still mostly not that. But we're shifting from the destination to one where talented people in India and China, for example, increasingly stay home.)
by josh-gree | 2025-12-30 21:06:55+00:00
Hi HN! I wanted to test the custom skills I've been building for Claude (https://github.com/josh-gree/gen-art-framework – see PRs/issues for the workflow patterns), so I asked it to build an automated generative art gallery from scratch.

Result: https://josh-gree.github.io/gen-art-gallery/
Repo: https://github.com/josh-gree/gen-art-gallery

Everything here was done through conversation with Claude:
- Set up the repo structure and GitHub Actions workflow
- Built the static gallery site (HTML/CSS/JS)
- Debugged workflow failures (Python version issues, uv configuration)
- Added incremental generation (only regenerate changed scripts)
- Added UI features (modal view, source links)
- Created example art scripts

The skills handle the full development lifecycle:
- Creating tickets to capture intent (not implementation plans)
- Planning implementations for existing tickets
- Executing on plans
- Reviewing PRs and addressing feedback
- Managing git worktrees for parallel development

The goal wasn't the gallery itself, but pinning down a good set of patterns for how Claude should handle planning, implementing, and reviewing changes in a real project. The PRs and issues in the gen-art-framework repo show the iteration on these workflows.

Curious if others are building similar "meta" workflows for AI coding assistants – patterns that work well across different projects?
by ignoramous | 2025-12-30 21:07:06+00:00
> Nix ... declarative reproducible system closures are a joy to work with ...

From what I read, I gather nixpkgs are more hermetic (as in Bazel [0]) & not reproducible? https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-is-not-reproducible/4268... / https://archive.vn/mXeih

[0] https://bazel.build/basics/hermeticity
Show HN: AI Tutor for Math with Customer Hardware
by ajabhish | 2025-12-30 21:07:08+00:00
Add capability to Voice AI agent to use camera + screen share to peek at things in real-time

This unlocks unique abilities. Here: Connected a document camera so the AI tutor watches me solve math on pen & paper, then guides me through mistakes. It generated dynamic slides to teach me concepts. Showers emojis when I got it right.

Personalized. Has memory. Learns at your pace.

https://youtube.com/shorts/GE8hrbc0wYo?feature=share
by analog31 | 2025-12-30 21:07:30+00:00
A continual factor of debate is whether the front-page economic indicators tell the whole story about the welfare of the population. The US lags behind many countries in areas such as life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, health care, suicide, motor vehicle deaths, violent crime, and so forth. We have lots of money, but our money doesn't seem to buy us as much quality of life. I say these things, though I'm doing OK money wise and have an otherwise decent lifestyle.

The disparity between the big indicators and the lives of the people is in fact a source of political contention. In 2024, people were angry in a "growing" economy that seemed to have gotten inflation and unemployment under control.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-12-30 21:07:44+00:00
Can you imagine an ICE vehicle having "Location-based fill-up limits" or "3D visualizations of gas station locations, synced with active availability / occupancy per stall" ? And of course, such useful features as a spacex docking simulator, which every vehicle needs (I guess).

And you wonder why Tesla is heading the way of the dodo? Wasting the SW talent to deliver drek.
by necovek | 2025-12-30 21:08:00+00:00
While it is possible to use "semantic" styling and page layouts and templates in Word, I would argue that Word owes its popularity to the fact that no user is surprised when they select text, change the font, it does not change it anywhere else.

It is one of the tools that popularised "WYSIWYG" as an approach, and as we know from many other tools, you lose something when you adopt a tool like that.

Now, I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system (but despite my huge respect for DEK, not Computer Modern family of fonts, even for mathematics), but many struggle with non-visual document entry: it is no surprise scientific community is the only one which standardized on it since inputting mathematics visually is a PITA.
by aspenmartin | 2025-12-30 21:09:17+00:00
It would definitely be the profession if we stopped developing things today. Think about the idea of coding agents 2 years ago, I personally found them very unrealistic and am now coding exclusively with them despite them being either a neutral or net negative to my development time simply because I see the writing on the wall that in 6 mos to a year they will probably be a huge net positive and in 2-3 years the dismissive attitude towards adoption will start to look kind of silly (no offense). To me we are _just_ at the inflection point where using and not using coding agents are both totally sensible decisions.
by mburns | 2025-12-30 21:09:31+00:00
That is a common misconception.

> Next, we've got more than just two tables. The quote/paraphrase doesn't make it clear, but we've got two tables per thing. That means Accounts have an "account_thing" and an "account_data" table, Subreddits have a "subreddit_thing" and "subreddit_data" table, etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z9sm8/comment/...
by dsmurrell | 2025-12-30 21:09:45+00:00
I've made a few small projects that were built almost exclusively with Cursor (if that's considered vibe coding, I'm not sure). They don't have many users.

https://spikelog.com

https://runnem.com

https://leveloh.com

https://thefudgesisters.com

https://hop.coffee

I'm write a few articles here about tricks that work for me when it comes to AI assisted coding: https://foundinglean.substack.com
by constantcrying | 2025-12-30 21:09:54+00:00
This argument only makes any sense at all because the demand for software developers continually grew.

As long as more software developers are needed your logic obviously holds, it is irrelevant whether you are a master. There are enough jobs for "good enough". But what if "good enough" is no longer a viable economic niche? Since that niche is now entirely occupied by LLMs.
by neogodless | 2025-12-30 21:09:58+00:00
I was able to find 2 x 16GB DDR4 for $150...

Building a budget AM4 system for roughly $500 would be within the realm of reason. ($150 mobo, $100 cpu, $150 RAM, that leaves $100 for storage, still likely need power and case.)

https://www.amazon.com/Timetec-Premium-PC4-19200-Unbuffered-...

https://www.amazon.com/MSI-MAG-B550-TOMAHAWK-Motherboard/dp/...

For a server that's replacing a 12 year old system, you don't need DDR5 and other bleeding edge hardware.
by andy99 | 2025-12-30 21:10:00+00:00
That’s not how LLMs work, it’s part of the reinforcement learning or SFT dataset, data labelers would have written or generated tons of examples using this and other patterns (all the emoji READMEs for example) that the models emulate. The early ones had very formulaic essay style outputs that always ended with “in conclusion”, lots of the same kind of bullet lists, and a love of adjectives and delving, all of which were intentionally trained in. It’s more subtle now but it’s still there.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-30 21:10:10+00:00
Exactly. LLMs aren't taking the jobs of developers - unless they're selling some micro-SaaS stuff that anyone with enough domain knowledge can duplicate with a Claude subscription over a weekend.

Like the DVD catalogue software I was using[0] became subscription based, and I'm not paying 50€/year for that.

Just rewrote the bits that I need this afternoon with Claude. It definitely doesn't have the same features as the CLZ Movies app had, but it has all the ones I need specifically (adding movies easily, quickly seeing if I already own a movie).

And the same will happen to more and more SaaS style things unless they offer something unique a self-made and self-hosted one can't provide.

[0] https://clz.com/movies
by mraduldeodhiya | 2025-12-30 21:10:35+00:00
Mechanical keyboard sounds for your Mac.

FunKey adds satisfying mechanical keyboard and mouse click sounds to your Mac, making typing more immersive and enjoyable. Every key press sounds realistic and plays instantly as you type.

Perfect for coding, designing, writing, or everyday work.

Features
• Realistic mechanical keyboard sounds
• Instant sound feedback while typing
• Easy access from the Mac menu bar
• Fast, lightweight, native macOS app

Built for Mac
FunKey is designed exclusively for macOS, ensuring smooth performance and a seamless experience.
by necovek | 2025-12-30 21:10:45+00:00
When I jumped into my GNU/Linux journey in late 90s, TNR was nowhere to be found, and I believe is only available through "ms-ttcorefonts" or whatever the package is called (IOW, Times New Roman actually comes from Microsoft).

I believe "Times" is the venerable standard, and has been present on Unices and Macs since... forever. Now, TNR is the same metrics-wise IIRC, and thus it was always a recommendation to use a fallback line of the form "Times New Roman, Times, serif".
by websiteapi | 2025-12-30 21:10:54+00:00
> Another important part of this story is where the server lives and how it is managed. F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff.

> The previous server was 12 year old hardware and had been running for about five years. In infrastructure terms, that is a lifetime. It served F-Droid well, but it was reaching the point where speed and maintenance overhead were becoming a daily burden.

lol. if they're gonna use gitlab just use a proper setup - bigco is already in the critical path...
Show HN: tmpo – CLI time tracker with Git integration and local-first storage
by dylandevelops | 2025-12-30 21:10:59+00:00
I built tmpo because I was losing money tracking freelance hours in Google Forms. It's a CLI time tracker that auto-detects your project from Git and stores everything locally.

Key technical decisions:

- Pure Go implementation with modernc.org/sqlite (no CGO, easier cross-compilation)

- Auto-detection via git rev-parse for project names

- Local SQLite database in ~/.tmpo/ (nothing leaves your machine)

- Single binary, zero dependencies

New features since I started:

- Milestone tracking - organize entries into sprints/releases with auto-tagging

- Pause/resume workflow for context switching

- Manual entry creation for forgotten time

- Configurable date/time formats and currency (stored in global config)

- Edit/delete entries

Example workflow:

```bash
cd ~/projects/client-website

tmpo milestone start "Sprint 5"

tmpo start "Fix auth bug"

# ... work ...

tmpo pause # lunch break

tmpo resume

tmpo stop

tmpo stats --week

tmpo export --milestone "Sprint 5" --format csv
```

It detects "client-website" from git and tags everything with the active milestone automatically.

The codebase is ~6k LOC. Working on the Homebrew formula, but pre-built binaries are now available.

GitHub: <https://github.com/DylanDevelops/tmpo>

Questions for you all:

1. Are there any features that you want to see in tmpo?

2. Currently using a 3-tier config priority (.tmporc > git > directory). Better approaches?

3. Any concerns with the milestone auto-tagging approach?
by j-krieger | 2025-12-30 21:11:15+00:00
> This results in them moving up a layer, in this case creating a network of inter-dependent containers that you now have to put together for the whole thing to start... and we're back to square one, with way more bloat in between.

Yea, with uneeded bload like rule based access controls, ACS and secret management. Some comments on this site.
by cs02rm0 | 2025-12-30 21:11:35+00:00
It only becomes false to say they've been cancelled if they happen. They're planning on postponing them again, and if that continues to happen indefinitely, they've been cancelled.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdd5p5gyvveo

Starmer doesn't just have negative approval ratings. His are through the floor. The last voting intention poll from YouGov (which has been relatively favourable for Labour) would have given them just 69 seats - fewer than the Lib Dems currently have.
Ask HN: How good do I need to be to work at a startup?
by anastasiaess | 2025-12-30 21:11:36+00:00
I want to work at a startup, but I don't know how to stand out. Any advice? I'm a senior atm but if I could I'd drive down to SF tomorrow to start work...

I build a lot and love it but some of these applications say things like "what are you the top 1% at?". I don't go to a target school and have no idea how to market myself. My skills / interest are in vision + interactivity AI applications. For ex: building a full stack local llm app to control a 3D blender scene, getting NVIDIA's research libraries to run headlessly (drone -> 3d selfie), and I've been babysitting extra hrs to save up for AR glasses to do spatial hacking with.
by simonw | 2025-12-30 21:11:43+00:00
This is pretty recent - the survey they ran (99 respondents) was August 18 to September 23 2025 and the field observations (watching developers for 45 minute then a 30 minute interview, 13 participants) were August 1 to October 3.

The models were mostly GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The study was too early to catch the 5.x Codex or Claude 4.5 models (bar one mention of Sonnet 4.5.)

This is notable because a lot of academic papers take 6-12 months to come out, by which time the LLM space has often moved on by an entire model generation.
by bawolff | 2025-12-30 21:11:55+00:00
If a foreign national threatened or tried to improperly influence a US judge, you better belueve the US courts would claim juridsiction.

Generally speaking courts usually claim juridsiction over actions that take affect in their territory even if comitted outside of it (e.g. someone running a scam call center specificly targeting americans would likely get in trouble with us courts even if they never step foot there. Someone hiring an assain to kill an american will still get charged even if they never step foot in america). The ICC is not unique in this regard. The limiting factors here are politics and power not traditional views of how juridsiction works.

There is a difference between juridsiction and actual ability to execute judgements/orders.
by olyjohn | 2025-12-30 21:12:21+00:00
That may be a part of it, but I think for a lot of people the problem is how surround sound movies are processed.

Voice comes through the center channel. Music tends to come out of multiple speakers, and so do a lot of explosions and sound effects.

Most people don't have multi-channel setups at home. So you get everything coming out of 2 speakers or a sound bar.

What that means, is that you get 4+ channels of music and sound effects mixed into 2 channels. So it ends up drowning out the single voice channel.

When I play movies through Kodi, I generally go into the audio settings and turn up the center channel. This fixes the issue every time for me.
by zwnow | 2025-12-30 21:13:37+00:00
Its all a hype train though. People still believe in the AI gonna bring utopia bullshit while the current infra is being built on debt. The only reason it still exists is that all these AI companies believe in some kind of revenue outside of subscriptions. So its all about:

Owning the infrastructure and enshittify (ads) once enough products are based on AI.

Its the same chokehold Amazon has on its Vendors.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-12-30 21:13:59+00:00
I can't tell if you're joking or serious. I recently rented a tesla on a vacation back east, and the nightmare that is charging cannot be erased. And FSD of course does not work (yet... they've been at it for 10+ years, maybe someday, who knows?). My rented 2025 MY with full self driving could barely keep itself between 2 white-painted lines!

I assume this post is a troll, 'no one is within a decade of Tesla' -- are you serious ? Have a look at Rivian, which is preparing to make the Cybertruck even more of a laughing stock.
by yacthing | 2025-12-30 21:14:01+00:00
Easy to say if you either:

(1) already have enough money to survive without working, or

(2) don't realize how hard of a life it would be to "flip burgers" to make a living in 2026.

We live very good lives as software developers. Don't be a fool and think you could just "flip burgers" and be fine.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-30 21:14:10+00:00
Interview until hired, that’s the bar. Every org and hiring manager are different. Each interview only costs your time, but respect each org and those involved by arriving to the interview prepared and engaged. After every interview, take notes and reflect on what you didn’t know, and where you can do better in the future.

Wishing you success.

https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
by kashyapc | 2025-12-30 21:14:53+00:00
> Why should we aim to reward pointless, Sisyphean tasks at the expense of actual achievement?

Of course that would be ridiculous. You're trivializing the author's point. I'm not sure you've actually read the article in full. The author admits the difficulty in measuring it and that we may have to rely on "non-scientific" measurements.

Many of the tech robber barons and VCs (who call themselves "angels") carry the air of "my winnings are entirely of my own making". They rarely acknowledge the role of good fortune (in various aspects) in any meaningful way.

They inhale their success too deeply, as Michael Sandel memorably puts it.
Show HN: Coffee Hop – Find work-friendly coffee shops by walking time
by dsmurrell | 2025-12-30 21:15:03+00:00
For those that like to work in coffee shops...

I built this over the holidays to get myself out of the house more in 2026.

Coffee Hop helps remote workers find cafés (and pubs) nearby, rated by the community for WiFi speed, plug availability, coffee quality, and ambiance.

Pick how far you want to walk (5 mins to an hour), work for a couple hours, then hop to your next spot.

The idea: $10-15/day in coffee vs $50 for a desk in a co-working space, plus you get some movement between sessions.

Built entirely with AI (Cursor and Opus 4.5) - I didn't write any code myself.

Not many ratings yet, but I'm using it myself to build up the initial data.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-12-30 21:15:27+00:00
It could just be a colo, there are still plenty of data centres around the globe that will sell you a space in a shared rack with a certain power density per U of space. The list of people who can access that shared locked rack is likely a known quantity with most such organisations and I know in the past we had some details of the people who were responsible for it