MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by djinnrutger | 2025-12-23 21:32:04+00:00
I am not comparing myself to you (or any developer) I know the basics of code and play around, but with AI tools like VSCode and CoPilot subscription I have done some crazy stuff that would have either been impossible or years worth of work for me. I have been working with Python and created a few tools that saved me tons of time every day. I do side computer/networking work and I was able to build my own invoicing application to bill and track everything. My latest project has been an IT helpdesk for our internal IT team. I am sure the code is not good by your standards but these tools are amazing for what I use them for. What scares me is if someone with my level "skill" would create programs that become mission critical and think nothing of it...that is asking for trouble..at least with where we are at with AI right now.

I am pretty proud of my helpdesk:
website: https://helpfuldjinn.com/ or via the github: https://github.com/DjinnRutger/HelpDesk-Public

It has been a great adventure seeing what AI has enabled to be done!
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-23 21:32:06+00:00
> You talk about "western" politicians, but this point feels like it only really applies to the US with its ridiculous two-year cycle.

I'm German, it's even worse here because we have 16 states plus the EU elections and that means you have about three to five distinct elections in any given year. And with the exception of the small states no one gives a fuck about (sorry Saarland), each and every single of the state elections is seen as a sign for federal politics.
by GaryBluto | 2025-12-23 21:32:37+00:00
> Two are optional, and the other 3 are just for a small script to convert the one mar[k]down file to HTML and push it live (of which one (awk) you likely already have on your system).

None of which are needed. Why is an intermediate step needed?

> Most tone deaf thing you've seen in your life seems a bit over the top.

To complain about overcomplication via an overcomplicated project is a tad rich.
by bgnn | 2025-12-23 21:32:49+00:00
I don't get the VHDL or Verilog hate. Digital IC design engineers have no problem with them. True, most of the industry moved to SystemVerilog, mainly for simulation and verification reasons.

It's the weirdnesses of FPGAs though. You aren't really designing a gate level circuit at the end. I'm not sure Verilog or VHDL are to blame here. Maybe they aren't fit for purpose to begin with. I hate the toolchains too. They got worse (sluggish, more paid IPs etc) in the last 15 years. IC design tools cost A LOT more (like 2-3 orders of magnitude more) comparatively but they just work at least!
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-23 21:33:42+00:00
The more powerful form is the UAC full privilege escalation dance that Win 7+(?) does, which is a surprisingly elegant UX solution.

1. Snapshot the desktop
2. Switch to a separate secure UI session
3. Display the snapshot in the background, greyed out, with the UAC prompt running in the current session and topmost

It avoids any chance of a user-space program faking or interacting with a UAC window.

Clever way of dealing with the train wreck of legacy Windows user/program permissioning.
by lucketone | 2025-12-23 21:34:14+00:00
I known for very long time that c (and co) inherited the syntax from algol.

But only after long time I tried to check what Algol actually looked like. To my surprise, Algol does not look anything like C to me.

I would be quite interested in the expanded version of “C has inherited syntax from Algol”

Edit: apparently the inheritance from Algol is a formula: lexical scoping + value returning functions (expression based) - parenthesitis. Only last item is about visual part of the syntax.

Algol alternatives were: cobol, fortan, lisp, apl.
by belter | 2025-12-23 21:34:20+00:00
Every time I see this video, I feel a strange tenderness for the new generations watching it.

They do not really understand how bad Oracle used to be. This is us, old combat veterans, sitting by the fire, describing unspeakable battles to the youth...knowing full well that they think we are exaggerating. :-)

And the most disturbing part is the realization that the Frankenstein monster itself, Larry Ellison, is still out there. Still roaming free. Still very much alive... An eternal, terrifying, lawnmower wielding zombie of enterprise software and government corrupting rent extraction.
by raverbashing | 2025-12-23 21:34:24+00:00
Let's be honest

Linux (and its ecosystem) sucks at having focus and direction.

They might get something right here and there, especially related to servers, but they are awful at not spinning wheels

See how wayland progress is slow. See how some distros moved to it only after a lot of kicking and screaming.

See how a lot of peripherals in "newer" (sometimes a model that's 2 or 3 yrs on the market) only barely works in a newer distro. Or has weird bugs

"but the manufacturers..." "but the hw producers..." "but open source..." whine

Because Linux lacks a good hierarchy at isolating responsibility, otherwise going for a "every kernel driver can do all it wants" together with "interfaces that keep flipping and flopping at every new kernel release" - notable (good) exception : USB userspace drivers. And don't even get me started on the whole mess that is xorg drivers

And then you have a Ruby Goldberg machine in form of udev dbus and what not, or whatever newer solution that solves half the problems and create another new collection of bugs.
80.1 % on LoCoMo Long-Term Memory Benchmark with a pure open-source RAG pipeline
by ViktorKuz | 2025-12-23 21:34:54+00:00
I just pushed the current SOTA on the LoCoMo long-term memory benchmark for agents: 80.1 % accuracy using only:
-BGE-large-en-v1.5 (1024d) + FAISS

-Custom “MCA” gravitational ranking (keyword coverage + importance + frequency)

-BM25 sparse retrieval

-Direct Cross-Encoder reranking (bge-reranker-v2-m3) on the full union (~120-150 docs)

-Gpt-4o-mini only for final answer generation and judging (everything else is open weights or classic)

Repo: https://github.com/vac-architector/VAC-Memory-System Key tricks that finally broke 80% :

-MCA-first filter (coverage ≥ 0.1 → top-30) — catches exact-keyword questions early

-Feeding the entire union straight into Cross-Encoder (112–135 documents) instead of pre-filtering

-Proper query instruction for BGE-large (the classic “Represent this sentence for searching relevant passages”)

The whole pipeline runs in < 3s per query on a single RTX 4090. LoCoMo is currently the hardest public long-term memory benchmark (5.880 real human–agent conversations, multi-hop, temporal, negation, etc.).

Beating Mem0 official baseline by ~12–14 pp with fully open components feels pretty good. Would love feedback, especially from people who are also grinding on agent memory systems.

My background: My path didn't start in an IT office, but in Columbus, Ohio, where I worked as a handyman after leaving my job on the cell towers. The decision came from necessity: I bought a powerful PC on installments and resolved to create something that would change my life.

I had no experience, but I had an idea. Using Claude CLI as my sole mentor, I focused on architecture, not syntax.

Over 4.5 months of work, I engineered and created the VAC Memory System. To prove its value, I tested it on the toughest RAG benchmark—LoCoMo. Today, my system shows an overall result of 80.1% and a phenomenal 87.78% in the "Commonsense" category.

This is more than just code; it is the result of faith in an idea. I showed that by using modern tools, it is possible to achieve SOTA-level performance and create serious technology, regardless of your starting point. I highly anticipate your feedback.
by sombragris | 2025-12-23 21:34:54+00:00
I fail to see how my comment could be construed as being pro-monopoly.

There are a huge number of onboard GPUs being left out of even minimum requirements for most recent games. I'm just saying that maybe this situation could led game devs to finally consider such devices as legitimate targets and thus make their games playable on such devices. This is by no means a pro-monopolistic take.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-12-23 21:35:46+00:00
There seem to be quite some negative comments to this post.

Regardless of the title and the full story, I mostly feel empathy for the writer of the article.

Half a year ago a colleague of mine told me, in tears, that her spouse suddenly left her after living together for 7 years. I felt her pain and cried with her, i tried to comfort her with kind words. I had a nightmare that night. She's truly a very good person and I still feel very sad for her. She told me later that his personality suddenly seemed to have changed, he was not the man she used to know.

The bottom line of what I want to say: please have empathy with people going through a break of relationships, even if such things happen every day. Be thankful if you are in a good relationship.
by simonw | 2025-12-23 21:35:48+00:00
If anyone wants to try out MicroQuickJS in a browser here's a simple playground interface for executing a WebAssembly compiled version of it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/microquickjs

It's a variant of my QuickJS playground here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/quickjs

The QuickJS page loads 2.28 MB (675 KB transferred). The MicroQuickJS one loads 303 KB (120 KB transferred).
by WackyFighter | 2025-12-23 21:37:29+00:00
You are deflecting from the original point, while saying nothing.

It simply doesn't work for a lot of people and never will and you were trying to pretend these are niche things when they are not.

People generally don't like public transport. You have to be in a confined space with strangers, that in any other circumstance you would probably never see.

I ended up cycling through wet, snow, extreme cold because I got fed up of dealing with buses and trains after a week. When I had to travel by train it was because cycling wasn't feasible and I had no other choice. It was miserable. Everyday there seemed to be delays and that is 2 hours a day for a year I will never get back.

Saying use what you think is best basically equates to "I am going to drive" for the vast majority.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-23 21:37:46+00:00
He's probably conflating static and strong typing.

C is statically typed, but weakly typed - you need to throw away types to do a bunch of run of the mill things. Python is dynamically typed, but strongly typed, where it will just fail if typed don't resolve.

C# and C++ are both statically typed and strongly typed, although C# more than C++ in practice.
by elzbardico | 2025-12-23 21:37:47+00:00
There's no real reason other than bad configuration/coding for a H.264 1080p 30fps screen share stream to sustainably use 40mbps. You can watch an action move at the same frame rate but with 4k resolution while using less than half this bandwidth.

The real solution is using WebRTC, like every single other fucking company that have to stream video is doing. Yes, enterprise consumers require additional configuration. Yes, sometimes you need to provide a "network requirements" sheet to your customer so they can open a ticket with their IT to configure an exception.

Second problem, usually enterprise networks are not as bad as internet cafe networks, but then, internet café networks usually are not locked down, so, you should always try first the best case scenario with webrtc and turn servers on 3478. That will also be the best option for really bad networks, but usually those networks are not enterprise networks.

Please configure your encoder, 40mbps bit rate for what you're doing is way way too much.

Test if TURN is not acessible. try it first with UDP (the best option and will also work with internet cafe), if not try over tcp on port 443, not working? try over tls on port 443.
by oracleedgeapp | 2025-12-23 21:37:47+00:00
I came across CoachFrame, an AI tool focused on structured interview prep. Unlike general chat-based mock interviews, it emphasizes scoring your performance across dimensions like clarity, structure, and confidence, then diagnoses weaknesses and assigns specific drills to improve them. You re-test to track measurable progress.
It's voice-first for low-latency conversations, supports roles like software engineering, PM, sales, and behavioral interviews. Free tier gives 1 scored session/month, Pro is $29/mo for more sessions and full dashboard.
The approach of "interview → diagnose → drill → re-test" with actual metrics seems useful for deliberate practice. Curious what HN thinks—has anyone tried it or similar tools that go beyond just chatting?
by sfpotter | 2025-12-23 21:38:01+00:00
C's support for modularity is actually rather strong. This PDF gives a good overview of the basic techniques available: http://www.metamodulaire.org/Computing/modular-c.pdf

It may not be immediately obvious how to approach modularity since it isn't directly accomplished by explicit language features. But, once you know what you're doing, it's possible to write very large programs with good encapsulation, that span many files, and which nevertheless compile quite rapidly (more or less instantaneously for an incremental build).

I'm not saying other languages don't have better modularity, but to say that C's is bad misses the mark.
by xonix | 2025-12-23 21:38:07+00:00
Re: TCO

Does the language give any guarantee that TCO was applied? In other words can it give you an error that the recursion is not of tail call form? Because I imagine a probability of writing a recursion and relying on it being TCO-optimized, where it's not. I would prefer if a language had some form of explicit TCO modifier for a function. Is there any language that has this?
by KPGv2 | 2025-12-23 21:38:10+00:00
> the problem in that picture is the belief (whichever level of the management hierarchy it comes from) that you can introduce technical impediments against every instance of stupidity one by one until morons are no longer able to stupid

I would say the problem in the picture is your belief that corporate IT is introducing technical impediments against every instance of stupidity. I bet there's loads of stupidity they don't introduce technical impediments against. It would just not meet the cost-benefit analysis to spend thousands of tech man-hours introducing a new impediment that didn't cost the company much if any money.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-12-23 21:38:20+00:00
How is that germane to this discussion? I already made it clear I didn't think the Venezuelan migrant in the segment should have been deported to a third country under those conditions.

This feels like an attempt at a setup instead of an actual discussion of the thread's subject. That's especially glaring since you went trolling through my post history, a signature of Reddit users looking for a 'gotcha' moment more than HN users engaged in dialogue.
by lrvick | 2025-12-23 21:38:31+00:00
Just a couple examples off the top of my head I have bumped into: Packages that cannot be full source bootstrapped like Haskell are allowed, so total trust is placed in a third party compiler binaries. Also in cases like qemu where binary blob firmware is in the repo, it is kept as is and not rebuilt from source. Determinism is also not mandated so there is no way to know if any of the non deterministic packages were faithfully built from source. There are no hard enforced rules in cases like these, only cultural guidelines that are followed optionally.

Compare to e.g. stagex which I founded specifically because nix did not wish to adopt a strict threat model that trusts no single individual, build machine, or third party binary.
by qbow883 | 2025-12-23 21:38:47+00:00
Setting aside the various formatting problems and the LLM writing style, this just seems all kinds of wrong throughout.

> “Just lower the bitrate,” you say. Great idea. Now it’s 10Mbps of blocky garbage that’s still 30 seconds behind.

10Mbps should be way more than enough for a mostly static image with some scrolling text. (And 40Mbps are ridiculous.) This is very likely to be caused by bad encoding settings and/or a bad encoder.

> “What if we only send keyframes?”
The post goes on to explain how this does not work because some other component needs to see P-frames. If that is the case, just configure your encoder to have very short keyframe intervals.

> And the size! A 70% quality JPEG of a 1080p desktop is like 100-150KB. A single H.264 keyframe is 200-500KB.

A single H.264 keyframe can be whatever size you want, *depending on how you configure your encoder*, which was apparently never seriously attempted. Why are we badly reinventing MJPEG instead of configuring the tools we already have? Lower the bitrate and keyint, use a better encoder for higher quality, lower the frame rate if you need to. (If 10 fps JPEGs are acceptable, surely you should try 10 fps H.264 too?)

But all in all the main problem seems to be squeezing an entire video stream through a single TCP connection. There are plenty of existing solutions for this. For example, this article never mentions DASH, which is made for these exact purposes.
by reconnecting | 2025-12-23 21:38:53+00:00
Here is the demo of my perfect software.

https://play.tirreno.com

However, I'm skeptical about AI, because what I've understood about agentic processes is more about cheap dopamine.

When it comes to medium-sized software development (over 50k LOC), there is much less fun and much more pain, because a growing codebase doesn't allow you to make new features easily.

I believe it is important not to mix up a dose of dopamine gotten from agentic results, as in the article, with achievement from longstanding work, even if it's not so attractive from a short-term perspective.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-23 21:39:13+00:00
Your tortured argument tests credulity and is pretty much opposite of how actual markets work.

In this case, stopping Apple from degrading competitor products means they can compete on a level playing field and Apple will need to create better products to maintain a lead. Their ability to degrade competitor products has nothing to do with the features or quality of their headphones but rather that they control a closed platform. Thus the EU's action in maintaining fair competition.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-23 21:39:14+00:00
> and an executive hobbled until the January after that because, goodness knows why, you get to remain in power for weeks after someone else has taken the mandate to govern.

Heh in Germany we have taken our sweet time as well. 2017 for example? That stretched into 2018, half a year [1].

The key difference is, while the outgoing executive holds their position until the new government coalition is formed, there is a strong tradition in a) the outgoing government to not abuse their positions to force their successors' hands, b) for everyone (including the far-left, excluding the far-right) to cooperate with each other to keep the country running and c) for cooperation across the aisles in general, even when there is a stable government. And there is no problem when the government/parliament cannot pass a budget either. Governmental authorities and public services keep on running assuming the last year's budget.

[1] https://www.mehr-demokratie.de/nachrichten/einzelansicht/die...
by asdff | 2025-12-23 21:39:24+00:00
Why would AMD shareholders tolerate them engaging in gaming pc market if Nvidia drops out? They might last a couple years but I mean the writing will be on the wall for them to chase enterprise sales and abandon gamers. Especially when game console manufacturers would prefer you spend $25 a month for life instead of buying a $500 console every 8 years. There won't be an xbox or playstation in your house before long.
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-23 21:39:27+00:00
The "AI laptop" boom is already fading. It turns out that LLMs, local or otherwise, just aren't very useful.

Like Big Data, LLMs are useful in a small niche of areas, like poorly summarizing meeting notes, or grammar check at a middle-school level.

On LLMs for coding tasks: I asked a programmer why they loved Claude and he showed me the output. Twenty years ago, that kind of code would have gotten someone PIP'd. Today it's considered better than most junior programmers...which is a sign of how far programming standards have fallen, and explains why most programs and apps are such buggy pieces of sh$t these days.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-23 21:40:01+00:00
Not an implementer of group policy, more of a consumer. There are 2 things that I find extremely problematic about them in practice.

- There does not seem to be a way to determine which machines in the fleet have successfully applied. If you need a policy to be active before doing deployment of something (via a different method), or things break, what do you do?

- I’ve had far too many major incidents that were the result of unexpected interactions between group policy and production deployments.
by Spivak | 2025-12-23 21:40:27+00:00
I think the problem is that, as a group, people who care about software quality/craft don't actually produce higher quality software. You'll get good quality and garbage software out of the craftsman and pragmatist groups at about equal rates. And folks in the craftsman group tend to have more and stronger opinions which isn't a good or bad thing except that having too many of them on a team can lead to conflict.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-23 21:40:31+00:00
> can it run in WebAssembly?

You can safely assume so. Bellard is the creator of jslinux. The news here would be if it _didn't_.

> What's the difference to regular JavaScript?

It's in the project's README!

> Is it safe to use as a sandbox against attacks like the regex thing?

This is not a sandbox design. It's a resource-constrained design like cesanta/mjs.

---

If you vibe coded a microcontroller emulation demo, perhaps there would be less pushback.
by mgilroy | 2025-12-23 21:40:35+00:00
I was very specific in using the word generally. I taught a mixture of computer science and electronic engineering students. About three to four times more electronic students were competent for every computer science student over the years I taught.

It's not a case of just stating computer scientist weren't capable of doing it. They struggled with the parallelism and struggled with the optimisations and placements when you had to make physical connections on chips.

I'm well aware it's mostly going to be computer scientists writing the tools we use.

For those that want FPGAs to take off like the Arduino platform, I agree. I'd love it. However, it isn't the tooling that's holding it back. The reality is it is that cheaper, faster and easier solutions already exist. Why would you use an FPGA?
by luckylion | 2025-12-23 21:41:00+00:00
> Everyone seeks career growth, but pushing for it too quickly often just leads to inflated titles without real substance.

That's why I'm not a big fan of recommending people to often and quickly change jobs to increase titles and pay. Their skills don't level up the same way, and they end up with a title of senior/lead developer and can't actually build maintainable systems or solve problems that nobody tells them the solution to.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-23 21:41:50+00:00
Markets depend on regulations. You can make any case you want, but you must acknowledge this root fact if you are discussing real-world capitalist policy. Otherwise you are advocating to change a system that does not exist in real life, or reflect any modern economy anywhere on the planet.

Your claim that the parent ignored everything you said is bad-faith and objectively wrong. They are critiquing your attack on regulation and pointing out that reality works in the opposite way. Case in point, you have no bombshell argument against regulating Apple in this instance. You cited no real-world examples and gestured at generic and irrelevant anti-regulation boogeymen. Then you used ad-hominem to attack them instead of refuting the point they made.