MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thelastgallon | 2025-12-27 15:11:06+00:00
Also, In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

Excerpts where he explains: "Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist."

and

"When my Powerbook broke my heart, and when Word stopped recognizing my old files, I jumped to Unix. The obvious alternative to MacOS would have been Windows. I didn't really have anything against Microsoft, or Windows. But it was pretty obvious, now, that old PC operating systems were overreaching, and showing the strain, and, perhaps, were best avoided until they had learned to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The changeover took place on a particular day in the summer of 1995. I had been San Francisco for a couple of weeks, using my PowerBook to work on a document. The document was too big to fit onto a single floppy, and so I hadn't made a backup since leaving home. The PowerBook crashed and wiped out the entire file.

It happened just as I was on my way out the door to visit a company called Electric Communities, which in those days was in Los Altos. I took my PowerBook with me. My friends at Electric Communities were Mac users who had all sorts of utility software for unerasing files and recovering from disk crashes, and I was certain I could get most of the file back.

As it turned out, two different Mac crash recovery utilities were unable to find any trace that my file had ever existed. It was completely and systematically wiped out. We went through that hard disk block by block and found disjointed fragments of countless old, discarded, forgotten files, but none of what I wanted. The metaphor shear was especially brutal that day. It was sort of like watching the girl you've been in love with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, and then attending her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and makeup she was just flesh and blood."
by wvh | 2025-12-27 15:11:14+00:00
This is what is called "tiivistettävä" in Finnish. I live in such an area, with traditional wooden housing, in the city core. If some houses get in bad state, the city orders to throw them down and some low-rise apartment blocks are built on top of them, thus increasing the number of people that can be housed per square meter.

It's a fine line between the noble intentions of the urban planning concept and creating a horrible mismatched pot-pourri of different building styles and ages, though. Ideally buildings in an area are somewhat congruent with each other.

Urban sprawl is an issue here in part because of the abundance of water, land-locking expanding city centres.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-27 15:11:16+00:00
> The key insight is that any algorithm implementation for a process which has an objective must, as an absolute minimal requirement, possess an encoding of that objective in its implementation.

I don't agree with this in any way, or perhaps more accurately, I don't agree that we know (and perhaps could know) the scope of the implementation even if this claim was true, which I don't think it is.

The idea that "people with a computer science background have a distinct advantage" is also plainly wrong to me. I have a background (as in, I quit my PhD in) computational biology, have been a software engineer for more than 35 years, and there are just as many people with as without computer science backgrounds who fall for the fallacy.
by randallsquared | 2025-12-27 15:11:22+00:00
There are two possible forks. The physical fork involves factual disagreement on how much humanity has built vs destroyed, the relative ease of destruction over construction, and an argument that given entropy and other effects, even a slight bias toward production would produce little positive, leading to the conclusion that humans mostly produce vastly more than they consume, even though production is, as mentioned, more difficult.

The value or "moral" fork would be trying to convince you that building, producing, and growing was actually helpful rather than harmful.

I don't imagine we actually disagree on the physical fork, making that argument pretty pointless: clearly humans and human civilization are learning, growing, and still have a strong potential to thrive as long as ASI, apathy, or a big rock don't take us out first. Instead, I took your statement as an indication that you don't actually positively value humans, more humans, humans growing, and humans building things. That's a preferences and values disagreement, and there's no way to rationally or logically argue someone into changing their core values. No ought from is, and all that.

I'm not suggesting, by the way, that people's values don't change, or can't be changed by discussion, only that there is no way to do so with logical argument; reason can get you to your goal, but it can't tell you what ultimate goal to want.

Anyway, I was expressing that I like humans and want humans (or people who themselves used to be humans, in the limit) to continue and do more, rather than arguing that you ought to feel the same.
by markab21 | 2025-12-27 15:11:49+00:00
I love where you're going with this. In my experience it's not about a different persona, it's about constantly considering context that triggers, different activations enhance a different outcome. You can achieve the same thing, of course by switching to an agent with a separate persona, but you can also get it simply by injecting new context, or forcing the agent to consider something new. I feel like this concept gets cargo-culted a little bit.

I personally have moved to a pattern where i use mastra-agents in my project to achieve this. I've slowly shifted the bulk of the code research and web research to my internal tools (built with small typescript agents).. I can now really easily bounce between different tools such as claude, codex, opencode and my coding tools are spending more time orchestrating work than doing the work themselves.
by Tempest1981 | 2025-12-27 15:12:00+00:00
Yes, VLC works fine for playing. The user wanted to edit some mp4 videos with iMovie (vs ffmpeg).

I think it was an M4 Mac. Does iMovie need a codec pack? I know some PC OEMs don't ship an h.265 codec, pointing users to a $0.99 download. Thought Mac would include it, being aimed at content creators. Hoping for a cheaper solution than Adobe Premiere.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-27 15:12:03+00:00
A few feature requests:

When I click "Add projection texture", nothing changes. IIUC only the downloadable version changes, not the web version. It would be nice to show/hide a texture in the web version, so it's more clear.

Also, it adds some (random?) lines, I expected noise/grain.

Is it possible to add the option to download an animated gif?
by dangoodmanUT | 2025-12-27 15:12:03+00:00
I was just sufficiently nerd sniped by this, so let me know if I’m close:

Based on what the commenter below found about sshpiper I believe that you use the ssh identity + the ip from the slot to resolve the vm target. sshpiper knows how to route the ssh identity + slot ip to the correct VM. I suspect you have a custom sshpiper plugin to do that routing.

You use the slot record indirection so you can change the ip of a slot without having to update everyone’s A records across the customer base. It also makes it easy to shuffle around vm-slot mappings within a customer. I haven’t tested, but I’m guessing this dns server is internal (coredns?), and the ips too.

I did something similar (ip + identity routing) for a project a few weeks ago. Yours is a lot more elegant with the dns indirection.

I’m no ssh expert, but in theory you should be able to ssh -J exe.dev myvm.exe.xyz for a one-liner? Or maybe you don't even need it, if that DNS server within the ssh exe.dev is the same as the public DNS. Pardon for not testing it yet!
by anonym29 | 2025-12-27 15:12:20+00:00
Are you sure you don't have single-threaded and multi-threaded backwards?

Why would the A720 at 2.8 GHz run circles around the N150 that boosts up to 3.6 GHz in single-threaded workloads, while the 12-core chip would wouldn't beat the 4-core chip in multithreaded workloads?

Obviously, the Intel chip wins in single-threaded performance while losing in multi-threaded: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6304vs6617/Intel-N150-v...

I can't speak to why other people bring up the N150 in ARM SBC threads any more than "AMD doesn't compete in the ~$200 SBC segment".

FWIW, as far as SBC/NUCs go, I've had a Pi 4, an RK3399 board, an RK3568 board, an N100 NUC from GMKTec, and a N150 NUC from Geekom, and the N150 has by far been my favorite out of those for real-world workloads rather than tinkering. The gap between the x86 software ecosystem and the ARM software ecosystem is no joke.

P.S. Stay away from GMKTec. Even if you don't get burned, your SODIMM cards will. There are stoves, ovens, and hot plates with better heat dissipation and thermals than GMKTec NUCs.
Show HN: TimeSeal – Cryptographic time-locked vaults with Dead Man's Switch
by teycirb | 2025-12-27 15:12:47+00:00
# Hacker News Submission

## Title
Show HN: TimeSeal – Cryptographic time-locked vaults with Dead Man's Switch

## Post Text

I built TimeSeal to solve a problem: most "future message" apps rely on trust. TimeSeal uses split-key cryptography to make early access mathematically impossible.

*How it works:*

Your browser generates two random AES-GCM-256 keys. Key A stays in the URL hash (never sent to server). Key B goes to Cloudflare Workers. The server refuses to release Key B until the unlock time. Without both keys, decryption is impossible—even for me.

*Three modes:*

1. *Timed Release* - Opens at exact future date (product launches, birthday messages)
2. *Dead Man's Switch* - Auto-unlocks if you stop checking in (crypto inheritance, whistleblower insurance)
3. *Ephemeral* - Self-destructs after N views (one-time passwords, confidential sharing)

*Architecture highlights:*

- Triple-layer encryption (client-side AES-GCM + server-side key encryption + master key)
- Split-key design: no single party can decrypt early
- Server-side time enforcement (client clock is irrelevant)
- Cloudflare Workers + D1 database (edge-native, globally distributed)
- Replay attack prevention with nonce-based pulse tokens
- Rate limiting via SHA-256 browser fingerprinting
- Open source (BSL license, converts to Apache 2.0 in 4 years)

*Security model:*

Even with full database access, an attacker cannot decrypt without:
- Key A (in URL hash, never transmitted)
- Master encryption key (environment secret)
- Both keys combined

The server enforces time-locks via Cloudflare's NTP-synchronized infrastructure. No root access = no time manipulation.

*Use cases I didn't expect:*

- Estate planning (crypto seed phrases that unlock after 30 days of silence)
- Journalist insurance (evidence auto-releases if arrested)
- Marketing stunts (countdown timers for product drops)
- Legal holds (contracts that activate on settlement date)

Live demo: https://timeseal.online

Source: https://github.com/teycir/timeseal

Docs cover threat model, attack scenarios, self-hosting, and trust assumptions. Happy to answer questions about the crypto, architecture, or edge cases.

---
by seamusabshere | 2025-12-27 15:13:00+00:00
xsv was a revelation when it came out 10 years ago. It's a rust-based CSV tool. Lately people are recommended to use QSV, also rust-based, but incredibly (too much) feature rich. I worked with Claude to modernize XSV and add a few key features like --compress and --flexible... and also upgrade the underlying rust csv lib, whose 2018 version was known to hang on certain weird input.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-27 15:13:46+00:00
I think the Beechcraft Bonanza deserves special mention here. I'm sure all the people that worked on it were experts too!

The big problem with this analogy is that it conflates three very important things:

- GA is more dangerous, period. Doesn't matter whether you build the plane yourself or if you bought it ready made (hopefully new, hopefully very well maintained if second hand)

- GA craft tend to have less experienced pilots than airliners, but even airliner pilots tend to do worse as GA pilots than when they're at work. The reason for that is simple: the processes are what keeps commercial aviation (mostly) safe.

- GA craft tend to kill the pilots, because they are more often than not the only person on the plane.

- GA craft have malfunctions like larger aircraft, there is nothing special about them in that sense. But there is something that they don't have that larger aircraft do have: redundancy. In electronics systems, in the design of the mechanical bits, and finally in the people.

- GA craft that are designed and built by their operators are experimental class for a reason: they are untested and so more likely to fail than the ones that are certified. The design processes for commercial aircraft are nothing compared to the design processes employed by what we'll call hobbyists to distinguish them.

- And finally, even though it is a fun analogy I only meant it from a skin-in-the-game point of view, a GA hobbyist is still going to do his level best to make sure that he's not going to get killed. Boeing executives only care about the bottom line, safety is a distant second. And based on my experience with the difference between the guts of various bits and pieces of avionics and the software that they run on compared to my experience looking at medical devices, their guts and the software that they run on I would be more than happy to bet that the loop hackers know as much more more about the failure modes of these devices as the manufacturers do.

Cleanroom manufacturing under sterile conditions is the main differentiator here, and that just applies to the hardware, and it is an art that the medical industry understands very well. Electronics is already at a lower level of competence and their software knowledge tends to be terrible, not to mention the QA processes on said software.

Programmers working for corporations don't necessarily suddenly grow an extra quality brain when they do their work.
by impossiblefork | 2025-12-27 15:15:01+00:00
Usually I use the format "Analyze the following ...".

For simple discussions this is fine. For complex discussions, especially when people get into conflict-- whether that conflict is really complex or not, problems usually result. The big problems are that the model will misquote or misrepresent views-- attempted paraphrases that actually change the meaning, the ordinary hallucinations etc.

For stories the confusion is much greater. Much of it is due to the basic way LLMs work: stories have dialogue, so if the premise contains people not being able to speak each other's language problems come very soon. I remember asking some recent Microsoft Copilot variant to write some portal scenario-- some guys on vacation to Teneriffe rent a catamaran and end up falling through a hole in the world of ASoIAF and into the seas off Essos, where they obviously have a terrible time, and it kept forgetting that they don't know English.

This is of course not obviously relevant for what Copilot is intended for, but I feel that if you actually try this you will understand how far we are from something like AGI, because if things like OpenAIs or whoever's systems were in fact close, this would be close too. If we were close we'd probably see silly errors too, but it'd be different kinds of errors, things like not telling you the story you want, not ignoring core instructions or failing to understand conversations.
by mr_mitm | 2025-12-27 15:15:07+00:00
This is a 73000x security on silver: https://www.ls-tc.de/en/turbo/4244036

It's got an ISIN and all that.

L+S is the exchange where Trade Republic trades: https://support.traderepublic.com/en-nl/705-On-which-trading...
by eleventyseven | 2025-12-27 15:15:27+00:00
That makes sense, as the Pi is as easy as x86 at this point. I almost never have to compile from scratch.

I'm not a compiler expert... But it seems each ARM64 board needs its own custom kernel support, but once that is done, it can support anything compiled to ARM64 as a general target? Or will we still need to have separate builds for RPi, for this board, etc?
by MrDunham | 2025-12-27 15:16:44+00:00
Website link on Github points to https://deepmyst.com/

But actually hosted on https://www.deepmyst.com/ with no forwarding from the Apex domain to www so it looks like the website is down.

Otherwise excited to deep dive into this as this is a variant of how we do development and seems to work great when the AI fights each other.
by comrade1234 | 2025-12-27 15:17:18+00:00
I live in Zurich-wollishofen and love it here. There are some areas of dense housing (Green City, Entlisberg, etc) but despite that there's a farm that's a 5-minute walk to get to, two other farms that are about 30 minutes, a fourth farm that's 45-minutes, and finally a fifth farm that's over an hour and includes a 400 meter climb up a ridge. We do much of our shopping at the farms.

The lake and swimming is a 10-minute walk with many green areas, and I gather mushrooms on the uetliberg/Albis ridge that takes me about 25-minutes to get to on foot.

Zurich has dense housing areas but its also well-integrated with nature and it's not just my neighborhood - there's lovely forests all around the city with streams and waterfalls, wild garlic and berries and mushrooms..
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-27 15:17:23+00:00
Thank you! This hit the nail on the head for me, though I probably need to try out a few more examples to fully convince myself.

TL;DR: It's actually harmless (and often convenient) to "inflate" the domains of partial functions to make them total (by making them return arbitrary junk values where the original function is undefined), provided that every theorem you want to apply still comes with the original, full restrictions.

Kevin's example is good. My stupider example would be: We can define a set that contains the integers ..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ..., plus the extra element "banana". If we define the result of any addition, subtraction or multiplication involving a banana to be 42, and to have their usual results otherwise, then, provided that we add the condition "None of the variables involved is banana" to the theorem "x+y = y+x", and to every other theorem about arithmetic, anything that we can prove about arithmetic on elements of this set is also true of arithmetic on integers.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-12-27 15:17:30+00:00
> Linux systems commonly already provide an outdated system Python you don’t want to use

They can be a bit long in the tooth, yes, but from past experience another Python version I don't want to use is anything ending in .0, so I can cope with them being a little older.

That's in quite a bit of contrast to something like Go, where I will happily update on the day a new version comes out. Some care is still needed - they allow security changes particularly to be breaking, but at least those tend to be deliberate changes.
Show HN: Simulation of 1M Flocking Birds
by pistolpete__ | 2025-12-27 15:17:43+00:00
I love starlings and algorithms and decided to combine.
I built a starling murmuration simulation that scales to one million birds.
The flocking emerges from simple local rules and continuous adjustment to nearby birds. It is based on Boids - separation, alignment, cohesion, soft boundaries and a gentle pull toward the center.
The flock’s motion also drives sound, where altitude controls pitch and local density shapes texture.

Desktop supports up to one million birds with adaptive limits on mobile.
Make sure to play around with the controls and let me know what you think.
by evanjrowley | 2025-12-27 15:18:09+00:00
>"A calculator app? Anyone could make that"[0]

Shameless plug: my favorite calculator "app" is wxMaxima. It uses similar techniques[1] as those described in the fantastic article at the top of this 2025 list. Implemented in Lisp[2].

[0] https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

[1] https://feb.kuleuven.be/public/u0003131/WBT23/wxMaxima/wxM_i...

[2] https://maxima.sourceforge.io/lisp.html
by aurareturn | 2025-12-27 15:19:35+00:00
I already said many times that I was reading between the lines and it was speculation.

You keep asking me to appeal to authority. No thanks.

It is what it is. To me, it’s clear that he wants things to go back to pre ChatGPT because that’s the world he’s familiar with and that’s the world he has most power.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t make such idiotic claims.
by ghaff | 2025-12-27 15:19:42+00:00
"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.

Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.
by ofek | 2025-12-27 15:20:49+00:00
This is awesome, thanks a lot! I'm going to introduce this in the test suites of the extension modules I maintain [0][1] and, if all goes well, eventually at work [2].

I really appreciate the support for Windows as that platform is currently underserved [3] when it comes to such memory tooling.

[0]: https://github.com/jcrist/msgspec

[1]: https://github.com/ofek/coincurve

[2]: https://github.com/DataDog/integrations-core

[3]: https://github.com/bloomberg/memray
by pell | 2025-12-27 15:20:51+00:00
It’s a complicated question nowadays as the first generation of networks that were really all about networking have mostly died out or morphed into algorithmic feeds. So the question is whether there’s a market for this classical networking at all. If so for a network to make sense you do need networking effects of some kind as people would likely not want to pay to be registered to a service that shows them having 0 friends. I do think it’s a difficult bet.

I can however see this for niches and small groups. Something more akin to old school bulletin board forums. In a sense Metafilter works a bit that way already.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-27 15:21:16+00:00
Good question, I can't backtrack right now but it was apmplanner that I had to compile from source, and it contains some python that gets executed during the build process (I haven't seen it try to run it during normal execution yet).

Probably either one of python-serial python-pexpect judging by the file dates, and neither of these are so exciting that there should have been any version conflicts at all.

And the only reason I had to rebuild it at all was due to another version conflict in the apm distribution that expects a particular version of pixbuf to be present on the system and all hell breaks loose if it isn't, and you can't install that version on a modern system because that breaks other packages.

It is insane how bad all this package management crap is. The GNU project and the linux kernel are the only ones that have never given me any trouble.