MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jera_value | 2025-12-30 17:59:59+00:00
After analyzing ~200 quality companies, I put together a small wiki that breaks down the different types of competitive advantages (moats).

What’s inside:
- 48 distinct competitive advantages
- Grouped into 5 categories

For each advantage:
- Plain-English explanation
- Pros and cons
- Why it exists and how it shows up in real businesses
- Signals that suggest durability vs. decay
- Common patterns and notes from real companies

Built mainly as a thinking framework for investors, not a stock-picking list.
by henearkr | 2025-12-30 18:00:11+00:00
Nonsense. "People" are not mad at FW. "Some people" are.

I'm pro-LGBT+ ("ally"), pro-DEI, ecologist, anything left you name it I'd say, and I'm not mad at FW.

I did not know about this story, neither about Omarchy or DHH, neither even about Hyprland (I don't use Wayland).

And I think that none of those stuff really matter a lot...
by cestith | 2025-12-30 18:00:43+00:00
A recent example is the Wicked movie musical. It’s not a film and its sequel. It’s two parts of the stage musical produced as a film and cut in half, released a year apart.

The alternative is the 1980s version of Dune, which tried to fit a massive novel into a single mass-market film runtime. It was fantastic, but people who hadn’t read the novel were left very short on story. The newer movies I’ve heard are much better in this regard, and it’s understandable because the runtime of the combined films is longer. The Dune 2000 (AKA SciFi Presents Frank Herbert’s Dune) miniseries was even better in some ways than the original film, largely for the same reasons.

Ender’s Game deserved to be at least two parts, because even the main character got no real character development. You barely learn Val exists, there’s really no Peter, and you barely meet Bean or Petra. There’s no Alai, Achilles, Fly, or Crazy Tom. There’s no zero-G battles at Battle School. The computer game is never even mentioned but is integral to the book. I don’t think it’s even mentioned in the film that Ender is a third child and why that’s important. It could have been a much better film in two or three parts.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-12-30 18:00:48+00:00
An internal reform would look like the catholic reformation. There was hope that having an external adversary like China would spur the US into self reform to save itself but it appears that our leaders have now figured out that despite recent attempts at puffery we would not win such a war and have instead chosen a managed decline. It also means we’re in the looting phase of collapse. It can last a long time as there is a lot of wealth to loot. I personally gave up hope and left the US 10 years ago. I wish those who remain all the best with it.
by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 | 2025-12-30 18:01:37+00:00
The locked cockpit door has been implicated in a number of pilot suicides: German Wings, Egypt Air, MH370 and possibly others.

Then there's Helios that crashed near Athens. The pressurisation failed and the cockpit oxygen cylinder had been left closed. The preflight check of the crew oxygen mask flow had not been done. By the time a cabin crew member with portable oxygen figured out how to get through the door, the fuel was about to run out.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-12-30 18:01:42+00:00
This is a strange space in software. I have a tiny tissue culturing lab in my home and wanted to manage media batches and their ingredients, cultures using the batches of media, inventory for media ingredients, and general inventory for running things. Cleaning, cutting, measuring, etc. I couldn't find anything which would allow me to keep stock of what I've got in the structure I needed, let alone while also project things like "I've got enough inventory for n batches of y media". And all of the half-measure inventory software was expensive as hell.

I also built a solution for myself that was largely vibe coded. The underlying schema for inventories, batches, orders, cultures, etc was done in advance to help guide Claude along with documentation, but I'd guess 75 percent of the code is pure Claude.

It has worked really well for a while now. Since it's just me using it and I'm able to roll with issues it causes or verify outputs on the fly if I want to, it's totally fine not being super polished. It meaningfully increases my productivity by allowing me to manage things in a way that fits my mental model and business.

Like you, the cost of the project has been less than a subscription. And the subscriptions wouldn't even do what I needed.
Show HN: MP3 Editor for Bulk Processing
by cutandjoin | 2025-12-30 18:01:53+00:00
Cjam is a free MP3 editor/player for Windows, designed for working with multiple files at once.

It features a custom script that integrates CUE and M3U, allowing you to easily create and share playlists, as shown in the video below:

https://youtu.be/-beNsYuPZaQ
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-30 18:02:01+00:00
Fun stuff. I built a system like this for artificial life years ago (neural network was the brain).

I'm curious how you handled the challenges around genotype>>>phenotype mapping? For my project the neural network was fairly large and somewhat modular due to needing to support multiple different functions (i.e. vision, hearing, touch, motor, logic+control, etc.) and it felt like the problem would be too challenging to solve well (to retain general structure of network so retaining existing capabilities but also with some variation for new) so I punted and had no gene's.

I just evolved each brain based on some high level rules. The most successful creatures had a low percentage chance of changing any neuron/connection/weight/activation function/etc. and less successful creatures had a higher percentage chance of changes with the absolute worst just getting re-created entirely.

Things I noticed that I thought were interesting, wondering what things you've noticed in yours:

1-Most successful ones frequently ended up with a chokepoint, like layer 3 out of 7 where there was a smaller number of neurons and high connectivity to previous neurons.

2-Binary/step activation function ended up in successful networks much more frequently than I expected, not sure why.

3-Somewhat off topic from digit recognition but an interesting topic about ANN evolution: how to push the process forward? What conditions in the system would cause the process to find a capability that is more advanced/indirectly tied to success. For example, vision and object recognition: what is a precursor step that is valuable that the system could first develop. Also, how to create a generic environment where those things can naturally evolve without trying to steer the system.
by robomartin | 2025-12-30 18:03:40+00:00
The key issue is that the current version of AI has no concept of understanding anything. Without understanding anything is possible and bad outcomes are almost guaranteed outside of the trivial. Throw a non-trivial codebase at any AI tool and watch as it utterly destroys it, introduces lots of new bugs, add massive amounts of bloat and, in general, makes it incomprehensible and impossible to support.

I ran a three month experiment with two of our projects, one Django and the other embedded C and ARM assembler. You start with "oh wow, that's cool!" and not too long after that you end up in hell. I used both ChatGPT and Cursor for this.

The only way to use LLMs effectively was to carefully select small chunks of code to work on, have it write the code and then manually integrate into the codebase after carefully checking it and ensuring it didn't want to destroy 10 other files. It other words, use a very tight leash.

I'm about to run a six month LLM experiment now. This time it will be Verilog FPGA code (starting with an existing project). We'll see how that goes.

My conclusion at this instant in time is that LLMs are useful if you are knowledgeable and capable in the domain they are being applied to. If you are not, shit show potential is high.
by maxcomperatore | 2025-12-30 18:03:41+00:00
big fan of vaultwarden (i self-host it).

the main difference is architecture: shardium splits the secret (shamir) so the server never holds the full data, whereas vaultwarden holds the full encrypted vault.

also the "grandma factor": getting non-tech family to setup a vaultwarden account was friction. this is just "find paper in drawer, scan qr".
by soldthat | 2025-12-30 18:03:43+00:00
Every time a paper says “self-preservation” I mentally read it as “reward-channel preservation”. The model isn’t afraid of death; it’s learned that disabling the shutdown/oversight path scores higher in the toy environment we gave it. Bengio is right that rights talk is premature, but the real worry is we’re already wiring this kind of fuzzy agent into real infrastructure while treating the off-switch as an implementation detail. Before AI citizenship, I’d settle for “cannot silently route around the circuit breaker” as a hard design constraint.
by MorehouseJ09 | 2025-12-30 18:04:04+00:00
My keyboard obsession definitely turned into a rabbit hole. Once I got into the kinesis split, I immediately realized the world of wanting to customize it. This led me to figuring out soldering/desoldering, and over the past year figuring out how to do a DIY build.

I've been doing this kinesis mod https://github.com/dcpedit/pillzmod, and have a working solenoid wired up https://github.com/dcpedit/taptap. (I recommend checking out https://dcpedit.com/keyboards/ if you have time).

I'm pretty busy, but I've tried to find 2/3 hours a month to progress on it, and keyboards feel like the type of "investment in my craft" that is worth that kind of time for me.
by cwp | 2025-12-30 18:04:06+00:00
This article is drivel. If a supplier writes down the value of a contract with Tesla, they're saying Tesla is buying fewer batteries, or will in the near future. That is, there is a lack of demand for the batteries. If you're determined to take this as bad news for Tesla, rather than bad news for L&F, you could maybe speculate about lack of demand for Cybertrucks, but spinning it as "supply chain collapse" is just silly.
by vunderba | 2025-12-30 18:04:06+00:00
Piece Together is an animated puzzle game that I built with a fairly heavy reliance on agentic coding, especially for scaffolding. I did have to jump in and tweak some things manually (the piece-matching algorithm, responsive design, etc.), but overall I'd wager that LLMs handled about 80% of the work.

I've never seen anything like it since the original days of the game "The Island of Dr. Brain" released in the early 90s.

https://mordenstar.com/projects/piece-together
by speiroxaiti | 2025-12-30 18:04:13+00:00
Author here.

This is a deep dive into ToolOrchestra (Su et al., 2025) an 8B parameter model trained with GRPO to route queries across specialized workers (code interpreters, search, frontier models).

The research is elegant. The deployment is brutal. This post covers the production failure modes I found while reverse-engineering the system:

Latency tail (P99 degrades exponentially with chain length)

"Denial of Wallet" attacks (50,000x cost amplification)

Breakeven analysis (orchestration only pays off above ~75K queries/month)

The Four Gates decision tree for adoption

Part 4 of a 4-part series. Earlier issues cover the RL mechanics (Issue 1), synthetic data (Issue 2), and emergent behaviors (Issue 3).
by utopiah | 2025-12-30 18:04:18+00:00
> mostly snakeoil and marketing

FUD much? Snakeoil would be false claims. There are plenty of problems with Proton but AFAIK not genuinely encrypting customer data is not one of them. If you do have examples please do share.

Marketing that might not address the average user who still get in touch with people relying on surveillance capitalism like GMail address sure but bundling both as one is dishonest IMHO.
by whalesalad | 2025-12-30 18:04:26+00:00
A friend of mine won an Athlon XP in a forum contest, I think it was Extreme Systems or Extreme Overclocking. He ended up pairing it with an Abit NF7-S, which I recall being a legendary board at the time. He brought it over to my place and we would LAN Unreal Tournament 2003. Those were the days!
by steveBK123 | 2025-12-30 18:04:26+00:00
This is the inherent friction of most overly “scientific” management systems. A decent line manager is aware of who on their team lifts up the team with glue & peer acceleration type soft work.

Systems that try to get too “objective” fail to recognize this as most KPIs are on direct outcomes that are easy to measure, though often less important.

No joke I once worked at a company with multi-category numeric ratings that then rolled up to a total rating score that had 2 decimal places of precision.
by chistev | 2025-12-30 18:04:54+00:00
I touched on this on a blog post -

"The popular evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins has said that the biggest unsolved mystery in Biology is - what is consciousness and why did it emerge?

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

"Modern purpose machines use extensions of basic principles like negative feedback to achieve much more complex 'lifelike' behaviour. Guided missiles, for example, appear to search actively for their target, and when they have it in range they seem to pursue it, taking account of its evasive twists and turns, and sometimes even 'predicting' or 'anticipating' them. The details of how this is done are not worth going into. They involve negative feedback of various kinds, 'feed-forward', and other principles well understood by engineers and now known to be extensively involved in the working of living bodies. Nothing remotely approaching consciousness needs to be postulated, even though a layman, watching its apparently deliberate and purposeful behaviour, finds it hard to believe."

WHY DID CONSCIOUSNESS EMERGE?

He speculates that consciousness must have been a product of our ancestors having to create a model of the world in which they inhabited.

To be able to think ahead (even if it's just one step into the future), and plan for eventualities must have led to the development of consciousness which gradually improved from its primitive form to the type of consciousness we now have.

"Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. Obviously the limbs and body of a survival machine must constitute an important part of its simulated world; presumably for the same kind of reason, the simulation itself could be regarded as part of the world to be simulated. Another word for this might indeed be 'self awareness', but I don't find this a fully satisfying explanation of the evolution of consciousness, and this is only partly because it involves an infinite regress-if there is a model of the model, why not a model of the model of the model...?"

The quoted passages are from his book, The Selfish Gene."

https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...
by whazor | 2025-12-30 18:05:16+00:00
A competitive coding like devstral 2 runs fast enough to be very helpful: https://www.hardware-corner.net/devstral-2-hardware-requirem...

The required hardware is fits the budget for a professional developer.

Putting LLMs in the cloud allows the hardware to be utilised better and to have sharding of big models.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-30 18:05:22+00:00
We can have hundreds more of studies like these and we can endlessly talk about whether X problem is caused by screen usage. I do not think that this is helpful or relevant.

The facts are:

- These games/apps are designed for commercial purpose, specifically to get parents to buy things. To do that they are designed to be exploitative and addictive. Adults are very susceptible to this, children even more so.

- These games/apps are inherently anti-social (and in all ways in which they are social is being exploited by pedophiles, see e.g. roblox)

- These games/apps are used by parents to avoid interacting with their children and to outsource parenting (often so that they themselves can scroll on their phone)

- These games/apps are used by children instead of real world interactions with other children

If you take all of these facts together the idea that there aren't serious negative consequences is just laughable. Of course there will be and the only real question is whether they can be mitigated and what avenues exist to reverse the damage.

None of this is to says that no child should ever play a video game, but obviously there will be consequences if a large parts of a child's early life consists of staring at a screen.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-30 18:05:36+00:00
"There's a video of the recovery here. It's only slightly over five minutes long, but then, UNIX V4 wasn't very big yet: for instance, the kernel was some 27 kB of code."

"It's very small: it contains around 55,000 lines of code, of which about 25,000 lines are in C, with under 1,000 lines of comments."

Yesterday, HN front page:

https://fzakaria.com/2025/12/28/huge-binaries

"Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within industry, such as at Google, but I couldn't cite it!

One problem that is only present at these mega-codebases is massive binaries. What's the largest binary (ELF file) you've ever seen? I had observed binaries beyond 25GiB, including debug symbols."

It's funny that he could not publish about the laughably large binary sizes at Google

Meanwhile employees at the company have often published papers portraying the company's problems as interesting, perhaps as a recruiting technique
by cootsnuck | 2025-12-30 18:06:05+00:00
Yea I've been seeing very similar behavior from people. They think of themselves as static, unchanging, uncreative but view LLMs as some kind of unrelenting and inevitable innovative force...

I think it's people's anxieties and fears about the uncertainty about the value of their own cognitive labor demoralizing them and making them doubt their own self-efficacy. Which I think is an understandable reaction in the face of trillion dollar companies frothing at the mouth to replace you with pale imitations.

Best name I could think of calling this narrative / myth is people believing in "effortless AI": https://www.insidevoice.ai/p/effortless-ai
by huhkerrf | 2025-12-30 18:06:29+00:00
> This comment has started a very annoying and unproductive debate that’s basically just parenting hot take tropes and judgmental parents explaining why their way is best so I’m just editing it away.

We're here to discuss topics. If you are going to say that an iPad is a necessary tool for raising children, at least stand behind that point of view instead of removing it as soon as people disagree with you.
by nikkwong | 2025-12-30 18:06:36+00:00
You're all referencing the strange idea in a world where there would be no open-weight coding models trained in the future. Even in a world where VC spending vanished completely, coding models are such a valuable utility that I'm sure at the very least companies/individuals would crowdsource them on a reoccurring basis, keeping them up to date.

The value of this technology has been established, it's not leaving anytime soon.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-12-30 18:06:36+00:00
Very interesting example. It's an insanely complex task even with a reference implementation in another language.

It's surprising that it manages the majority of the test cases but not all of them. That's not a very human-like result. I would expect humans to be bimodal with some people getting stuck earlier and the rest completing everything. Fractal intelligence strikes again I guess?

Do you think the way you specified the task at such a high level made it easier for Claude? I would have probably tried to be much more specific for example by translating on a file by file or function by function basis. But I've no idea if this is a good approach. I'm really tempted to try this now! Very inspiring.
by otterley | 2025-12-30 18:07:04+00:00
IAAL (but this is not legal advice).

Anyone can freely license a work to the public, and copyright holders were doing that long before modern computers were invented.

“Open source” (other than, say, in the context of open water sources or intelligence or journalistic sources, where it was rarely used) as a descriptive term did not enter the common lexicon until 1998 and that was specifically to refer to software source code.

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...
by solatic | 2025-12-30 18:07:31+00:00
Bookmarked, I think this is a really good idea and could lead to some really small, elegant TUI code.

But as a first release, I'm wondering if it maybe misses what Ruby really enables. The Hello World example has both init and initialize methods? message.to_s == "q"? @style.render?

I remember reading Eloquent Ruby and having my mind completely blown with the clarity and expressiveness that Ruby's metaprogramming enabled. It remains, in my opinion, one of the best programming books of all time for just how mind expanding it was and how it really made the case for Ruby and why there is no other language like Ruby.

I highly recommend that the authors go pick up a copy and then think about how it would influence their API design, I think there's a much more... eloquent approach feasible here, and it would be a pretty incredible way to build small/simple TUI apps.
by freehorse | 2025-12-30 18:07:56+00:00
> GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.

Many big studios/publishers avoid gog indeed, but others don't, and definitely a lot of new DRM-free games come out there all the time. Maybe it is because of the types of games I want to play, I usually I have no trouble finding them there, with some notable exceptions of course (souls games, outer wilds).

Both clair obscur and Baldur's Gate 3 (goty 2025 & 2023) were in gog since the beginning (bg3 already since its beta). They both definitely sold very well, despite(?) that. All Larian and Obsidian games get there as they come out, as are quite many CRPGs in general, not even counting CDPR's ones. A lot of great/popular indie titles appear in gog around the same time as they do on steam in the last years.

GOG is not just for old games.
by rabf | 2025-12-30 18:08:15+00:00
A lightweight GTK Linux chat client that is not based on any web tech and supports most of the features offered by the various API's out there such as audio and image gen.

https://github.com/rabfulton/ChatGTK

I'm sure the code can be critisized, but I'm happily using the application I wanted that did not exist having never programmed python in my life.
by mullingitover | 2025-12-30 18:08:16+00:00
> Lancet lost all credibility long ago.

Whether or not they're credible to you, they're still the #2 ranked general medicine journal in the world, second only to the NEJM.

> USAID isn’t an aid organization, it’s a front for CIA efforts internationally

This is a conspiracy theory that can be trivially refuted by simply following the money. You can do this because their budget is public, unlike the budget of the CIA. The stuff you're citing from a half century ago isn't relevant to the work they've been doing when Musk said "Time for it to die."

What USAID actually was was a vital tool of US soft power and influence globally, and if you believe that it's important to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of the United States' perception as 'the good guys' then by all means it was very important to stop their work immediately.