MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by casey2 | 2025-12-27 18:50:31+00:00
I was thinking about this last night before bed. People often counter that data visualization in 2D and 3D are more important and that we need a visual programming language.

I completely disagree, if LLMs have taught us anything it's that the semantic space is MASSIVE and has far too many dimensions to visualize. Of course for some specific situations visualizations are great and can give you almost immediate insight, but for truly complex problems the only ability we have as humans that lets humans understand complex relationships is language

Now language can be visual, textual or auditory. But at the end of the day it must be a language. Music notation isn't a language, it's a very simple set of semantics splayed out in a standard way, when people try to increase the semantic density it turns comical, also there is very little contextual relationship between the semantic markings (key affects notes and ties affect notes but key never affects ties). Whereas a programming language can have entire scores a single identifier. Many people have a shared, somewhat lossy understanding of unreal whether they worked with it, played a game with it or whatever, one that can include a lot more than just the code.
by datameta | 2025-12-27 18:50:59+00:00
I was a proponent initially of CLI when Claude integration with VSCode required a WSL instance, but now that it is integrated directly into VSCode I feel one grouping of tooling hiccups is now ruled out in my workflow. The only (major) nitpick I have is that it wont let you finish typing and cuts you off when asking whether/how to proceed.
by danaris | 2025-12-27 18:51:40+00:00
The difference is that, in many places, the gas taxes are specifically earmarked for road maintenance.

Of course, a better solution would be to pass legislation properly funding road maintenance from the general funds, and raising income taxes to support that. But raising income taxes, even on those for whom a 50% increase in income tax would mean zero change in their actual lifestyle, is politically anathema in these benighted times.
Show HN: Buildex – Interactive system design practice with AI feedback
by rushabh011 | 2025-12-27 18:51:53+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Buildex (https://buildex.dev) to help engineers practice system design interviews interactively.

The problem: System design prep usually means reading blogs or watching videos passively. There's no way to actually practice designing systems and get feedback.

How it works:
- Pick a challenge (URL shortener, rate limiter, chat system, etc.)
- Drag-and-drop components onto a canvas to design your architecture
- Connect them to show data flow
- Submit and get scored on efficiency, cost, and reliability
- AI evaluates your design and gives specific feedback

Tech stack:
- Frontend: React + Vite
- Backend: Go
- Database: PostgreSQL
- AI: Claude API for design evaluation
- Payments: Razorpay

Free tier gives you 2 AI evaluations/day. I'm a solo dev and built this over the past few months while prepping for interviews myself.

Would love feedback on:
- Challenge difficulty/variety
- Scoring system fairness
- UI/UX issues
- What's missing?

Happy to answer any questions about the implementation.
by browningstreet | 2025-12-27 18:53:01+00:00
Given that it's under scrutiny for regulatory bypass, it's not a purchase and is being reviewed as circumventing those very rules. Might not even happen.

I know, I'm joking: Trump likes Nvidia, but maybe he'll bump the Chinese tax to 30% to approve this deal? In a way I hope he pulls something like that, to punish Huang for his boot shining manipulations.

#iwantRAM
by larusso | 2025-12-27 18:53:54+00:00
I did the switch this year after getting yet another personal computer. I have 4 in total (work laptop, personal sofa laptop, Mac Mini, Linux Tower). I used Yubi keys with gpg and resident ssh keys. All is fine but the configuration needed to get it too work on all the machines. I also tend to forget the finer details and have to relearn the skills of fetching the public keys into the keychain etc. I got rid of this all by moving to 1Password ssh agent and git ssh signing. Removes a lot of headaches from my ssh setup. I still have the yubi key(s) though as a 2nd factor for certain web services. And the gpg agent is still running but only as a fallback. I will turn this off next year.
by creativesage | 2025-12-27 18:54:16+00:00
Thanks to everyone with constructive feedback.

A few things that stood out to me:

One alert is never enough. Treating alerting as a system, not a single email.

GCP pricing calculator in the deployment checklist, not an afterthought. You almost have to be obsessive about checking.

Hard caps: GCP doesn't have them. Budgets only send alerts, they don't stop charges. You can wire automation to disable billing but that's a hack, not a feature.

Cloud providers benefit financially from complexity and opaque defaults. I own my config mistakes, but the suggestions around capacity planning and realistic cost modeling were genuinely helpful.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-27 18:54:30+00:00
When talking about LLMs as search engine replacements, I think the stark difference in utility people see stems from the usecase. Are you perhaps talking about using it for more "deep research"?

Because when I ask chatgpt/perplexity things like "can I microwave a whole chicken" or "is Australia bigger than the moon" it will happily google for the answers and give me links to the sites it pulled from for me to verify for myself.

On the other hand, if you ask it to summarize the state-of-the art in quantum computing or something, it's much more likely to speak "off the top of its head", and even when it pulls in knowledge from web searches it'll rely much more on it's own "internal corpus" to put together an answer, which is definitely likely to contain hallucinations and obviously has no "source" aside from "it just knowing"(which it's discouraged from saying so it makes up sources if you ask for them).
by npodbielski | 2025-12-27 18:54:38+00:00
> Part of the point of journaling and documenting is to later revisit and unlocking memories one might have not accessed in some time. This is part of the reason Spotify Wrapped and similar "recaps" are enjoyable.

Wow. I hate that. I was doing diary when I was like 10 years old and when I was actually reading that after few weeks it was terrible. Pure cringe and whinings. With music it is not that visible but there are still few bands I cannot stand anymore, and I was litnening to them extensively few years back, like Neurosis.

But as a pure informational referrence... Sure!
by Yoric | 2025-12-27 18:54:39+00:00
> Well, yes, but it also means a gag gift; I'd hazard a guess that >99% of uses of the term in the past several decades have been of the "gag gift" persuasion. There are many white elephant parties thrown by people who care little for history.

Is this an Americanism? I've never heard "white elephant" used with such a meaning.

> Even then, intentionally ruining someone's financial life requires more care and attention than telling an AI agent to perform random acts of kindness (so far).

Absolutely.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-27 18:54:41+00:00
I’ve noticed a huge spike in anti Indian sentiment on Twitter/X. Vivek Ramaswamy even recently commented on it, since his posts are nearly fully filled with utterly vile racist replied. Fuentes himself has been pretty vocal about his anti Indian hate too - see https://nypost.com/2025/12/24/us-news/nick-fuentes-latest-ra... where Fuentes says the Ohio governor race is the most important one and that he doesn’t care if a Jewish woman gets elected instead (given he’s an antisemite).
by dahart | 2025-12-27 18:55:18+00:00
What use of GitHub are you talking about? The use of GitHub by @c-linkage at the top of the thread was, in fact, based on GitHub being free to use. And GitHub’s basic services are free to use. I really don’t know what you mean.

Your oft-repeated customer vs product platitude doesn’t seem to apply to GitHub, at least not to it’s founding and core product offering. You are the customer, and GitHub doesn’t advertise. It’s a freemium model, the free access is just a sort of loss leader to entice paid upgrades.
by tooltalk | 2025-12-27 18:56:38+00:00
You are conflating power banks and smartphones.

In China, the current trend in "high-end" smartphones/laptop is to switch to higher-energy silicon-anode batteries. LFP is primarily for low-energy dense (gravimetric/volumetric) storage devices, such as power banks; or in vehicles, low-end/low-range EVs, or stationary energy storage (ESS) -- BYD being one notable exception.

China implemented rules in mid-2025 banning uncertified (no 3C mark) and recalled power banks from Anker & Romoss models, from domestic flights due to fire risks.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-27 18:57:16+00:00
> Multi agent collaboration is quite likely the future

Autogen from ms was an early attempt at this, and it was fun to play with it, but too early (the models themselves kinda crapped out after a few convos). This would work much better today with how long agents can stay on track.

There was also a finding earlier this year, I believe from the swe-bench guys (or hf?), where they saw better scores with alternating between gpt5/sonnet4 after each call during an execution flow. The scores of alternating between them were higher than any of them individually. Found that interesting at the time.
by dnautics | 2025-12-27 18:57:51+00:00
it's terrible advice for actual programmers though because often 0 is a sentinel value with special meaning for systems that you don't have control over (sometimes because of pre-digital conventions that shouldn't be lightly fucked with).

This is usually done by PL's that want to avoid crashes at all costs, but "turning crashes into subtle logic errors" seems like a really bad idea.
by skybrian | 2025-12-27 18:57:55+00:00
There’s more to international trade than what central banks do. The US is still a good place to invest overall, which is why we can run trade deficits. The money earned by foreigners, whether it’s from selling oil, cars, or anything else, goes into US investment of all kinds. Foreigners can buy the S&P 500 just as easily as bonds.

US interest rates have been declining lately, so perhaps other investments are more attractive.
by anonymousiam | 2025-12-27 18:59:04+00:00
My experience with the OrangePi 4 LTS has been poor, and I'm unwilling to purchase more of their hardware. Mine is now running Armbian because I didn't care for the instability, or for the Chinese repos.

They seem uninterested in trying to get their hardware supported by submitting their patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel, and popular distros. Instead, you have to trust their repos (based in PRC).
by bitwize | 2025-12-27 18:59:17+00:00
One of my childhood computers was a Tandy 2000. This was a 186-based PC-incompatible computer available from Radio Shack. It was more performant than an AT, could access more base memory (due to a disk-based rather than ROM BIOS), and available at a lower price so it was a contender before it was clear that the IBM standard would be used by everybody.

Not only could it run Windows 1.0, Microsoft used the Tandy 2000 internally for Windows development because it was the only x86 machine out there that could do hi-res (640x400) color graphics. So, getting Windows 2.x backported to the 2000 is definitely feasible.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-27 19:00:55+00:00
> It is useful to overcome censorship, inflation and money transfers

No it's not. It cannot overcome any of these, and the constant nagging to the opposite is a big part of the scam. The problems in question are political and cannot be solved outside of the regulatory framework.

> without relying on third parties (or relying on burocratic, traditionally greedy and ancient parties).

Well, the non-traditionally greedy happen to be much greedier and a mere tool in the hands of the "traditional and ancient parties". A bunch of politicians and those connected to them are the ones who benefit the most from crypto scams, guess what's going to happen when the music stops and their profits dry up.

> I see a trend that all privacy focused projects have this bad press always - Cryptocoins, GrapheneOS, Tor

Because they are designed to accommodate scams under the guise of privacy - I'd exclude GrapheneOS from that list though, it's very different, it doesn't have a bad name among the grassroots and including in this list is nonsensical.
by tzury | 2025-12-27 19:01:36+00:00
https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen...

Example (for both functions):

/* Emits a 7-Hz tone for 10 seconds.

True story: 7 Hz is the resonant
frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
This was determined empirically in
Australia, where a new factory
generating 7-Hz tones was located too
close to a chicken ranch: When the
factory started up, all the chickens
died.

Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */

#include

int main(void)
{
sound(7);
delay(10000);
nosound();
return 0;
}

from the comments over there (2002)
by urcite_ty_kokos | 2025-12-27 19:01:37+00:00
Hi, I was wondering how is it technically possible for Russia firewalls to block calls over these platforms, while keeping chat messages working? Thanks

My guess is that it is because of a different layer 7 protocol than HTTP is used for calls, and the code of the protocol leaks in the TLS/SSL header. Is this guess correct?
by tooltalk | 2025-12-27 19:02:15+00:00
Sure, my initially argument was that it was good for China, but bad for the rest of the world because of China's anti-market practices that only benefited China. In other word, 2/3 of the world came out losing because of China's mercantile practices -- it's had negative net effect for the world.

Again, no point in talking in circles.
by andrewaylett | 2025-12-27 19:02:48+00:00
You shouldn't be relying on hooks to maintain the integrity of your codebase, and I'm not seeing anything here that makes me want to avoid `pre-commit` (or, more literally, the https://pre-commit.com/ tool). CI must be the source of truth for whether a commit is acceptable.

If you're using `pre-commit` the tool, not merely the hook, you can also use something like https://github.com/andrewaylett/pre-commit-action to run the tool in CI. It's a really good way to share check definitions between local development and CI, meaning you've shifted your checks to earlier in the pipeline.

I use Jujutsu day-to-day, which doesn't even support pre-commit hooks. But the tooling is still really useful, and making sure we run it in CI means that we're not relying on every developer having the hooks set up. And I have JJ aliases that help pre-commit be really useful in a JJ workflow: https://github.com/andrewaylett/dotfiles/blob/7a79cf166d1e7b...
by jweir | 2025-12-27 19:03:08+00:00
We have some tests that ensure the interface is correct - that the correct type of args are passed say from a batch process to a mailer and a mail object is returned.

For these tests we don’t care about the content only that something didn’t get incorrectly set or the mailer interface changed.

Now if the developer changes the Mailer to require a user object the compiler tells us there is an error. Sorbet will error and say “hey you need to update your code here and here by adding a User object”

Before we would have had test coverage for that - or maybe not and missed the error.
by lubujackson | 2025-12-27 19:03:15+00:00
The solution is to remove the temptation to hit a "looks good" button. A non-shitty AI tool could return a bullet list of events and time stamps:

- officer said "Freeze!" at 3:12:34am
- "my arm!" said person #2 at 3:12:48am

Then the office must at a minimum reformat the events into text and add their own details. Again, AI is a tool and it is immensely useful if we treat it like a tool and not a panacea.
by Jaauthor | 2025-12-27 19:03:52+00:00
As an author, I dig what this is saying since it resonates so well with my journey as an author. Everything I publish is one more chance to connect with people who are drawn to other people in motion. I'm still learhing how to bring people along and inspiring others to create.

Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1.
https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/
by ajross | 2025-12-27 19:04:04+00:00
> The replacement will probably be a multinational currency with strictly controlled quantity tied to [...] probably [...] gold.

This is econolibertarian fan fiction. Literally no one wants that except people already involved in speculating[1] on gold. Are there bad externalities to relying on a unlitaterally controlled reserve currency? Yes. Are they made better by handing financial control over to a bunch of fucking mine and vault operators? Let's be real, here.

Basically this idea appeals to people who've convinced themselves they can get rich betting on financial policy and stay rich by burying their loot in their metaphorical backyard.

[1] The very fact that such speculation even exists should be a triple exclamation point red flag on any argument about hard currency, but alas no.
by dahart | 2025-12-27 19:05:43+00:00
Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization, as an example of a digital commons.

The ‘tragedy’ that the top comment referred to is losing unlimited access to some of GitHub’s features, as described in the article (shallow clones, CPU limits, API rate limits, etc.). The finiteness, or natural limit, does exist in the form of bandwidth, storage capacity, server CPU capacity, etc.. The Wikipedia article goes through that, so I’m left with the impression you didn’t understand it.
by emptybits | 2025-12-27 19:06:23+00:00
Normally I would nod at the title. Having lived it.

But I just watched/listened to a Richard Feynmann talk on the nature of time and clocks and the futility of "synchronizing" clocks. So I'm chuckling a bit. In the general sense, I mean. Yes yes, for practical purposes in the same reference frame on earth, it's difficult but there's hope. Now, in general ... synchronizing two clocks is ... meaningless?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHtlXA1f-w
by Spivak | 2025-12-27 19:06:48+00:00
pre-commit is a convenience for the developer to gain confidence that pre-flight checks in CI will pass. I've found trying to make them automatic just leads to pain when they interact with any non-trivial git feature and don't handle edge cases.

I've been much much happier just having a little project specific script I run when I want to do formatting/linting.
by vinceguidry | 2025-12-27 19:07:04+00:00
> look at rack. What a joke.

Yeah, I think the Ruby world burned out of the whole "make everything nice" aesthetic when they alienated the everloving fuck out of _why. Now it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland where if you want nice things, you better be prepared to become a right expert because you will have no one to turn to when it breaks. I don't mind, I don't make money coding anymore and the challenge makes me feel alive again.

If I ever get to the point to where I gotta learn the C API, I'll do it through mruby. But it'll be a much easier path to systems work to interop with Rust instead.
by ur-whale | 2025-12-27 19:07:29+00:00
> Every time I hear people claiming India and China now not using dollar and the end of dollar’s dominance, I feel it’s coming from mostly clickbait headlines

I would encourage you to actually take a gander at the history of reserve currencies, how long they last, how they lose their reserve status, and what the current state of thinking around where the dollar is headed.

Unless you would classify the IMF as a clickbait farm, of course.

Start with the brit. pound and what led its downfall to the niche financial instrument it is today.

But the pound is just the latest, and by no mean the only one.

Here are a few links to get you started:

https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/

https://www.economicprinciples.org/DalioChangingWorldOrderCh...

Barry Eichengreen – “Exorbitant Privilege”

https://www.imf.org/en/publications/departmental-papers-poli...
by dang | 2025-12-27 19:07:52+00:00
Related. Others?

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534483 - Sept 2024 (79 comments)

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211 - Aug 2022 (12 comments)
by rangestransform | 2025-12-27 19:08:08+00:00
It’s either printing or increasing taxation for constant benefits. We all know what happens when the government tries to increase taxes at all, now try doing it for zero increased benefits. This is a populace that’s had candy for dinner since WW2, and forcing them to eat their vegetables will result in a never before seen level of civil unrest from people of all political inclinations.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-27 19:10:27+00:00
Paying for the road-time you use, like any shared resource, seems fair to me. It would be nice to see decreases in earned income taxes though.

If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller.

Edit: to respond to reply about trucks causing more damage to road:

Construction costs are one cost of roads, but another cost is time cost due to congestion (and resulting effects of delays due to congestion). A variable rate toll that also incorporates congestion is the ideal way to manage road use, much like paying more for electricity or other resources at peak demand to modulate demand.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-27 19:10:31+00:00
Roads cost money, costs are just catching up to reality. If folks are unhappy now when taxes are at historical lows while we accumulate all sorts of off book debt (in this case, “deferred maintenance”), further sadness is ahead. If one does not care to pay for roads, my recommendation is to live somewhere one doesn’t need roads, or the per capita costs are lower due to density (urban areas, broadly speaking), making paying the costs more palatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... (“In 2021, state and local governments spent $206 billion, or 6 percent of direct general spending, on highways and roads. As a share of state and local direct general expenditures, highways and roads were the fifth-largest expenditure in 2021.”)

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-tra... (“The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.”)

(very similar to how climate costs are causing agriculture and insurance costs to snap to reality, with similar sadness; debts coming due)
by rubslopes | 2025-12-27 19:11:21+00:00
My non-physicist but curious-about-the-topic take is similar. Things at the quantum level are not "complex" in the systems-theory sense. They couldn't be, I think, since we're dealing with the most basic constituents of the universe. They are mysterious, confusing, wildly counterintuitive... but they are fundamental. The most basic stuff there is.

The study of these things, on the other hand, is genuinely complex and difficult. But that's epistemology, not ontology.