MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2025-12-24 20:09:07+00:00
The original Docker (and the current Podman) created each layer as an overlay filesystem. So each layer was essentially an ephemeral container. If a build failed, you could actually just run the last successful layer with a shell and see what's wrong.

More importantly, the layers were represented as directories on the host system. So when you wanted to run something in the final container, Docker just needed to reassemble it.

Buildkit has broken all of it. Now building is done, essentially, in a separate system, the "docker buildx" command talks with it over a socket. It transmits the context, and gets the result back as an OCI image that it then needs to unpack.

This is an entirely useless step. It also breaks caching all the time. If you build two images that differ only slightly, the host still gets two full OCI artifacts, even if two containers share most of the layers.

It looks like their Bazel infrastructure optimized it by moving caching down to the file level.
by jmyeet | 2025-12-24 20:09:13+00:00
This is not correct at all.

The GOP are masters of using parliamentary procedure to avoid votes that would pass that they don't want to pass, nominations and bills that they can't defend voting against.

This was a big issue in the Obama era where Mitch McConnell was determined to make Obama a one term president and decided to "obstruct, obstruct, obstruct" on things that historically never been obstructed, or at least not to the degree they were under Obama. For example, judicial appointments would get stuck in committee and never come up for a vote because the vote would pass. The most famous example of this was the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination that was never given a vote for 11 months, which was completely unprecedented.

The GOP has a narrow working majority in the House. The House, unlike the Senate, has the discharge petition process where if a majority of House representatives sign it, it forces a vote. All the Democratic reps signed on so it only took about 4 GOP reps for it to pass.

The lengths Mike Johnson went to to avoid this were unprecedented. 3 Democratic reps have died in office this Congressional session. Texas has consistently delayed a special election to avoid a replacement. Arizona had a special election. A Democrat won and Johnson avoided swearing her in for 7 weeks because she would be the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition.

4 GOP reps signed on and the White House and the Speaker both put incredible pressure on them to change their mind. It was a big part of why Trump fell out with Marjorie Taylor-Greene (she was one of the 4).

Why go to all this effort? Because Epstein was core foundational mythology for MAGA, reps couldn't defend voting against it and everybody knew it.

Johnson then tried to use a procedure to pass a vote called unaminous consent. Basically, rather than go through a roll call of up to 435 members, the House is given the option to object. If anyone does, it forces a vote. Why would he do this? Because there's no voting record for unanimous consent. It gives members cover to say they did or didn't vote for something. A roll call is an official record. Democrats objected and thus we got an official vote with only 1 "no" vote (Rep Clay Higgins).

The SEnate passed it with unanimous consent.

This was a veto proof majority. So if it was so popular, why just not schedule a vote to begin with?

And the obstruction continues. Johnson again put the House in recess 1 day before the 30 day deadline. Coincidence? I think not.

And now we're getting illegal redactions, not meeting the 30 day deadline and a drip feed of document releases because (IMHO) they can't find enough ethically-challenged lackeys to do doc review and redact the names and images of Trump and powerful people, many of whom are likely donors.

Johnson may well lose his position over this. The Attorney General has a non-zero chance of being impeached and removed over it.

There is no putting this genie back in the bottle. It's not going away and at no point was the Trump circle comfortable they could redact their way out of it. They are in full on panic mode right now.
Show HN: Secret Santa Wonderland – No More Lonely Christmas
by shyonagi | 2025-12-24 20:09:47+00:00
Hello everyone! It’s my first time on HN — it took me a while to get the hang of it, but I’m excited to share my first publicly released website of an idea that I have been thinking of for years!

---

I still remember my first Christmas in a game years ago. that unexpectedly turned into gift-for-gift, because you couldn’t buy gifts for yourself. But it showed me something truly magical - strangers coming together with holiday spirit. It stuck with me.

When I started researching Christmas traditions, Secret Santa completely captivated me. But back home, it isn’t very common. My class and internship company hosted it, so I finally got to experience it, but it felt… transactional. Not engaging. Missing that magic.

That's when the idea hit: What if Secret Santa wasn't just about gifts, but about connection? What if the real gift was the mystery itself?

And here's my favorite part: When real gifts between strangers are impractical, why not customized greeting cards? There's something special about receiving something handmade. The effort someone puts into creating just for you - that never goes wrong for me.

For years, this idea kept me up at night. Now, after discovering vibe coding just last week (truly magical), I’m finally building Secret Santa Wonderland — hopefully bringing that magic to everyone this Christmas.

---

Secret Santa Wonderland transforms traditional gift exchanges into an exciting social deduction experience where players must guess their Secret Santa's identity through hints, mini-games, and conversation.

Problem we solve:
- Holiday loneliness (especially for remote workers/students)
- Awkward virtual gatherings with no structure
- Traditional Secret Santa lacks engagement
- Difficulty meeting new people during holidays
- No one to play Secret Santa with

How it works:
1. Join/create a room (public or private), with minimum of 4 players
2. Get assigned a Secret Santa anonymously
3. Receive 3 personalized hints about your Santa
4. Chat with everyone to gather clues
5. Play holiday mini-games for extra guesses
6. Draw a greeting card for your Santee and receive one from your Secret Santa during the big reveal.
7. Guess the most to win!

---

Thanks!
by a_t48 | 2025-12-24 20:10:20+00:00
I think I could actually build what I was thinking of on top of basis, but need to think about some things. Serialization of internal state was kicked around as a design idea at the start, but didn’t see enough benefit back then. In any case basis isn’t quite dead, I still use the thing as a test bed for ideas.

I’ll take a look at your thing, too!
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-24 20:10:45+00:00
Yes, you can dump your IR straight to the disk and then stream it to process further. That's how quite a number of compilers (and assemblers) were written back in the 70s and it was quite painful.

IIRC, Unix's original as works that way: during assembly, the text and data sections are written into separate temporary files, and then they are merged together into the a.out. And yes, it's slow.
by moss_dog | 2025-12-24 20:11:10+00:00
I was looking into this earlier -- presumably you'd also need to allowlist Claude itself (whatever endpoints it hits to run inference etc). VM firewall gets a little trickier with Claude's web search tool, too.

The solution I landed on recently was to locally modify the Chrome devtools MCP to launch the browser instance with strict network restrictions. I believe the implementation used `--host-resolver-rules`, blocking all URLs by default with an environment variable to control the allowlist (which, in hindsight, Claude can easily work around if it needs to -- I should probably just hard-code the allowlist).
by labcomputer | 2025-12-24 20:11:20+00:00
Sure, in principle, but that takes effort and special equipment to set up. The point is that GPIB makes it easy (trivial, actually) with nothing more than the cables you normally use to connect instruments to get very low and predictable latency.

GPIB GET works by first configuring a subset of bus devices as listeners and then sending a single-byte message (it’s an 8 bit bus, so one bus cycle) with the ATN line asserted. It’s intrinsically low latency without any special effort.

Whether that makes it worthwhile to put GPIB on a new instrument in 2025 is a different question. I’m only addressing “what does GPIB give you”?
by throwup238 | 2025-12-24 20:13:10+00:00
There’s a great Australian comedy called Utopia about a government department that has a whole episode B-plot of the characters working on the Aussie equivalent of a FOIA request. It’s pretty funny and in the end one of the workers just finds it easier to leak the document to the requesting journalist rather than deal with the official process, even though it was mundane contract details on a carpark that came in ahead of schedule and under budget.

In another episode they’re trying to find out the length of a stealth submarine for construction planning purposes of a port or something, and they have to go through endless layers of security checks with the military that lead nowhere. In the end a reporter filming a documentary episode on the government agency tells them the length because they were allowed to film the submarine on another program.

Definitely recommend the show and my friends in government say it’s scarily accurate.
by alwa | 2025-12-24 20:13:30+00:00
> iOS users seem far more comfortable with subscriptions than Android users, which is the opposite of what I expected.

I would offer that, for me at least, this may have a lot to do with the consistent, consumer-friendly subscription terms that Apple stringently enforces across its ecosystem. Which happen to line up well with your considerate approach, too!

I avoid subscriptions anywhere else because of the pervasive shenanigans: sneaky sign-ups, charging for functionality that’s built in to the OS, onerous cancelation processes, taking back the remaining time on your subscription if you cancel, easy to forget about, sneaky price hikes without my consent (looking at you, Microsoft 365)…

I know Android’s subscription policies only by reputation—namely, that less-techy people in my life are regularly burned by an endless array of scammy apps there—and I think of this kind of enforcement as one of the luxuries of the Apple ecosystem.

There’s value in doing good honest business: from the care you obviously pour into this project, all the way through to the consideration with which you approach the revenue. I’m glad the market is bearing that out!
by YegoBear | 2025-12-24 20:13:43+00:00
So basically the same price as an already decently upgradable Thinkpad P1 G8 on sale, but with a terrible screen and janky chassis. Plus it costs about the same to upgrade as getting a new machine, but then you no longer have the ability to throw Linux on the old one and donate it to a school or less fortune person. Tough sell.
by grugagag | 2025-12-24 20:14:47+00:00
I’ve been cooling off my brain after work on my way home on the bus by playing video games and it is very effective. Time flies and they move you in a completely different mental space. Initially I got Miyoo mini for my kid and installed a lot of Pico-8 games. Quickly I decided to get another one for myself and it’s been quite some therapy for the past year. By the way, I’m in my mid 40s and haven’t been playing games for a really long time, since the 80s or the 90s. I highly recommend Pico-8 games. I find the games very creative and novel and yet quite simple and to the point. I recently got into making a few myself, of course with the help of LLMs.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-24 20:14:59+00:00
These sorts of things are fun and interesting. Compiler optimizations fall into two categories:

1. organized data flow analysis

2. recognizing a pattern and replacing it with a faster version

The first is very effective over a wide range of programs and styles, and is the bulk of the actual transformations. The second is a never-ending accumulation of patterns, where one reaches diminishing returns fairly quickly.

The example in the linked article is very clever and fun, but not really of much value (I've never written a loop like that in 45 years). As mentioned elsewhere "Everyone knows the Gauss Summation formula for sum of n integers i.e. n(n+1)/2" and since everyone knows it why not just write that instead of the loop!

Of course one could say that for any pattern, like replacing i*2 with i<<1, but those pattern replacements are very valuable because they are generated by high level generic coding.

And you could say I'm just being grumpy about this because my optimizer does not do this particular optimization. Fair enough!
by cdev_gl | 2025-12-24 20:15:21+00:00
I can't speak to the rest of the text or the laptops themselves, but as someone who works with color reproducibility in video and print, those photos comparing colors of two different screens are worse than useless.

Uncalibrated screens photographed at different angles in different lighting conditions are not a valid basis for comparison. If you want properly calibrated displays, you need to purchase hardware (datacolor makes one such device) and calibrate them.

Even "factory-calibrated" monitors will benefit from this, because the quality of that calibration varies widely and your color reproduction is going to vary based on ambient lighting conditions etc.
by systemtest | 2025-12-24 20:15:24+00:00
Would be cool if Framework would sell speakers, a display, trackpad and housing comparable in quality to a MacBook Pro. It would have a high pricetag but you could slowly upgrade your machine. Especially since swapping out speakers or a trackpad is so easy.

Right now the Laptop 13 speaker kit is €20 but they could offer a €150 option that performs similar to a MacBook Pro for people who value sound.
by overwriteme | 2025-12-24 20:16:01+00:00
This is absolutely a gimmick, but I think it’s a fun one.

I built a website that only ever shows one sentence.
If you want to change it, you have to pay more than the last person did. That’s the whole mechanic.

No accounts, no ads, no infinite scroll. Just one sentence, a price, and a history of everything that came before it.

People can also interact without overwriting by buying the price down a bit, voting, or leaving comments that stick to that sentence forever.

It’s artsy, a little pointless, and mostly an excuse to watch what people say when words aren’t free. Maybe it turns into jokes. Maybe manifestos. Maybe nothing at all.

There’s a countdown up now and it goes live on New Year’s Day.
I genuinely don’t know what will happen, which feels very on-brand for the internet.

Happy to answer questions or hear thoughts.
by Amezarak | 2025-12-24 20:17:18+00:00
> I don't know where you get the idea that the Leave campaigns were complacent about racisms and bigotry and xenophobia; they excused it or amplified it at every turn (while lying about everything else)

I'm saying that despite knowing the populace had problems with immigration, and that this was a big driver of the Brexit vote, they had the Boriswave.

Secondly, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about: you're dismissing at least half the population, who has repeatedly voted for meaningful immigration restrictions in the UK and never gotten them, as racist xenophobic black-hearted bigots. Even if this was 100% true, you have to address this, rather than just leveraging institutional power to silence them. You have to actually convince people they're wrong in democratic societies, and if you can't, you have to steer the ship of state in the direction they want, or you are building up explosive and dangerous forces. You don't get to say 52% of people are wrong, screw them, we're not doing what they want because they're bigots.

There are deeper questions involved here too: whether it is a "good thing" or not, it is true that migration in the UK in many other places has resulted in rapid and massive demographic and cultural change. In no case did this take place with democratic input; instead, it was treated at some sort of natural, unavoidable force of nature, and now anyone who has any problem with it is a racist bigot. Perhaps all this could have been avoided with periodical referenda on desired immigration levels, which would have legitimized the whole ordeal. It's likely there never would have been a Brexit vote, although the UK's increasingly miserable economic path may have pushed something like it to happen eventually anyway - even before Brexit, the UK was simply in an awful, awful position economically, particularly stunning for what was a short time ago one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Perhaps UK politicians should consider some sort of dramatic change rather than re-arranging the deck chairs and arresting people for holding crimethink signs if they don't want social unrest.

(To be fair, I don't think there's much that can be done other than managed decline. The UK economy has been almost entirely hollowed out except for the finance and service sectors, the former of which survives only due to inertia from their glory days. Thatcher and Churchill really did a number on the UK. And regardless of your thoughts on immigration, at no time in history has it promoted social cohesion and harmony.)

> This just isn't true. I know some people who move in pretty elite circles, City circles, Oxbridge, and I can tell you that Brexit had at least lukewarm support and in some circles (those who don't know or don't care that Boris is a habitual liar) rabid support.

Regardless of personal anecdata, the data shows Brexit support was highly stratified by social class, income, and education.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2025-12-24 20:17:40+00:00
Slack and discord don't know the state of the room at any given time in the past. Show me anywhere in slack or discord where you can see the membership of a room at 2024-06-19T15:23:45Z. Or anywhere where you can see the historical profile picture and nickname of everyone in the room at 2024-06-19T15:23:45Z. You can't, because they don't know.
by piva00 | 2025-12-24 20:17:42+00:00
That's a very US-centric viewpoint though, it doesn't apply to every government or society.

If the US government is more inefficient than others then there's something to be said about how it works, how it could be improved, instead there's only this rhetoric that doesn't invite at all the discussion about what are its failures and paths to improve, just recycled catchphrases supported by a cliché.

Private companies are also inefficient in many ways even with competition, why is that if competition is supposed to make inefficient companies uncompetitive? Maybe there's something else to discuss rather than these thought-terminating clichés...
by rapnie | 2025-12-24 20:18:07+00:00
Launching in early 2026, Eurosky Social [0] is coming.

> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.

> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.

[0] https://www.eurosky.social
by ezst | 2025-12-24 20:18:36+00:00
> you are at best grasping at straws to find some semblance of justification for you irrational dislike.

You seem so emotionally-involved that the whole point whooshed above your head. JS is a language that gives me no joy to use (there are many of those, I can put Fortran or SQL in there), and, remarkably, gives me no confidence that whatever I write with it does what I intend (down to basic branching with checking for nulliness/undefinedness, checking for edge-cases, etc). In that sense it's much worse than most of those languages that I just dislike.

> Not only is JavaScript way more than a webdev thing, you are ignoring the fact that most of the mainstream programming languages also support things like automatic type conversion.

Again, you are missing the point. JS simply has no alternative for webdev, but it's easy to argue that, for everything else, there are better, faster, more expressive, more robust, … languages out there. The only time I ever have to touch JS is consequently for webdev.
by jasonlotito | 2025-12-24 20:18:51+00:00
> As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out.

Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.
by maxloh | 2025-12-24 20:19:10+00:00
Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters.

> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. Note that this implies some structures and on-wire representations (for example, the request line in HTTP/1.1) will necessarily be larger in some cases.

Mainstream browsers support at least 64,000 characters [1], and Chrome supports up to 2MB [2].

[0]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#section-4.1-5

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/417184/

[2]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/s...
by shireboy | 2025-12-24 20:19:26+00:00
I have used this in a “beta” feature for an enterprise app and really like it. In ~100 lines of code I have a secured OpenAI compatible endpoint that I can chat with, and write tools for in .NET. I have it doing natural language query over some data and it works quite well.

You can also expose the agents as MCP, AGUI and so it can be a tool you integrate with other AI platforms.
by kbolino | 2025-12-24 20:20:01+00:00
I was on this hype train when Apple switched about 6 years ago, but too much time has passed since then without much movement outside of Apple-land for me to believe it anymore. Apple is a special case; they have done this twice before (68k to PPC, PPC to x86), they have a smaller/tighter ecosystem, and they are vertically integrated. I think a lot is going to change in PC-land over the next decade or two, but I don't think it's going to look like Apple's transition at all; if anything, x86-vs-Arm is not going to matter that much against the wider backdrop.
by justin66 | 2025-12-24 20:20:20+00:00
> I think ultimately what frustrates me is that people don’t consider the ability to repair or upgrade your machine part of a “premium” experience, but that’s is just something I have to accept. I think it is unfortunate that our consumerist culture places so little value on it though.

Buying one of the original Frameworks and a Macbook Air at roughly the same time made me realize how little I actually care about upgradeability and repairability. This feeling took me by surprise. Modern Macbooks are just so much better in terms of feel it's like comparing tech from a different decade.

(it also turns out that having a defect that the manufacturer doesn't make right can cause a person to feel a few different things, but gratitude for the product's repairability isn't at the top of the list)