MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by athrowaway3z | 2025-12-29 07:12:59+00:00
I'm trying to describe a rather large spectrum of situations, and how most of them are favorable (or not unfavorable) to anyhow.

I'm not saying the error domain is small per se.

Instead, one argument I'm making: what you're describing about errors bubbling up to the top layer, is what happens with the overwhelming majority of errors in my experience.

Whether the error space is large or small, just wait until you have an immediate need to treat one error different from the rest. It happens, it's just not common.

I didn't steelman the case for when to use enums, but in short: In a tiny error space or as valuable documentation.

(The doc value is undermined somewhat when projects use 1-big-error and functions that eg only returns 3 of the 6 possible errors)

I'm not advocating removing an Error enum. Just that writing one can and should be postponed, saving a lot of maintenance edits.
by Fiveplus | 2025-12-29 07:13:28+00:00
The section on conjure is fascinating. For those who haven't followed the refraction networking space, the idea of leveraging unused address space at the ISP level is something academic papers have proposed for years [1]. Seeing it deployed in the wild is huge. The hardest part of this has always been non-technical by the way. Convincing ISPs to cooperate. If the Tor project has managed to get ISPs to route traffic destined for unallocated IPs to a station that handles the handshake, it completely breaks the censor's standard playbook of IP enumeration. You can't just block a specific subnet without risking blocking future legitimate allocations.

I’d be curious to know if these are smaller, sympathetic ISPs or if they managed to partner with larger backbone providers. I'm interested to hear more about this.

[1] look up tapdance
by doubletwoyou | 2025-12-29 07:14:28+00:00
i really do like kde, it just works and doesnt’t get in my way!

and there’s the fact that every update actually seems to improve the user experience is something quite astonishing in the current climate

im still reluctant about wayland but the work the kde team have put in to make it just work (x11 dpi, fractional scaling, actually supporting extensions) is just lovely
by agentifysh | 2025-12-29 07:17:35+00:00
im not worried about Taiwan it has sufficient deterrence against any sort of land invasion. China might be able to launch a lot of air and missile strikes but if pushed to the brink Taiwan could use the ultimate trump card that is targeting the Three Gorges dam with its advanced cruise missiles.

secondly, JSDF and US Navy offer overwhelming reinforcement if it looks like Taiwan would fall and China's PLAN would not be able to face the two most powerful navy in the world.
Show HN: Instant map of your flight routes, no account required
by atamagno | 2025-12-29 07:18:03+00:00
Hi HN! I've always wanted a simple app to just track my flights and see how they look on a map. I know there are a lot of apps out there for this, but most of them make the process of loading flights really slow and require you to create an account.

I wanted to focus mainly on these two issues and make it really simple and quick to load flights: just the mandatory origin and destination, you can add the rest of the flight details later if you want. You can also use it offline, basically as a "calculator" if you just want to quickly see data on a single flight route.

On top of that, there's a page with comprehensive stats and even AI powered insights. The main features are:

-Free and no account required (account creation optional)
-Add a flight route and see it on an interactive map instantly (origin and destination only)
-Use it offline if you just want a quick "calculator" mode
-Share your map with a single link
-Optionally track multiple flights and view stats
-Get AI insights (account required for this feature)

This is still a work in progress and I plan to keep adding more cool features, but I'd like to keep it simple at the same time.

I'd really appreciate it if you let me know whether you find it useful and any features or improvements you think I should add. Hope you like it!
by Defletter | 2025-12-29 07:18:05+00:00
Scope guards are neat, particularly since D has had them since 2006! (https://forum.dlang.org/thread/dtr2fg$2vqr$4@digitaldaemon.c...) But they are syntactically confusing since they look like a function invocations with some kind of aliased magic-value passed in.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-29 07:18:23+00:00
Although the points regarding the software itself which we self host which is getting enshittified is somewhat valid, I feel like we can still see forks,migrate and many other things so I am not particularly worried about it

But the biggest thing I am worried about is the hardware prices too.

So I want to ask but is there any hardware (usually ram) which isn't getting its price increase insanely much? Perhaps refurbished or auctioned servers?

What is the best way to now get hardware which is bang for its buck? Should we even buy hardware right now or wait 3-4 years for factory production to rise and AI bubble to crash, I definitely think that ram prices will fall off very steeply (its almost a cycle in the ram business)

I am not sure but buying up small levels of compute feels like a decent idea if you are doing anything computationally expensive and of course if you have something like plex, then I suppose you have to expand on the storage part and not so much on the ram part (perhaps some encoding/decoding which could be ram intensive but I don't know)

I had gotten into the rumour that asus is ramping up chip production or smth to save hardware but it turned out to be fake so not sure how to respond but please some hardware company should definitely see this opportunity smh.
by xeonmc | 2025-12-29 07:18:36+00:00
What’s interesting is that even Edward Snowden made a mistake in his PGP emailing procedures, resulting in Micah Lee needing to make a plaintext request to Snowden for his pubic key, which might have allowed a MitM substitution of a compromised key to Laura, if the threat actor had intercepted and deduced the communication early.
by postpawl | 2025-12-29 07:18:39+00:00
That's surprising given the data. Were these transactions recent? Investors focus on entry-level properties, so if you're buying above that tier you'd see less competition. But California overall has high investor activity:

“In 2025’s first half, 36% of purchases statewide were made by investors – up from 31% for all of 2024 and 16% at the recent low in 2020 as coronavirus was scrambling the economy.”

https://www.dailynews.com/2025/09/11/36-of-california-homebu...
by solatic | 2025-12-29 07:18:39+00:00
> most of your time

For hybrid workplaces wanting 3 days in-office, it's a little less than half

> away from your family

Yes, this is a trade-off. The choice is between whether your family will be crammed into a too-small-barely-affordable apartment in the city, or a more spacious house, since anything family-sized in the city is priced for executives. A lot of kids don't live at home during college; a lot of sales people and the like are used to living out of a suitcase, this is a similar lifestyle except better because the pieds-a-terre apartment is actually stable, it's not the same as living out of hotel rooms.

> pay for 2 places instead of 1

Theoretically 1 pieds-a-terre + train tickets + 1 rural mortgage payment is cheaper than 1 family-sized apartment in the city. If it's not in your case - fair enough.

> 3-5 hour commute away from your job

Even if it's 5 hours, if you do that twice a week plus 3x 15 minute walks each way, that's 10h45m commute time per week, mostly on a train where you can watch movies, read something, etc. If you drive two hours each way, in congestion, to a (premium-priced) house in the suburbs, that's 10 hours of commute time per week fully concentrated on the road. YMMV.

> dream of remote or physically proximal

Well sure. That's a dream. Part of the question is, what's a realistic goal to set for yourself? Pieds-a-terre + train + rural house is achievable on my own agency. Overhauling the industry to become remote-first, or overhauling housing to become more affordable closer to employers, is not.
by bsimpson | 2025-12-29 07:19:06+00:00
I have a Legion Go, which is basically a premium Steam Deck - playing similar games but on a nicer screen with a stronger GPU to drive it. I've been very happy with it - still playing nearly daily 2 years later.

All this hubbub about chip shortages has me wondering if it's going to extend the lifespan of these devices. Already in the Legion Go line, its successors are much more expensive but not much more performant. The line bifurcated into an entry level and a premium option, and both have a variant whose chip is derived from the same 7840 as the original model. That is, the Legion Go S and Legion Go 2 are both priced higher than the original, with a lower screen resolution and identical (or nearly identical) chipset. The only reason to choose one over the original is if you really need that extra RAM.

Like the Steam Deck, the Legion Go is still a perfectly serviceable device years later. The Deck competitors from Lenovo, ASUS, OneX, AYANEO, etc. are all built around basically the same chip that's a bit stronger but less power efficient than the Deck. The performance envelope hasn't really moved.

Tariffs and part shortages are making these devices a lot more expensive, but they aren't noticeably better than they were 2 years ago. In fact, Valve's upcoming Steam Machine has very similar specs, and was designed to outperform 70% of the devices currently gaming on Steam.

If prices are going up and performance is stagnating, people who already have gaming devices are going to be reluctant to upgrade. I expect these market forces are going to extend the lifespan of current-gen devices.

Most games take years to make. I wonder how many games currently in the production pipeline were banking on players having more performance available by the time the games are released, and how that is going to impact their reception.

The Steam Deck has been a really useful performance-and-feature anchor for computer gaming. Until hardware improves enough to justify a Steam Deck 2, I expect it will continue to maintain that position, improving the playable lifespan of all the other gaming devices in the market too.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-29 07:20:09+00:00
I think it's quite obvious that any textual description that had any hope of being converted to video in this way would be entirely useless for a human mind. It wouldn't say something like "the fastener is on the under side of the chair about 3/5s of the way", it would say somerhing like "there is a square-shaped object in view 5cm from the top of the view and 120cm from the right; the object is 2cm x 2.2cm, color 0x7F325A".
by palmotea | 2025-12-29 07:21:04+00:00
There are mirrors in Picard and Troi's quarters (click the viewpoints near the beds), and I think you can catch a glimpse of the camera they used to make the panoramas. It's blurry, and kind of looks like a droid from Star Wars.

I suppose it's also possible they photo-shopped in something that looked sci-fi, to cover up whatever mundane camera they were actually using.
by gizmo686 | 2025-12-29 07:21:57+00:00
There is a map-territory problem here.

There is some underlying reality to what autism is, even if we do not have a good understanding of it; and even if turns out to be multiple unrelated things that happen to have similar symptoms.

Of the people with those actual conditions, it seems entirely plausible that some will not be hindered.

The authors of the DSM-V needed to create a diagnostic criteria for a condition that they do not understand, and for which no objective test is known. Further, their objective was designing something useful in a clinical setting. Giving those constraints, saying "if it is not a problem, we don't care about it" is entirely reasonable; despite not being reflective of the underlying reality.
Show HN: Text-to-Light: Local LLM-Powered Christmas Tree on Raspberry Pi [video]
by eyesim | 2025-12-29 07:22:19+00:00
I built a Christmas tree that answers questions using light. It runs locally on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) using WS2812B addressable LEDs and a small interface.

I used a single prompt that makes the model return a structured JSON response, which made it easy to map yes/no/maybe and emotions directly to LED colors and patterns.

I tested multiple LLMs and eventually settled on Gemma3:1B running locally on the Raspberry Pi. It performed surprisingly well both in terms of reasoning quality and computational efficiency. I would really appreciate any suggestions for improving performance or adding creative features.

Happy holidays!
by bigyabai | 2025-12-29 07:23:46+00:00
> And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.

Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps.

Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.
by xarope | 2025-12-29 07:23:57+00:00
I visited the galapagos islands about 15 years ago, and you could sorta get internet when the ships were docked. Enough for me, back then, to check my emails and make sure there were no crit-sits or urgent issues to handle, and then return to admiring the sunset, blue footed boobies, seals everywhere, albatross sitting next to a fish monger in isabela waiting for the fish head to be thrown as a snack.

Nice times.
by doubletwoyou | 2025-12-29 07:24:04+00:00
The cones are the colour sensitive portion of the retina, but only make up a small percent of all the light detecting cells. The rods (more or less the brightness detecting cells) would still function in a deuteranopic person, so their luminance perception would basically be unaffected.

Also there’s something to be said about the fact that the eye is a squishy analog device, and so even if the medium wavelengths cones are deficient, long wavelength cones (red-ish) have overlap in their light sensitivities along with medium cones so…
by Uncorrelated | 2025-12-29 07:24:10+00:00
I found the article you wrote on processing Librem 5 photos:

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-photo-processing-tutorial/

Which is a pleasant read, and I like the pictures. Has the Librem 5's automatic JPEG output improved since you wrote the post about photography in Croatia (https://dosowisko.net/l5/photos/)?
by l9o | 2025-12-29 07:24:26+00:00
It feels like a weird tension: we worry about AI alignment but also want everyone to have unrestricted local AI hardware. Local compute means no guardrails, fine-tune for whatever you want.

Maybe the market pricing people out is accidentally doing what regulation couldn't? Concentrating AI where there's at least some oversight and accountability. Not sure if that's good or bad to be honest.
by squirrel | 2025-12-29 07:25:02+00:00
It seems you are assuming that because the majority of people have a certain quantity of glutamate receptors, that they are the healthy ones and that we should be trying to bring autistic people up to that level. Is that right?

Why not consider the opposite, that the most beneficial quantity of glutamate receptors could be somewhere below the typical amount? If that were true, then we could try to help others reduce their glutamate receptor level to become healthier and more successful (and a little more autistic).

If we found, say, an association between a lower level of neurological characteristic X and concert-level piano skill, then those who aspire to play that instrument at an elite level might try to decrease X. The fact that most of us are rubbish piano players would not be evidence that lower levels of X are harmful, but very much the opposite.
by mschild | 2025-12-29 07:26:20+00:00
As another German, I think there is different kinds of corruption. There is low-level and high-level.

Low-level is when you bribe individual cops, city clerks, etc so they let you go instead of writing a speeding ticket or approving your house building plan.

High-level is when people like Merz receive a political donation from McDonalds, do some self-promotion in one, and then keep/lower the Mwst (VAT) for restaurants.

Germany unfortunately has high-level corruption but as far as I know, very little low-level. I think thats partially why people don't care to vote to differently. Yes, it happens, but there is a large disconnect between what Merz does and how it impacts an individuals bottom line.

If people would have to constantly hand out bribes to anyone then maybe its a different story.
by sublinear | 2025-12-29 07:27:31+00:00
So, the blog post says to avoid using labels because they get in the way of making your point. People have preconceived notions about those labels, so anything you say about them is stepping into a minefield.

I agree, but there's so much more involved in convincing people than just avoiding offense. In fact the author sounds like they're saying to patronize your audience. That's possibly even more offensive than attacking their labels!
by derriz | 2025-12-29 07:29:11+00:00
I used ResultSet because the comment above mentioned it. A clearer example of what I’m talking about might be say you replace “x.size() > 0” with “!x.isEmpty()” when x is a mocked instance of class X.

If tests (authored by someone else) break, I now have to figure out whether the breakage is due to the fact that not enough behavior was mocked or whether I have inadvertently broken something. Maybe it’s actually important that code avoid using “isEmpty”? Or do I just mock the isEmpty call and hope for the best? What if the existing mocked behavior for size() is non-trivial?

Typically you’re not dealing with something as obvious.
by firefoxd | 2025-12-29 07:29:30+00:00
In the olden days, internet explorer couldn't support html5 tags. I found a snippet of code from my 2010 library [0] that I used to use to remedy the problem. You see if you created the tags via JavaScript, IE would somehow recognize them. You could discard then right after. Here was my script:

(function(d) {
'abbr article aside audio bdi canvas data datalist details figcaption figure footer header hgroup mark meter nav output progress section summary time video'.replace(/\b\w+/g,function (a){
d.createElement(a);});
})(document);

It didn't take long before I realized I could just add any random tag, add it to my shim, and render it on any browser.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/revisiting-my-old-javascript
by cubefox | 2025-12-29 07:29:44+00:00
> However, this is not the interpretation that leads to a straightforward correspondence between logic and programming. For example, we would like "A and B" to correspond to the type of pairs of elements of A with elements of B, which is not at all the set-theoretic intersection. And while "(A and B) implies A", we do not want to say a value of type "(A, B)" also has type "A". (E.g., if a function expects an "A" and receives an "(A, A)", we are at an impasse.)

Intersection types in TypeScript and Scala 3 do work like conventional intersections / conjunctions. Something of type A&B is of type A. For example, a Set&Iterable is a Set. This makes perfect sense and is coherent with how unions work. A&A is then obviously equivalent to A. I'm not sure where you see the problem.
by samdjstephens | 2025-12-29 07:30:15+00:00
Politics is accruing and deploying political capital within an organisation - or less abstractly, building relationships and using them.

What you’re describing is a particular form of manipulative and divisive politics which is performed by insecure, desperate or selfish people.

Many engineers are not good at building relationships (the job of coding isn’t optimal for it after all), so painting the people who are good at is as narcissistic may be comforting but isn’t correct.
by nneonneo | 2025-12-29 07:30:32+00:00
To be fair, this is with debug symbols. Debug builds of Chrome were in the 5GB range several years ago; no doubt that’s increased since then. I can remember my poor laptop literally running out of RAM during the linking phase due to the sheer size of the object files being linked.

Why are debug symbols so big? For C++, they’ll include detailed type information for every instantiation of every type everywhere in your program, including the types of every field (recursively), method signatures, etc. etc., along with the types and locations of local variables in every method (updated on every spill and move), line number data, etc. etc. for every specialization of every function. This produces a lot of data even for “moderate”-sized projects.

Worse: for C++, you don’t win much through dynamic linking because dynamically linking C++ libraries sucks so hard. Templates defined in header files can’t easily be put in shared libraries; ABI variations mean that dynamic libraries generally have to be updated in sync; and duplication across modules is bound to happen (thanks to inlined functions and templates). A single “stuck” or outdated .so might completely break a deployment too, which is a much worse situation than deploying a single binary (either you get a new version or an old one, not a broken service).
by epistasis | 2025-12-29 07:32:06+00:00
What a weird and unsupported accusation. Claims without evidence do not require evidence to rebut.

The US is threatening Ukrainian territory, claiming "it's already been lost." The US is not respecting the sovereignty of the borders of Ukraine.

And that's not even getting into the US breaking its promise to respond strongly to Russia should Russia ever violate the memorandum during the Obama administration.

I do not know what you consider the lie, but I do know that the US has completely tarnished its reputation over the course of many presidential administrations and has put its own interest in the world at risk due to its weakness.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-29 07:32:08+00:00
> it remains decodable even when the specific tooling is lost, making it the most robust encoding for long-term information survival.

This may be true if you mean text written on a physical medium (especially if it's engraved in stone or clay), but it's not true at all if you mean text stored in a computer medium. Text is just binary with a dedicated codec. Good luck interpreting Chinese plain text files after humanity has forgotten about Unicode and UTF-8.

While text-based representations may be easier to decipher than random binary data even without knowing the encoding (as in an archeological setting), it's hardly going to be the easiest. Bitmaps, for example, have a much more limited set of symbols than Unicode, so I'd bet it would be much easier to display a long lost .bmp file than a random .txt file even a few hundred years from now. Same goes for raw audio, too. Now, JPEG and MP3 might be much more difficult, because the encoding is doing much more work.
by nailer | 2025-12-29 07:33:01+00:00
Close:

Virginia’s 23 Democratic electors (Southern) refused to vote for Democratic VP candidate Richard Mentor Johnson due to his open common-law relationship with Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman of mixed race (octoroon). Interracial marriage was illegal under anti-miscegenation laws.
They voted for Van Buren (president) but switched VP votes to William Smith (another Democrat), denying Johnson a majority. The Senate elected Johnson anyway.