MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lio | 2025-12-25 09:14:19+00:00
I’m in the same boat as your partner except that I generally max the RAM in my laptop when buying it.

The thing is it would probably be the same issue with a Framework or any other brand of laptop as they all have some final limit on RAM or GPU RAM.

If you upgrade the GPU or motherboard you have to ask what will happen to the old one. You can reuse some of them but most probably will just be e-waste.

There’s a chance when upgrading a whole laptop that the old one will a new use somewhere.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-25 09:14:40+00:00
> buying top of the line laptops and trying to use them longer is never going to be cheaper or better than buying medium grade laptops and upgrading more often.

I think this is much less general than you make it out to be and has an extremely strong dependency on how you use the thing and of your preference. It makes me think of the boot theory.

Personally, for the type of work I do, I rarely need the latest ludicrously fast CPU. But I use it a lot and love to do so comfortably. To me, that means a great screen, a quiet fan, and a nice keyboard and touchpad.

Buying a mediocre computer and changing it more often means you'll always have a mediocre experience. A case in point: at work we have HP Elitebooks. The brand-new 2025 models I see people receive have worse screens and trackpads than my 2013 MBP. Sure, that box was quite a bit pricier even in nominal terms, but it had the same amount of RAM (16 GB) and SSD (512 GB) as these new computers. I'll also grant that the new ones have a faster CPU but the SSDs are somehow absurdly slow. I haven't seen a single one of these machines last more than 10 years fully functional. My mom still uses that MBP.

But the experience is sub-par. In the period 2013-2015, we never got to experience a nice laptop. For the office work these people do, that 12-year-old Mac would be an all-around better experience.

The HP screens at the time were truly horrendous. They're leagues better now but still poor and clearly worse than the 2013 mac. They are relatively contrasty, but the colors are all weird.

The trackpads have also improved a lot, but there still is some kind of odd lag when you use them [0]. They're horrible enough that many people still prefer carrying a mouse when using them away from their desks, and the mice we're provided aren't some Rolls-Royce ultra-premium affair, just a crappy, laggy Bluetooth Dell.

They also degrade from daily use: the screen hinge loosens so it moves if you look at it wrong, barrel power connectors from older models somehow become unreliable, and USB ports start to get loose (although when new they tend to be extremely tight). USB-C ports tend to become mushy.

Newer models tend to be quieter, but up until a few models ago, the fan would go wild for no reason (I work with many "non tech" people, so they basically use Outlook and browse a few random websites).

Now, if you only ever use your laptop tethered to a big screen and whatnot, and it's basically a very compact and easy-to-cart-around desktop, then sure, I can understand not caring one bit about all this: you never go out in the rain, so you never get wet feet!

---

[0] This is possibly a Windows driver issue, since on my lower-end Elitebook (840 vs 1040) from 2020 running Linux, this doesn't happen.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-25 09:14:42+00:00
>but there’s nothing really limiting any other laptop on this front. You just use an external dongle and have the same flexibility.

Yeah, but thars another part to lose. I have tons of dongles and expansion bays, and have lost half a ton of them to the tides of school, work, travel, and carelessness. Most lost, some break because it's a huge portrusion out of your core machine. A few borrowed and never returned. One of them stuck at an office I got laid off from but never returned to post pandemic (but the severance hush money was worth more than me raising a fuss as opposed to replacing the $30 bay).

I don't need it to literally be plug and play, but I appreciate a more modular setup that is flush and stuck to the machine.

PS. Your link is 404.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-25 09:15:00+00:00
This car runs KDE Plasma's KWin, along with many other Mercedes-Benz models currently launching:

https://youtu.be/wo5As8et1G8

https://youtu.be/pqJ-9SUPFwY

Notably this deployment doesn't use any of the old-gen automotive Wayland cruft like ivi-shell though. It's pretty much the desktop stack now.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-25 09:16:56+00:00
Arguably the true successor of Diablo 2 is Path of Exile 2, but PoE 2 doesn't have a stamina mechanic for running as well. It's just an anti-fun mechanic nobody asked for

This tread claims that David Brevik, creator of Diablo, regretted the stamina mechanic too https://steamcommunity.com/app/2694490/discussions/0/6052961...
by vicentereig | 2025-12-25 09:18:42+00:00
Same here. T::Struct and T::Enums at API boundaries has been the sweet spot—typed request/response models, runtime validation at ingress/egress.

I’ve been using this pattern for API clients[0] and CLIs[1]: define the shape once with Sorbet, get automatic JSON Schema generation when you need it.

[0] https://github.com/vicentereig/exa-ruby
[1] https://github.com/vicentereig/lf-cli
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-25 09:19:24+00:00
With macOS and Windows I'm still stuck in corporate ecosystems though which was my point. I used to use Mac but I couldn't deal with the increasing iOSification and I only use windows now for gaming (VR) because it's such an awful OS.

But that's another point, I do use many OSes so being locked in to one ecosystem is not an option. I must also have the option to back up my credentials at all times (eg a cloud service will never suffice)

But yeah I should have mentioned Linux. I thought it was the norm here really especially among people advocating against corporate ecosystems.
by byroot | 2025-12-25 09:19:43+00:00
> It seems Ractor is still work in progress

The Ractor experimental status could almost be removed. They no longer have known bugs, and only one noticeable performance issue left (missing Ractor local GC).

But the API was just recently changed, so I think it's better to wait another years.

> I vaguely remember reading Shopify is using Fiber / Rack / Async in their codebase.

Barely. There is indeed this management obsession for fibers even when it doesn't make sense, so there is some token usage there and there, but that's it.

There is one application that was converted from Unicorn to Falcon, but falcon isn't even configured to accept concurrent requests, the gain is basically 0.

As for Rails, there isn't much use cases for fibers there, except perhaps Active Record async queries, but since most users use Postgres and PG connections are extremely costly, few people are using AR async queries with enough concurrency for fibers to make a very noticeable difference.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-25 09:21:33+00:00
> I’m not sure that it’s so valuable as to justify battery life being around a third what my MacBooks get or wrestling a buggy, immature BIOS and all the issues that come with that.

It is to me, given my 15 odd years of using Windows and Linux instead of Mac. I'm not even liking windows much these days, but I've never had a situation where I was forced to use a Mac.
by baobun | 2025-12-25 09:21:48+00:00
Since it's not done via CSS here, I suggest not copying the existing approach directly but recreating the same effect using CSS only.

If you look in the DOM tree / source like I proposed, you see that the list is already a table, so you can use that exact approach you already mentioned.

table tr:nth-child(odd) td.rank{
color: red;
}
table tr:nth-child(even) td.rank{
color: green;
}

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/S...
by akrauss | 2025-12-25 09:21:57+00:00
It is really important that such posts exist. There is the risk that we only hear about the wild successes and never the failures. But from the failures we learn much more.

One difference between this story and the various success stories is that the latter all had comprehensive test suites as part of the source material that agents could use to gain feedback without human intervention. This doesn’t seem to exist in this case, which may simply be the deal breaker.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-25 09:22:22+00:00
As this gets more common, I think it will eventually lead to startups having a hard time attracting talent with lucrative equity compensation. It will be interesting to see how long it takes until this catches on among employees, but I already wouldn't take any positions in startups with a significant payment in equity anymore. The chances are slim that this pays out anyways, but now even when you are successful, noone will stop some megacorp from just buying the product and key employees and leaving everyone else with their stake in the dust.
by net_rando | 2025-12-25 09:22:39+00:00
Random thoughts:

- Seems great. Added to the backlog :)

- No colors in PDF illustrations. Is it a deliberate choice?

- > The first six chapters (and Appendix A) are essentially that book, but with the programming language changed to Python, some rewording, reformatting in Latex, and a few additions.

Try [typst](https://typst.app/) as an alternative to Latex.
by Bayko | 2025-12-25 09:23:18+00:00
Langchain? I tried using/learning langchain then I found out that it was evolving so fast that even the latest ai models didn't have even remotely up to date information on it! Not to mention the hundreds of Google search results for ---- why do langchain docs suck?
I finally switched to haystack and I have been really happy. (Don't work on corporate ai software this is just for personal use)
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-25 09:23:40+00:00
Well, isn't this compositor related? I've never had any window placement issues running Sway (i3 for Wayland). I never used night light on that machine, so I can't comment on that particular point, but the thing seems to work just as well as i3.

The only problem I have is with JetBrains IDEs, which seem to have shaky support. They're usable (meaning you can code), but the experience is so wonky that I basically consider they don't support Wayland.

The reason I switched from i3/x11 is that we've got some 27" 5k screens at work that are basically useless at 100%, and Sway handles different scaling settings flawlessly (except for IntelliJ, which seems lost).
by baubino | 2025-12-25 09:26:16+00:00
The problem is that LLM “summaries” do not cite sources. They furthermore don’t distinguish between making summaries and taking direct quotes; that “summary” is often directly lifting text that someone wrote. LLMs don’t cite in either case. It’s a clear case of plagiarism, but tech companies are being allowed to get away with it.

Publishing in a paid publication is not a solution because tech companies are scraping those too. It’s absolutely criminal. As an individual, I would be in clear violation of the law if I took text someone else wrote (even if that text was in the public domain) and presented it as my own without attribution.

From an academic perspective, LLM summaries also undermine the purpose of having clear and direct attribution for ideas. Citing sources not only makes clear who said what; it also allows the reader to know who is responsible for faulty knowledge. I’ve already seen this in my line of work, where LLMs have significantly boosted incorrect data. The average reader doesn’t know this data is incorrect and in fact can’t verify any of the data because there is no attribution. This could have serious consequences in areas like medicine.
by goku12 | 2025-12-25 09:26:27+00:00
Even more unimaginative dismissals are not what I wish to debate. I have already explained why this argument is disingenuous at best. Apple's model isn't the best. It just appears so because these companies never put significant effort into better alternatives and the consumers never demanded it. I keep trying to point this out - this is a repeated misdirection tactic employed by these companies and their fans.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-25 09:28:04+00:00
AI has purely linear input channel. It gets tokens one by one. Context is a form of short term memory. I know, that because you give it written text it seems like you provide it with a document it should be able to process in any way it likes, but the system is set up as if you read the document to AI, word by word and asked questions about it, that it, that in needs to answer "of the top of its head".

> It's simple, I can do it myself:

> Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead.

Can you do it without looking at the document? Just by ear? Every time correctly? Without missing something?
by sluongng | 2025-12-25 09:28:28+00:00
The underlying problem is that most container images are not cache efficient. Compressed tarballs arent and that’s what most of container images are. And Bazel relies heavily on caching to stay fast.

Most of the hyper scaler actually do not store container images as tarballs at scale. They usually flatten the layers and either cache the entire file system merkle tree, or breaking it down to even smaller blocks to cache them efficiently. See Alibaba Firefly Nydus, AWS Firecracker, etc… There is also various different forms of snapshotters that can lazily materialize the layers like estargz, soci, nix, etc… but none of them are widely adopted.
by petre | 2025-12-25 09:28:29+00:00
It does weird stuff. I've bitched about it do much to my workmates until they disabled autoformat features wich cause 5k line conflicts in SCM. I'm ysing codium which also does Clippy dmart stuff trying to be helpful and breaks code. They keep pushing AI junk and break functionality to the point that I'm looking for another editor with usable muliple cursors (not *vim and not helix which breaks my vim muscle memory).
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-25 09:28:43+00:00
Mastodon doesn't do enough to prevent centralization of control - when you make an account to use the network, you're making that account on some specific server. This ties your ability to communicate on the network under that identity both to the server operator, and to the domain name of the server. A fediverse server can go down because its maintainers deliberately shut it down or lose interest and stop maintaining it; a domain name can be lost or taken by a government (see the queer.af debacle). The administrators of a fediverse server can also decide to censor your posts or remove your account if they don't like what you post - and it's hard to argue that they don't have the right to do so because they're the ones running the server and storing your account as a row in their database.

If you run your own single-user fediverse server, you are the admin yourself so most of these aren't problems (although you still don't control your domain name). But it's difficult for most people to maintain their own social media server, so most people don't do this, meaning that they are still subject to the petty tyranny of their social media provider. It's just that instead of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, it's whatever random person runs the server that they randomly picked to put their account on.
by aebtebeten | 2025-12-25 09:29:14+00:00
I got nerdsniped by this quantity, and here's more or less where I wound up after monte-carlo sampling some rabbit holes:

- the Praetorian Guard, famous for having been involved in many a roman imperial coup, varied in size between 4'500-6'000.

- on 18 Brumiare VIII, Napoleon had at least 6'000 men at his disposal.

- modern brigades are around 5'000.

- the smallest successful coups since 2010 have been in Africa, with force estimates of 4'000-6'000.

At least in the pre-drone era, "handful" has quantitatively meant at least several thousand (although it's probably true that any political component would have to liaise with only a few senior officers, and a modern brigade is composed of a handful of modern battalions)

[note that Napoleon's was recursively a coup-within-a-coup; his political partners thought they were the brains and he was the muscle, but events proved them mistaken]
by petepete | 2025-12-25 09:29:17+00:00
Nothing.

fd, rg and ag all work how I expect them to work and the arguments and order fit in with my expectations for modern cli applications.

They're recursive, they ignore things I don't care about and I can just give them the string I'm looking for, no path, no -name or --recursive etc.

find and grep do similar things but work entirely differently and their args aren't even in the same format.
by ipnon | 2025-12-25 09:29:31+00:00
This is a great example of how basic napkin math eliminates many classes of errors.

And most certainly we will see alien code. Already in speedrunning we see a pattern of “ahuman” behavior, where a learner optimized for a well-defined system begins to lose the implicit beauty of the system that draws humans to it. Before RL models became feasible for speedrunning, top runs were these apexes of performance, the tightest possible lines and utmost precision. But the RL speedruns use impossible strategies like nonstop tricks impossible to do with hands, and they lose a great deal of beauty in this manner, at least to some people.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we can derive from this example is that the improvements are still marginal compared to top players. A casual player might beat a track in 1:10, the world record might be 1:00, and the RL record might be 0:50. So we still see significant yet undeniably marginal improvements in performance.

I suppose soon enough we will have experimental evidence for all these ideas!
by RobotToaster | 2025-12-25 09:30:38+00:00
You're too young to remember then ;)

A sovereign was officially the pound coin from 1817 until 1931, when gold convertibility was abolished. Although it slowly vanished from active circulation from the beginning of WWI.

(On a similar note, in 1919 the silver coins were actual sterling silver with £1 being approximately 113g of sterling silver.)
by extropy | 2025-12-25 09:31:33+00:00
Thanks for linking Arcan, looks interesting.

After a quick scan, Arcan seems to be pushing a microkernel approach, with some clients providing display server capabilities and others talking to them via shared memory. This will have the same problem as all other microkernels - nice for research, but the extra completely outweights the marginal benefits over a monolithic thing that generally has a smaller API surface to maintain.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-25 09:31:59+00:00
I'd say comparing hardware vs software is very different. If there were 5+ competing OS's with decent market share, maybe you'd have a point there. But the reality is that mobile software is controlled by 2 trillionaire tech companies that made use of anti-competitive measures to prevent consumer alternatives.

Heck maybe even 3. The desktop scene doesn't feel that much better, but them all allowing "sideloading" as we call it today alleviates full control of the OS.
Ask HN: Did anyone make sponsorship or crowdfunding work?
by asim | 2025-12-25 09:32:29+00:00
Hey all

I'm working on a new project and thinking about alternative funding paths.

Previously I founded a startup around an open source project, had a corporate sponsor, raised VC funding, etc. But something about that feels misaligned with my values. I really tried to make it work and struggled.

I was wondering if anyone has made sponsorship or crowdfunding from users work? I noticed that Kagi the search engine toots that it's entirely user and crowdfunded after being bootstrapped by it's founder. What made something like this work?
by kgeist | 2025-12-25 09:35:49+00:00
>A world is consistent and has a set of rules that must be followed.

Large language models are mostly consistent, but they have mistakes even in grammar too, from time to time. And it's usually called a "hallucination". Can't we say physics errors are a kind of "hallucination" too, in a world model? I guess the question is, what hallucination rate are we willing to tolerate.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-25 09:37:11+00:00
I'm a hoarder so I'd just keep it around. I still have my Playstation 2 after all.

Every laptop except my first college one is also somewhere around my house. Even my $300 high school laptop that could really only run Microsoft Word (I remember running Fallout 3 on it at lowest settings at a brisk 10 fps). Even for that college laptop I salvaged the storage, ram, and disk drive.
by tetromino_ | 2025-12-25 09:37:16+00:00
> I’d appreciate hearing what others would do differently

Very naive answer: before doing anything I would start by playing around in the GCP pricing calculator [1] to figure out how much it was going to cost during development and in production. Did you use the calculator tool? If so, were its estimates accurate?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator
by miki123211 | 2025-12-25 09:38:01+00:00
Since you're here and this is likely to become professionally relevant for me pretty soon, what is the best way you know of for securely running Python inside Python?

I was looking for something like Pyodide but runnable from Python, but that doesn't seem to exist quite yet. I can get a Python interpreter to run in wasmtime, but that doesn't have the Pyodide goodies like Micropip etc. Sadly, Pyodide itself seems fully married to JS, as it compiles to Emscripten and not WASI.

I'm almost tempted to just go with a small binary embedding V8 and running Pyodide inside V8 isolates or something.

(I know I can do this via Firecracker / GVisor / whatever, that is not the solution I'm looking for.)
by sapphicsnail | 2025-12-25 09:38:38+00:00
There are 2 competing textual varients in the Greek sources. The word for "good will" (eudokia) shows up in the nominative and the genitive. If it's genitive it modifies humankind if it's nominative it's parallel to the first half of the sentence meaning, in Heaven let there be glory to God, on Earth let there be good will to humankind.

That was fun! I read that verse earlier today and I didn't know about the version with genitive case.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-25 09:39:07+00:00
> You don't realize how much savings we used to extract by progressively upgrading the same desktop PC for two to three generations instead of throwing away the whole PC and buying a new one each time. This dismissal of the feature is bizarrely shortsighted.

The main things I keep long term are the drives and power supply, and those can be kept on most laptops too.

In the medium term I get a lot of use out of separately upgrading CPU and GPU, but most frameworks can't do that. The 16 gets half a point in that category because the options are still very limited.

A Framework lets me keep the same screen which is cool. And it lets me keep the same chassis which is not as beneficial if it's not a particularly good chassis.

If I'm generous, the extra flexibility in a Framework would save me $200 every 5-8 years. Which leaves me in the hole, further if I'm less generous.

I hope they reach a scale where they can price things better, and I'm willing to pay some extra for what they do, but not as much as they currently charge. Looking at Framework's site I can get the same specs as the author for $1800. Lenovo offers a model with a worse screen but otherwise the same specs for $600. Gigabyte has a fully matching model plus bonus GPU for $1150, and for half of November it was on sale for $1000. And if you want an RTX 5070 then Framework is $2500 and Gigabyte is $1350.