MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-12-27 00:21:27+00:00
It's a balance thing. You can't make a language without any features, but you can be too small ('Brainfuck') and you can definitely be too large ('C++'). There is a happy medium in there somewhere and the lack of a string type was perceived as a major shortcoming of C, but then again, if you realize that they didn't even have structs in the predecessor to C (even though plenty of languages at the time did have similar constructs) they got enough of it right that it ended up taking off.

C and personal computing hit their stride at roughly the same time, your choices were (if you didn't feel like spending a fortune) Assembly, C, Pascal and BASIC for most systems that mere mortals could afford. BASIC was terribly slow, Pascal and C a good match and assembler only for those with absolutely iron discipline. Which one of the two won out (C or Pascal) was a toss up, Pascal had it's own quirks and it was mostly a matter of which of the two won out in terms of critical mass. Some people still swear by Pascal (and usually that makes them Delphi programmers, which will be around until the end because the code for the heat-death of the universe was writting in it).

For me it was Mark Williams C that clinched it, excellent documentation, good UNIX (and later Posix) compatibility and whatever I wrote on the ST could usually be easily ported to the PC. And once that critical mass took over there was really no looking back, it was C or bust. But mistakes were made, and we're paying the price for that in many ways. Ironically, C enabled the internet to come into existence and the internet then exposed mercilessly all of the inherent flaws in C.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-27 00:21:39+00:00
> I can create hypothetical cases for either location to be higher or lower than the other.

- Transmission is easier in the city due to closer contact and more shared resources.

- Urban parasites are likely to be more debilitating to the victim because they may come from an unfamiliar environment. (Compare how hookworm in the American south was a nuisance to blacks, but debilitating to whites.)

We know that diseases were a much heavier burden in cities than they were in rural regions. Parasites are mostly just bigger diseases; you'd need to come up with a really interesting idea to explain why they were a smaller issue in cities than outside of them.

Hookworm is an interesting example to consider here; you catch them by stepping on soil with your bare feet. Stereotypically they are a problem of the rural south. But I found this paper on "neglected tropical diseases" in the United States, which had this to say:

> Toxocariasis is a soil-transmitted helminth infection [it isn't hookworm, but hookworm is also a soil-transmitted helminth infection] that can result in visceral larva migrans, visual impairment from ocular larval migrans, or a condition that resembles asthma, known as covert toxocariasis. Urban playgrounds in the US have recently been shown to be a particularly rich source of Toxocara eggs, and inner-city children are at high risk of acquiring the infection.

https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journa...

Another example to consider might be covid, where my read of the consensus is that (1) initial nature -> human infection is more likely in rural areas (where there's more nature), but (2) once it can live in humans, it's a bigger problem in urban areas (where there are more humans).
by wdporter | 2025-12-27 00:23:37+00:00
alt-0151 (numeric keypad) on windows

Some other useful ones to memorise:

0150 the endash, 0133 the ellipsis, 0145 the single quote opening, 0146 the apostrophe/single quote closing, 0147 and 0148 for double quotes, 0149 for a bullet point.
by blibble | 2025-12-27 00:24:03+00:00
> The argument against AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned either. Humans (and other life) are also self-perpetuating and mutating. We could produce a super intelligence that is against us at any moment!

there is fundamental limit to how much damage one person can do by speaking directly to others

e.g.: one impact of one bad school teacher is limited to at most a few classes

but chatgpt/grok is emitting its statistically generated dogshit directly to entire world of kids

... and voters
by solarkraft | 2025-12-27 00:25:07+00:00
The kindle system is a joy to dig around in. The UI‘s based on X, awesome WM, GTK and a bunch of mostly unobfuscated shell scripts and JS.

One thing I‘d love would to find a way to make it wake up every once in a while to turn it into an auto-refreshing display. I haven’t found a way to do so without external hardware (which could save a lot of power by not having to wake the whole system, but I think the wakeup can’t be triggered via the serial port and other contacts aren’t as easily accessible).
by crawshaw | 2025-12-27 00:26:18+00:00
Apologies for the vagueness of the home page, we were not expecting to be here today. There is a little more info in our first blog post https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev and docs, but far needs to be written.

(We have also built some interesting tech behind this that we are excited to write up, I have a doc two pages long of blog posts we want to write.)
by billy99k | 2025-12-27 00:26:35+00:00
Australia just blamed the wrong people as an excuse for a horrific gun crime and is now taking rights ways from its citizens as a result. Videos of the crime are being completely censored and if you mention who committed the crime online, you go to jail.

The UK has slid into complete authoritarianism and is also jailing anyone that that speaks the truth under the guise of 'hate speech laws'.

Canada has been eroding its citizens rights for years now. During the trucker protest for instance, many had their bank accounts frozen and were arrested for merely protesting.

Who shouldn't we be able to trust again? These nations aren't free and the people on the left will either ignore it or deny it, because it's left-wing authoritarianism.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-27 00:26:38+00:00
It's not just greenfield-ness but the fact it's a commercial endeavor (even if the code is open-source).

Building a commercial product means you pay money (or something they equally value) to people to do your bidding. You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money).

In this case it's a company that believes they can make a "good" package manager they can sell/monetize somehow and so built that "good" package manager. Turns out it's at least good enough that other people now like it too.

This would never work in a FOSS world because the project will be stuck in endless planning as everyone will have an opinion on how it should be done and nothing will actually get done.

Similar story with systemd - all the bitching you hear about it (to this day!) is the stuff that would've happened during its development phase had it been developed as a typical FOSS project and ultimately made it go nowhere - but instead it's one guy that just did what he wanted and shared it with the world, and enough other people liked it and started building upon it.
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-27 00:27:12+00:00
> the same sort of reason that retailers can't be held to incorrectly published prices (in the UK at least, a displayed price is an “invitation to tender”, not a contract or other promise)

The hell? Over here, the price tags are a sort of public contract, to which the seller pre-commits. The seller forgot to change the tags? That's not the buyer's problem.
by crawshaw | 2025-12-27 00:27:33+00:00
Thank you! Yes, KVM. And public IPs are very useful and we want to do them. We will have to charge and/or limit them, unlike VMs, unfortunately, because IPv4 is scarce. (I am busy trying to buy some right now.) You can follow along here: https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/6
by jacquesm | 2025-12-27 00:27:52+00:00
I can take anything I wrote in C since ~1982 or so and throw it at a modern C compiler and it will probably work, I may have to set some flags but that's about it. I won't have to hunt up a compiler from that era, so the codebase remains unchanged, which increases the chances that I'm not going to introduce new bugs (though the old ones will likely remain).

If I try the same with a python project that I wrote less than five years ago I'm very, very lucky if I don't end up with a broken system by the time all of the conflicts are resolved. For a while we had Anaconda which solved all of the pain points but it too seems to suffer from dependency hell now.

George Orwell was a writer of English books, not a programmer and whatever he showed us he definitely did not show us that small programming languages constrain our thinking. That's just a very strange link to make, programming languages are not easily compared with the languages that humans use.

What you could say is that a programming languages' 'expressivity' is a major factor in how efficient it is in taking ideas and having them expressed in a particular language. If you take that to an extreme (APL) you end up with executable line-noise. If you take it to the other extreme you end up some of the worst of Java (widget factory factories). There are a lot of good choices to be found in the middle.
by jbaiter | 2025-12-27 00:28:01+00:00
Also not like logging setups outside of k8s can't be a horror show too. Like, have you ever had to troubleshoot a rsyslog based ELK setup? I'll forever have nightmares from debugging RainerScript mixed with the declarative config and having to read the source code to find out why all of our logs were getting dropped in the middle of the night.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-27 00:29:12+00:00
I believe that the outcome of the Ukraine-Russian will shape the world for decades just as WWII did. It is my hope that the Ukrainians succeed in throwing the Russians out of their country. In a post war Ukraine, I'd like to help it rebuild in any way I can, and to do that I have to speak Ukrainian at least conversationally.
by pengaru | 2025-12-27 00:30:53+00:00
In 2014, the solar sector only accounted for around 11 percent of silver demand. That rose to 29 percent in 2024.

According to a research paper by scientists at the University of New South Wales, solar manufacturers will likely require over 20 percent of the current annual silver supply by 2027. By 2050, solar panel

source: https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2025/12/15/silver-industria...
by bryanstjohn | 2025-12-27 00:31:04+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Bryan founder of ForwardToAudio.

The Problem: Like many of you, I subscribe to way too many long-form newsletters (Substack, technical digests, etc.), but I never find the time to actually sit down and read them. I tried using standard screen readers, but listening to them read URLs, "view in browser" links, and footer disclaimers was unbearable.

The Solution: I built a tool that creates a private podcast feed from your emails.
1. Ingestion: You get a unique email address. We use Cloudflare Workers to catch the inbound mail instantly.
2. AI Cleaning: We don't just read the raw text. We run a 3-stage pipeline (Cheerio -> Mozilla Readability -> GPT-4o-mini) to strip the "email junk," remove tracking pixels, and fix the formatting.
3. Hybrid TTS: We prioritize a self-hosted instance of Kokoro TTS (running on a Reserved VM) for high-quality, low-latency audio, with a fallback to Google Cloud Neural2 for resilience.
4. RSS: It generates a standard podcast feed you can add directly to Apple Podcasts or Overcast.

How it works:
Forward an email to providedemail@forwardtoaudio.com (sign up to get your own permanent address). It gets processed and appears in your feed minutes later.

Tech Stack:
* Backend: Express/TypeScript with Drizzle ORM & Postgres.
* Audio Engine: Self-hosted Kokoro (Primary) + Google Neural2 (Failover circuit breaker).
* Parsing: Mozilla Readability for extraction, LLMs for polish/SSML insertion.

It’s free to try (no credit card). I’d love to know if the parsing handles your weirdest newsletters correctly—email HTML is a beast!
by quuxplusone | 2025-12-27 00:31:41+00:00
Seems somewhat reminiscent of the "Petition of Who and Which" (1711), Spectator #78:

https://books.google.com/books?id=c6MIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA86

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20844

But if I understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395467 correctly, this em-dash broadside was itself AI-generated, so any similarity to the above might be completely unintended by the human who wrote the prompt. (Anyway, the similarity is superficial or spiritual at best.)
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-12-27 00:32:11+00:00
I stick to HN for finding interesting technical articles (whenever you all aren't bikeshedding about LLMs lol)

2025 Online:
Noahpinion, Zeihan on Geopolitics, Ezra's column NYTimes, Where's Your Ed At

2025 Books:
Abundance, Human Nature - Thomas Bell,
(Plus a handful of books on maintaining faith despite not being politically conservative)

Looking forward to in 2026:
Everything is Tuberculosis - John Green
by contingencies | 2025-12-27 00:32:21+00:00
According to a voluminous illustrated tome I acquired during my extended stay, Yunnan has at least seven species of native psilocybe. Like nearby areas along the Himalayas, cannabis and opium are endemic and widely utilized in traditional cultures of the area. Heroin processed in Myanmar became a problem in rural Yunnan the early 2000s and present-era government shut it down with a heavy-handed campaign around 15 years ago. These days it's probably trans-shipped more than locally consumed.
by ggm | 2025-12-27 00:32:49+00:00
Without projecting some future non existing ideal, which of these hateful left wing authoritarian states would you refuse to visit, or live in? How much would e.g. the 5 year or more life expectancy they have over the US alter that or do you believe life there is so oppressed that even living longer would be punishment?

BTW this question does not mean I accept any or even part of your premise.

(I live in one of them and have lived in one other and visit all three, the US, the EU, China and other places frequently for work)
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-27 00:33:08+00:00
I had worms as a kid once in the nineties, I ate some cookies I found buried in the sand on the playground.

It’s not super common (if you live in Europe) but it happens.

Meanwhile my friends who grew up in a tropical country they had to take anti-worm meds regularly.

It depends a lot on your circumstances
by SpaceNugget | 2025-12-27 00:33:16+00:00
As a quick and kind of oversimplified example of what zero copy means, imagine you read the following json string from a file/the network/whatever:

json = '{"user":"nugget"}' // from somewhere

A simple way to extract json["user"] to a new variable would be to copy the bytes. In pythony/c pseudo code

let user = allocate_string(6 characters)
for i in range(0, 6)
user[i] = json["user"][i]
// user is now the string "nugget"

instead, a zero copy strategy would be to create a string pointer to the address of json offset by 9, and with a length of 6.

{"user":"nugget"}
^ ]end

The reason this can be tricky in C is that when you call free(json), since user is a pointer to the same string that was json, you have effectively done free(user) as well.

So if you use user after calling free(json), You have written a classic _memory safety_ bug called a "use after free" or UAF. Search around a bit for the insane number of use after free bugs there have been in popular software and the havoc they have wreaked.

In rust, when you create a variable referencing the memory of another (user pointing into json) it keeps track of that (as a "borrow", so that's what the borrow checker does if you have read about that) and won't compile if json is freed while you still have access to user. That's the main memory safety issue involved with zero-copy deserialization techniques.
Show HN: LynxPrompt – repo-first AI config generator and shareable blueprints
by geiser | 2025-12-27 00:34:27+00:00
Hi! I’m Sergio, the founder of LynxPrompt: https://lynxprompt.com

I built it because I got tired of rewriting the same “how I want the AI to code” rules every time I started a new repo. LynxPrompt generates and manages AI coding rules/config files in a portable way across IDEs and other AI-enabled coding tools. It also lets you save, share & discover blueprints (also called templates/AI configs/prompts — the industry has many names for these) made by other devs.

Honestly, I know: yet another AI tool. But my problem was very specific: keeping AI coding rules consistent across projects and tools without relying too much on “memory” features. LynxPrompt focuses on bootstrapping a repo config quickly and making those rules portable and versionable.

What it does:

- Wizard generator: bootstrap an AI config for an existing repo or a new project in minutes

- Portable rules: keep your AI coding preferences consistent across coding sessions

- Blueprints: publish/share (and optionally sell) your team or personal setup

One feature I like a lot is having the API enabled in LynxPrompt, so your AI of choice can self-update its coding rules and save/version them in the platform (also, if you configure it that way in the wizard).

I’m posting to get feedback (and ideally a few early users): Does the “portable AI coding rules” idea make sense? or what would you need to trust shared/paid blueprints (previews, diffs, versioning, ratings, etc.)?... What is your real pain here?

Links below. Thank you and "happy" vibe-coding — at least, we have LynxPrompt ;).

- First blog post: https://lynxprompt.com/blog/thrilled-to-welcome-you

- Docs: https://lynxprompt.com/docs

- Ideas/bugs/support (please, show some love): https://lynxprompt.com/support

- Wizard (requires sign-in—sorry, I decided to do this to prevent abuse): https://lynxprompt.com/wizard
by teleforce | 2025-12-27 00:34:47+00:00
>i get the notion that "human things should not pretend to be human"

I cannot understand why LLM most of time using the words like "I understand" in their conversation with their users although we all know they don't think or understand anything [1]. The irony is that the HN crowds also did not like to highlight this issue by asking Dang to change the title of the original post consisting of "AI system don't think" to something else by claiming it's a provocative title although it's the original title [2].

[1] Secondary school maths showing that AI systems don’t think:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/secondary-school-maths-show...

[2] Using secondary school maths to demystify AI (248 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46245731
by ranger_danger | 2025-12-27 00:34:51+00:00
From what I have seen, the (US) courts seem to make a distinction between 100% machine-automated output with no manual prompting at all, versus a human giving it specific instructions on what to generate. (And yes I realize everything a computer does requires prior instruction of some kind.)

But the issue with copyright I think comes from the distribution of a (potentially derivative or transformative in the legal sense) work, which I would say is typically done manually by a human to some extent, so I think they would be on the hook for any potential violations in that case, possibly even if they cannot actually produce sources themselves since it was LLM-generated.

But the legal test always seems to come back to what I said before, simply "how much was copied, and how obvious is it?" which is going to be up to the subjective interpretation of each judge of every case.
by gpm | 2025-12-27 00:36:13+00:00
By my understanding under US law first sale doctrine means that 3 (both (a) and (c)) doesn't apply, copyright has been exhausted and the intermediate party here doesn't need a license at all to sell the device on. Even if you want to argue the GPL is a contract and not just a license the intermediate owner has never been required to become a party to it. Even if for some reason they agreed to the contract - and somehow it was a binding contract despite the complete lack of consideration - it seems unlikely that the courts would interpret 3 to apply because reselling a device isn't "distributing" within the meaning of copyright law because of first sale doctrine.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-27 00:37:12+00:00
Sure you do, you see a crime where no crime happened. Read my post carefully. I imposed nothing. A standard was imposed onto me. I didn't in turn impose anything on anyone else.

People may agree with you but don't imply something was done when nothing of the sort was even attempted. I did not impose my sloppiness onto others, what happened was someone tried to impose their pedantic-ness onto me and then you falsely accused me of imposing onto others. Please don't make up shit.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-27 00:38:32+00:00
You're being overly literal. It's not "trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process" but rather "using anthropomorphization as a descriptive tool". This situation is not unlike when someone takes issue with an analogy due to erroneously interpreting it as a direct comparison.

> here are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric

So too are there multiple different options when working towards any nontrivial goal in the real world. In the context of stochastic optimization the multi-armed bandit problem is a rather well known concept.

> evolution is not attempting to optimize anything

For the purpose of communication (of some other idea) it could be reasonable to say that the human race merely wants survival first and foremost. That is what evolution is after, at least in a sense. Of course that is not technically correct. Pointing out technical inconsistencies isn't going to convince me that I'm in the wrong here because I've already explicitly acknowledged their presence and explained why as far as I'm concerned objecting to them is simply missing the point.

Switching to a technical angle, to claim that evolution is not optimizing is to claim that water doesn't flow downhill but rather molecules just happen to vibrate and move around at random. It's completely ignoring the broader context. Evolution happens at a species level. It's an abstract concept inherently tied to other abstract concepts such as optimization and survival.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-27 00:40:29+00:00
It's trivial in terms that it will cost them nothing, because it's very likely there are no changes to the kernel, or nothing of value nor commercially-sensitive anyway.

It's not trivial in terms of big company bureaucracy - this request will have to go through so many levels of red tape that they (correctly) decided not complying to random people's requests is more profitable.

I'm sure if you actually sue them then they will comply right away, because at that point paying for some engineer's time to tar up the source tree and send it to you now becomes cheaper than lawyer time.

But their analysis is correct in that nobody will waste time/money suing to get what is effectively a stock kernel they can get from the official source anyway. Which is why these complaints are also a bit stupid - they're not asking for anything of value or using the GPL to advance software freedom by freeing up some valuable code, they're just wasting both theirs and others' time asking for something they can already download directly.
by throw0101c | 2025-12-27 00:40:29+00:00
> Unfortunately even if you naturalize, they're now floating the concept of denaturalization for people opposed to the regime.

They're now floating that birthright citizenship under the 14th isn't really a birthright:

* https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/prot...

* https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5327552/trump-takes-bir...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...