MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nicbou | 2025-12-08 09:09:37+00:00
I use it as a write only medium. I post about what I am doing and leave. It keeps my audience and people in my industry aware of what I am working on, and that makes my work more impactful. I have met many people that way, including my current partner.

It’s part of my strategy of working in public. It’s good for business and for my morale.
by watwut | 2025-12-08 09:09:43+00:00
I found nerds based analysis juvenile, immature and flat out wrong. First, being manager and business man in tech does not make one nerd. The people DeBoer hates are all people with high social skills and ability to impress others. Nothing suggests they were nerds as in "having singular obsession with something and being socially incompetent about it".

Second, there are only about two nerd kids in the show - Dustin and his girlfriend. Steve is a jock that saves a day. Both Byers are artistic. The rest of kids are normal average although somewhat introverted boys. There is a bookish girl, misfit skateboarder girl and "normal" gay girl. If anything, the show is covering all stereotypes that there are and paints them all in positive light. You can choose your hero that is kind of like you and feel good about the show. Even if you are an adult. Hopper is a flawed hero, Byers is stereotypical mom except smart and can fight.

That is, imo, another reason for the success of the show. No matter which stereotype you relate to, you can feel good about yourself. Unless you are Freddie, I guess, and feel like a show where nerds are not bullied by sociopathic jocks, but cooperate and befriend each other must be an aberration.
by Davidzheng | 2025-12-08 09:10:26+00:00
Even if they are "simplistic projections", which I don't think is the correct way to think about it, there's no reason that more LLM thoughts in middle layers can't also exist and project down at the end. Though there might be efficency issues because the latent thoughts have to be recomputed a lot.

Though I do think in human brains it's also an interplay where what we write/say also loops back into the thinking as well. Which is something which is efficient for LLMs.
by eru | 2025-12-08 09:10:30+00:00
Mostly agreed that Java, warts and all, has gotten better, and will stick around. It's the new COBOL, for better or worse. (I still wouldn't want to use it voluntarily, but if someone pays me enough money, sure.)

However:

> Java is also the workhorse of the big data ecosystem and moves enough money either as product revenue or as transactions than most nations GDP.

The global financial system moves so much money around that comparisons to GDP are a bit silly. Financial transactions dwarf GDP by so much that even a bit player of a technology will facilitate more transactions than global GDP.

(And that's fine. Many of these transactions are offsetting, and that it's a sign of an efficient market that the mispricings are so small that participants needs giant gross flows to profit from them.

Somewhat related: a single high capacity fire hose (at about 75kg of water per second) moves about the same number of electrons as you'd need to power the total US electricity consumption at 120V. Obviously, your fire hose also sprays plenty of pesky protons which completely offset the electrical current from the electrons.)
by bhaak | 2025-12-08 09:10:31+00:00
The JVM proved to the mainstream that a virtual machine good be as fast (sometimes even faster) than a compiled binary. Because of that it took a lot of the market share of C/C++ in the 90s.

You got a buffer overflow safe language without compromise of speed. After it has been loaded, of course. But that's why Java had such a tremendous effect in Web services where the load times are negligible to the run time.
Show HN: Bat‑KV – A tiny single‑file KV database for Windows Batch scripts
by WaterRun | 2025-12-08 09:11:39+00:00
Windows Batch (BAT) is well-known for its limited capabilities and retro syntax — to the point where even basic persistent storage lacks simple, generic tools. Bat-KV, as the name suggests, is a tiny “BAT library” that provides the simplest possible persistence layer: basic CRUD operations stored in a custom plain-text .bkv file.

It’s ultra‑lightweight (the whole project is just 346 lines — trivial for an LLM), and extremely easy to use. Just download it from the GitHub Release page (https://github.com/Water-Run/Bat-KV/releases/tag/Bat-KV), drop it into your script directory, and "import" it.

Here’s a minimal example:

batch @echo off REM Minimal Bat-KV usage example

REM Create database call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.New echo Create database: %BKV_STATUS%

REM Add data call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Append "name" "Alice" call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Append "age" "25" call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Append "city" "Beijing"

REM Read data call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Fetch "name" echo Name: %BKV_RESULT%

call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Fetch "age" echo Age: %BKV_RESULT%

REM Check if data exists call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Include "email" if "%BKV_RESULT%"=="No" ( echo Email not set, adding default... call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Append "email" "alice@example.com" )

REM Delete data call Bat-KV.bat :BKV.Remove "city" echo Remove city: %BKV_STATUS%

pause

The repository also includes a test program and a simple DBMS, along with detailed documentation to help you get started quickly. If this tiny project is useful to you, consider leaving a star to support it :)
by lionkor | 2025-12-08 09:12:04+00:00
You can run an entire, productive modern Linux, (minus a modern browser*) on 128MB of RAM and one slow core. If you push lower, you start running into issues. I would recommend having around 200MB or so of swap for sudden spikes of memory usage. An aggressive userspace OOM killer may make life easier.

On Linux, if you just run SDDM that launches xfce, you will quickly OOM the system, because SDDM will stay in memory. The same goes for most desktop managers. So the real way is to just `startx` your desktop environment directly and use console login.

i3 is the best call for usability/a modern feeling, with extremely low memory usage. The reasoning is that, if you're used to sway or i3, this will feel like home, and it has all the features you need to be productive. Anything else will eat more RAM, from what I've tried. It also feels really fast, even if your GPU is struggling, because there are no animations and very little movement.

I would personally recommend Alpine, as it really comes with nothing extra. You can then install a desktop environment manually (or use their setup-desktop script if you have plenty of RAM and storage). TinyCore is a bit too wild to do modern computing on; the paradigms are just too outdated, the installation is a bit of a pain, and the installer would OOM on the same system where I can run my entire i3 alpine setup.

DSL seems cool, I haven't tried it; I just wanted to share my experience.

You can try all of this by setting up a qemu VM. Be aware that you will need more RAM just for the BIOS, so maybe if you configure 210MB, youll end up with around 128 usable, or so. Your OS will report how much is usable, accurately.

You can then set CPU cores with usage limits, limit HDD speeds to 2000's HDD speeds (so that your swap isnt fast), and so on. Its a fun exercise to try to develop software on such a limited machine, and its fun to see which software launches and which doesn't.

*: the browser is an issue. Firefox is the preferrable option, but wouldn't launch on so little RAM. NetSurf or elinks/lynx etc. is the way to go, but websites that rely on JS to work, like any and all Rust documentation sites, will be completely unusable.
The overlooked engineering behind high-efficiency LEDs
by emmasuntech | 2025-12-08 09:12:10+00:00
LED bulbs feel simple, but the physics and materials science behind them are surprisingly complex. From heat dissipation challenges to driver circuitry and phosphor quality, small design choices dramatically impact lifespan and color accuracy. Curious how others here think LED tech will evolve over the next decade—especially in efficiency and micro-LED applications.
by dwroberts | 2025-12-08 09:12:40+00:00
Pleased this is being discussed somewhere as it’s something that has troubled me for a while.

There are so many third party actions where the docs or example reference the master branch. A quick malicious push and they can presumably exfiltrate data from a ton of repositories

(Even an explicit tag is vulnerable because it can just be moved still, but master branch feels like not even trying)
by cons0le | 2025-12-08 09:13:25+00:00
>I still can't believe that they paywalled the ability for the video to keep playing when the screen is turned off.

That's why I will never pay, no matter how much people glaze yt premium. I distinctly remember the day they took that simple feature away. uBlock and Vanced work fine, and it's also not hard to download to my media server for offline

I don't want to reward a company for shitty practices. What are they even doing at youtube besides changing the UI every 3 months and stuffing AI where it isn't wanted/needed.

At the bare minimum they need to enable the ability to blacklist entire channels, like I can easily do on my home setup. And ban AI videos without a label. Then they can have my $8
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-08 09:13:37+00:00
I only refer to bitcoin (and lightning as Layer2), not crypto. Real-world problems will become more relevant if you live in a 2nd or 3rd world country:

- private (as in privacy) store of value without necesity to build a vault (or trust a 3rd party for storing)

- Transfer of money by immigrants "back home". Good luck sending money to Cuba or Venezuela right now

- Micropayments / Webpayments via Lightning (TradFi failed on this) - you can literally send 10cent right now to someone at the other end of the world - or pay for a news article.

- Decentralized / Ad-free social media like Nostr. Pay with micropayments for everything (hosting, forwarding, micro-donation for content). If you look at how damaging the ad-based social media economy is fighting for engagement and attention, it is obvious society is better of without Instagram/Facebook/Youtube/Tiktok trying to get you to watch more, to get more ad revenue

- Insurance against dictatorships taking over free democracies. If monetary policy is not done my the government, they can't use it to control the people. In Bitcoin, the people are deciding and voting on monetary policy independent of the government (miners, node runners/validators, acceptance of transfers etc.)

- Insurance about fiat devaluation (governments printing money)
by rickydroll | 2025-12-08 09:13:49+00:00
One would think it's the same, but it's not. Each leg of a route is unique. Travel time, distance, and stops on the way. They are not interchangeable.

Practical example: a former customer of mine had a specific route carved out for transporting fruit and vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast. They had exactly one time slot in the day they could take, which brought the travel time down to about 3-5 days. If they missed that time slot, it was up over 10 days. If one of the route segments was out of service, it could have been two weeks or more. Yeah, you could get from point A to point B, but the time made the alternative routes unacceptable.

The power grid is not sufficiently redundant to protect against many forms of damage. Find power substations and count how many 10 kVA lines feed each substation. Then ask yourself, what happens when that substation goes down because a good old boy decided to take potshots at the transformers? When there's a natural disaster like a winter storm here in Boston, there are a lot of power outages, indicating that the grid is not a grid but a lot of branches.

As for the last mile, no, cell towers don't take over for my FiOS fiber when it fails, nor does Starlink. Cell, fiber, cable, and Starlink are not expanding the market for internet access. The cable market, the internet end-user market, is mostly saturated. Users switch but do not duplicate the service.

FWIW, this is another example of you never eliminate single points of failure, you only move them.
by copirate | 2025-12-08 09:13:51+00:00
> giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous)

Not perfectly. A lot of heuristics are needed to link a unique owner to multiple transactions. With bitcoin, it's recommended to use a new address for every transaction so, for example, in a basic transaction, it's not so easy to identify which output is the recipient and which is the change.

And there's Monero that tries to hide these links a lot more.
by eru | 2025-12-08 09:14:04+00:00
> Java may be used a lot, but so is Windows. It's an accident of history, of early adoption and network effects, rather than being inherently good technology.

Going on a tangent: Windows is an interesting example to bring up, because the Windows versions everyone uses today have about as much to do with the 'accident of history / early adoption' versions that were based on DOS as using Wine on Linux has.

It would perhaps be like today's JVM being register based, when the first version were stack based.

I don't actually know how much the JVM has changed over time.
by kragen | 2025-12-08 09:14:29+00:00
If your database of software projects has a thousand web browsers in it, you have to ask why all those programmers couldn't work together and write just ten or fifteen web browsers; maybe they're hobbyists who are reinventing the wheel for fun? If so, is that a good basis for estimating a new web browser?

The first time I worked on a database-backed web site, my team had written their own ORM, and while I was there we put together a thing so we could use the same view on more than one web page. The second time, we used web.py and no ORM. The third time, we used Ruby on Rails, which solved most of the problems we had on the first project I mentioned out of the box. Most recently, I used Django, which is roughly as convenient as Rails but easier to debug. I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing Claude Code could probably put together a usable Django site in a few minutes.

So achieving equivalent results requires very different activities over time, because each time someone does it, we accumulate not just knowledge but code that makes it easier the next time—thousands of times easier, if the novelty is small enough. This impedes estimation.

Often, too, the things we're trying to estimate are things like "add automatic Dart dependency support to Blaze". The time-consuming part of this is not breaking the rest of Blaze in the process. What reference class do we use for estimating adding new languages to Blaze without breaking it? Is Dart more like C++ or more like Go? These are questions for lawyers, not actuaries.

Maybe the videogames industry is different because they don't share code and don't maintain it? But it seems like an awful lot of games these days are getting written in Godot and Unity where 15 years ago people would have written their own engines... and problems that were major technical challenges for Quake are trivial now.

If someone wants ragdolls in their game, they can just license your code, right? They don't have to write it themselves. A dataset of how long it took people to implement ragdolls from scratch wouldn't provide any insight into how long it should take to integrate your ragdoll library.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-08 09:14:34+00:00
Words are the "simplistic" projection of an LLM's abstract thoughts.

An LLM has: words in its input plane, words in its output plane, and A LOT of cross-linked internals between the two.

Those internals aren't "words" at all - and it's where most of the "action" happens. It's how LLMs can do things like translate from language to language, or recall knowledge they only encountered in English in the training data while speaking German.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-12-08 09:14:35+00:00
Is running Pihole or Adguard home even worth it these days ?

You can get something like NextDNS for $18/year, which is probably less than what you pay for the power required to serve Pihole or Adguard Home, and you get enterprise level infrastructure for it, along with redundancy, and it works "everywhere".

Yes, you (probably) need a caching resolver at home, and that could be Pihole or Adguard, but going through hoops to setup Wireguard and have all DNS resolve over that, just to reach pihole at home, that sounds like overkill.

Anyway, In case it's not obvious, NextDNS is how i roll, using a "stupid" caching DNS resolver at home.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-08 09:14:57+00:00
I don't think Safari mattered much. Java was still used for things that wouldn't work on phones without massive redesigns anyway.

I doubt you'd have been able to bootstrap Runescape in any form, even rewritten in native code, on the first iPhone to support apps. Applets worked fine on desktops and tablets which was what they were designed for.

Browser vendors killed the API because when they looked at crashes, freezes, and performance opportunities, the Flash/Java/etc. API kept standing out. Multithreaded rendering became practical only after the old extension model was refactorerd and even then browsers were held down by the terrible plugin implementations they needed to work around.
by wisty | 2025-12-08 09:15:02+00:00
Pretty much. People say it's meant to replace laws and regulations, but if it's successful then it won't.

The US has a large bitcoin strategic reserve. Banks offer bitcoin accounts (in some countries). You can get a loan backed by your bitcoin.

We're not yet at the point where you can get a credit card and 60 year home loan denominated in bitcoin, with the fed writing bonds or even issuing fiat to stabilise rates, but if it was more popular then is there any technical reason we couldn't get there?
by vletal | 2025-12-08 09:15:05+00:00
I was so stoked, when it was released. Loved the approach they take. So, I can say, there was at least one person who asked for it.

With the hindsight, it is not a great mainstream language and the new opinionated language is too hard for junior Joe developers.

Anyway, you clearly have not read the article, as it is about bug in a transitive dependency, not an actual Scala 3 issue.

p.s.: Scala compiler is one of the most aggressively tested pieces of software in the JVM ecosystem.
by seec | 2025-12-08 09:15:21+00:00
Well, they tout altruism, but they don't actually practice it. It's all fake; if they were true altruists, they wouldn't need to argue all day about people needing to share their stuff. In altruism, there is the concept of not personally benefiting or not requiring reciprocity.

But the demagogues endlessly promoting communist ideologies definitely benefit from it by appearing morally superior and getting resources for no valuable work in exchange.

The GPL, shows that, actually, they are not really ok with the no reciprocity part.

There are very few truly altruistic individuals, and their defining characteristic is that they just do the good stuff instead of endlessly talking about it for brownie points. Basically the complete reverse of communists (and everyone far left in general).
by geokon | 2025-12-08 09:15:50+00:00
Wouldn't it make more sense to run/emulate JVM bytecode on WASM instead of compiling Java to WASM? It seems like that'd be a much easier task.

From a high level WASM and JVM byte code seems incredibly similar (though I'm sure the containerizing and IO are radically different). I never really understood why WASM wasn't some JVM subset/extension.

Not an expert at all in this, so genuinely curious to hear from someone who understands this space well
by 9dev | 2025-12-08 09:15:53+00:00
Both, kind of. The demand to have at least a rough estimate when something will be available is justified IMHO—other departments obviously need to maintain their own timelines and schedule work that depends on output from engineering.

Also, I wholeheartedly agree that we do need to question the work culture we follow and the measures we make, and that managers with control issues shouldn't dictate them.

On the other hand, the point I was getting to is that a critique of estimation that amounts to "the work I do is so bespoke and unique and novel and important that I can't be bothered to estimate how long it'll take", is just… ignorant. Most software engineers are not lone wolf 10X wizards without any accountability, have managers and other departments to report to, and thus are not eligible to make that point.
by JohnLocke4 | 2025-12-08 09:15:56+00:00
No, that is not what I mean. The efficiency of a piece of knowledge is not only a function of its intrinsic value, but also how easy it is to understand. Sure, the people who are expected to read the document are smart and this is probably the best way to do it, but even Lockheed engineers are fallible.

If anything, the enemy will be defeated before they have had the time to understand the document in case it gets leaked xD
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-08 09:16:31+00:00
If you want to leave a variable unused, you can just assign it to _ (underscore) though. IIRC gofmt (which your editor should run when you save) will warn you about it but your code will compile.

It's a slightly different mindset, for sure, but having gofmt bitch about stuff before you commit it rather than have the compiler bitch about it helps you "clean as you go" rather than writing some hideous ball of C++ and then a day of cleaning the stables once it actually runs. Or at least it does for me...
by uxcolumbo | 2025-12-08 09:16:32+00:00
It looked good at the beginning, but then I found out about its creator - DHH. Not someone I want to support. There are better distros out there (Omarchy isn't a distro btw).

Just a few issues highlighted here:

https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance

https://paulbjensen.co.uk/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-l...
by torginus | 2025-12-08 09:16:44+00:00
I'm surprised about how popular these racist explanations about why the program failed, and not exploring the fact that the hardware, software and training for teachers might have been lacking

If they were good at what they set out to do, the program would've been successful and desired in Western countries (perhaps with upgraded models). But it wasn't.

I'd say the lack of ability to self-reflect on the shortcomings of the HW/SW/Infra and the willingness of the program's creators to embrace such explanations is much more telling about the probable cause of failure.

I'm sure most of these supposedly cognitively inferior Peruvian kids are on their laptops right now, playing League or Overwatch, with most of them having smartphones.

In broader strokes, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think the story of Africa is worth exploring, after a century of Western selfless efforts of trying to civilize and develop the continent, very little progress has been made. Then the Chinese moved in with far less noble intentions and a profit motive, and succeeded beyond imagination at civilization-building.
by eru | 2025-12-08 09:16:57+00:00
> That will just be distraction tbh, Java has its strength in large scale systems and it should just focus on those rather than get caught up in Frontend's messy world.

Multiple people can work on different things in the Java ecosystem.

Compiling Rust to WASM doesn't really distract anyone from compiling Rust to x86 or ARM, either.