MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-12-26 15:02:08+00:00
> This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-)

Fair enough :-)

This reminds me about pigeon research by Skinner. Skinner placed hungry pigeons in a "Skinner box" and a mechanism delivered food pellets at fixed, non-contingent time intervals, regardless of the bird's behavior. The pigeons, seeking a pattern or control over the food delivery, began to associate whatever random action they were performing at the moment the food appeared with the reward.

I think we humans have similar psychology, i.e. we tend to associate superstitions about patterns of what were doing when we got rewards, if they happen at random intervals.

To me it seems we are at a phase where what works with LLMs *(the reward) are still quite random, but it is psychologically difficult for us to admit it. Therefore we try to invent various kinds of theories of why something appears to work, which are closer to superstitions than real repeatable processes.

It seems difficult to really generalize repeatable processes of what really works, because it depends on too many things. This may be the reason why you are unsuccessful when using these descriptions.

But while it seems less useful to try to work based on theories of what works -- although I had skeptical attitude -- I have found that LLMs can be huge productive boost -- but it really depends on the context.

It seems you just need to keep trying various things, and eventually you may find out what works for you. There is no shortcut where you just read a blog post and then you can do it.

Things I have tried succesfully:
- modifying existing large-ish Django projects, adding new apps to it. It can sometimes use Django components&HTMX/AlpineJS properly, but sometimes starts doing something else. One app uses tenants, and LLM appears to constantly struggle with this.
- creating new Django projects -- this was less successful than modifying existing projects, because LLM could not imitate practices
- Apple Swift mobile and watch applications. This was surprisingly succesful. But these were not huge apps.
- python GUI app was more or less succesful
- GitHub Pages static web sites based on certain content

I have not copied any CLAUDE.md or other files. Every time Claude Code does something I don't appreciate, I add a new line. Currently it is at 26 lines.

I have made a few skills. They are mostly so that they can work independently in a loop, for example test something that does not work.

Typically I try to limit the technologies to something I know really well. When something fails, I can often quickly figure out what is wrong.

I started with the basic plan (I guess it is that $30/month). I only upgraded to $100 Max and later to $180 2xMax because I was hitting limits.

But reason I was hitting limits was because I was working on multiple projects on multiple environments at the same time. The only difference I have seen is that I have hit the limits. I have not seen any difference in quality.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-26 15:02:13+00:00
The article conclusion is just... not good. There are many benefits to using Git as backend, you can point your project to every single commit as a version which makes testing any fixes or changes in libs super easy, it has built in integrity control and technically (sadly not in practice) you could just sign commits and use that to verify whether package is authentic.

It being unoptimal bandwidth wise is frankly just a technical hurdle to get over it, with benefits well worth the drawback
by trgn | 2025-12-26 15:02:23+00:00
spain was no longer a major player in world politics by 1800s, but they had a good 2-3 century run. not sure if the monetary crisis was really did them in, or more just it being the ebb and flow of history. britain's world dominance is long over too. if they did "fuck up", it was because charles v was the first global hegemon, nobody know how to do that, he was in uncharted territory. and obviously no, the merino sheep weren't a better bet long term, that's absurd. global dominion required a cohesive domestic home country to serve as the wellspring of power, not the fractured foedal remnants of a mediaeval europe that required constant war to keep together. and then of course, industrialize early.
by vladsanchez | 2025-12-26 15:03:53+00:00
Become a Tradesman (Carpenter, Electrician, Mechanic, Welder, Plumber, Cleaner, etd) or a tradesman agency! They've become highly paid and most agencies are ripe for acquisition.

But since if you're so lazy/undisciplined to disregard skilling up (Leetcode, Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsight, etc) then I think your race to become one won't be any easier and I can't recommend anything else.

Good luck!
by freedomben | 2025-12-26 15:04:13+00:00
I'm not sure whether this question was asked in good faith, but is actually a damn good one.

I've looked into self hosting and git repo that has horizontal scalability, and it is indeed very difficult. I don't have the time to detail it in a comment here, but for anyone who is curious it's very informative to look at how GitLab handled this with gitaly. I've also seen some clever attempts to use object storage, though I haven't seen any of those solutions put heavily to the test.

I'd love to hear from others about ideas and approaches they've heard about or tried

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly
by VierScar | 2025-12-26 15:04:45+00:00
The first two talks are in the "Ethics, Society & Politics" category, and the third in the "Art & Beauty" category. Why would they need to be about computing?

It's a big organisation, and politics is wrapped up in what they do, along with the post-WWII Antifaschism culture in Germany.

Even if it weren't the case, I don't get why attack them for helping stand up for democracy, something in dire need of advocacy these days
by brinedew | 2025-12-26 15:05:04+00:00
Thank you. I started the development with the interface first, basically making a mockup of how the finished game should look like, and then prodding LLMs with a stick to make a backend that would support this interface without crashing.

Making a nice-looking web GUI without knowing relevant vocabulary was a very clunky process in comparison to code pipelines, basically just pasting screenshots into the chat window and asking LLMs to "line up stuff properly", which they still couldn't manage to do in places.
by bigbluedots | 2025-12-26 15:05:05+00:00
It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up prices for people who need to, ya know, heat their homes and eat
by DiscourseFan | 2025-12-26 15:05:11+00:00
It is not in the interests of the super wealthy alone, just like JP Morgan's railroads were created for his sake but in the end produced great wealth for everyone in America. It is very short sighted to see this as merely some oppression from above. Technology is not class-oriented, it just is, and it happens to be articulated in terms of class because of the mode of social organization we live in.
by nfriedly | 2025-12-26 15:05:19+00:00
My FW13 has two USB-C ports so I can charge from either side and have one free while it's charging, and then USB-A on one side and MicroSD on the other.

That covers all of my frequent needs. (My main monitor has usb-c input, and I have a couple of inexpensive adapters/hubs for HDMI, DP, Ethernet, etc. - all of which are used infrequently.)

I was a little concerned before buying it, and four is probably the minimum number of ports I could be happy with. But in practice I've been very satisfied with my port selection, and if you do need more ports, there's always the FW16.
by ChaosOp | 2025-12-26 15:05:54+00:00
Are you opening the website via your smart tv's browser? If so, it could mean that the TV is not able to handle the live connections. I've noticed some Samsung Tv's exhibiting this behauviour. At the moment the recommended way is to run the games on a computer. Still a lot of optimization for me to do when it comes to smart tv's
by einrealist | 2025-12-26 15:06:03+00:00
I mostly agree.

I wear a Freestyle Libre. Even during their mandatory onboarding, they warn about incorrect readings for the reasons you described and urge you to verify the glucose level with manual measurements when in doubt. Also, it's better to just eat glucose when the CGM shows a rapid decline or low level, even if it's due to an inaccurate measurement. This is in contrast to accidentally applying too much insulin and forcing a low glucose level. Of course, low levels often present with very obvious symptoms.

However, the FDA announcement warns about constantly low measurements. Unfortunately, the announcement does not explain what 'low' means in this context and what the actual issue was (it might be technical with the sensor or with the applicator). If it means that glucose levels are too low in terms of 'alarming low', this should prompt manual measurements. However, if the measurements show incorrect levels within the 'normal' range, this is a much bigger issue with these devices. This could explain why affected people have changed their diets or medication plans. These changes should always be discussed with a physician, though. Disease management programs can catch this (e.g. quarterly measurements of HbA1c).

CGMs are helpful. But they require knowledge about their limitations, especially for people who need insulin. They helped me to bring my glucose levels back into normal range without the need for any medication. I hope, I can keep my insulin intolerance at bay for a long time this way.
by KitN | 2025-12-26 15:06:29+00:00
I just want this to be found by some internet archaeologist (maybe some future version of netrunners) in the next 2,000 years, or maybe even more. For them to see what it was like to live through the chaotic year of 2025, when everyone was trying to undercut their competitors and new things popped up every week.

For those reading this now, though, it’s just a log of the switches I made this year, so that I might revisit them again next year.
by fweimer | 2025-12-26 15:06:42+00:00
I understood what you meant. I just disagree about priorities. Conceptually, every array access (absent dependent types) can produce a null value because the index might be out of bounds. Languages that eliminate null values in other areas typically fail to deal with the array indexing issue at the type level, which seems at least as prevalent in real-world code as null pointer deferences, if not more so.

Regarding the category error, on many platforms, Rust panics use the same underlying implementation mechanism as C++ exceptions. In general, Rust library code is expected to be panic-safe. Some well-known Rust tools use panics for control flow (in the same way one would abuse exceptions). The standard test framework depends on recoverable panics, if I recall correctly. The Rust language gives exceptions a different name and does not provide convenient syntax for handling them, but it still has to deal with the baggage associated with them, and so do Rust library authors who do not want to place restrictions on how their code is reused. It's not necessarily a bad approach, to be clear: avoiding out-of-bounds indexing errors completely is hard.
Show HN: Text Behind Image – put text behind objects using AI
by kyrox | 2025-12-26 15:06:49+00:00
I built a small web tool that automatically places text behind the main subject of an image.

Upload an image, add text, and the AI handles subject detection and masking. No signup, no watermark.

Built this because doing this effect manually in Photoshop is more annoying than it should be. Feedback welcome.
by squeaky-clean | 2025-12-26 15:07:00+00:00
Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.

The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.
Show HN: Xcc700: Self-hosting mini C compiler for ESP32 (Xtensa) in 700 lines
by isitcontent | 2025-12-26 15:07:01+00:00
Repo: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/xcc700

Hi Everyone! I just wrote my first compiler!

- single pass, recursive descent, direct emission

- generates REL ELF binaries, runnable using ESP-IDF elf_loader

- very basic features only, just enough for self-hosting

- treats the Xtensa CPU as a stack machine for simplicity, no register allocation / window usage

- compilable on Mac, probably also Linux, can cross-compile for esp32 there

- wrote for fun / cyberdeck project

Sample output from esp32:

xcc700.elf xcc700.c -o /d/cc.elf

[ xcc700 ] BUILD COMPLETED > OK
> IN : 700 Lines / 7977 Tokens
> SYM : 69 Funcs / 91 Globals
> REL : 152 Literals / 1027 Patches
> MEM : 1041 B .rodata / 17120 B .bss
> OUT : 27735 B .text / 33300 B ELF
[ 40 ms ] >> 17500 Lines/sec <<

My best hope is that some fork might grow into a unique nice language tailored to the esp32 platform. I think it is underrated in userland hobby projects.
Show HN: Crawlee Cloud Self-hosted platform for running Crawlee and Apify actor
by aminembarki | 2025-12-26 15:07:16+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Crawlee Cloud, an open-source, self-hosted platform that lets you run Crawlee and Apify Actors on your own infrastructure.

The problem: The Apify ecosystem (Crawlee, SDK, Actors) is fantastic for web scraping, but it's tied to their cloud. If you want to keep your data on-prem, run on your own servers, or save on costs at scale, you're stuck.

The solution: Crawlee Cloud implements Apify's REST API so your existing Actors work without code changes. Just point APIFY_API_BASE_URL to your own server.

What's included:

SDK compatible: Datasets, Key-Value Stores, Request Queues all work
Docker-based: Each Actor runs in an isolated container
Dashboard: Monitor runs, explore datasets, manage Actors
CLI: Push, run, and manage Actors from your terminal

Stack: Node.js, Fastify, PostgreSQL, Redis, S3/MinIO, Next.js

GitHub: https://github.com/crawlee-cloud/crawlee-cloud

Happy to answer questions!
by bartvk | 2025-12-26 15:07:18+00:00
Thanks so much. Going through some of these motions... installed OpenSCAD, made something basic which was easy. But I found out that making something more complex forces you to invent your own layout system. Last month I looked on Udemy and did part of Mango Jelly's course. It's a good one, I actually found out later that he has a bunch of stuff on YouTube.

I'm still reading the rest of this and your other comment, thanks so much. Inspirational.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-26 15:07:20+00:00
Yes by adding friction to any existing user so they have to fuck with it every single time they update instead of just downloading a blob.

Now Go being easy to get builds running makes it less painful, but still, the entire reason it is in codebase is to add friction.

> If anything, it’s quite a bit of entitlement that “FOSS companies must provide free code, and free builds, forever, or they are evil.” Especially when they are getting VC money to presumably add features that otherwise would not exist and would have no code available at all.

I don't consider "OSS license with CLA forcing code rights assignment" to be FOSS. It being closed source would be better for everyone (but them) because less people would get baited into bait and switch and maybe support less insidiously managed projects.
by freedomben | 2025-12-26 15:07:37+00:00
LLM's obviously can't do it all, and they still have severe areas of weakness where they can't replace humans, but there are definitely a lot of areas where they really can now. I've seen it first hand. I've even experienced it first hand. There are a couple of services that I wrote years ago that were basically parked in maintenance mode because they weren't worth investing time in, and we just dealed with some of the annoyances and bugs. With the latest LLM's, over the last couple of months I've been able to resurrect them and fix a lot of bugs and even add some wanted features in just a few hours. It really is quite incredible and scary at the same time.

Also in case you're not aware, accusing people of shilling or astroTurfing is against the hacker news guidelines
by Greed | 2025-12-26 15:07:42+00:00
Yes, this is the true dividing factor for me. The battery life of the new ARM laptops is an astounding upgrade from any device I have ever used.

I've been a reluctant MacBook user for 15 years now thanks to it being the de-facto hardware of tech, but for the first time ever since adopting first the M1 Pro and then an M2 Pro I find myself thinking: I could not possibly justify buying literally any other laptop so long as this standard exists.

Being able to run serious developer workflows silently (full kubernetes clusters, compilers, VSCode, multitudes of corpo office suite products etc), for multiple days at a time on a single charge is baffling. And if I leave it closed for a week at 80% battery, not only does that percentage remain nearly the same when resumed-- it wakes instantly! No hibernation wake time shenanigans. The only class of device which even comes close to being comparable are high end e-ink readers, and an e-ink reader STILL loses on wake time by comparison.

I'm at the point now where I'm desperately in need of an upgrade for my 8 year old personal laptop, but I'm holding off indefinitely until I discover something with a similar level of battery performance that can run Linux. As I understand it, the firmware that supports that insane battery life and specifically the suspend functionality that allows it to draw nearly zero power when closed isn't supported by any Linux distro or I would have already purchased another MacBook for personal use.
by mikewarot | 2025-12-26 15:08:23+00:00
Am I the only one who thinks it's possible that the vast majority of VPN providers are actually working for the intelligence agencies of the world? It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened.

There was a Swiss company[1] selling cryptography gear that turn out to be a CIA front.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-26 15:09:36+00:00
Understood - a new mainboard on the Framework website is around $700, which I still prefer to a new laptop.

I'd be willing to pay more over time to have better hardware over my laptop's life. Meaning, I'd rather pay ~$3200 over 10 years for a Framework + 2 mainboard upgrades + a RAM upgrade vs ~$2000 for a laptop that slowly gets worse over the same time period.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-12-26 15:10:03+00:00
At the very least there is an ideological conflict brewing in tech, and this post is a flashpoint. But just like the recent war between Israel and Hamas, no amount of reaction can defeat technological dominance--at least not in the long term. And the pro-AI side, whether you think its good or evil, certainly exceeds the other in terms of sheer force through their embrace of technology.
by ben_w | 2025-12-26 15:10:18+00:00
All true. A counter, and a counter-counter:

The counter: the existing system of checks with (presumably) humans was not good enough. For the last 15 months or so, I have been dealing with E.ON claiming one thing and doing another, and had to escalate it to the Ombudsman. I don't think E.ON were using an AI to make these mistakes, I think they just couldn't get customer support people to cope with the idea "the address you have been posting letters to, that address isn't simply wrong, it does not exist". An LLM would have done better, except for what I'm going to say in the counter-counter.

The counter-counter, is that LLMs are only an extra layer of Swiss-cheese: the mistakes they make may be different to human mistakes or may overlap, but they're still definitely present. Specifically, I expect that an LLM would have made two mistakes in my case, one of which is the same mistake the actual humans made (saying they'd fixed everything repeatedly when they had not done so, see meme about LLMs playing the role of HAL in 2001 failing to open the pod bay door) and the other would have been a mistake in my favour (the Ombudsman decided less than I asked for, an LLM would likely have agreed with me more than it should have).
by colesantiago | 2025-12-26 15:10:30+00:00
Graphs aren't telling me anything.

What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application.

Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card?

That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.
by therobots927 | 2025-12-26 15:10:56+00:00
The traditionalist, anti-postmodernists would have a lot more ground to stand on if they hadn’t rallied behind a draft dodging pedophile (I.e., Jordan Peterson). Don’t talk about morality and meaning and then vote for a nihilist fascist. I don’t know who the author voted for but I can guess. Get lost.
by _alternator_ | 2025-12-26 15:11:08+00:00
Rob Pike is definitely not the only person going to be pissed off by this ill-considered “agentic village” random acts of kindness. While Claude Opus decided to send thank you notes to influential computer scientists including this one to Rob Pike (fairly innocuous but clearly missing the mark), Gemini is making PRs to random github issues (“fixed a Java concurrency bug” on some random project). Now THAT would piss me off, but fortunately it seems to be hallucinating its PR submissions.

Meanwhile, GPT5.1 is trying to contact people at K-5 after school programs in Colorado for some reason I can’t discern. Welp, 2026 is going to be a weird year.
by easywood | 2025-12-26 15:11:12+00:00
A few years ago I promised myself to read the top of "must reads" from world literature. Many of them were literally unreadable (hello Moby Dick).
But some of them are true gems, must-reads indeed.
I just finished "The Grapes of Wrath" and holy cow, this is an impressive piece of literature. And unfortunately, more relevant than ever.
Why not give science fiction a break and try this classic instead.
by oblio | 2025-12-26 15:11:19+00:00
> jstummbillig:

> Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)

Why would you lie: https://imgur.com/a/1AEIQzI ???

For those that don't want to see the Gemini answer screenshot, best case scenario 10x, worst case scenario 100x, definitely not "3x that rounds to 0x", or to put it in Gemini's words:

> Summary

> Right now, asking Gemini a question is roughly the environmental equivalent of running a standard 60-watt lightbulb for a few minutes, whereas a Google Search is like a momentary flicker. The industry is racing to make AI as efficient as Search, but for now, it remains a luxury resource.
by neither_color | 2025-12-26 15:11:32+00:00
What kind of rooms are you lighting up? I like LED strips enough to use them as a main light source a lot of the time, but if you really want to make a room "pop" you still need floor lamps, recessed lights, hanging, and wall lights to highlight/accent certain things and make a cozy atmosphere for guests.

For longer runs, like along all the undercabinet + above cabinet spaces in a large kitchen, I just run the jumpers as 120V and put the transformer/drivers somewhere hidden at the start of each segment, so if I have 3 segments I prefer to have 3 separate drivers all controlled by the same switch.

Have you tried COB strips? They largely get rid of the need for diffusers if the goal is to simply not see dots. Diffusers are still useful if you want to change the "texture" of the light.