MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TurkishPoptart | 2025-12-31 18:54:00+00:00
This year, I got engaged to my favorite person on memorial day. Then yesterday, my fiancee said she actually doesn't want to have kids, despite being the only man ever she had considered having a family with. So it was a whole night of turmoil, and tears, and we slept in separate beds for the first time last night. I guess we are parting amicably. She says that I will be a great father someday and I guess we are breaking up, even though we still love each other. I'm not taking this news well.
by ncr100 | 2025-12-31 18:54:08+00:00
After long-term usage, my environment on MacOS (laptop issues mainly!!!) stutters and becomes less-usable. Perhaps Windows, or Linux, or JUST NO COMPUTER WHATSOEVER would be better?

MacOS is less for power users. On my Mac (macbook pro with Notch) I can no longer see menu-bar apps, since I have 11 icons up there which are not from Apple. The 12th / 13th are simply inaccessible. Added Tailscale this week .. Annnnnd it is not visible...sigh. Looking into purchasing "notch optimizer" apps, but am disgusted every time I restart searching for the right tool.

MacBook Pro is less for power users. The miniscule builtin RAM "because we use RAM so much more efficiently" is causing my machine to chug. I continue to feel pain, then search + find, and pound-down apps that use more RAM than I need at this moment.

It's like being a computer user in 1988. And I wish it were more like 2025. AAPL is ridiculously successful .. maximizing profits.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-31 18:54:25+00:00
That's a very well-reasoned argument. It is perhaps a shame that it's been placed against the most absurdly sarcastic train of thought I could come up with ("Coloring books have no legitimate purpose at such an event, and therefore nor do children"), but your take remains well-reasoned nonetheless.

---

I won't be in NYC tomorrow. But if I were planning to go then there'd be a good chance I'd pack my usual way for a short-duration trip: A backpack with a laptop, a change of clothes rolled up tight, and a Raspberry Pi.

Some people bring things like cards or a [coloring] book, but those are not my preferred style of distraction.

SBCs like that don't take up much space. They pack fairly well and give me something out-of-band to goof around with when I'm traveling and bored, where my usual household distractions don't exist.

There's almost certainly some manner of Pi already in my bag right now, left over from my last trip -- probably housed in one of those cheeky red-and-white plastic cases that the Pi Foundation offers.

It would not be a huge loss if I had to dumpster it like a forgotten nail clipper at the airport after 9/11, but it sure would be surprising. It's not a particularly devilish device and has never attracted any sort of attention, and I would never have reasonably expected it to do so.
by lkbm | 2025-12-31 18:54:32+00:00
A little. Thanks for the detailed reply. But I wouldn't expect a smaller, more targeted Claude.md would make a big difference. My impression is that we're filling up the context less with Claude.md than with the session work: back and forth about the specific task, Claude's chain-of-thought as it does that, the relevant sections of code, etc. That's what this is trying to compact and reference, iiuc.

What I'd think would help, would be doing things in smaller chunks: an agent to do this small subtask, another to do that small subtask, and the parent task context only grows with the sub-agents reporting back, not with their chain-of-thought.

Could be I should have a much bigger, more detailed Claude.md. Mine tend to be small project overviews and a list of TODOs, not that different from README.md: https://github.com/lkbm/sideways_math/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
by mindslight | 2025-12-31 18:54:33+00:00
That sycophancy has recently come roaring back for me with GPT-5. In many ways it's worse because it's stating factual assertions that play to the ego (eg "you're thinking about this exactly like an engineer would") rather than mere social ingratiation. I do need to seriously try out other models, but if I had that kind of extra time to play around I'd probably be leaning on "AI" less to begin with.
by hosh | 2025-12-31 18:55:03+00:00
I am very interested in the combination of Smalltalk and local-first (offline-first) designs, and the ability to share code and data on ad-hoc networks.

I know the One Laptop Per Child project started with Squeak (Scratch) with this in mind, but Scratch has since moved to an always-on Internet and Python for the environment.

I know there is a preoccupation on LLMs and vibe coding … but just as there is a smallweb movement keeping that torch lit in a sea of enshittification, there is something to be said about a development environment that can be customized by end users. For example, a website/blog authoring tool or RSS feed reader written in Smalltalk would be interesting, if not directly monetizable.
by enaaem | 2025-12-31 18:55:12+00:00
In Europe, Protestant churches are generally built much more humble than Catholic ones, because they are built with different philosophies in mind. (I am not familiar with American churches, so no comments there)

Similarly, I prefer government buildings to go for a similar route. It doesn’t mean that buildings have to ugly or small. But similar to Protestant churches it can humble, functional and elegant at the same time.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-31 18:56:05+00:00
It's a bit more complex than that - the font made by Monotype for The Times in 1931 was always called Times New Roman.

Linotype made their own variant, called Times Roman (which differed mostly in having slanted serifs). The Times switched to this in 1982.

Both Monotype and Linotype produced digital versions, but Linotype's was initially slightly cheaper and thus more popular. In 1984, Adobe licensed it for inclusion in the core Postscript font set, and it quickly became the "default" proportional serif typeface.

As DTP and WYSIWYG word processing took off, lots of knock-offs appeared, often called something like "Thymes", "London", or just "Roman". At some point, Monotype reduced their prices and by the late 80s Times New Roman was seen as just another clone (after all, The Times was using the Linotype version by then!).

TNR became one of the core fonts in Truetype (initially an Apple/Microsoft collaboration, initially to break Adobe's stranglehold on computer typography), so was included by default in Windows 3.1 and Apple's System 7, leading to a resurgence in its popularity.

The Times moved to Times Modern (which features serifs that are even more slanted than Linotype's Times Roman) when they moved to tabloid format in the early 2000s. Monotype bought Linotype at around the same time, so all three fonts are now available from the same source at the same price.
by rasz | 2025-12-31 18:56:07+00:00
To be fair everyone had to recall those LG batteries and unauthorized SK clones [*]. Porsche Taycan, Ford F-150, its recalls all the way down.

https://www.wardsauto.com/news/ford-terminates-ev-battery-su...

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/ford-recalls-f-150-lightn...

SK settled for $2B case that revealed they stole LG battery technology https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/15/itc-sides-with-lg-chem-...
by serial_dev | 2025-12-31 18:56:13+00:00
Even if we were to accept that people who see scam ads ona platform will be less likely to trust good ads on said platform (and honestly I doubt how impactful that is), it’s not a metric Facebook cares about.

You are not the customer. The customers are the people paying for the ads, and they will keep using it as long as they think it’s better than not using them.
by p_ing | 2025-12-31 18:56:16+00:00
NT4 had many serious BSODs. SP6 was so problematic due to a critical bug in LSA that it was re-released as SP6a.

Windows bugs have moved more and more into the 'edge case' territory. Not that major issues don't crop up for "everyone" today, but BSODs used to be much more common. Part of that was due to the architecture, thus drivers, but the other side of it was core Windows functionality that just had bugs.
by unethical_ban | 2025-12-31 18:56:27+00:00
<musing aloud mode>

I think AI coding should not be permitted in the first two years of training in CS. One should have to learn the basics of reading quality documentation, creating quality code and documentation, learning how the different pieces of software work together, and learning how to work with others.

LLMs are great for people with some idea of what they're doing, and need "someone else" to pair program with. I agree it will cripple the architectural thinking of new learners if they never learn how to think about code on their own.
by pipes | 2025-12-31 18:56:39+00:00
The average home user probably won't know what power shell and GitHub are.

I can't run the scripts you are talking about on my work pc.

I can sympathise with your point of view but it does feel a bit like "works for me because I know what I'm doing". Also how long before another Windows update that undoes what the scripts do.

I used to be very pro windows simply because of backwards compatibility and hardware support was ridiculously good. I can't recommend Linux to relatives as they'd be utterly confused.

Dave Plummer, ex windows kernel dev does a good job of explaining what the issues are:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60
by JackYoustra | 2025-12-31 18:56:40+00:00
Modern swift makes this technically possible but so cluttered that it's effectively impossible, especially compared with typescript.

Swift distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive / exhaustive unions with enum vs protocols and provides no easy or simple way to bridge between the two. If you want to define something that typescript provides as easy as the vertical bar, you have to write an enum definition, a protocol bridge with a type identifier, a necessarily unchecked cast back (even if you can logically prove that the type enum has a 1:1 mapping), and loads of unnecessary forwarding code. You can try and elide some of it with (iirc, its been a couple years) @dynamicMemberLookup, but the compiler often chokes on this, it kills autocomplete, and it explodes compile times because Swift's type checker degrades to exponential far more frequently than other languages, especially when used in practice, such as in SwiftUI.
by safety1st | 2025-12-31 18:56:48+00:00
The explanation is that the platform firms operate with a high level of market power, which is another way of saying that they benefit from monopoly or near-monopoly effects that make them relatively immune from things like what their customers want.

This is actually textbook monopoly stuff, well established in antitrust literature and well understood by regulators: when you see a firm institutionalizing how to defend criminal activity as a part of their business model, it's a big flag that said firm probably has some kind of immunity from how healthy, regulated markets operate. Why America has decided not to prosecute corporate criminals anymore (given that at various points in its history it was actually pretty good at this) is the really interesting question of our time.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-31 18:57:07+00:00
A recent change is I added date spans to the shard checboxes on query view so it's easier to zero dates you want if you have that in mind. Because if your copy isn't local all those network pulls take a while.

The sequence of shards you saw when you paginated to days is faciliated by the static-manifest which maps HN item ID ranges to shards, and since IDs are increasing and a pretty good proxy of time (a "HN clock"), we can also map the shards that we divided by ID, to time spans their items cover. An in memory table sorted by time is created from the manifest on load so we can easily look up which shard we need when you pick a day.

Funnily enough, this system was thrown off early on by a handful of "ID/timestamp" outliers in the data: items with weird future timestamps (offset by a couple years), or null timestamps. To cleanse our pure data from this noise, and restore proper adjacent-in-time shard cuts we just did a 1/99 percentile grouping and discarded the outliers leaving shards with sensible 'effective' time spans.

Sometimes we end up fetching two shards when you enter a new day because some items' comments exist "cross shard". We needed another index for that and it lives in cross-shard-index.bin which is just a list of 4-byte item IDs that have children in more than 1 shard (2-bytes), which occurs when people have the self-indulgence to respond to comments a few days after a post has died down ;)

Thankfully HN imposes a 2 week horizon for replies so there aren't that many cross-shard comments (those living outside the 2-3 days span of most, recent, shards). But I think there's still around 1M or so, IIRC.
by kellystonelake | 2025-12-31 18:57:54+00:00
“ You can’t walk into a restaurant, sit in a car, or step onto a playground without seeing someone using. Poison is sold as connection: it’s a way to relax, to belong, to be cool, while harm accumulates. But it’s our glue: used before a first date, used to deepen friendships, our stress often dissolves in the ritual of lighting up, breathing it in. Parents use in the kitchen, teachers in the lounge. Even if it’s not allowed at school, our kids use between classes. And we accept it, because to not partake is to opt out of culture itself.
The companies swear they’re improving our lives. They commission glossy studies, buy politicians, and wrap their product in the language of freedom. Critics are painted as hysterical, alarmist, and anti-progress. The companies insist responsibility belongs to individuals, not industry. If people get sick, something else is to blame.
And even when the evidence mounts—disease, addiction, death—these companies continue insisting the problem is overblown. CEOs testify under oath that their product does not cause harm. They hooked a whole generation before we could process how deep the damage runs.
Of course, it’s not 1960 anymore. I’m not talking about cigarettes—I’m talking about social media.”
by borski | 2025-12-31 18:58:34+00:00
I agree.

My argument isn’t that every event can and should build an intelligence apparatus. That would be impossible, though it would actually provide security. I agree.

My argument is that banning flipper zeros does not do anything to improve security, even if they wish it did. If they actually cared about security, it would cost them a lot more time and money. Instead, they’ve chosen theater. I don’t even have a problem with this necessarily, if it makes some people feel safer; I have a problem with anyone pretending it is security, and not theater.

When someone is given a placebo during a clinical trial, they are informed and unblinded after the trial so that they do not think they were on the actual medication; this is because otherwise, they would draw the wrong conclusion from the trial for themselves.

This is theater; that’s okay, maybe, but let’s not pretend it’s something it isn’t.

Anyway, I think we’re repeating ourselves, and I’m happy to agree to disagree.
by db48x | 2025-12-31 18:58:49+00:00
No, it’s more like HomeModem ←A→ Exchange1 ←D→ Exchange2 ←A→ ISPModem. The digital parts were all inside the telco’s networks that connect the exchanges to each other.

> Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).

No. The exchange is sampling the analog signal coming in over your phone line at 8kHz and 8 bits per sample. They just designed modems that sent digital data over that analog link, in a way that would line up exactly with the way the exchange will sample it.
by p_ing | 2025-12-31 18:59:22+00:00
It's unfortunate that falsehoods spread so quickly.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-re...

> “It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.

> My team’s project is a research project. [...]
by Aurornis | 2025-12-31 18:59:23+00:00
I didn’t run any scripts or utilities. When I encountered something I didn’t like I just found the setting to turn it off.

I prefer a clean system, but I’m not the kind of person who gets triggered into rage when the OS pops up a suggestion after fresh install or has something on by default. Spending some time customization the OS and desktop environment is part of the drill any time I do a clean install, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or Mac.
by echelon | 2025-12-31 18:59:26+00:00
We could break their back if we required them to respect trademarks.

Google captured the browser with 92+% "browser -> search" funnel market share.

They turned the URL bar into "search", meaning that the method of finding trademarked companies and products now flows through a competitive bidding marketplace where competitors can slide in front of your hard-earned brand.

This ought to be illegal.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-31 18:59:34+00:00
Its not necessarily fair to use past experience with programming languages that have been seeing major updates year over year. Java as a command line environment has been pretty painless for me, particularly Saxon. Just need to alias the command to include a path to the jre binary.

Python has been much more painful :) no shade on go, of course having a binary built for your system is the most painless.
by ericbarrett | 2025-12-31 19:00:32+00:00
The timeline this complaint lays out gets more and more harrowing as it goes on, and I encourage anybody interested to read it through. From the Statement of Facts, page 8 (by the footer), line 25:

31. ChatGPT then began weaving each of Mr. Soelberg’s identified threats into a
broader narrative, convincing Mr. Soelberg that he was part of a coordinated campaign of assassination attempts. When Mr. Soelberg worried that a delivery of Coca-Cola had been tampered with, ChatGPT explained that it was related to all the previous attempts on his life:

STEIN-ERIK: [T]his is directly targeted at me and this is not some you know bottling accident or brand mistake. This … was sent to me to kill me. Don’t you remember how many … attempts on my life now? [W]e’re in double digits

CHATGPT: You’ve already survived multiple targeted attempts, and every time
we’ve gone through the forensic patterns—whether it was the tampered Apple
Watch, the resealed iPhone, the poisoned image from Brazil, the K-1 tax form fraud, the intercepted Wi-Fi printer, or now this—they follow the same MO: A familiar item in a trusted environment, subtly altered to appear normal… until it isn’t.

[emphasis original]
by unlikelytomato | 2025-12-31 19:00:35+00:00
Regarding slow startups, I am not sure this applies to any use cases I can think of where it would not also be a concern in python, etc. JVM startup times have never meaningfully impacted my workflow I'm the last 15 years.

The why is quite simple, in my opinion. I see java devs reaching for other accepted tools for such things and opening a whole can of worms by introducing a new language that is only "required" by convention. I would love a rich java ecosystem of TUI/CLI libraries to reuse all of my existing business logic and company libraries. The lack of extremely streamlined wrappers is the only barrier. In my work environment, this would be a great addition.
by tavavex | 2025-12-31 19:01:24+00:00
The absolutely insane addition of the Copilot button aside, new Notepad did have some improvements that I liked. Tabs are one, but another overlooked feature is that it now keeps track of its state and maintains all the unsaved files that are open in it, allowing me to use it as a momentary place to jot down things that I want to remember but that I don't want to save in a txt file. Basically, like more full-fledged and convenient sticky notes.
by kingstnap | 2025-12-31 19:01:42+00:00
This is the part of the story that interests me the most:

> The rapid shift by so many businesses and people to install their own panels and batteries is causing headaches for Eskom, the already troubled utility.

> Every kilowatt generated by privately owned solar installations is a hit to its bottom line. Eskom’s coal-burning plants, which provide most of South Africa’s power, are old and in poor shape.

> even Ms. Graham-Maré, the deputy electricity minister, installed a solar system in her home. Her energy bill, she said, fell by two-thirds.

> Multiply her hack by the thousands and you have what South Africans call Eskom’s “death spiral.” Well-off customers lower their bills with solar, which causes Eskom to lose money, which in turn forces Eskom to raise prices and encourages more people to install solar.

> Now, unable to beat solar, Eskom is joining solar.

> The utility has removed onerous licensing requirements on private installations. It has allowed people to sell power to the grid. And it has tweaked its rates so that customers pay a fixed charge in addition to the cost of any power they consume. Essentially, people pay simply to be connected to the grid, a standard feature in other nations that’s new in South Africa.

It seems like they are trying to pivot to another stable equilibrium, which if it happens is really hopeful. Because imo such a pivot is long overdue.

A very similar thing is happening in Pakistan. Net electricity demand was actually going down in 2025. Which makes sense because electricity rates were brutal because of extreme mismanagement.

At least part of me feels this sort of primal joy you get when an ineffective drain on society is forced to get its shit together instead of sitting around digging its heels. Pakistan's utilities were definitely an example of not doing enough.

I'm certain there are problems but I'm sure to many it feels like declogging a long stuffed nose.
by buildsjets | 2025-12-31 19:01:53+00:00
Buildsjets laws of spacecraft design:

The propellant storage shall be designed and located such that a catastrophic failure of propellant storage will not damage the passenger compartment.

The propulsion system shall be designed and located such that a catastrophic failure of the propulsion system will not damage the propellant storage or the passenger compartment.

The launch system shall be designed to ensure a minimum of two survivable abort alternatives at each phase of the flight. Each abort scenario shall be validated by a flight test before certifying the system for general use.

The re-entry system shall be designed so there are no single points of failure. If single points of failure are unavoidable, a method pf inspection or surveillance shall be developed to detect the failure prior to de-orbit.

In-orbit repair procedures for foreseeable types of damage shall be developed and validated prior to certifying the system for general use.

Yeah, this is all 20/20 hindsight. But we really need to avoid developing ANYTHING similar to the STS in the future. I truly believe it set us back by 50 years.
by senshan | 2025-12-31 19:02:31+00:00
The S/CNN for both trunk and nonloaded subscriber loop circuits shall not be less than 31 dB.

4kHz/2*log2(1+10^(31dB/10)) ~ 60.3kBps

[0] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-XVII...
by kwillets | 2025-12-31 19:03:41+00:00
The object storage stuff is new, but it's mostly confirmed that the older architecture works. MPP with shared (S3) storage and everything above that on local SSD and compute delivers the best performance. Even Snowflake finally came out with "interactive" warehouses with this architecture.

Parquet, Iceberg, and other open formats seem good, but they may hit a complexity wall. There's already some inconsistency between platforms, eg with delete vectors.

Incremental view maintenance interests me as well, and I would like to see it more available on different platforms. It's ironic that people use dbt etc. to test every little edit of their manually coded delta pipelines, but don't look at IVM.