MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kleiba | 2025-12-14 20:14:53+00:00
My biggest grief with wooden utensils replaceing plastic ones and cardboard(-ish) cup lids replacing plastic lids is the texture - I almost shudder everytime these environmentally friendly replacements touch my mouth, to the point that I eat in the most ridiculous way in order to avoid having to touch the wooden fork when I'm trying to get the food off of it.

And the reason is exactly the finish. Metal and plastic spoons, forks, lids, etc. are nice and smooth and don't get in your way. Cheaply made wood or cardboards ones are rough and tacky.

Of course you could argue that from an environmental standpoint, that's not a bug but a feature: now I'm using even less disposable stuff (first, no plastic because it's been replaced by other stuff; and second also the replacements because I hate using them).
by knuckleheads | 2025-12-14 20:14:55+00:00
I am still plugging away at https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/hex/en-US/today , a daily word game for language learners.

Since hacker news last saw it, it’s been translated into English, German, Spanish and Chinese. If, say, a Chinese speaker wanted to learn more English words, then they could go to https://threeemojis.com/zh-CN/play/hex/en-US/today and play the game with English words with Chinese definitions and interface. This is the first cross language daily word game of its kind (as far as I know), so it’s been a lot of fun watching who plays which languages from where.

The next challenge that I’m thinking about is growing the game. The write ups and mentions on blogs add up, the social sharing helps, but I’d really like to break into the short form video realm.

If you read interviews from other word game creators, every successful game has some variation of got popular riding the wordle wave, or one random guy made a random TikTok one time that went super viral, and otherwise every other growth method they have tried since then hasn’t worked that well and they are coasting along.

So, sans another wordle wave, I am working on growing a TikTok following and then working on converting that following into players, a bit of a two step there, but that’s how the game is played these days. https://www.tiktok.com/@three_emojis_hq for the curious. Still experimenting and finding video styles and formats that travel well there. Pingo AI and other language apps have shown how strong TikTok can be for growth, so I think there’s something there. That’s all for this month!
by Culonavirus | 2025-12-14 20:15:37+00:00
> No more requests from Frontend developers like „Hey, can you also add that field to this endpoint? Then I don’t have to make multiple requests“.

Do people actually work like this is 2025? I mean sure, I guess when you're having entire teams just for frontends and backends then yea, but your average corporate web app development? It's all full stack these days. It's often expected that you can handle both worlds (client and server) and increasingly its even TypeScript "shared universe" when you don't even leave the TS ecosystem (React w/ something like RR plus TS BFF w/ SQL). This last point, where frontend and backend meet, is clearly the way things are going in general. I mean these days React doesn't even beat around the bush and literally tells you to install it with a framework, no more create-react-app, server side rendering is a staple now and server side components are going to be a core concept of React within a few years tops.

Javascript has conquered the client side of the internet, but not the server side. Typescript is going to unify the two.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-14 20:15:52+00:00
That’s not what is happening. One distro is kicking the tires on using this by default. The purpose is exactly because the GNU versions are being treated as the proper versions. Divergences from them are being fixed, so that this new version follows those. You can only do that by actually trying them out, because it’s impossible for the test suite to cover every behavior.
by wcchandler | 2025-12-14 20:17:20+00:00
Pretty simple, really. Cloud native app that scrapes job postings for higher ed institutions, then send me a daily summary based on a handful of keywords. Mostly targeting something to find remote jobs offered through schools. I like working in Higher Ed and my wife is looking for a remote job. Seems like it should be easy to vibe code and run in a free tier.
by ItsBob | 2025-12-14 20:17:21+00:00
I'm working on something called Kopi: a CLI tool that replaces the slow process of restoring massive production database backups on a dev machine with a "surgical slicing" approach, spinning up lightweight, referentially intact Docker containers in seconds: It spins up the exact schema of your source db and generates safe, synthetic datasets in seconds. It can, if you want, also replicate the actual data in the source DB but with automatically anonymized PII data.

It can replicate a DB in as little as 9 seconds.

It's Open Core: Community Edition and Pro/Enterprise editions.

Still a WiP --> https://kopidev.com
by ryoppippi | 2025-12-14 20:17:43+00:00
After a year of experimenting with RAG, web search, llms.txt, and MCP servers, I've found that local documentation works best for coding agents.

The approach: publish docs to npm, let agents explore with `fd`/`rg`.

Why it works: - No remote fetch overhead - Version-matched docs (finally\!) - No N+1 problems like MCP - Agents read only what they need

Benchmarked with gunshi: $1.37 → $0.44 cost, 3:31 → 0:40 time.
by huhnmonster | 2025-12-14 20:18:24+00:00
Working on a single-node job scheduler for Linux. Large HPC clusters use schedulers like SLURM or PBS to manage allocation of resources to users, but these systems are quite overkill when all you have is a single node shared by a few users.

I am trying to offload as much of the complex stuff to existing parts of the kernel, like using systemd/cgroups for resource limiting and UNIX sockets for authentication.
by culi | 2025-12-14 20:18:48+00:00
I don't get this attitude. Unless you're just feeding the scraped data into an LLM or doing archival work, you will need to structure the data anyways, right? So either you're gonna do website-specific work to structure the data or you can just get already-structured data from an API. The vast majority of APIs also follow a spec like OpenAPI or standard idioms as well so it's much less repeated work
by rubymamis | 2025-12-14 20:18:51+00:00
Creating Daino Qt - a collection of components that makes Qt apps feel and look native on both Desktops and mobiles (each with its own set of challenges).

Developing Qt apps with C++ and QML is a blast - the fast performance of C++ and ease of use of writing UI in QML. But there is so much left to be desired with the built-in Qt Quick components - mobile issues like non native text handling, non native swipe-able stack view and much more. I’m aiming to bridge that gap.
by pwg | 2025-12-14 20:18:51+00:00
The reality is that the ratio of "total websites" to "websites with an API" is likely on the order of 1M:1 (a guess). From the scraper's perspective, the chances of even finding a website with an API is so low that they don't bother. Retrieving the HTML gets them 99% of what they want, and works with 100% of the websites they scrape.

Investing the effort to 1) recognize, without programmer intervention, that some random website has an API and then 2) automatically, without further programmer intervention, retrieve the website data from that API and make intelligent use of it, is just not worth it to them when retrieving the HTML just works every time.

edit: corrected inverted ratio
Show HN: Nutriqs.ai-AI Social and Gamified Health Network
by Go_Parvesh | 2025-12-14 20:19:07+00:00
Problem: People know they should eat better, but apps fail at long-term engagement. Nutritional tracking is manual and boring, ignoring psychology and social dynamics. Result: 80%+ dropout rates in health apps. We saw this gap in markets like Suriname and the Netherlands, where community health is key but tools are outdated. Solution: AI Scan a meal, analyzes nutrients, and UPFs. Get AI Cindy insights (e.g., "This meal aligns with habit loops—pair it with a walk"). Share in a social feed, invite your inner circle or join other for inspiration, and participate in challenges for viral motivation.

MVP is partially functional—core analysis and social beta ready. Download the Webapp from mobile browser and add it to your homescreen.

Targeting Suriname/Netherlands first(underserved markets with high mobile adoption), then global. Test the MVP at nutriqs.ai and help us iterate. Feedback Requests: (A) What feature excites you (e.g., AI image analysis or AI Cindy)? (B) What feature is absolutely engaging/technically solid? (C) What feature does not add value or has bugs? Curious about HN's take—let's discuss in comments.
by PotatoPancakes | 2025-12-14 20:19:13+00:00
Is this the origin of the classic analogy that Windows is a station wagon, Mac OS is a European luxury sedan, and Linux is a free tank? I had no idea that the author Neal Stephenson came up with that.

The analogy is definitely a bit outdated now, what with Windows 8 then 10 then 11 getting aggressively less user-friendly each year.
by Y-bar | 2025-12-14 20:19:23+00:00
> If you are writing a scraper it behooves you to understand the website that you are scraping.

That’s what semantic markup is for? No? H1…n:s, article:s, nav:s, footer:s (and microdata even) and all that helps both machines and humans to understand what parts of the content to care about in certain contexts.

Why treat certain CMS:s different when we have the common standard format HTML?
by AznHisoka | 2025-12-14 20:19:31+00:00
I'm working on Bloomberry, an alternative to Builtwith for finding companies that use a specific tech vendor/product/technology. Unlike Builtwith, it focuses a lot more on technologies that can't be detected solely from the front-end (ie devops tools, security products, CRMs, and ERPs)

https://bloomberry.com
by gorgabal | 2025-12-14 20:20:01+00:00
This might be anecdotal evidence. But seeing this is really jarring, as I find the Dyslexia font actually easier to read. My girlfriend actually has dyslexia and also finds it easier to read. (maybe it is just more comfortable to read, not necessarily faster? Same with dvorak vs qwerty)

There are more and more cases where my personal experience seems to contradict with science. And I am not sure what to make of that.
by teekert | 2025-12-14 20:21:08+00:00
Hmm, yes seems a bit one-sided. At 30 life was distinctly family oriented, now mid forty there is a lot more room again, I suspect there will be even more room at 55. I myself was kinda clueless 18-30.

I work a lot for/with a couple of retirees (pensionados?) with a startup in drug repurposing: Huge network, crazy deep knowledge, authority, no need for a salary so they have very low cost. Basically I line up high quality information for them and built infra as needed. They move quite quickly tbh.
by ekipan | 2025-12-14 20:21:38+00:00
I confess I'm still pretty new to git. I haven't had a very long time to wed myself to git's index and its presence makes me do extra ceremony that I resent whenever I want to polish my graph for my personal projects.

The main difference, it seems, is workflow: git's "prepare then commit" vs jj's "commit then revise".

Currently I do make use of `git add -p` just like grandparent, but I also feel a psychological burden: I will often leave like 3 or 4 separate 2-line changes in the worktree because I don't wanna bother with the ceremony right now, but my perfectionism also resists me putting a lump commit. That's jj's main appeal to me. It amends my work in, then supposedly let's me sculpt it when I'm ready with less of that ceremony.
by spott | 2025-12-14 20:22:10+00:00
I don’t have the time pressure, so I just use tung oil.

I throw it in a bag and vacuum seal the spoon (with tung oil) for a day or two, then remove, wipe, and let cure for a month.

The resulting finish is largely dishwasher safe for a year or so before I have to reapply. Without the vacuum sealing stage, it doesn’t last as long.
by Sharlin | 2025-12-14 20:22:22+00:00
Neoteny is easy to achieve in 10k years. Cf. the Soviet experiments on domesticating foxes, which started showing juvenile, gregarious traits in a few generations of selective breeding. In general felids are social in kittenhood within their family unit, most wild species just "grow out of it" in puberty. Selection pressure (natural or artificial) favoring individuals that tolerate or even enjoy human (or conspecifics') presence favors retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, and this change can happen quite quickly.
by ViktorEE | 2025-12-14 20:22:24+00:00
I'm working on porting KiCad to the browser. It's a lot of sweat and tears, multithreading issues and some more sweat. I've updated a port of WxWidgets and now I support all the features KiCad needs with ~200 tests.

Right now I have a build that loads in the browser, but I really want to have "multithreading" which means workers in the web. One can use asyncify with emscripten to translate blocking C++ to WASM, but that transition is not perfect, right now I'm debugging a bug where there's a race condition that halts all execution and the main thread runs in an infinite loop waiting for the workers to stand up. I guess I'll have a few of those ahead.

The main goal is to 1. just have fun 2. use yjs as a collab backend so multiple people can edit the same PCB. This will probably work with pcbnew, KiCad's layout editor, since it has a plugin system and AFAIK I can do the sync layer there. For the rest ( schematic, component editor etc. ) I'll have to figure out something.. KiCad does not sync automatically if you modify a file, I'll have to do some lifting there.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun, I really want this thing to exist, I'm hoping that I won't run into a "wellll, this is just not going to work" kind of issue in the end.
by sshadmand | 2025-12-14 20:22:35+00:00
A friend of mine is using N8N a lot, but he isn't a developer and I think that is the main reason. I think LangChain is the most popular, but there is always a trade off between upstart costs, and the cost of forcing a pre-fab to fit your needs as you grow. I personally have used NextJS's AI SDK a a lot since it is very web friendly (nodejs/JS) https://ai-sdk.dev/docs/introduction.
by gethly | 2025-12-14 20:22:54+00:00
I've been taking some time off from https://gethly.com, as majority of functionality I wanted to implement and offer to customers is done, so it's mostly just some tweaks here and there.

I was pondering doing something in regards to decentralised consummation of content. I am beginning to see how various websites are walling off their content and centralising everything whilst also monetising access to it for themselves and kicking content creators out, forcing them to run their own websites and use multiple backup platforms(mostly the dying youtube).

So I was thinking about flipping it on its head and instead of going to different websites to consume this content, like youtube, twitter and whatnot, people would have a single program to aggregate it instead. Then it occurred to me that this is what RSS/Atom was made for, kind of. So I am just letting the idea marinate for a bit and maybe next year I will look into it. Mastodon might have some good concepts in it that I want to look into and also come up with some standardised way for richer content that creators could provide beyond RSS to make it more palatable and easier consumable for users.

tl;dr not much this month :)
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-14 20:23:17+00:00
> In the real world I would not have a shared "money library" to begin with. If there were money-related operations that needed to be used by multiple services, I would have a "money service" which exposed an API and could be deployed independently.

Depending on what functionality the money service handles, this could become a problem.

For example, one example of a shared library type function I've seen in the past is rounding (to make sure all of the rounding rules are handled properly based on configs etc.). An HTTP call for every single low level rounding operation would quickly become a bottleneck.
by bitwize | 2025-12-14 20:23:24+00:00
Marxists have the tendency to think that the Venn diagram of "people who have read and understand Marx" and "Marxists" is a circle. There are plenty of AGI evangelists who are smart enough to read Marx, and many of them probably have. The problem is that, being technolibertarians and that, they think Marx is the enemy.
by xtiansimon | 2025-12-14 20:23:36+00:00
Interesting.

I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy.

While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored.

Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).
by verdverm | 2025-12-14 20:23:54+00:00
yup, and while they are fixed, it amounts to a more complicated code flow to reason about compared to you're typical REST handler

Seriously though, you can pretty much map GraphQL queries and resolvers onto JSONSchema and functions however you like. Resolvers are conceptually close to calling a function in a REST handler with more overhead

I suspect the companies that see ROI from GraphQL would have found it with many other options, and it was more likely about rolling out a standard way of doing things
by alex-aizman | 2025-12-14 20:24:20+00:00
Appreciate the mention. Just to clarify: AIStore is a reliable storage cluster that can natively operate on both in-cluster and remote data, without treating either as a cache.

Yes, it _can_ be configured to act as a cache in front of any of the four supported Clouds but (a) we've never done so at NVIDIA, and (b) its primary function always was - and remains - reliable, resilient storage for AI/ML workloads.

For details:

* https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore
by spwa4 | 2025-12-14 20:24:53+00:00
Oh perhaps the same reason we're not seeing AI impact across the entire economy? Because everything is demand limited, and AI can only increase supply.

The big problem for demand is wealth concentration, ie. the problem is money. Lots of people not having money, specifically. So unless AI actually becomes a way to transfer money to a great deal of people, it won't move the needle much. And if it becomes an actual reason to do layoffs (as opposed to an excuse, like it is now) then it will actually have negative impact.
by everlier | 2025-12-14 20:24:54+00:00
There are too many LLM-related projects. Setting up multiple runtimes, Python, Node, Go, Rust and then some environments, different CUDA versions, dependencies is tedious. Managing updates later is even worse.

So, I'm building a toolkit that allows to keep things simple for the end user. Run Ollama and Open WebUI configured to work together: `harbor up ollama webui`. Don't like Ollama? Then `harbor up llamacpp webui`. There are 17 backends, 14 frontends and 50+ different satellite projects, config profiles that can be imported from a URL, tunnels, and a helper desktop app.

https://github.com/av/harbor?tab=readme-ov-file#what-can-har...
Show HN: Hacker News Christmas Colors Browser Extension
by freedomben | 2025-12-14 20:25:01+00:00
I love the look of HN on Christmas Day, but I never feel like I get quite enough of it in just one day. To rectify this catastrophic problem, I created a browser extension to give me the Christmas HN experience from the day after Thanksgiving until the first work-day of the new year.

I also added a fun "extra festive" mode that enhances the festivity level of the site beyond it's normal look. I love it, but I expect it to be controversial :-D

It's pretty easy to `git clone` and install it (instructions for Firefox and Chrome in the README.md). I haven't put it in the extension stores as I have no idea if anybody else would want it, but if it turns out there are dozens of us[1] that want to use it, I will do so.

Goal is to fully support Firefox and Chrome (as I'm a Firefox user primarily), though I haven't found a way to get the Christmas tree animated gif to load in Firefox so that one part doesn't currently work. I tried all kinds of hacks to convert the tree into an animated svg, and even generate new ones, and they are laughably horrible. I'll continue to look and try stuff but for now at least it will just display the alt text on Firefox.

Settings are accessible by clicking on the extension in the menu or tray.

[1]: A nod to the iconic Dr. Tobias Fünke from Arrested Development
by robomc | 2025-12-14 20:25:27+00:00
> If the cloud service you’re using doesn’t support OIDC or any other ephemeral access keys, then you should store them encrypted. There’s numerous ways you can do this, from password managers to just using PGP/GPG directly. Just make sure you aren’t pasting them into your shell otherwise you’ll then have those keys in plain text in your .history file.

This doesn't really help though, for a supply chain attack, because you're still going to need to decrypt those keys for your code to read at some point, and the attacker has visibility on that, right?

Like the shell isn't the only thing the attacker has access to, they also have access to variables set in your code.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-14 20:25:48+00:00
Zed is amazing. It has AI features but it was still amazing before them

The pivot to AI is concerning but the technology is solid and most importantly, it is open source.

I'm kind of mad that JetBrains wouldn't open source Fleet even after EOL, and going as far as taking down the download (something annoying for people that care about software preservation - I hope archive.org has a copy). I can't support a company like this
by hammock | 2025-12-14 20:26:01+00:00
Well unless you are getting solid wood utensils (much more $$ and most aren’t) then you are starting with bamboo glued together with adhesives. So at that point if you are worried about the finish I’d be worried about the glues as well

I get solid wood (olive wood or other woods ) tools and I don’t finish them. But if I did I might just use beeswax
by spenvo | 2025-12-14 20:26:04+00:00
I'm about to launch a new (now free) version of my Mac app, CurrentKey, which helps you keep track of workflows across macOS Spaces and track how you use your Mac. https://www.currentkey.com It had been a subscription app (4.5 stars) pulling in a few thousand per year, but I recently decided to try to broaden its appeal and make it free. The new version will launch within a day or two (the launch build is just "Waiting for Review" in App Store connect).