MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-12-29 16:31:26+00:00
> We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card.

Some people might have given it up. I personally own a Sony Xperia phone, and intend to buy another Xperia next year, which will almost certainly still have both. In fact Sony is the one manufacturer that returned to a headphone jack after having removed it for a while. It might be more expensive than the competition, but this is my voting with my wallet.
by pg_law | 2025-12-29 16:31:27+00:00
I built friend.backend.how as a small experiment in accountability.

Instead of making New Year’s resolutions for yourself, the idea is to let your friends do it for you. Friends often see our blind spots, neglected responsibilities, and hidden potential more clearly than we do — and they have a kind of permission to challenge us in ways we don’t challenge ourselves.

How it works:
• You form a small group with close friends
• Friends suggest challenges for each other (growth, comfort zone, neglected things, hidden potential, shared joy)
• The group votes and finalizes a set of challenges for each person
• Progress is tracked socially throughout the year — the real stake is not letting your friends down

This isn’t productivity software or habit tracking. It’s an attempt to use friendship itself as the accountability mechanism, instead of willpower.

Curious to hear whether this feels motivating, uncomfortable, or somewhere in between — and what failure modes you see.
by vee-kay | 2025-12-29 16:31:35+00:00
Try Win11 on that old PC, and you'll really feel the need for more RAM and a better CPU.

I sometimes feel M$ is deliberately making its Windows OS clunkier, so it can turn into a SaaS offering with a pricey subscription, like it has already successfully done with its MS-Office suite (Office 365 is the norm in corporates these days, though individuals have to shell out $100 per year for MS Office 365 Personal edition). We can still buy MS Office 2024 as standalone editions, but they are not cheap, because Micro$oft knows the alternatives on the market aren't good enough to be a serious threat.
by dagmx | 2025-12-29 16:31:48+00:00
This is very much not true.

Telephony is significantly less latency sensitive than real time audio processing, it’s also significantly less taxing since you’re dealing with a single channel.

The level of compression and audio resolution required are significantly different too. You can tune codecs for voice specifically, but you don’t want compression when recording audio and can’t bias towards specific inputs.

They’re only similar in that they handle audio. But that’s like saying the needs of a unicycle and the needs of an F1 car are inherently the same because they have wheels.
Show HN: Package Manager for Agent Skills: Publish, Discover, Install Everywhere
by kajogo | 2025-12-29 16:31:51+00:00
Paks is:
+ A CLI to create, validate, install, and publish skills
+ A public registry to browse and discover skills
+ Semantic versioning to manage skill updates
+ Open source

Skills are pakaged, versioned, and published so they can be reused across different AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, Stakpak, GitHub Copilot, Goose, and more...

Agent skills are often copied between tools or stored in your file system, which makes them hard to share. Paks extends agent skills by adding packaging and a registry.

This project is an early open source project, so your feedback and contributions are highly appreciated!

Repo: https://github.com/stakpak/paks
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-29 16:31:54+00:00
It's still not JS-level/JS-compatible GC (yet?) and it is still quite low level (more about corralling buffers of bytes than objects, a bit closer to OS-level page management than JS or C# level GC), as it is intended to be lower level than most languages need so that different languages can build different things with it. It is also a tiny stepping stone to better memory sharing with JS APIs (and the eventual goal of WASM "direct DOM"), but still not quite finished on that front as more steps remain.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-29 16:32:13+00:00
It's like being tortured to extract information that we do not have. They'll only believe it once they've completely broken you down.

And then you meet the next person, who has not yet tortured and broken you, so they again do not believe that you "don't have the intel", and you get to go through it all over again.

The worst part is when you start believing for yourself that they're right, that you're holding back, and that it's all your fault for not giving them what they want, just for the life of you you can't figure out how.

Getting certainty about my condition did so much to heal me.
by ashray | 2025-12-29 16:32:33+00:00
I'll post an example for the parent just in case they are honestly confused about use cases. Here is one that happened to me. I had an eSIM on my iPhone. My iPhone broke (screen became somewhat unusable, and the phone was stuck in a restarting loop). It was an older model phone so I checked the repair cost and thought I'd rather buy a new one.

Bought a new phone. Now, to transfer my eSIM from the old phone to the new phone, I needed the carrier to approve. But I was away from my home country and on roaming. So I tried to call them. They needed me to use a verification PIN they would send via SMS on the old phone, to verify the transfer to the new one. Impossible since the old phone is unusable.

Back in the day, I'd have just taken out the sim from the old phone and moved it to the new one. Easy peasy.

The only other option in this case now was to visit one of their stores thousands of miles away. Eventually just ended up doing that when I returned weeks later but during this time I could not access several services due to lack of access to my number plus 2 factor codes being sent there.

Moving a sim from phone to phone was seamless. Now the carrier needs to approve this swap. Even with two working phones sometimes it's a hassle and there will be delays while carriers decide to approve the move. There is a new feature that allows you to transfer eSIMs easily between phones but carriers seem to be holding onto their power in this regard and not every carrier will let their sims move so easily. This possibly requires regulators to step in and solve the issue - make it up to the user to move eSIMs. I would count on the EU to make this easier at some point.

On the plus side, eSIMs are nice to be able to signup and provision them through an app. Helps with travel and roaming. So there's that too.
by solaire_oa | 2025-12-29 16:32:41+00:00
I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.

But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.
by tazjin | 2025-12-29 16:33:24+00:00
> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette.

Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time.

Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain.
by RangeLead | 2025-12-29 16:33:28+00:00
Thanks for checking the site and for the thoughtful feedback. You are rightm many B2B businesses operate just fine without websites or reviews.

Regarding the issue you saw: nothing is broken. Phase 1 is state-level data only. County and city filters are planned for Phase 2 and should be live in about 1–2 months. The UI is already prepared, but the data is not populated yet.

Appreciate you taking the time to test it and flag this
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-29 16:33:37+00:00
>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.

This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.

Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.

Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
by cfstras | 2025-12-29 16:33:41+00:00
A couple years ago, I was at a station waiting for a (delayed) ICE train.
I couldn't buy a ticket at the machine or with the app, since the train had already departed (if it had been on schedule).
The ticket machine also wouldn't take VISA / MasterCard, only the more common Girocard (most people still call it EC)

Later, in the train, when I asked the conductor to buy a ticket with my Girocard, he said "That's not a commonly used payment method" and asked for VISA, or cash (not having any to provide change, obviously).
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-29 16:34:09+00:00
I've taken trains regularly in England for 25 years. I disagree.

What's your experience?

And it's taken a massive turn for the worse since 2020

England is definitely worse than Scotland and Wales I grant you that. And fwiw, in Scotland, they have far less powers to prosecute compared to England, which is why they seem like they are more lenient

As I responded in another thread, not all operators are 15 minutes. Not that 25/50% often isn't really that much compensation...

And that taxi is far from gaurenteed.

I get the sense you had one or two good experiences and extrapolated?
by luqtas | 2025-12-29 16:34:11+00:00
and most interfaces have a condition watching for CTRL or SHIFT to ++/-- values slower or faster depending on the modifier held... that allows one to turn a knob with much greater precision than a physical interface!

double-clicking usually lets one type the value... really good interfaces let one scroll seamless independent of screen borders; the perfect pair with a trackball or a long surface/desk for sliding the mouse
by reverserdev | 2025-12-29 16:34:17+00:00
Some random person I met dropped their phone in a river, just after arriving in a foreign country. He bought a new phone, but getting back to his phone number was not easy or possible for him (while in a foreign country). If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him. Instead he had to wait until he got home to pop in a new SIM card.

I learned from this experience that maybe eSIM is a good idea and I switched immediately upon hearing this person's story. Did I miss something?
by f1shy | 2025-12-29 16:34:56+00:00
Faking a medical emergency emergency is both illegal and immoral.

In Germany in particular, you could be charged for all the expenses. A friend of mine did not fake, was in real panic, but still was at the end of the ”nothing” and had to paid the ambulance costs. Not cheap!

If you think you are being kidnapped or whatever, instead of lying and abusing EMS, you can call the police, and explain clearly what’s going on with the truth. If serious enough they will be able to act better in that case.
by api | 2025-12-29 16:34:59+00:00
How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? I have a local image generator app called Draw Things that has many times more options than this.

Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ

Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.

Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.
by dbacar | 2025-12-29 16:35:09+00:00
The site explicitly states that :
"This website is not licensed for ML/LLM training or content creation. "

Yet I asked chatgpt to summarize it , and it did.
And it says that:
Why summarization is allowed

In most jurisdictions and policies:
Summarization is a transformative use
It does not substitute for the original work
It does not expose proprietary structure, wording, or data
It does not enable reconstruction of the original content

very strange days, you cant cope with this mouthful mambo jambos.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-29 16:35:10+00:00
> AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year.

Arguably that's already so. There's no clear single dimension for "smart"; even within exact sciences, I wouldn't know how to judge e.g. "Who was smarter, Einstein or Von Neumann?". But for any particular "smarts competition", especially if it's time limited, I'd expect Claude 4.5 Opus and Gemini 3 Pro to get higher scores than any single human.
by fn-mote | 2025-12-29 16:35:12+00:00
For the last two decades, YouTube (or better, MIT's OpenCourseWare) has provided instruction that sets a baseline.

I'm positive that college lecturers fall below this baseline, but there's plenty of alternatives that a moderately motivated student could use.

Part of the problem is that the typical ~20 year old student has little idea how to learn something and little opinion about what their education should produce, to guide them.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-29 16:35:20+00:00
>If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.

Worse. You can't even take responsibility even if you want to, that's usually against the rules too.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-12-29 16:35:41+00:00
I have a dog in this fight as a professor, but I think the AI era may actually (and ironically) help reestablish colleges as a useful tool for employers. We have a significant amount of legacy infrastructure to support in-person testing, and non-digital written exams may be the best way to determine actual competency going forward.

I have historically done my computer science classes entirely online, but I am switching to in-person on-paper tests and increasing their weight in my classes to deal with the cheating.

As paul graham said: do things that don't scale.
by esbranson | 2025-12-29 16:35:43+00:00
My understanding is that an issue is local hyperconnectivity / long-range underintegration, linked by the E/I imbalance.[1][2]

[1] "The findings support the idea that an imbalance of excitatory and inhibitory signals in the brain could be contributing to traits associated with autism, the researchers say." https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/molecular-difference-...

[2] "Converging evidence from diverse studies suggests that atypical brain connectivity in autism affects in distinct ways short- and long-range cortical pathways, disrupting neural communication and the balance of excitation and inhibition." https://doi.org/10.3934/Neuroscience.2025031
by seba_dos1 | 2025-12-29 16:35:56+00:00
I fully agree regarding gamma, but completely disagree when it comes to debayering. Unless you turn 2x2 Bayer blocks into a single RGB pixel (losing some data in the process), the point of debayering is to interpolate missing data - it's upscaling of a kind after all - and you can use a multitude of various approaches to do that resulting in differing outputs.
by mtlynch | 2025-12-29 16:36:04+00:00
> Have YOU ever tried interacting with the developers? No?

I have. I emailed them a couple of weeks ago and they responded promptly and professionally.

> All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

You want me to read thousands of GitHub issue comments and discord messages in search of bad behavior?

If you have examples of the Meshtastic team behaving badly, why not link to them? The burden of proof is on you, not me.

I don't have a dog in this fight. I think LoRa messaging is neat but I have no investment or relationship with Meshtastic in particular.
by damnitbuilds | 2025-12-29 16:36:11+00:00
This is silly.

When the AI in my IDE offers to apply the member access code I changed for one variable to all the other variables, it saves me minutes of typing duplicate boilerplate.

So why the #$%^& would I be "reluctant to use AI" ?
Why would any developer ?

At what level we use AI can be reasonably discussed. Vibecoding a whole app has led me down many pointless dead ends.

But no sensible developer/lawyer/whatever chooses not to use AI at all.
by dartharva | 2025-12-29 16:37:04+00:00
You'd think so, but things are a LOT worse in the country's rural/sparser spaces in every aspect. Urban citizens are at least mostly self-aware, and high population density in cities has some dampening effect to prevent most of the social bads from going beyond intolerable limits.

It all stems from the general phenomenon of Indians still being stuck in the subsistence mindset - including those who don't need to. This is because 1) unlike the US and Europe, (almost all of) India has never had a nontrivial period of continuous and consistent economic security, and 2) The country has a MASSIVE load of "liability" population of a size ridiculously disproportionate to the "asset" population, despite having the largest youth count in the world.

India is one of the very rare wonder countries that would have fared much better (nonviolently) balkanized.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-29 16:37:04+00:00
Using AI is a different skill set that allows you to dive into topics that you otherwise aren’t ready for. I just used it to do a task that would have taken me a couple days of reading up on a different software system that I wasn’t already familiar. Now I have no need to ever really know that system, is that a good thing or not? I don’t know yet. But I had to know lots of basics about how those systems work in general to get the AI to do the thing I wanted, snd it wasn’t a one shot prompt, rather it was an iterative prompt process.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-12-29 16:37:51+00:00
> Same as what happened to body positivity in the face of Ozempic.

I have definite feelings about this exchange on autism, which are being hashed out reasonably without my input. But the Ozempic reference is super interesting. I hope some smart person looks into that particular "correction" vs. "coping" dichotomy at some point in the future.
by wolfi1 | 2025-12-29 16:38:04+00:00
Surely you're joking Mr Feynman begins in the 30s and takes us to the 60s IIRC, so one has to take into account, what the mainstream was in those times. But he is against hazing, explaining how traumatized European Jews were hazed and reliving their fears in Europe. But, of course, some things cannot be understood nowadays with the mindset we have now.
by H1Supreme | 2025-12-29 16:38:17+00:00
> Golf is not so smooth. Yes, each round is a state-dependent game of error-correction (i.e. Zeno's Paradox). But golf swings are coarse actions -- few swings per game, with no recourse for fine adjustment between swings.

This is a bit of a contradictory statement. The "error-correction"'s are typically fine adjustments between swings. Small adjustments to setup, backswing, tempo, etc. are exactly the sort of thing a golfer adjusts during a typical round.
by thewisenerd | 2025-12-29 16:38:26+00:00
one of the non-intrusive approaches i have for this [1] is kubenetmon[2] which uses a kernel feature called nf_conntrack_acct to have counters for (src, dst).

it's not perfect [3] but gets the job done for me

[1] not as much "control" as it is "logging", of sorts; "especially when you just need to answer “what is my cluster talking to?”"

[2] https://github.com/ClickHouse/kubenetmon / https://clickhouse.com/blog/kubenetmon-open-sourced

[3] if you have a lot of short-lived containers, you're likely to run into something like this: https://github.com/ClickHouse/kubenetmon/issues/24

edit: clarifying [1]
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-29 16:38:59+00:00
> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?

Whenever you want.

Of course you can't directly control what other people do or how much they use t0echnology. But you have lots of direct control over what you use, even if it's not complete control.

I stopped taking social media seriously in the early 2010's. I'm preparing for a world of restricted, boring, corporate, invasive Internet, and developing interests and hobbies that don't rely on tech. We've had mechanisms to network people without communications tech for thousands of years, it's probably time to relearn those (the upper classes never stopped using them). The Internet will always be there, but I don't have to use it more than my workplace requires, and I can keep personal use of it to a minimum. Mostly that will mean using the Internet to coordinate events and meeting people and little else.
by this_user | 2025-12-29 16:39:05+00:00
"I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but it's also true, and even more so in the context of Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more murky for the civilians who theoretically could have walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that they were just doing their jobs. And you have to keep in mind that all of the Nazi's racial ideology had been codified into law at the time. So you were once again just implementing the rules, even if those rules were actually harmful.

But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of this in the form of the American approach that is much more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary. Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw away the key, they recruited them.