MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elzbardico | 2025-12-31 17:04:27+00:00
Well, the year is 2003 and I am on a hot dungeon with bad Air Conditioning, figuring out the correct spells for a black magic ant build. A few years later I am writing tons of XML, first for vanilla J2EE, then for spring. We complained, we wondered, nobody cared until one day we decided "fuck that shit, I don't care if ruby is slow as molasses, I just want the pain to go away!"

Forgive me if in 2026 I get triggered at the mere mention of the phrase "java build".

Lots of us had long relationships with Java, relationships marked by toxicity and abuse. We moved on. Now Java says it is changed, it has matured. Well, it could be true, probably it is even true, but on the other hand, now your toxic ex found out his father, and his name is Larry Ellison.
by pepperball | 2025-12-31 17:04:35+00:00
As many, I got into programming as young boy thank to video games.

I remember one year, someone bought me an old book on game development. It was a book using DirectX 3.0. To this day, that was probably the most intimidating programming books I’ve ever read. I remember hearing about XNA at the time and it just made so much more sense to me.

I’ve tried a few times to get back into game development, but I don’t like most big engines. The opinionation of them doesn’t square with how my non-game dev mind wants to model things, and I’m too retarded for the math/physics involved in rolling your own engine.

I did briefly toy with monogame though during a period where I was unemployed. It certainly had me the most comfortable as someone who’s career prior had been enterprise .Net crap.

At this point though, game dev seems extremely tedious. I have much more interest in game design. I’ve considered picking up genetic coding just to try it out for that purpose.
by pacifi30 | 2025-12-31 17:05:01+00:00
Happy New Year HN! Grateful for the insights I get every morning from fellow humans through the comments.

This year I sold my company, for a while I thought I will die with it. This year has been brutal in some ways, tackling lots of daemons and getting through them.

Wishing everyone a great new year celebrations with friends and family.

Love you HN.
by vasco | 2025-12-31 17:05:04+00:00
I really hate that vision of the world with a passion. For people with such opinion nothing is ever enough or pure enough, but if you ask directly such people donate almost nothing themselves.

The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.

Also pro-tip, if you do more than a handful donations you'll realize that you as the giver is always the one that most benefits from being charitable. The feeling you get is why you do it.
by jen20 | 2025-12-31 17:05:12+00:00
I concur with Nick, and the last time I programmed Java professionally was late 2024, with all of the latest and greatest frameworks (obviously not my choice) and tooling (which, to be fair to the Java ecosystem, is second to none).

The experience after having spent over a decade primarily doing Go, Rust and Erlang (with a smattering of TypeScript, C#, Python, Swift, C, C++ etc) was the final push over the line to leave that employer.
Show HN: HexoRama – client-side crypto address decoder and debugger
by the_raccoon | 2025-12-31 17:05:54+00:00
Crypto address validators usually answer one question: “valid or not?”
HexoRama focuses on the next question: why.

It’s a fully client-side web tool that decodes and visualizes the internal structure of cryptocurrency addresses. Currently supported:
Bitcoin: P2PKH, P2SH, Bech32 (SegWit), Bech32m (Taproot);
Ethereum / EVM: EOA addresses with EIP-55 checksum validation;
USDT: ERC-20 (Ethereum), TRC-20 (Tron), Omni (Bitcoin);
BNB Chain: BEP-20 (EVM-compatible).

Instead of just validating, it breaks addresses into components like prefixes, payloads, checksums, witness versions, and contract metadata (for known token contracts). It also assigns a “format score” to indicate how modern and well-formed an address format is (e.g. Taproot vs legacy).

Everything runs locally in the browser — no backend, no APIs, no address storage.

I built this primarily as a debugging and learning tool. Feedback from people who’ve worked with address parsing, wallets, or crypto infra would be especially welcome.

https://hexorama.com/about/
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-31 17:05:55+00:00
I've been writing Java utils for the terminal since forever. Mostly because I was extremely familiar with Java. It's never been really slow unless you were loading shitload of classes, like apps that package the entire kitchen sink do or as Clojure does for example. For Clojure now there's Babashka: super quick.

And GraalVM compiled Java is more than speedy.

Back in, say, 2005, two decades ago, on computers from back then, sure, the java startup time from the CLI were noticeable. But on today's computers?

Nowadays when it comes to terminal apps I wrote both Clojure (Babashka), Bash and Java (recently I needed something from a .jar and had no convenient Clojure wrapper and didn't want to bother, so I just wrote my CLI app in Java).

Maybe, maybe, maybe that I do feel the startup time when I run my CLI Java app on Raspberry Pis. Raspberry Pi 2 and 3s that is (for I don't have any newer).

Startup times aren't an issue. But there may be other reasons to prefer other languages to write CLI apps.
by EGreg | 2025-12-31 17:05:59+00:00
I truly don’t understand how the world’s most valuable corporations with huge reserves of cash employing tons of developers can exist and NOT make a stable and reliable bug-free product after 30 years. It’s just more bloat and bugs all the time. I think open source projects by contrast get better over time, because they’re not constrained by whatever corporate agenda is that obviously doesn’t prioritize combatting enshittification over chasing fads and enriching shareholders.

Apple has had the same crap, Webkit/Safari is now the sick man of browsers, the entire development stack for Apple is a steaming pile of ad-hoc kludges (from Objective C to Swift to iOS APIs) and they even forgot to renew the certificate to their own app store, breaking all their apps. Twice!

https://magarshak.com/blog/if-steve-jobs-still-ran-apple/

Even today, the new OS they shipped is focused on creating a usability nightmare with liquid glass making everything hard to read and forcing users to use “Accessibility > Reduce Transparency” to try and combad rather than, say, focusing on fixing long-standing bugs and making their browser better. I mean hey, iOS has been around for almost 20 years and their search is still so broken that “Coo” shows a result but then continuing to type “Cool” hides all results including those with the word Cool, for some mysterious reason every search keeps hitting their servers before it can reveal what’s on the local device. The “Spotlight” MacOS indexing sucks more than “Sherlock” did 30 years ago, it never seems to find the files, always appears to only begin indexing only when you search (default setting), the search results interface sucks with everything including previews etc. despite a single guy at Apple literally creating Previews for every major file format! But somehow they can’t be bothered to make it easy to use, but you can hold Option or Shift and then open each found file in a full program to see what it contain. Technically takes literally at most $200K to get this right and rock-solid out of $50 BILLION DOLLARS. One would think they’d care about “user experience”. The old Apple did.

And Siri is nearly as dumb as it was 10 years ago, and ALSO needs to send data to their servers just to, say, find out what time it is on your own device. “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that — I can’t reach my servers right now.” Sigh. This isn’t buildin rockets to Mars, people. You have BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SITTING AROUND and you don’t know what to do with them. This is a failure of basic product management. These corporations KNOW that their users aren’t leaving. They are an oligopoly in devices and browsers. That’s what they use to keep the plebs in line.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-31 17:06:00+00:00
My quality of sleep/life have greatly increased since installing an Energy Recovery Vent (ERV) — it exchanges outside/inside air through a membrane, which is about 60-80% efficient for both humidity and temperature re-capture (depending on fan speed).

[•] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation#Ener...>

I use a Panasonic model — readily available from Big Box Retail (~$700 + $100 in vent/conduit) — which can do 20 - 60 cfm (in my 900 sqft home this can easiliy exchange the entire volume several times per day).
by lenkite | 2025-12-31 17:07:20+00:00
> This is a wild assertion. The sum total of all 7 publicly listed insurance companies’ market caps is less than Eli Lilly, just one pharmaceutical company

Why are we using market cap as a metric ? Look at investment value.

From the NAIC report at
https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/capital-markets..., common stock holdings alone of U.S. insurance industry is roughly ~$1.2 trillion.

"Over the past 20 years, health care companies spent 95% of their net income on shareholder payouts, totaling up to $2.6 trillion, according to the research findings. Shareholder payouts also tripled over this period - a trend largely shaped by a few powerful pharmaceutical companies, the research team noted."

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/health-care-company-p...
by lutusp | 2025-12-31 17:07:38+00:00
> It should be noted that the number e = 2.71828 ... does not have any importance in practice, its value just satisfies the curiosity to know it, but there is no need to use it in any application.

In calculations like compound financial interest, radioactive decay and population growth (and many others), e is either applied directly or derived implicitly.

> ... 2*pi is the most important transcendental number, not pi.

Gotta agree with this one.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-31 17:07:54+00:00
> Is it incredibly rare?

There are thousands of new games each year. The handful lucky outstanding low-budget games won't put anyone to shame.

> There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.

Don't confuse indie with AAA. Indie is about control, AAA about budget. There is usually a correlation between control and budget, but there are also many long-running indie-devs with good budget now. Supergiant, who made Hades 2 for example, are such an AA(A)-Indie.

> Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
> More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.

Those are long-running, genre-defining games, which also received a good budget over the years. Many of them are in the realm of AA, probably AAA now. Those are naturally grown services-games which could grow from success to become even more successful. Big studies tried to emulate this in the last years, but ultimately failed big in most cases.

The general problem is, the bigger your budget, the bigger the anxiety, leading to more control, conservative micromanaging and throwing every shit into the game to cater as much people as possible, which in high numbers cannibalizes the market eventually. Low-budgets can take on more risks, focus on their gaming-mechanisms and don't have to sell big. Making small money to cover your costs is already good enough, and they all can always explode by luck if they get their marketing right.

Games like Schedule 1 or R.E.P.O. don't have to offer 100h+ of fancy fun and high level entertainment. People are happy if they can get their 10+ hours of fun out of it, because they didn't waste big money on it anyway. So you will always see cheap games occasionally explode for a short while, while everyone is waiting for the big games going on sale, especially when the cheap games are coming with a social aspect.
by sfn42 | 2025-12-31 17:08:12+00:00
Never in the history of the planet has the temperature increased anywhere near as quickly as it's doing now.

If you look at a chart of historic temperature levels, pretty much every significant change on that chart corresponds to a mass extinction.

So yes, the earth does die. The earth has died many times before and it's currently happening again. The rock itself will still be here but us and pretty much everything else that lives here will be wiped out by climate change. The only question is how long it will take, and as you can see it's going fast.

This is not controversial, except for ignorant people who refuse to face the facts. This is what climate scientists have been warning us about for our entire lives.

Doesn't matter whether you believe it, it's happening.
by Sharanxxxx | 2025-12-31 17:08:17+00:00
I built two small products mostly using AI-assisted coding (plus a lot of manual glue work).

One is Solo Launches, a Product Hunt–style platform for solo founders where you can launch your SaaS for free. I built it in ~15 days as a self-taught dev. It’s live, used by real users, and started making revenue recently (~$100+ in December, verifiable on TrustMRR).
https://sololaunches.com

While growing it, I focused a lot on distribution and SEO. By submitting it to relevant directories, I managed to increase its DR noticeably. That process later turned into a second small product, listmy.site, where I help others get similar directory-based backlinks.
https://listmy.site

Both are fairly simple full-stack apps, but they’re in production, have real users, and generate revenue — mostly built with LLM help + iteration. Happy to share more details about the stack or workflow if useful.

Happy New Year
by kyboren | 2025-12-31 17:08:27+00:00
There is no such state as 'Palestine'. The PA is widely recognized and has acceded to the Rome Statute, but it has never held sovereignty in Gaza, making ICC's recognition of 'Palestine'--specifically including not only the West Bank but also Gaza and East Jerusalem--as a State Party under Article 12(2)(a) of the Rome Statute dubious at best.

But really, it's not dubious at all: It's utterly absurd.

ICC claims that since PA claims to represent 'Palestine', and UNGA Resolution 67/19 "Reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967", and that since they consider Gaza "Palestinian territory occupied since 1967" (despite the fact that Gaza has certainly not been occupied by Israel for decades and a completely separate entity exercises sovereignty there), therefore 'Palestine' is a State Party properly represented by the PA and covered by its accession to the Rome Statute, and thus the ICC totally have jurisdiction over Gaza.[0]

Bonkers.

Anyway Israel never acceded to the Rome Statute and the doctrine of state immunity applies. Even if PA were sovereign in Gaza and had properly delegated that sovereignty to the ICC, ICC's claim that Article 12(2)(a) grants them jurisdiction over Israel and Israeli leaders for their actions in Gaza is still a brazen claim to jurisdiction not well supported by customary international law.

[0]: https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/itemsDocuments/p...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-31 17:08:32+00:00
As do Christians. Jews. Hindus.

I was asked to help with creating what seemed like a human trafficking app to Christian me, but that to the Muslim founder was 'just an app to get the best payment for an arranged marriage' and just improving something that he said already happened all the time in his culture (he was from Pakistan I don't know if that is actually a thing there or he was just trying to justify his messed up app).
by nancyminusone | 2025-12-31 17:08:47+00:00
I can't think of any breakthrough successes Musk has had within the last 5 years, unless you count helping the current president get elected. If the promising but still incomplete Starship was on the same pace as the exceptionally successful Falcon 9, it would have already delivered cargo to orbit by now. His rates appear to be slipping.
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-31 17:08:51+00:00
> Suppose you have a good commit 123 were all your tests pass for some project, you cut a release, and deploy it.

And you've personally done this for a larger project with significant amount of changes and a longer duration (like maybe 6 months to a year)?

I'm struggling to understand why you would eliminate branches? It would increase complexity, work and duration of projects to try to shoehorn 2 different system models into one system. Your 6 month project just shifted to a 12 to 24 month project.
by mapt | 2025-12-31 17:08:54+00:00
It happens a lot in efficient houses that don't cover all bases with HVAC (the vast majority of recently built houses), where the room door is closed, maybe the vents are not ideal, and there is usually no makeup air or forced air ventilation other than a furnace intake.

This change in scientific literature actually causes a ~quadrupling of recommended airflow ratios for tight homes versus ASHRAE's previous guidelines, putting strong emphasis on an ERV. Previously, ventilation needs tended to be dominated by air quality and smell, by humidity buildup, or by theoretical house parties that maxed out the system.

This ventilation adds capital expense, but it's substantially more controllable and significantly cheaper in the long run in colder climates than 'just open a window' or 'just don't build the house so tightly sealed'. Reserve the operable window for the aforementioned house party, which is out of a reasonable design envelope.
by rvnx | 2025-12-31 17:08:57+00:00
> The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.

(this sounds like an attack btw, as you can't know what I do)

"Sponsoring", "Supporting", "Paying", "Hiring", "Contracting", etc, this is all ok.

but calling it charitable donation is a bit too much; calling "donation" money that you give that directly benefits your own interest is something I don't feel is right.

"I made a video game and now I chose to give 500 USD to help women who need shelter because they are beaten by their husbands", or even 50 USD, or 5 USD.

then yes, this is charity, and beautiful.

But this is very different to "I sent 100K USD to the project I absolutely and critically depend on".

It's not about the amount or doing "more", or that people are never satisfied, is that if you give to people who work in your interest, it's strategic sponsorship (or contractors...).

It's two very very different things, under the same word: "donation".
by hnuser123456 | 2025-12-31 17:09:24+00:00
It makes perfect sense. The prices are inflated with a few extra zeroes to try to force people to get any job with insurance. The big numbers are just to scare people. You can also turn negotiating with the hospital into a full time job and get the real numbers. If you're too unhealthy to do either of these then you can just die I guess.
by gunnarmorling | 2025-12-31 17:09:47+00:00
As a practical example for a Java-based CLI tool in the wild, here's kcctl, a command line client for Kafka Connect: https://github.com/kcctl/kcctl/. It's a native binary (via GraalVM), starting up in a few ms, so that it actually be invoked during tab completions and do a round-trip to the Kafka Connect REST API without any noticeable delay whatsoever.

Installation is via brew, so same experience as for all the other CLI tools you're using. The binary size is on the higher end (52 MB), but I don't think this makes any relevant difference for practical purposes. Build times with GraalVM are still not ideal (though getting better). Cross compilation is another sore point, I'm managing it via platform-specific GitHub Action runners. From a user perspective, non of this matters, I'd bet most users don't know that kcctl is written in Java.
by jen20 | 2025-12-31 17:09:58+00:00
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to claim it was definitely written by AI (after all, LLMs tend to write the way they do because it reflects their training material), but it does have a large number of suspicious constructions that suggest it could have been:

- "Look, I’m going to say something that might sound crazy...."

- But here’s the thing: there’s nothing stopping us...

- Emdashes. I don't believe that alone they are a tell for AI any more than they are a tell for the cultured, but in combination with other things, maybe.

- The question/answer style.

- The "It's not X, It's Y" construction.

This is all in the first sections.
by francescopace | 2025-12-31 17:10:02+00:00
Author here. Thanks for the interest!

Multiple people moving: The system detects "motion presence" rather than counting individuals. With multiple people, CSI variance increases, so detection works well. Distinguishing how many people would require ML (on the roadmap).

Detection latency: The algorithm processes each packet in real-time (~10ms @ 100 pkt/s), so detection is essentially instant.
The default Home Assistant publish rate is 1 second to avoid flooding the event bus, but it's fully configurable via publish_interval.

Accuracy vs traditional sensors: See PERFORMANCE.md in the repo for detailed benchmarks.

Main advantages over PIR: no line-of-sight needed (Wi-Fi passes through walls) and no dead zones.

Happy to answer more questions!
by ufmace | 2025-12-31 17:10:04+00:00
I disagree with AI being part of the OS. IMO, any desktop OS should have absolutely nothing to do with AI. It's only a platform for managing other applications and resources. Remote AI stuff should be on websites only, available only if I choose to go to them and interact, or in apps specifically designed to be AI, like Claude Code or Antigravity.

All the nonsense in Windows 11 has me thinking about trying Linux desktops again for the first time in decades.
by jltsiren | 2025-12-31 17:10:18+00:00
That's not a good example, but for a different reason: the N95 outsold the original iPhone.

The original iPhone was a promising proof of concept. It got the form factor and the interface right, but the actual device was underwhelming. It had no 3G, no GPS, no third-party apps, and a weak camera. iPhone 3G added all the features competitors already had (apart from a good camera) and became a much bigger commercial success.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-31 17:10:55+00:00
> Video cards have been a nightmare on Linux for decades,

Again, I question your experience in this regard. Do you actually use dGPUs on Linux, or are you repeating a 14-year-old meme?

GPU support on Linux is more comprehensive than macOS, and if you don't need DirectX it's arguably better than Windows too. Mesa drivers are unparalleled by Apple or Microsoft, in a myriad of ways.
by pixtur | 2025-12-31 17:11:05+00:00
I think the parts that run, run surprisingly well. Performance on Wine is incredible. I would argue faster than on Windows.

But there are a bunch of issues related to internal Windows APIs that need to be resolved, esp. related to encoding videos with MS Media Foundation. We're planning to replace that with ffmpeg / libav. But sadly due to GPL and patent issues, bundling an encoder is then even more complex.
Ask HN: Best ways to create and stay on track with New Year's resolutions?
by orenlindsey | 2025-12-31 17:11:10+00:00
Hello everyone, I have a goal of reading 52 books in 2026, and I wanted to gain some wisdom and ideas for how to do that today. What ways have y'all found to stay on track with your goals and resolutions (whether New Year's resolutions or not)? Any books you could recommend would be helpful too.