MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nemothekid | 2025-12-14 02:38:42+00:00
As I understand it, this is too brittle. I think this is trivially defeated if someone adds an append to your code:

func do_another_important_thing(key []byte) []byte { newKey := append(key, 0x0, 0x1) // this might make a copy! return newKey } key := make([]byte, 32) defer scramble(&key) do_another_important_thing(key) // do all the secret stuff

Because of the copy that append might do, you now have 2 copies of the key in data, but you only scramble one. There are many functions that might make a copy of the data given that you don't manually manage memory in Go. And if you are writing an open source library that might have dozens of authors, it's better for the language to provide a guarantee, rather than hope that a developer that probably isn't born yet will remember not to call an "insecure" function.
by slaymaker1907 | 2025-12-14 02:39:13+00:00
I might need to try it out. However, I haven't really found a use case yet where the speed of Python has been a major factor in my day job. It's usually fast enough and is a lot easier to optimize than many languages.

I actually sped up a script the other day that had been written in bash by 200x by moving it over to Python and rewriting the regexes so they could run on whole files all at once instead of line by line. Performance problems are most often from poorly written code in my experience, not a slow language.
by kuria002 | 2025-12-14 02:40:01+00:00
I built a small daily game inspired by Wordle — but instead of guessing words, you guess a movie by seeing actors revealed one by one.

What surprised me isn’t engagement metrics, but how people play it.

Unlike word or trivia games, this relies almost entirely on:

episodic memory (faces, roles, eras)

pattern recognition

emotional recall (when/where you saw a movie)

People don’t describe it as “hard” or “smart.” They describe it as nostalgic — like recalling a memory shared with a sibling or a partner.

It made me think about why daily puzzles work at all. Word games exercise language. This exercises memory without feeling educational. There’s nothing to learn, just something to recognize.

Curious if others have noticed differences in retention or habit-forming between:

Game is here if you want to try it:

https://castme.wtf

Would love thoughts on:

whether recognition-based daily games are underexplored

why nostalgia + recall seems to create stronger daily pull than difficulty
by jart | 2025-12-14 02:40:24+00:00
WASM sandboxes don't do much to guarantee the soundness of your program. It can hose your memory all it wants, it can just only do so within the confines of the sandbox.

Using a sandbox also limits what you can do with a system. With stuff like SECCOMP you have to methodically define policies for all its interactions. Like you're dealing with two systems. It's very bureaucratic and the reason we do it, is because we don't trust our programs to behave.

With Fil-C you get a different approach. The language and runtime offer a stronger level of assurance your program can only behave, so you can trust it more to have unfettered access to the actual system. You also have the choice to use Fil-C with a sandbox like SECCOMP as described in the blog post, since your Fil-C binaries are just normal executables that can access powerful Linux APIs like prctl. It took Linux twenty years to invent that interface, so you'll probably have to wait ten years to get something comparable from WASI.
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-14 02:40:51+00:00
I use this a lot, but the problem with this, that still hasn't been fixed after all these years, is if you have 2 or more keyboard layouts, you can't make more than one bookmark pointing to the same URL with different search prefixes.

So if, for example, you wanted to make

> x <search_term>

and

> y <search_term>

both work the same, x and y being letters from 2 different alphabets but mapped to the same keys, you couldn't, without some JavaScript. If you just added those 2 keywords, even if you manually edited or created your bookmarks, one bookmark would override the other and the other would appear empty with no keyword.

The workaround I found was using a bookmark with this code in it (instead of the usual URL):

javascript:(function(){var keywords="%s";var mainURL="https://<URL>/";var searchURL="https://<URL>/<params>-"+keywords;if(keywords==""||keywords=="%"+"s"){window.location=mainURL}else{window.location=searchURL}})();

Where https://<URL>/<params> is something like https://example.org/search/q-.

It's slower and sometimes doesn't work if you type "y" and then the query too fast, especially if you're pasting the query. So sometimes it doesn't work and searches with the browser's default search engine for "y <query>".
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-14 02:41:15+00:00
The idea of deploying to production 10-20 times per day sounds terrifying. What's the rationale for doing so?

I'll assume you're not writing enough bugs that customers are reporting 10-20 new ones per day, but that leaves me confused why you would want to expose customers to that much churn. If we assume an observable issue results in a rollback and you're only rolling back 1-2% of the time (very impressive), once a month or so customers should experience observable issues across multiple subsequent days. That would turn me off making a service integral to my workflow.
by boneitis | 2025-12-14 02:41:30+00:00
> less likely to visit the site in the future or view it with contempt and abandon it a soon

> fiddling with a VPN is often more hassle than its worth and its just left always on.

Not to saying this is wholly preferable, but I have often found this to be beneficial for me in that it tends to deter me from wasting disproportionate amounts of time on crap web content (either that, or HN wins over that remaining browsing time when it's not blocking me :)
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-14 02:41:48+00:00
> We went back to the drawing board and really listened to the people we were designing for, for the context in which they lived. That research changed everything,”

I understand they had a very good idea to begin with, and more importantly their heart in the right place And then further made it better with more input.

Reading the comments here the better solution for us is probably not to go back to "dumb" washing machines, but to regain control of how these machines are designed, for who and for what.

I'm thinking about Linux, which can be stripped down as small and nimble as needed to run a single board micro controller, or be large as needed to have everything to run an enterprise service. Being able to do the same with a washing machine would absolutely change their usefulness and place in our society.

I don't know how it could start, perhaps with an IKEA washing machine that actually needs assembly, for users to then tweak the parts, start comminities so we get at least in a KALLAX situation ?

https://ikeahackers.net/2025/07/ikea-kallax-hacks-2.html
by mopsi | 2025-12-14 02:44:15+00:00
> Our homeland is unassailable by conventional means (especially if we keep our Navy well-funded) and we can also sit behind our nuclear arsenal.

Unless you intend to nuke the White House, the nuclear arsenal remains entirely useless against the political subversion that Russia has very successfully used to destabilize and isolate the US. The official US envoy was recently caught advising Russians on how to manipulate the US president. Who needs tanks and missiles when you have reach like this? Without a single bullet being fired at the US, the sitting president is rolling out red carpets for Putin and praising him as genius while verbally attacking the Canadian prime minister and openly undermining Canada's sovereignty.

> I would challenge you to do the same. Not once in this discussion have you made any critical analysis of the US's actions, statements, or motivations. NOT. ONCE.

My entire initial reply was a criticism of the US and EU naivety in thinking that buttering the KGB-military circles could lead to long-term positive outcomes, an idea you seemed to share. Overall, when it comes to Russia's relations with its European neighbors, the US is simply not an important factor. It is a question of sovereignty, enlightenment and other European values versus Russian imperialism, which is focused on finding ways to suppress them both at home and abroad. The people of Europe want to mind their own business, but Russia will not leave them alone. For 80 years, the US was a partner in this. Nowadays not so much, but the long-standing confrontation continues nevertheless.

> ABM sites in Romania could also, forecasting into the future, be home to hypersonic missiles which could engage Russian launch sites with little or no warning and completely destabilize their MAD capability.

Russian ICBMs are primarily in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, many thousands of kilometers from Romania. Not even hypersonic missiles would pose a threat. The danger from such sites is political in nature: closer US-Romanian defense cooperation directly threatens Russian ambitions in Romania, because the US would then be more likely to assist Romania if it comes under Russian political, economic or military attack.

> Does the US have legitimate national security concerns? Does Germany have legitimate national security concerns? Does Romania have legitimate national security concerns? Does Russia have legitimate national security concerns?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. But focusing on Russia's overplayed "security concerns," when Russia has been the main aggressor in the region for centuries, is out of balance and unjustified. It is like writing about fire safety by centering the narrative on the inconvenience suffered by the arsonist.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-14 02:45:11+00:00
What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.

In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-14 02:45:19+00:00
Snow can be very heavy depending on the water content. So sometimes it's really light and basically effortless to shovel, but sometimes each shovel full of snow is 10-20 pounds of weight that you have to throw over and over. That gets taxing very quickly, plus people don't generally warm up before doing this intense exercise.

It's not like shoveling snow is super dangerous. Most people don't die from shoveling the snow. But it can happen and it's worth slowing down and taking breaks.
by brightball | 2025-12-14 02:45:44+00:00
That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.

I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.

I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
by jjk166 | 2025-12-14 02:46:07+00:00
> ICU is obviously important in a different way. You can't really "experiment". Iteration needs data. So you need to go out and learn what good looks like from different disciplines, and then carefully plan the changes you want to make and get buy-in.

I would think test runs with simulated patients offer plenty of opportunity to experiment.

> Get it wrong, and people die. Best case scenario you're struck off, worst case you're going to prison for murder.

Get it right and people may still die. The whole reason for the improvement effort is that the current practice is excessively risky. No one is getting fired, nonetheless going to prison for trying a sensible improvement to reduce the odds of a child dying which they were approved to attempt.
Show HN: Scrape websites into queryable Gemini RAG knowledge bases
by yoloshii | 2025-12-14 02:46:32+00:00
Simple Apify actor that scrapes websites and indexes them in Google's new Gemini File Search API (launched Nov 6).

The workflow: Scrape → Clean content → Upload to Gemini → Get permanent queryable knowledge base with automatic citations.

Technical approach: - Intelligent scraper selection from 5 Apify-native scrapers - Automatic content cleaning (strips nav/ads/fluff) - Uploads to Gemini File Search (persistent storage) - Per-page PPE pricing ($0.02 start, $0.0015/page)

Potential use cases: - Turn documentation into AI chatbots - Make company wikis naturally searchable - Build RAG apps without managing vector databases

Basically streamline your Gemini file search RAG ingestion with an Apify scraper run AIO.

You can also employ the actor programmatically with agents using Apify's actor mcp.

Built this over a weekend for the Apify 1M Actor Challenge. It's my first Apify actor, so curious to hear if the pricing makes sense.

Note* There is a banned websites to scrape list filter due to the constraints of the challenge. This will be lifted after the challenge ends (Jan 31, 2026).
by arboles | 2025-12-14 02:46:34+00:00
Markov models with more than 3 words as "context window" produce very unoriginal text in my experience (corpus used had almost 200k sentences, almost 3 million words), matching the OP's experience. These are by no means large corpuses, but I know it isn't going away with a larger corpus.[1] The Markov chain will wander into "valleys" of reproducing paragraphs of its corpus one for one because it will stumble upon 4-word sequences that it has only seen once. This is because 4 words form a token, not a context window. Markov chains don't have what LLMs have.

If you use a syllable-level token in Markov models the model can't form real words much beyond the second syllable, and you have no way of making it make more sense other than increasing the token size, which exponentially decreases originality. This is the simplest way I can explain it, though I had to address why scaling doesn't work.

[1] There are 4^400000 possible 4-word sequences in English (barring grammar) meaning only a corpus with 8 times that amount of words and with no repetition could offer two ways to chain each possible 4 word sequence.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-14 02:47:36+00:00
I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.

Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.

Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.

What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.
by theamk | 2025-12-14 02:48:08+00:00
> the build farm for the next OS update is a god object

This is a very interesting question! It may sound meaningless to you, but modifying firmware images is pretty common when trying to modify locked-down hardware. As in, "I'll unpack the firmware image, set root password and enable telnet, then flash it back". So no, the build farm is not a god object. Whatever controls firmware updates is. Can any app initiate it? Or does it need user's password? Or maybe physical presence? Or a private key that only select people have?

> If sudo couldn't be used from other programs / she'll scripts and doesn't give access to a god account.. But why require people to manually wrap programs..

So, you mean like what "polkit"? This is what systemd is doing - instead of requiring "sudo", commands like "systemctl start SOMETHING" will handle privilege escalation themselves. For example on my computer, running this in terminal pops-up interactive dialog asking for my password. In theory, you can have the whole suite of programs - "secure-cp", "secure-mv", "secure-edit" (see also: "sudoedit"), "secure-find", etc... But it seems pretty wasteful, no? Sure, most common actions (installing/removing apps, configuring networks) can get its own nice privilege-escalating wrappers, but there are many advanced tasks that user can do, and it's much easier to make (and audit) a single "sudo" than hundreds of random scripts.

(Unless you want to have a fully locked-down system where the only OS creator can decide which privileged actions are allowed. Those things exists and are pretty popular: Android and iOS. They are also only usable for a very specific purposes, basically as a remote terminals to server machines running unrestricted OSes without such limitations)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-14 02:48:15+00:00
For reference, Germany has ~101GW of solar capacity installed as of this comment (and is deploying ~2GW/month). 59% of Germany's electricity in 2024 came from renewable sources, up from 56% in 2023. I am curious to see how 2025 turns out, and therefore predict 2026 from planned renewables and battery storage projects.
by x0x0 | 2025-12-14 02:48:24+00:00
Google Photos deliberately broke all backup tools in March, so there's that.

Yes you can still mostly do Takeout, but it's garbage. (not incremental. Requires me to remember. duplicates files for every album (total incompetence). downloads regularly fail. Requires more room than I have on my mac to decompress so I have to put it on an external drive.)
by monoidl | 2025-12-14 02:49:46+00:00
I think this is more correctly described as a trigram model than a Markov model, if it would naturally expand to 4-grams when they were available, etc, the text would look more coherent

Iirc there was some research on "infini-gram", that is a very large ngram model, that allegedly got performance close to LLMs in some domains a couple years back
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-14 02:53:06+00:00
There is definitely something lost by relying on the algorithms, although I have found some fun stuff using Pandora. I wonder though how much of the decline in less "railroaded" discovery is due to algorithms per se versus the second-order effects that have accompanied the rise of algorithmic listening. An obvious one is the decline of record stores. Another is the decline in radio listening. It's not just that we use the algorithm to listen, but that we use an algorithm instead of other ways of listening, which then causes those other ways to wither.
by lkbm | 2025-12-14 02:53:11+00:00
Reading through these things, I was thinking about how being a high trust society is incredibly important (though to be fair, I harp on this a lot).

When I was in Cape May, I walked to the beach, and realized I'd forgotten my access pass. The person at the entrance let me borrow her bike to ride back to the house to grab my pass and bike back. You do that when you trust the people around you to behave honestly. Any time you do something to reduce that trust of strangers (it doesn't have to be crime), we erode the high-trust environment and make everyone a little worse off.

Thanks to all the kind strangers discussed in these comments for having and building social trust through your actions. Collectively, we build a safe, happy society through small kindnesses.
by Svoka | 2025-12-14 02:53:17+00:00
I really do want to learn and love it. It seems I love all the things which are told about it, but, I think JJ has a tutorial problem. I would really want something which focuses on concepts of it rather than workflows. May be some diagrams? I know that JJ-ists think that it is very easy to understand wall of cli printed text, with ascii trees and hash prefixes in bold, but it really isn't. Especially for target audience of tutorials (folks new to JJ).
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-14 02:54:17+00:00
To add to AlotOfReading's point, many places have some electricity, just utterly unreliable.

It might be down a few hours every day, or completely cut for days after storms or infra degradation, or the current fluctuate too much for delicate electronics. Many places could also get hold of a gasoline generator.

These kind of variations could require more thinking on the design, but being able to use electricity when available and hand power when needed would be the best.

Ideally the people on the ground thinking about their specific issues and having open ways to adapt the machine for it opens the door for many kind of evolutions.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-14 02:54:26+00:00
I really like the practicality and simplicity of this.

Designing stuff for real humans to use, is really difficult, and really humbling.

In my experience, defense contractors really have to take the user context into account. It can be life or death. I used to work for one, and seeing the stuff come back from the field, was a lesson in humility.
by consumer451 | 2025-12-14 02:55:39+00:00
It now appears that we took the understanding of democracy, the scientific process, and other basic tenants of our modern society for granted. But, it was a good run.

It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.

It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.
by kkukshtel | 2025-12-14 02:58:00+00:00
This is the most boomer response. The idea of a long horizon to build your wealth against implies some faith in the future, which a lot of younger people no longer (righfully) believe in. But for a lot of the working public it seems a lot like they will not get to benefit from a future promised to them, and so have no stock in trying to work with the system to believe in it.

https://reallifemag.com/play-to-lose/
by scoofy | 2025-12-14 02:58:07+00:00
Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.

We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.