MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lefra | 2025-12-23 10:14:09+00:00
I program FPGAs professionally (Xilinx Zynq, VHDL). I agree that the tool's GUI is atrocious, the actual way to use it is to write everything in TCL scripts, and invoke the tools through a Makefile. I only open the GUI to look at timing issues or ask it for code templates.

I disagree with "HDL is software" though. It's not, it's even in the name: "hardware description language". Yes it's a text file with what looks a lot like regular code in it. However what's being decribed is how to connect boxes of logic together, and how to compute the output of the boxes from their inputs. There's no implicit program counter that's advancing from one line to the next.

It is (theoretically) possible to write these kind of things with a lot of abstraction, but every time you try that by using more advanced language features, you hit some bugs in the tool's implementation of the language. If you're lucky it'll tell you where you're doing undupported stuff. Often it'll crash. Sometimes it'll sythesize hardware that doesn't conform with the language spec.

Finally, FPGAs are simple only when you're looking at a bird's eye view (just like CPUs are simple when you're looking at a diagram with a few boxes saying "ALU", "Cache", "Registers"). The actual datasheets are thousands of pages long.

FPGAs are still useful though, their use case is "I need custom hardware and I don't have the volume to build an ASIC". For example, my application is a custom signal processing pipeline that's handling about 3.5 Gbit/s of streaming raw data. On a $40 chip.

I think my main point is that yes, the tooling is a pain to use, with heaps of bugs and bad language support. However a HDL is conceptually different from a software language and I'm not sure you can hide away the complexities of designing hardware behind "modern" language features.

For those suggesting diagram-based languages, go program something in LabView, you'll quickly understand why that's a bad idea (works for trivial designs, anything complex is an opaque mess of boxes and lines, unsearchable, and impossible to integrate with version control).
by defrost | 2025-12-23 10:14:12+00:00
Trump.

Anybody sane in office would build the same kind of thing (hardened command and control bunker) but somewhere else in the area.

The argument for the whitehouse location would be "in the event of a nuclear missile headed for DC with little to no time to move ... " the POTUS could be moved straight down and have access to all that is needed for digital control, etc.

The argument against would be that's the one location almost guarenteed to get a penetrating atomic or conventional warhead (if anywhere) and it'd be better to be anywhere else.

That said .. any bunker or data centre might well be some distance away .. and the project is build a fast transport tunnel from the complex already under that wing to a new deep bunker some reasonable distance away.
by amluto | 2025-12-23 10:14:44+00:00
Shallow clones are a thing. And it’s fairly straightforward to create a tarball that includes enough hashes to verify the hash chain all the way to the commit hash. (In fact, I once kludged that up several years ago, and maybe I should dust it off. The tarball extracted just like a regular tarball but had all the git objects needed hiding inside in a way that tar would ignore.)
Show HN: I built a tool to clear my YouTube's "Watch Later" Video Graveyard
by nikhonit | 2025-12-23 10:14:47+00:00
I built this because I consume a lot of technical lectures and long-form podcasts on YouTube, but I found myself wasting hours scrubbing through videos just to find specific citations or concepts.

Recapio is a tool that extracts the transcript and generates structured summaries for videos (and web articles). It’s not trying to replace watching content, but rather to act as a 'Ctrl+F' for video context.

One technical challenge I faced: Dealing with auto-generated YouTube captions vs. forced captions was messy. I had to build a parser that normalizes the timestamps so that when you click a summary point, it actually seeks to the correct frame, even if the caption timing is drifting.

It has a free tier that should cover most casual usage. I’d love your feedback on the extraction quality
by LeratoAustini | 2025-12-23 10:14:48+00:00
As someone who is sometimes on slow/spotty internet, Discourse's loading dots/circles rub me the wrong way. Like what are they *doing* for all this time while I wait for a page of relatively simple-looking HTML to load? I kept seeing these familiar coloured dots on seemingly disparate sites and it took me a while to realise they were all running Discourse.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-23 10:15:36+00:00
> , suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps that the whole concept is outmoded

While outmoded might be the case, wrong is probably not the case.

There's some features of the network protocols that are designed to improve the network, not the individual connection. It's not novel that you can improve your connection. By disabling "good neighbour" features.
by gus_ | 2025-12-23 10:15:52+00:00
At the very least, these tools should not parse /proc to obtain information of processes or connections. It should be the last option.

Many LD_PRELOAD rootkits hide their activity from the system by manipulating the output of libc functions like readdir(), open(), stat(), etc.
kernel rootkits can hide whatever they need, but the common functionality is also to hide data from /proc.

That's why netstat, ps, *top or lsof are not reliable tools if the system is compromised. ss is a bit different and is a bit more reliable.

In this case, snitch is written in Go, which doesn't use the libc functions, so probably it'll be able to obtain information from /proc even if hidden by a LD_PRELOAD rootkit.

Another option would be to compile the binary statically.

Anyways, these tools are not meant to unhide malicious traffic or processes, so I think detecting beacons, inspecting traffic, etc, is out of the scope.

Resources:

https://github.com/gustavo-iniguez-goya/decloaker

User-space library rootkits revisited: Are user-space detection mechanisms futile? - https://arxiv.org html/2506.07827v1

The Hidden Threat: Analysis of Linux Rootkit Techniques and Limitations of Current Detection Tools - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3688808

https://matheuzsecurity.github.io/hacking/bypass-userland-ho...

https://ops.tips/blog/how-is-proc-able-to-list-pids/
by troupo | 2025-12-23 10:16:34+00:00
> I really can't understand why JetBrains hasn't integrated its refactoring tools into the AI system.

Because their refactoring tools are not a "slap on a couple of commands and delegate actual work to external code" like LSP? Because their tools are a huge collection of tools deeply integrated into the IDE? Including custom parsers, interpreters and analysers?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-23 10:17:09+00:00
The US has a problem where government revenue has been increasing by the usual amount (i.e. as a percent of GDP it's within the same range it has been for 70+ years), and is therefore the highest it's ever been before in real dollars, but spending has increased by even more than that, and in particular spending has been increasing faster than GDP. But for the last few decades we've had people saying "deficits don't matter".

The trouble is, they kind of do, and now "interest on the debt" is eating a chunk out of the budget that rivals the entire Department of Defense. So not only is spending growing faster than GDP, a huge chunk of the money that had historically gone to cover even the traditional spending is now going to interest. And if the deficit stays how it is, that's only going to get worse.

The result is that there is no "tariff revenues" to spend on anything. Even with the additional revenue, spending still needs to go down just to tread water.

And then the question is, is the thing you're proposing worth more than the additional cuts it would take to cover it, i.e. what do you want to not have in order to have that?
by Ekaros | 2025-12-23 10:17:19+00:00
Honestly. Actually on premise infra doesn't sound insane. Especially if there is say real air-gapped part of it. Or in general storing information in place that at least feels like properly access controlled. To data stay inside premises it could make some sense.

And maybe NSA knows some attack vectors that we do not. So even geographically close by might have risks involved.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-23 10:17:26+00:00
TBH when I hit the Claude daily limit I just take that as a sign to go outside (or go to bed, depending on the time).

If the project management is on point, it really doesn't matter. Unfinished tasks stay as is, if something is unfinished in the context I leave the terminal open and come back some time later, type "continue", hit enter and go away.
by hulitu | 2025-12-23 10:17:30+00:00
> But, people's tolerance for failure is low, and starting to match existing service levels will demand more cost (-one kind of failure) or risk (the bigger one) of data loss.

"Nice datacenter you have. Such a pity that it has ... connection problems. ".

Microsoft is moving everything in the cloud.

(Takes popcorn)
EU is doing the same.

Some people never learn.
by mgaunard | 2025-12-23 10:18:12+00:00
the whole point of TCP is that it is a stream of bytes, not of messages.

The problem is that this is not in practice quite what most applications need, but the Internet evolved towards UDP and TCP only.

So you can have message-based if you want, but then you have to do sequencing, gap filling or flow control yourself, or you can have the overkill reliable byte stream with limited control or visibility at the application level.
by baruchel | 2025-12-23 10:18:54+00:00
When you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.
by noirscape | 2025-12-23 10:19:45+00:00
The spam issue is probably one of the stronger arguments against email centered design for bug trackers, code forges and the like. It's a bit crazy that in order to professionally participate in modern software development, you're inherently agreeing that every spammer with a bridge to sell you is going to be able to send you unsollicited spam.

There's a reason most code forges offer you a fake email that will also be considered as "your identity" for the forge these days.
by OKRainbowKid | 2025-12-23 10:20:16+00:00
Practically nobody "likes" war. However, when facing adversaries like Putin who don't care for democracy, human life, human rights, agreements and contracts, who have no conviction beyond "might makes right", not ensuring clearly superior military capabilities ultimately means submitting to their plans of domination. Reflexively rejecting any kind of military investment is naïve and plays into the hands of the likes of Putin. It is no surprise that in the west, political parties and actors with proven ties to the Russian regime predominantly promote this faux-pacifist narrative, effectively inviting the fox into the chicken pen.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-23 10:20:54+00:00
> As of Dec 2025, Sonnet/Opus and GPTCodex are both trained and most good agent tools (ie. opencode, claude-code, codex) have prompts to fire off subagents during an exploration (use the word explore) and you should be able to Research without needing the extra steps of writing plans and resetting context. I'd save that expense unless you need some huge multi-step verifiable plan implemented.

Does the UI shows clearly what portion was done by a subagent?
by vegabook | 2025-12-23 10:21:24+00:00
Yeah once you've used Nix[OS] and home-manager, it's hard to go back to apt or brew or the dreaded "sudo make install" without feeling like you need to have a shower afterwards. And I was a loyal Ubuntu person for like 15 years. It's especially true if you're a dev installing and uninstalling all day long.
by Y-bar | 2025-12-23 10:23:24+00:00
> I don’t see it as a matter of defending Apple, it’s really a matter of technical understanding and competence.

So do I. And my >20 years in the business gives me the experience and knowledge to see through Apple’s FUD.

> […] but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.

It is my device. I paid for it. If Apple thinks they deserve more money for what they did they are free to ask me, the customer, for more money.

> […] unelected bureaucratic despots

Aha, the dog whistle of the AfD brand of conspiratorial bullshit ”unelected” nonsense! Career bureaucracy is supposed to be certified and educated, not elected, because that is the only way they can properly implement the laws of the electorate. Bureaucracy still answers to elected officials, but they are supposed to act without political interference and provide specialist knowledge. For the same reason you do not vote on every captain and colonel in the military hierarchy, or every tax collector/auditor in your IRS equivalent, you do not vote on every bureaucrat in the Commission tasked to execute and implement law.
Show HN: A tiny work log that generates performance review summaries
by morozred | 2025-12-23 10:24:09+00:00
Hi HN,

A few months ago I posted JotChain here — a work log tool that tried to do too much. The feedback was fair: the value wasn’t obvious.

I rebuilt it with a much narrower focus: performance reviews.

The problem

We recently started doing performance reviews, and I had to review three developers. I remembered some highlights and issues from the past year, but a lot of context was missing — especially small but important things like soft-skill feedback or moments where someone quietly helped unblock the team.

Those things never make it into a 1:1 doc, and by review time they’re gone.

I wanted one place where I could quickly jot things down as they happen, without worrying about structure — and only structure it when it matters.

The approach

Write short notes as work happens (30 seconds, no format)

Add light context (project, teammates)

Pick a date range and generate a clean: self-review, peer/person review, accomplishments summary.

No meeting recordings, no standup bots — just a lightweight log that turns into review-ready output.

It’s early and adoption is slow, so I’m mainly looking for feedback:

- Does this solve a real problem for you?
- How do you handle performance reviews today?
- Is “performance reviews” a strong enough wedge?

Live here: https://jotchain.com

Happy to answer questions and very open to criticism.
by quantpunk | 2025-12-23 10:24:49+00:00
I learned programming with csound in the 90s but for me, Pyo and Librosa means there is no reason for a specialized language outside of python.

There is value in what has already been built for these languages but once you move beyond that, life is so much easier to just use python.

Cecilia5 is a great example of that being rewritten from csound to pyo.
by david-gpu | 2025-12-23 10:25:35+00:00
> Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.

I am an immigrant and find this line of thinking to be a cheap rhetorical trick, a thought-terminating cliché. Yes, people who are not immigrants can share their opinion on the behaviors of immigrants. Maybe we can all learn a little from each other instead of gatekeeping anybody who has had a different lived experience.
by Sharanxxxx | 2025-12-23 10:26:02+00:00
My internship ended recently, and I was offered a Junior Software Engineer role. The pay and growth didn’t really align with the effort I was putting in, so I made a tough call.

I left.

I had just one month of internship stipend saved. Instead of job hunting, I decided to use that time to build and ship my own product.

No audience. No launch hype. Just shipping every day and sharing it wherever it made sense.

Today, before that one month even ran out, I got 3 real sales.

It’s not life-changing money, but it’s validation — and honestly, relief. This is the first time something I built made money without a boss, a company name, or a salary attached to it.

Still early, still risky, but this small win changed how I think about betting on myself.

Happy to answer questions or share what worked / didn’t.
by iefbr14 | 2025-12-23 10:26:05+00:00
The damage from a frozen water line in your house can be a lot more than $4000.

We had them when I was still a kid in the sixties and I did not like it at all. Jumping in a warm bed is nice but leaving it on during the night makes you wake up all sweaty in the middle of the night. Even on the lowest setting.
by piva00 | 2025-12-23 10:28:02+00:00
It's related to culture, a culture that normalises driving as a non-risky activity while also being very individualistic, a culture that requires you to drive from early age to have access to places, with minimal training and not very strict training requirements to be licenced.

A habit of speeding is created from a lack of consideration, it's an ignorant and dumb thing to do.
by atombender | 2025-12-23 10:28:02+00:00
How do these compare? I'm very familiar with Augment and particularly enjoy its fast completions. I mostly don't use its agent, but rather Claude Code in the terminal, because the agent seems superior.

But Augment is not the most stable. I've had lots of serious problems with it. The newest problem that's pushing me over the edge is that it's recently have been causing the IDE to shoot up to use all cores (it's rare to see an app use 1,000% CPU in the macOS Activity Monitor, but it did it!) when it needs to recompute indexes, which is the only thing that has ever made my M2 Mac run its fan. It's not very reliable generally (e.g. autocompletions don't always appear), so I'd be interested in trying alternatives.
by throwaw12 | 2025-12-23 10:28:08+00:00
I didn't say it is "the result of optimizing for something else", I said model is optimized for coding, use it for coding and evaluate based on coding, why are you using it for political fact checking.

when do we stop this kind of polarization? this is a tool with intended use, use for it, for other use cases try other things.

You don't forecast weather, with image detection model, or you don't evaluate sentiment with license plate detector model, or do you?
by Jonghwa_Lee | 2025-12-23 10:28:09+00:00
I've been exploring a speculative idea: what if some of the "strange" phenomena in physics—like gravitational time dilation—aren't fundamental forces, but emergent effects of a universe with finite computational resources?

In this preprint, I model the universe as a Universal Computing System (UCS). The core hypothesis is what I call Information-Induced Time Dilation (ITD): regions with high information density may experience a local "processing lag," which we observe physically as time dilation.

Rather than replacing General Relativity, the idea is to extend it by adding an information entropy term to the stress-energy tensor. Importantly, the paper also outlines a concrete experimental test using Sr-87 optical lattice clocks that could, in principle, distinguish this effect from standard GR predictions.

I'd really appreciate feedback from people in systems, distributed computing, and physics:
Does it make sense to think of spacetime as having computational bottlenecks, latency, or throughput limits?
by pjmlp | 2025-12-23 10:28:34+00:00
US navy has weapons targeting systems on some battleships implemented in Java with realtime GC, equally France has missile tracking systems, also implemented in Java with realtime GC, courtesy of PTC and Aonix.

https://www.militaryaerospace.com/defense-executive/article/...

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/aegis-combat-s...

https://vita.militaryembedded.com/1670-aonix-uss-bunker-hill...

Not all GC are born alike, and in real life there isn't "insert credit to continue".
by hm-iti26 | 2025-12-23 10:28:48+00:00
# Introducing YD Shomer - The Guardian's Hand for PHP

I just released *YD Shomer*, a runtime SQL validator that catches security issues during development and teaches developers secure coding practices.

## The Name

- *YD (י)* - Yod, the Hebrew letter symbolizing divine protection
- *Shomer (שומר)* - Guardian in Hebrew
- *The Guardian's Hand* - Protection through vigilance

## Quick Example
```php
use Shomer\QueryValidator;

define('SHOMER_ENABLED', true);

// This will trigger a warning
$report = QueryValidator::validate([
'sql' => "DELETE FROM users", // Missing WHERE!
'params' => []
], $verbose = true);

// Shomer provides:
// Error detected
// Exact location: file.php line 42
// Suggested fix: "DELETE FROM users WHERE id = ?"
// Email alert sent
```

## Key Features

*Security First:*
- Detects SQL injection vulnerabilities
- Validates prepared statements
- Checks parameter counts and types

*Developer Experience:*
- Auto-captures execution context (file, line, URL)
- Provides secure query suggestions
- Educational approach

*Production Ready:*
- Zero overhead when disabled
- Instant bypass
- No performance impact

## Perfect For

- Learning secure SQL practices
- Code reviews
- Onboarding junior developers
- Refactoring legacy code
- Development environments

## Installation
```bash
composer require yd-shomer/php-shomer
by quitit | 2025-12-23 10:29:49+00:00
I don't think it's as black and white as you suggest.

He just wrote about Japan's implementation of a similar set of laws rather favourably - the theme is that Japan's implementation looks very much like a genuine attempt at protecting users and benefitting end users and developers.

While I don't agree with what a lot of what Gruber has to say. A point I do agree with is that the DMA is being sold (by Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Ursula von der Leyer) as a set of consumer protections, when it's plainly not that, and in some clear ways does the opposite.

There's also persistent transparency questions like why the EU has excessive meetings with Spotify, or why there is not a "music" gatekeeper in the DMA, or the requirement to easily move music libraries between music services - things that would actually help consumers and prevent genuine lock in.

(Note this isn't to excuse the behaviour of big tech.)
by Y-bar | 2025-12-23 10:30:05+00:00
> always ends up catastrophically.

Government intervention like forbidding led-based paints or asbestos in homes? Or government intervention like doing something about the ozone depletion? Government intervention like forbidding roaming fees? Intervention like requiring 3-point seat belts? Like progressive taxation? Like forbidding discrimination based on skin colour? Like air travel safety? Like a max ceiling on credit card fees?

Always?