MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rcanand2025 | 2025-12-25 04:16:05+00:00
I am an indie developer working on building local private AI augmented niche human experiences for macs.

This may seem strange right now, but very soon, we will see that intelligent (AI) systems in various companies (OS, browser, cloud, AI labs) are learning much more about us and using that to maximize their own agendas - for example, these companies' AI systems can start recommending products I am likely to buy as part of my future interactions with them. Not happening broadly yet, but only a matter of time. And local private experiences will be very attractive then.

Next: Why Mac app? Currently, Macs with Apple Silicon (M1, etc. processors) can run the largest local models efficiently (compared to other alternatives). And Apple is also more committed to privacy of user data than others. Hence, mac apps. Would also consider iOS apps, but the app store review is an unpredictable bottleneck - so will only do it if experience is validated on Mac.

You asked how it is working on this: I have been learning to use AI assisted coding more efficiently, finding the balance between manual and vibe coding - reached critical mass recently - built and launched my first such mac app in 10 days from idea to launch - using AI assistance more for some parts, less for some. Now, it seems like if I can prioritize what to build (there are too many ideas possible, and most are claimed to be solved by several companies when you search - finding one that can work as an indie dev is the biggest challenge), there can be a pipeline of several small useful apps on this stack.

I have tried many alternatives for the tech stack to build the mac app - swift, tauri, electron, beeware toga, kivy, etc., and finally settled on pyside 6 (a more leniently licensed variant of Qt), so all my code is in python (breadth and depth of backend ecosystem is unmatched, and code assistant AI knows python better than some alternatives across the breadth of needed experiences). Also pyside 6 keeps the option to rebuild for windows and linux apps easier.

This is my current thinking, but given the rapidly shifting landscape, might change as I find better alternatives (or better options get released).
by fnordpiglet | 2025-12-25 04:18:52+00:00
The challenge with this way of thinking is what handicaps a lot of cultures education systems - they teach how to find the answer to a question - but that’s not where the true value lies. The true value comes from learning how to ask the right question. This is becoming even more true faster and faster as AI becomes better at answering questions of various sorts and using external tools to answer what its weak at (optimizations, math, logic, etc).

You don’t learn how to ask the right questions by just having facts at your fingertips. You need to have lots of explorations of what questions can be asked and how they are approached. This is why when you explore the history of discovery humanist societies tend to dominate the most advanced discoveries. Mechanical and rote practical focus yields advances of a pragmatic sort limited to what questions have been asked to date.

Removing arts, culture, philosophy (and its cousin politics) from assistive technologies will certainly help churn out people who will know answers, but answers the machines know better. But will not produce people who will ask questions never asked before - and the easy part of answering those questions will be accelerated with these new machines that are good at answering questions. Such questions often lie at the intersection of arts, culture, philosophy, and science - which is why Liebnitz, Newton, Aristotle, et al were polyglots across many fields asking questions never yet dreamed of as a result of the synthesis across disciplines.
Ask HN: At 34, can I aspire to being more than a JavaScript widget engineer?
by yesitcan | 2025-12-25 04:19:14+00:00
I’ve spent a decade doing frontend work. It pays pretty well but I am essentially just making modals and dropdowns for CRUD apps. I crave more purpose in life but understand the most rational choice is to keep going and saving for retirement.

Does it make sense to change direction at this point? I envy PhDs working on self-driving cars and rockets and AI. But also question overall morality of the tech industry.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-12-25 04:21:10+00:00
>"To address these issues, the research team adopted a dual strategy combining a Reversible Host (RH) and a Designed Electrolyte (DEL). The reversible host consists of a polymer framework embedded with uniformly distributed silver (Ag) nanoparticles,

guiding lithium to deposit in designated locations rather than randomly

. In simple terms, it acts like a dedicated parking lot for lithium, ensuring ordered and uniform deposition."

(I'm wondering if some process like this -- might one day replace (or supplement) photolithography for creating chips/IC's...)
by godelski | 2025-12-25 04:21:11+00:00
Mine still does this, especially when it's correcting a word. It happens when your cursor is in the word.

But I'm not sure what I hate more: the one I hate the most is when it completes for you and then you get two instances of the word, no space separation or where it corrects the word you just swiped AND the word before it... and then when you press backspace it deletes both words...

Btw, I have autocorrect disabled...

iOS typing is a fucking nightmare
by vkou | 2025-12-25 04:22:14+00:00
The best thing about windows 11 is that if you hit the windows key, and type 'restart', it searches for 'restart' on Bing.

Please give me the name, rank, and serial number of the PM who thought this was a good idea. I will use all my meager fortune to make sure that nobody will want to hire them for PM work ever again.
by stackghost | 2025-12-25 04:22:39+00:00
Interesting. What about ipv6 don't you like, and why would a 64-bit scheme remedy it?

>IPv6 would only promote incautious distribution which would again result in address space exhaustion

There are more ipv6 addresses than there are atoms in the earth.

>more abuse and increased cybercrime.

IP address-based mitigations are already not effective with v4, can you talk about why v6 makes this worse?
by h27 | 2025-12-25 04:23:01+00:00
I love Cloudflare. A lot. But I don't love that they refuse to address the fact their cloud has a single fault zone.

Customers can not, no matter how hard they try, build highly available services using Cloudflare.

They are quite proud of it too if you read the smugness in their blogs about having just 1 region: Earth... Yet they keep having global outages.

I can no longer recommend them.
by dagmx | 2025-12-25 04:25:13+00:00
The modules are just inset usb-c dongles.

Handy that you can have them fully encased but there’s nothing really limiting any other laptop on this front. You just use an external dongle and have the same flexibility.

Maybe some people really want the enclosed module so they have fewer things to carry, but that’s a pretty small advantage that I’m not sure many people will value.

I could get something like this ( https://satechi.net/products/undefined/products/pro-hub-slim ) for my MacBook Air and come out ahead on weight and size.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-25 04:25:24+00:00
I really like this atproto model so much.

Having one account/sovereign Personal Data Store that can hold many different kinds of data. Then having many different clients and services that are decoupled from the data, offering all kinds of experiences is just night and day better than everything else. For everyone.

You account works everywhere & that's awesome. You also have credible edit & can take your account to a different server without disruption, baked in: amazing win for sovereign computing & digital rights far better than (basically) anything.

People can make cool connected online services, without having to figure out how to host all the data! That's so powerful, so cool (and ActivityPub maybe can decouple someday, but we don't see it yet. The data store and the app go hand in hand, & you end up with an account for each service). It makes it wildly easy to build incredible connected services with fantastically little effort and costs.

That said, I did try to get some of my git repos on https://Tangled.org just today, and alas found that the actual git data needs a "knit" server to do that. And afaik there are are no knot servers I can just use. I'd never seen that complexity for a atproto app before! Usually with something like the book reading social app https://bookhive.buzz or the annotation service https://seams.co , just having your regular account is all the data & service you need. Tangled was a surprising contrast, but I hope to be online there sometime soon-ish!
by safety1st | 2025-12-25 04:26:10+00:00
I want Framework to succeed, but the author's objection isn't unreasonable:

> For a premium price I expect a premium laptop, but the Framework 16 feels more like a €1200-€1500 laptop at best... two thousand Euros for this kind of laptop is just absurd

For most people the long-term total cost of ownership is going to be a major factor when they consider a more repairable laptop. Sure, generating less e-waste is nice, but saving money is probably the main point. What the author is asserting here is that to get the repairable laptop you need to spend 50% more for the same specs! As well as accept that the form factor is bulkier etc. At a 50% premium you do have to question whether you're going to save a meaningful amount of money in the long run.

For me I probably would - I find uses for machines that are a decade old and the repurposability of Framework components is pretty interesting. But interest in this level of reusability is a pretty niche market.

I think the Framework 16 is too expensive. They can access a niche market at these price points but to get bigger they will need to find a way to deal with the cost issue. PC World's review of the Framework 13 this year was: "A steep price for a compelling upgrade."
by userbinator | 2025-12-25 04:26:14+00:00
I'm not. GCC started out as a work of idealistic licensing purists and was deliberately "obfuscated" to make it hard to extend and embed. That stance has since been softened considerably, but the code generator is still far more complex than it needs to be, and I think that has made it harder to modify for efficiency. Clang is far less ideology-focused and its structure makes implementing optimisations easier.

On the other hand, I find MSVC and especially ICC output to be quite decent, although I have never seen their source code.

Having inspected the output of compilers for several decades, it's rather easy to tell them apart.
by novaleaf | 2025-12-25 04:26:54+00:00
dunno if you tried VS2026 C#, but it's worse. I have no extensions (besides the default Copilot) and it's a never ending battle of just trying to get the normal intellisense to show up. What's worst is that the copilot autocomplete suggestions fill in made up methods/properties. Why can't it look at intellisense to get the real ones?
by petermcd | 2025-12-25 04:29:38+00:00
Thank you for introducing me to Terry Davis. I'm going to read more about him.

I am definitely not talking about art.

When I refer to 100x engineer, I'm referring to the impact that QEMU and FFmpeg have had on the world. I would be surprised if anyone who is familiar with these two projects would disagree that they have been highly impactful.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-25 04:30:11+00:00
> Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc.

> [...]

> By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.

So it's a great analogy. Wayland started out proudly proclaiming that it intentionally didn't support features in the name of "security" but everyone should "upgrade" because this was totally better, and has been very slowly discovering that actually all the stuff it willfully dropped was useful and has mostly evolved back to near feature parity with Xorg.
by joeturki | 2025-12-25 04:30:15+00:00
SCTP isn't just a UDP pipe, It's a message oriented, congestion-controlled, reliability protocol, with bunch of other semantics.

We measured:

1. Association state + Per PATH CC/RTO, timers, RTT tracking, cwnd etc.

2. Selective ACKs and re-transmit logic.

3. chunk framing + tsn sequences.

4. ordered vs unordered delivery, and fragmentation/reassembly.

much more ...

Also our vnet-based implementation isn't just dumb buffer, we have packet on wire validation, SCTP parsing, CRC32c validations. deterministic network conditions emulator. With real time conditions.

Sure you can get 100 GB/Core second if you bypass all of that and just do huge batching

The blog post claim is just under the same SCTP semantics and the same test harness, enabling RACK has a huge win. not the absolute ceilings of in-process "virtual network" sockets :)
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-25 04:33:01+00:00
> The choices in the Linux ecosystem lead to unnecessary fragmentation and development/packaging nightmares.

You cannot possibly use this as an argument in Wayland's favor. X11 sucked because it baked everything, including multiple outdated kitchen sinks, into a single Xorg monolith. Wayland sucks because it factors out everything, including really important features, into optional extensions, ensuring that anything more interesting than "draw pixels to a window" will always be different on every single compositor.
by chews | 2025-12-25 04:34:01+00:00
This is a humanities problem, sure those of us on HN are comfortable in a cashless society. That doesn’t translate to older generations of people. Cash is a fundamental part of a developed society, we should have privacy, fungibility, and large scale acceptance.

I hate that food shops like sweetgreen are cashless, just because the they can’t trust their tellers is not a reason to outright refuse the ability to purchase.
by kotatsu_dog | 2025-12-25 04:36:20+00:00
Hey HN! I built GitJin (gitjin.com) because GitHub's home feed was slowing me down. Too much clutter, too much scrolling, and I kept losing track of active PRs across multiple tabs.

The problem: GitHub's UI optimizes for discovery over productivity. When you need to quickly scan your repos, review PRs, or check issue status, you're stuck clicking through multiple pages.

How GitJin works:

- Single-screen view of all your repos, PRs, and issues

- GitHub-inspired interface (feels native, not another generic dashboard)

- CDN-optimized for sub-second load times

- Keyboard shortcuts and smart filters built for developer workflows

Technical details:
- Built with Next.js and TypeScript

- Server-side rendering for instant page loads

- Uses GitHub's GraphQL API for efficient data fetching

- Deployed on edge infrastructure for global performance

The goal isn't to replace GitHub—just to give developers a faster way to see what matters without the noise.
by ori_b | 2025-12-25 04:37:35+00:00
Which one? The Gnome Wayland, the KDE Wayland, the xroots wayland, Weston, or one of the others? Each one is an independent implementation of a Wayland compositor, with a differing, incompatible set of extensions.

X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap fonts, it's no longer a unified protocol.

And to top it off -- it kept the worst part of the X11 protocol, the XKB extension, but got rid of input handling entirely, which means that every platform needs to reach for platform specific code to implement reading from the mouse and keyboard.

Yay.
by linguae | 2025-12-25 04:38:06+00:00
As a fan of older Macs, I didn't know there were any 64-bit PowerPC chips made after the Power Mac G5 and the Cell processors used in the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3.

This is cool; it would be cool to play with a modern, hobbyist 64-bit PowerPC board. I will be keeping an eye on this project!
by gen220 | 2025-12-25 04:39:17+00:00
FWIW, I agree that less ink on a resume is usually a higher signal, and I also find that indicators for “ownership”, social trust, autonomy, and proxies thereof are more valuable than number go up narratives.

But sometimes people feel like they must play this game to get past the pre-interview loop screen; I’ve interviewed plenty of people with number go up narratives who’ve done exceptionally well. It’s challenging to make hard and fast rules!
by arunabha | 2025-12-25 04:39:39+00:00
I don't think the opposition from the public is because they don't see value in AI. Quite the opposite, every single non tech person I know has used AI tools and can immediately see the value.

The 'backlash' seems to be from the fact that people, esp white collar workers are finally realizing what blue collar folks have been feeling for quite some time. That an overwhelming majority of the technology driven productivity gains accrue to capital owners, not workers and AI is the ultimate productivity tool.

It doesn't help that capital owners no longer feel it necessary to even pretend. Like when CEOs openly salivate at the prospect of firing all workers and replacing them with AI. When people see their electricity rates go up to subsidize billionaires building AI data centers. When they see their real wages falling continually while they are told how good the economy is.

If the gains from AI were shared even a little with the regular people, they might not have the deep sense of unease and sometimes open hostility that we are seeing now.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-25 04:41:25+00:00
Conceptually yes, but trying to understand what affordances you have what tools you can use what options are about, to begin to then decide to learn those systems, is incredibly incredibly hard.

With LLMs, you can ask for what you want and it can assess approaches. And try to solve. And adjust rapidly.

Trying to understand what affordances are available has been a nightmare of computing. Yes people do incredible things & take ownership of systems in amazing & incredible ways! But I just think it has required such deep esoteric knowledge just to get started, to have an idea of where you have leverage. I really think there's such a chance for more agency here, and without such being totally lost and confused and having no idea and so little help pointing the way.
by fouc | 2025-12-25 04:42:09+00:00
The title for your submission should be a Show HN:

Interesting point about the problem of HN's depth-first comment structure. It feels like perhaps HN should collapse sub-comments by default to encourage more breadth. Perhaps collapse by default at the 2nd level.

Your approach to solving that is an interesting UX idea but even with the basic understanding the comments are sorted by their levels, it wasn't very obvious how to navigate the app. I kinda expected to be able to easily scroll across all level 1 comments (whether scrolling vertically or horizontally).

I was also surprised that the first comment was already pre-selected, and that level 2 comments were only for the selected comment. You could require new users to click on a comment first before expanding to show the level 2 comments, gives them an opportunity to learn the relationship between the two.
by therunninglight | 2025-12-25 04:45:19+00:00
yes, i've noticed some tendency for [agentic] qa services to go the puppeteer and then playwright route (sometimes either or). it's almost too easy to get running with pw. and, hence, enticing for any startup that wants to get off the ground asap and break even. seems vibium may tap into that startup market as it matures.

legacy selenium suites are a strong contender for vibium adoption. i think hugs has been surveying a ton of folks, he may have a better bird's eye view of the potential user base.

as for academic use of selenium, we have boni garcia - maker/popularizer or selenium webdriver manager teaching at a uni in spain. (maybe an isolated example, but he's rather known in the community)
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-25 04:45:29+00:00
Screens are dramatically better than a few years ago and have been advancing if you care about and shop for the feature. Trackpads are slowly sucking less.

Most people only see this in MacBook Pros, but the other manufacturers have excellent screens that are often hidden behind customization options and complex models/branding.

I have a framework and love it, but it’s a computer made for a specific purpose that doesn’t align with most people. That’s ok - Dell makes like 500 different let laptops and Framework has a totally different proposition.
by 20after4 | 2025-12-25 04:46:49+00:00
It really doesn't make much sense. The article was actually insightful on this point, or at least this matches my experience:

> it suggests they operate on a consensus-based model that stifles autonomy

The one place where I experienced a lot of rounds of interviews (at least 8 interviews, I think) was at the Wikimedia Foundation. It's an organization that is very explicitly built on consensus-based decision making. There were many great things about working there and at first it was very different from typical corporate culture. In some ways it was stifling, at least for someone who isn't a savvy politician. By the time I left in 2021, they had fully adopted the same kind of leveling system as discussed here, with all of the same political and structural constraints on advancement.
by ilvez | 2025-12-25 04:47:14+00:00
Some things do but for some details I'm amazed what I need to do to make it work, like going to sleep with multiple displays. Maybe it's a sway thing and I'm not complaining at all, crafting a solid minimal configuration has its charms.

I'm just thinking why did it take me so long to do the switch. I still keep X around, but not sure how long. Like keeping vim around after switching to nvim few years back..
by jollymonATX | 2025-12-25 04:47:49+00:00
Its important to consider others perspectives, even if inaccurate. As it was expressed to me when I suggested "why not write a blog" to a relative who is into niche bug photos and collecting they didn't want to give their writing and especially photos to be trained on. They have valid points honestly and an accurate framing of what will happen, it will get injested eventually likely. I think they overestimate a tad their works importance overall but still they seemed to have a pretty accurate guage of likely outcomes. Let me flip the question, why should they not be able to choose "not for training uses" even if they put it up publically?
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-25 04:47:50+00:00
That was due to a defective keyboard design that the company denied, failed to fix after several revisions, and was ultimately sued for.

I was stuck with one of these at work. I’ve owned or had in my custody probably 30 laptops since 1995. It’s the only one that required keyboard replacement, and ended up needing 3.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-12-25 04:48:26+00:00
From the article, an OpenAI researcher apparently:

> “Every time I use Codex to solve some issue late at night or GPT helps me figure out a difficult strategic problem, I feel: what a relief. There are so few minds on Earth that are both intelligent and persistent enough to generate new insights and keep the torch of scientific civilization alive. Now you have potentially infinite minds to throw at infinite potential problems. Your computer friend that never takes the day off, never gets bored, never checks out and stops trying.”

Um, this person needs help? Serious mental issues, hello?! It's really concerning me how many people are having breaks with reality, and I don't only mean the poor people who are sadly taking their own lives.