MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-31 17:37:04+00:00
Languages lose users when the tooling becomes too heavy.

You have to learn ( and maintain knowledge of ) build tooling, unit test frameworks, tools for front end / back end development, distribution and packaging systems, directory structures to accommodate all those, etc. ad nauseum.

Then something new and shiny comes out, with much smaller tooling. The lure of easy software construction seduces the user.

It never ends.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-31 17:37:37+00:00
> Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000.

What are you talking about? nVidia only has two models in the $1000 to $2000 range and they’re clearly premium parts.

The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.
by why-o-why | 2025-12-31 17:37:52+00:00
I really don't believe you, but according to HN, I am supposed to trust in good faith you aren't lying.

Maybe you just don't have any assets or make very little money. I have equity and cannot just toss it to a collection agency and hope they forget. I also play by the rules, silly, I know, but I don't want to risk getting fucked some other way later in life.
by Zetaphor | 2025-12-31 17:37:58+00:00
Linux ages like WINE, Windows ages like milk.

The incentives for improving Linux are driven only in part by commercial interests, and those interests are not completely centralized. Windows' fate is entirely in the hands of the current Microsoft leadership, and they seem hellbent on extracting maximum value from their users while ignoring the suffering their "Continuous Innovation" creates.

It's almost as if they want everyone to start looking for the exits, and thankfully Linux is finally at the point in its maturity on desktop to start attracting power users who have no prior experience.

I don't think 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but it does feel like we're at the start of a big shake-up in the industry. Once we start seeing the hockey stick pattern in the adoption rates I would expect that more money and developer time will follow to help smooth out the areas where the transition is still difficult, like professional software.
by hermitcrab | 2025-12-31 17:38:03+00:00
I spend a small amount on Adwords and that is pretty much it. I gave up on Bing PPC. Facebook Ads aren't suitable for my market. Linked Ads ar too expensive. I tried Reddit Ads, but that was a disaster. See also:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/12/22/is-the-golden-age-...
by Isamu | 2025-12-31 17:38:22+00:00
What’s up with the ending that makes no sense?

>Where are the physical limits? According to Bremermann (1982), a computer of 1 kg of mass and 1 liter of volume can execute at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1032 bits. The trend above will hit the Bremermann limit roughly 25 decades after Z3, circa 2200. However, since there are only 2 x 1030 kg of mass in the solar system, the trend is bound to break within a few centuries, since the speed of light will greatly limit the acquisition of additional mass

They shift from talking about the transistor density to somehow considering a supermassive construct. Reminds me of LLM mashups.
by coredog64 | 2025-12-31 17:38:23+00:00
Technically, is there a reason AWS can't support allowing sophisticated users to run arbitrary extensions in RDS? The control-plane/data-plane boundaries should be robust enough that it's not going to allow an RDS extension to "hack AWS". Worst case is that AWS would have to account for the possibility of a crash backoff loop in RDS.

I understand that practically you can b0rk an install with a bunch of poorly configured extensions, and you can easily install something that hoovers up all your data and sends it to North Korea. But if I understand those risks and can mitigate them, why not allow RDS to load up extension binaries from an S3 bucket and call it a day?

If AWS wanted to broaden the available market, this would be an opportunity to leverage partners and the AWS marketplace mechanisms: Instead of AWS vouching for the extensions, allow partners to sell support in a marketplace. AWS has clean hands for the "My RDS instance crashed and wiped out my market cap" risk, but they can still wet their beak on the money flowing through to vendors. Meanwhile, vendors don't have to take full responsibility for the entire stack and mess with PrivateLink etc. Top tier vendors would also perform all the SOC attestation so that RDS doesn't lose out.

P.S. Andy, if you're reading this you should call me.
by Marsymars | 2025-12-31 17:38:31+00:00
> As do Christians. Jews. Hindus.

Yes, absolutely. To elaborate a bit though, if you live in the West, Muslim ethics are more likely to stick out when applied to our regular practices. e.g. I know a Muslim programmer who declined to participate in a project involving billing interest to customers. (Which is decidedly non military and non killing, as posed by the post I was replying to.)
by random3 | 2025-12-31 17:38:49+00:00
I'll just leave this here https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gLnCTgIAAAAJ&hl=en so maybe you realize that's a bit of a tall claim from a random about one of the top researchers in AI, no matter what their opinions are. Perhaps you should look up what a "crank" actually is before labeling researchers, just because they don't match your religion.
by thisislife2 | 2025-12-31 17:39:03+00:00
Beer may indeed be "healthier" than soda as the fermentation process used to make it does create microbial cells that may be beneficial for your gut health (https://fermentation.wsu.edu/alcohol-fermentation-products/b...). It's the alcohol content in it that makes it "unhealthy" for us, just as it is the excessive sugar in the soda that's really bad for us. (And, ofcourse, it also depends on how much of both you actually consume).
by ComputerGuru | 2025-12-31 17:39:04+00:00
Unfortunately even the videos that do contain helpful imagery are still dominated by huge sections of low entropy.

For example, one of the most useful applications of video over text is appliance or automotive repair, but the ideal format would be an article interspersed with short video sections, not a video with a talking head and some ~static shaky cam taking up most of the time as the individual drones on about mostly unrelated topics or unimportant details yet you can’t skip past it in case there is something actually pertinent covered in that time.
by pcblues | 2025-12-31 17:39:22+00:00
I haven't had a _terrible_ UI experience with Win 11 that Apple hasn't put me through already. But it took away my sideways toolbar. I don't click anything that loads edge, like "Show me more from the web" type links. So I don't see ads. I use firefox and thunderbird.

The telemetry all the way through the operating system sucks ethically. But I'm invested and familiar with Windows and Office. Not being able to make Copilot disappear is annoying.

However, all my games and software that work on Windows won't necessarily work on linux. I am not interested in making a political stand and putting up without abilities and features I currently have.

So, for my own use-case, Win 11 it is.

Clearly not an endorsement, just a data-point.
by lenkite | 2025-12-31 17:39:47+00:00
I am talking about the "Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2021", then "Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act", then "Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act". They all had MUCH stronger drug-pricing proposals, all got stalled shamefully, with a watered-down version in BBB, which was further diluted in IRA that big pharma laughed at and accepted.

More specifically, the stronger acts which were killed by Big Pharma bribes would have

- Tied U.S. prices to international reference pricing (e.g., prices paid in Europe)

- Broad Medicare negotiation for many high-cost drugs - including dozens of new drugs.

- Applied negotiated prices beyond Medicare in the commercial market. (Private Insurance too!)

- Imposed strong penalties on drug companies that refused to comply

- Generated large federal savings. Also would have had faster rollout. Remember IRA pricing is YET to come into effect.

PS: Look at the Senators who diluted drug-pricing in BBB even further to a bad JOKE. (lol at price reduction for 10 drugs in 2026). Look at whom they received bribes oops..donations from.
by bevr1337 | 2025-12-31 17:40:17+00:00
> Gifts do not confer obligation.

Remind me, which Ferengi Rule of Acquisition is this?

There's not much argument to be had. You've created a logical justification for a myopic, misanthropic world view.

> My friend bought me lunch. I used that energy at my job. Do I owe them part of my paycheck?

Many find reciprocation important in a relationship.
by rvnx | 2025-12-31 17:40:25+00:00
It's nice to give back to people, no matter the amount.

https://framerusercontent.com/images/9GsFxfDtmRFpfgGlNH61QsX...

He also needs that tool to stay alive for the future, even if not considering the past.

It's a bit better position for everyone.
by airstrike | 2025-12-31 17:40:36+00:00
If you want to go the extra mile (no pun intended), when flying out of an airport that is a major airline hub, avoid that airline at all costs i.e. don't fly United out of EWR, American out of MIA, etc. They tend to be ridiculously busy and crowded.

YMMV, just my $0.02
by elcritch | 2025-12-31 17:41:05+00:00
I believe that FTL communication (if it's achievable) will start out in data centers at small scales. Perhaps millimeters.

Possibly as an extension of Quantum Computing where some probabilistic asymmetry can be taken advantage of. The QC itself might not be faster than classical computing, but the FTL comms could improve memory and cache access.

Also MetaGoog will use it to serve up hyper personalized ads in their Gemini based Metaverse.
by godelski | 2025-12-31 17:41:15+00:00
Surprisingly also not true. Yes, people go against the grain and it is required to actually make paradigm shifts but they're never alone nor did they build from scratch. It may be few against many but it is almost never one against all. That one only prevails due to support from others. Those names don't shine but it doesn't mean they weren't critical to the advancement of a field
by orwin | 2025-12-31 17:41:23+00:00
I only used Windows at work and for games in a VM, so take that with a grain of salt:

Older Windows bugs seemed fair: mostly edge cases, weird UI interaction, or stuff that only came out under heavy workload (also, windows file system).

This past few year, the bugs are incomprehensible. I understand non-professional versions are considered as Beta since Win10, but what it felt like is that Home version are actually alpha, and windows pro seems more and more like a beta.
by samiv | 2025-12-31 17:41:29+00:00
I've been preaching this for a while but the era of PC as in "personal computing" is coming to an end and will slowly but surely be replaced with CC, Corporate Computing, where the corporations own everything, the hardware, the software and only permit you to use their equipment against a monthly fee and only to the extent they allow and permit. Everything you do will be controlled and observed and extracted for data for extra revenue streams. (Ads)

Free/libre software is the only bastion of hope but I'm sure if it would ever become large enough to threat the CC revenue models it'd be locked down, amputated, bought out or silenced by any means necessary. For the time being the technical hurdles and low quality is what keep the majority away from it and gets the job done for the corporations.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-31 17:41:41+00:00
> I've been hearing this from Gamer's Nexus for decades

I liked the idea of Gamer’s Nexus at first when it was supposed to be a data-first rigorous independent journalism.

Somewhere along the way it turned into a constant grievance and outrage channel. I guess audience capture pays the bills and YouTube Drama is hard to ignore. I haven’t bothered with that channel since they tried to go to war with Linus Tech Tips. I don’t even watch LTT and I certainly don’t want to watch two channels go to YouTube war against each other when I’m just trying to hear how the latest coolers perform or something.

I think a lot of the ultra cynical HN comments about how it’s the end of computing or how gamers have been abandoned are coming from these channels, though.
by spankibalt | 2025-12-31 17:41:49+00:00
From the obituary:

Stewart Douglas Cheifet, age 87, of Philadelphia, PA, passed away on December 28, 2025.

Stewart was born on September 24, 1938, to Paul and Anne Cheifet in Philadelphia, where he spent his childhood and attended Central High School. He later moved to California to attend college, graduating from the University of Southern California in 1960 with degrees in Mathematics and Psychology. He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard Law School.

In 1967, Stewart met his future wife, Peta Kennedy, while the two were working at CBS News in Paris. They returned to the United States and married later that year. Stewart's career in television production took them around the world, and they lived together in the Samoan Islands, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, before eventually settling back in Philadelphia.

Stewart and Peta had two children, Stephanie and Jonathan.

Stewart is best known for producing and hosting the nationally broadcast PBS television programs Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe. Computer Chronicles aired from 1984 to 2002, producing more than 400 episodes that documented the rise of the personal computer from its earliest days. Net Cafe, which aired from 1996 to 2002, explored the emergence of the internet. Both programs were widely regarded as visionary, capturing the evolution of personal computing and the early development of the digital age.

Stewart's professional interests and talents were wide-ranging. After leaving television production, he worked as a consultant for the Internet Archive, helping to preserve and provide public access to cultural and technological media, including Computer Chronicles and other technology programs. He also shared his knowledge as an educator, teaching broadcast journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. After retirement, he spent his remaining years enjoying time with Peta, his children, his grandchildren, and his brothers.

Stewart is survived by his brothers Lanny and Bruce, his children Stephanie and Jonathan, and his grandchildren Gussy, Josephine, Benjamin, Freya, and Penny.

Services will be held for immediate family only.
by sznio | 2025-12-31 17:42:10+00:00
no expectation of free speech if you use modern technology.

free speech over the mail, phone, in writing, in books, in newspapers, in radio, in television, in shouting on the street

but not on the internet.

it's just irresponsible to allow someone to both reach millions of individuals, and be anonymous. either one, or the other.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-31 17:42:12+00:00
Sure, that makes sense. I don't think anyone ever treated Nvidia like the "pure raster" competitor though. Sacrifices have been made for CUDA for 10+ years, when the Nintendo Switch shipped it was with automotive grade SOCs. Gamers have been chopped liver for decades, but they still get GPU releases and software products.

Looking at the flip side, Apple, AMD and Intel all eschewed compute performance for raster and have nothing to show for it. No "DLSS killer" in sight, no CUDA alternative, nothing. It seems like the gaming revenue is a ball-and-chain holding back profitable applications.
by mothballed | 2025-12-31 17:42:17+00:00
Collections agencies are legally obligated to cease and desist upon request and if they don't you win a massive lawsuit. It's almost awesome to have debt collectors after you because they have to follow a bunch of little rules and every time they make a mistake it's something like $1000 free money to you.

> I also play by the rules,

... The debt in question is for services requested by the US government, for a private hospital to execute a warrantless search on me while I was handcuffed. Medical services I expressly denied consent for, expressly refused to sign off on, but were rendered anyway. The hospital does not play by the rules.
by game_the0ry | 2025-12-31 17:42:26+00:00
> your initial comment suggest to me that you are not familiar with qualitative research but have a bias or mistrust against it

I can confirm that, yes, I do have an arguably paranoid bias and/or mistrust against information that is not quantifiable in nature nor is simple enough for me (an idiot) to understand easily.

Appreciate the thoughtful response. Don't ask the spouse, just enjoy the new year. I'll figure it out.
by kube-system | 2025-12-31 17:42:48+00:00
I'd bet F-Droid probably is colocated. Nothing in their statement precludes this.

But the assertion by commenters above that home-hosting is a viable or even a better option for a project like this is silly. Colocating a single server is cheaper than a single a Comcast Business internet connection. Air conditioners fail. Electrical failures happen. These things might not be a problem for a personal project, but they're easily and cheaply mitigable risks at commercial scale.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-31 17:43:38+00:00
What do you mean docker doesn’t help you with desktop apps? I run complicated desktop apps like Firefox inside containers all the time. There are also apps like Citrix Workspace that need so specific dependency versions that I’ve given up on running outside containers.

If you don’t want to configure this manually, use distrobox, which is a nice shell script wrapper that helps you set things up so graphical desktop apps just work.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-31 17:43:40+00:00
It seems like the game is “off loading” the enemy bullet to player collision detection to the HuC6280. This would have presented a very complicated challenge to would-be bootleggers back in the day

Having an invincible RoboCop would be a devious punishment for arcade operators bootlegging the game. One quarter would eat up a lot of time on the machine. It would be hard to make any money on it.
by eterm | 2025-12-31 17:43:41+00:00
Oh I agree, literally `assert(false, "This cannot happen")` is useless, but ensuring message is always there encourages something more like, `assert(false, "This implies the Foo is Barred, but we have the Qux to make sure it never is")`.

Ensuring a message encourages people to state the assumptions that are violated, rather than just asserting that their assumptions (which?) don't hold.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-31 17:43:59+00:00
The usual thing for languages is to provide a global allocator. That's what C's malloc is doing for example. We're not asked to specify the allocator, it's provided by the language runtime so it's implied everywhere.

In standalone C, or Rust's no_std, there is no allocator provided, but most people aren't writing bare metal software.
by telui | 2025-12-31 17:44:07+00:00
Fire19 decided to expand its user base (not marketing) by putting it on here! Fire19 already exists but here you can host websites, Fire19 is community-based. Here are a list of repositories on Fire19:
Fire19: https://gitlab.com/kryptonitewing/jaguar
API (deprecated): https://gitlab.com/kryptonitewing/jaguarapi
If you do not know, Fire19 is a DNS (folder-based DNS) to publish websites.
IF you see a site being hyped up, PLEASE ignore it as it is a part of the old Fire19, NOT the new one.
Also, happy 2026!
by doodlebugging | 2025-12-31 17:44:28+00:00
I am wrapping up my shift from Windows to Linux. I will have a linux box to replace my Win7Pro/Win10Pro install on an old Dell workstation. I will also be migrating one of my older relative's pc's to an identical linux box to replace their 2008 model ASUS machine running Win10.

Once I have that all comfortably running I am walking away from iOS on the iPhone. I'm a bit tired of lock-in and in a position now where I have free time to manage the various things that interest me and to sort through any issues with data or software compatibility between the old/new OSes.

I've been a pc user since the early 1980's with DOS and my first pc was a 128k MAC which I still have. I won't have any more Microsoft or Apple stuff in a couple of months if all goes well. Wish me luck.
by tzs | 2025-12-31 17:44:45+00:00
If we are including numbers that aren't actually proven to be transcendental but that most mathematicians think are, I'd put Lévy's constant on the list.

It is e^(pi^2/(12 log 2))

Here's where it comes from. For almost all real numbers if you take their continued fraction expansion and compute the sequence of convergents, P1/Q1, P2/Q2, ..., Pn/Qn, ..., it turns out that the sequence Q1^(1/1), Q2^(1/2), ..., Qn^(1/n) converges to a limit and that limit is Lévy's constant.
Are you a deep-tech founder working on an interesting project?
by udit_50 | 2025-12-31 17:44:50+00:00
Hey, are you a deep tech founder working on something interesting in the niche? If yes, I would really like to discuss what you are building.

I am also a researcher and as a hobbyist, I grew a newsletter with ~5,000 readers. Last week only, I committed my community that I will start covering deep tech founders in either an article or a podcast, whatever fits.

If you are someone building something interesting, drop what you are building below, let's work together and discuss more about what you are building.

Also, you can reach me out anytime on my mail at researchudit@gmail.com
by Zetaphor | 2025-12-31 17:45:12+00:00
Windows users: Linux is too complicated, you have to configure too much stuff and eww command line

Also Windows users: I downloaded this massive collection of registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts that I have to run as admin after every update to undo whatever fresh fuckery Microsoft just forced on me. And there's no guarantee that it won't all be undone with the next update.

I'm being facetious to make a point, but it's always amused me how much effort you have to expend just to keep a moderately sane experience.

Software should adapt to the user, not the other way around.
by wildrhythms | 2025-12-31 17:45:24+00:00
Coincidence?

August 13, 2025
U.S. Drinking Rate at New Low as Alcohol Concerns Surge

>WASHINGTON, D.C. — The percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend. This coincides with a growing belief among Americans that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one’s health, now the majority view for the first time.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/693362/drinking-rate-new-low-al...
by bgwalter | 2025-12-31 17:45:37+00:00
It is clear that Nadella has no clue what he is doing in 2025 and just wants to make another big splash with "AI".

If you force employees to dedicate 100% of their thinking power to agents, prompts, "AI" meetings, working on their necessarily fake "AI" success stories and "impacts", no one has time to do real work. Or have any real new ideas about anything else.

But Nadella doubles down and goes into "startup mode":

https://www.ft.com/content/255dbecc-5c57-4928-824f-b3f2d764f...

Not only Windows 11 got worse, Github got worse, too. So did the free Copilot.
by thrownawaysz | 2025-12-31 17:45:45+00:00
>MonoGame is free to use on all platforms from the public repository, but the code for supporting console platforms is only accessible to authorized console developers.

>These platforms are provided as private code repositories that add integrations with the console vendor's APIs and platform-specific documentation.

https://docs.monogame.net/articles/console_access.html

How can something be open source and closed at the same time? Is this basically MIT license? (Project page says Microsoft Public license)
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-31 17:46:11+00:00
The relation is tangential at best. Microsoft's management was a personification of corporate rot for a long while now, AI or no AI.

They view Windows as a straw to suck users into their higher value products through, and are seemingly unaware of what "UX" is, or how their decisions affect it. Which is how Windows 11 ended up being such a clusterfuck.