MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 07:14:22+00:00
> Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"

What you actually want to compare speed in the most preferred font to, to show that individual choice is or is not better than one-size-fits-all dictate, is speed in the font that would be chosen as the universal choice by whichever mechanism would be used (to show it is universally better, show that there is no universal font choice that would lead to the average user being faster than with their preferred font.)

All comparing each individual's preferred font to each individual's fastest is showing that an individualized test-based optimized font choice is better for reading speed than individual preference font choice, which I guess is interesting if you are committed to individualized choices, but not if the entire question is whether individual or centralized choices are superior.
by crabmusket | 2025-12-11 07:14:54+00:00
This is a nicely laid out collection of tutorials, but I'm sad that collections like this have drifted away from the very deliberate structure that A Pattern Language introduced. While patterns weren't invented by Alexander and co, they did inspire a lot of what we see in tech these days, inherited via design patterns etc.

In A Pattern Language, each pattern is hyperlinked to other patterns in a kind of hierarchy, where larger patterns (like "house cluster") are broken down into smaller constituent parts ("main entrance") all the way to quite granular details ("low doorway").

This is because you can't just take a pattern on its own; it forms part of a larger whole.

Tech pattern books often focus on small recurring structures (e.g. "command pattern" from this site), but not how they help create some larger pattern, or in the other direction, what are the smaller patterns that help create them.

This sounds like a lot of hard work of course, which is why people don't do it.* I would love to see this accomplished though. If only I had an extra 36 hours in each day.

One thing that A Pattern Language is also great at is motivating each pattern with a specific problem or symptom. This site seems to do a decent job at that, though some problems seem... kind of weakly motivated. For example, the above mentioned "command pattern" is motivated by "what if we need to rename a method?" which... is pretty weak tbh.

*EDIT: also because fitting patterns into a whole, maybe unavoidably, will promote a perspective, or a way of building a whole system. A pattern book for web applications written from an HTMX point of view would be a very different book to one written from a React slant. Maybe one pattern language can accommodate both sets of technologies, or maybe not.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-11 07:14:57+00:00
Calibri works just fine on my machine. Just download the font using one of the many font packages available in your distro (i.e. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ms-win11)

I don't think it's included by default but the font itself will just work once you install it.

As for open fonts (can fonts even be truly closed in the first place?), Times New Roman is just as closed and proprietary as Calibri is.
by satisfice | 2025-12-11 07:17:13+00:00
AGI will never happen for one simple and obvious reason: there will never be a consensus about what AGI is.

This has always been the issue. This is an argument I made more than 20 years ago. AGI, whatever it is as a technical problem, is mainly a TESTING problem. If you don’t solve that, then AGI is remains a matter of faith. A cult.
by palmotea | 2025-12-11 07:17:21+00:00
>> One important reason people like to write code is that it has well-defined semantics, allowing to reason about it and predict its outcome with high precision. Likewise for changes that one makes to code. LLM prompting is the diametrical opposite of that.

> You’re still allowed to reason about the generated output. If it’s not what you want you can even reject it and write it yourself!

You missed the key point. You can't predict and LLM's "outcome with high precision."

Looking at the output and evaluating it after the fact (like you describe) is an entirely different thing.
by klausa | 2025-12-11 07:17:28+00:00
My understanding is that the HDMI 2.1 port situation on TVs is, weirdly enough, a SoC limitation from a single vendor.

Almost everyone (apart from... Samsung and LG, IIRC) is using MediaTek SoC for the brains for the TVs, and they just seem to be unable to make one that has enough bandwidth for 4xHDMI 2.1.

AFAIK LG and Samsung still handle theirs in-house (and that's why LG was the very first "big" vendor to ship 2.1 at all, and they rolled it out to all four ports even on their midrange TV's in _2019_!); and it's common to see those brands have more 2.1 ports.

This should be getting better in 2025/2026 model years, since it seems MediaTek has finally managed to ship a SoC that does it; but it's ridiculous how long it's taken.
by petre | 2025-12-11 07:18:00+00:00
Imagine you're in London. How you pick a restaurant for dinner? Do you simply walk into a restaurant or do you use Google too feed you a list of 'curated' venues? Because in the latter case both you and the restaurants (along with their owners, employees) are subject to FAANG's central planning. And that's exactly how people end up in tourist traps.

https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-al...
by nananono | 2025-12-11 07:18:43+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator of DailyMe.

I built this app because traditional reward charts weren't working for my son, who has mild ADHD. The "top-down" approach of parents setting rules and pushing tasks just created anxiety and resistance. DailyMe flips this by focusing on intrinsic motivation through RPG mechanics:

1. Agency: Kids co-create their rewards and goals (from "have to" to "want to"). 2. Gamification: Tasks are "Quests," and progress is visualized on an achievement board. 3. Partnership: It changes the parent's role from supervisor to ally.

It started as a paper prototype that solved our nightly homework struggles, and I turned it into an app to help other families facing executive function challenges.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the gamification logic or any features you think are missing!
by yturijea | 2025-12-11 07:19:18+00:00
I would say a fair compensation for the original work is fair, until certain threshold, after which they must invent new thing rather than continued benefit of an existing. Say once they earned 400% of valuation or cost of invention or similar. there could be a system in place. But of course the people to regulate this has a natural bias, as they themselves would be hurt by it, most likely. So the vast majority, ie. the public is at an disadvantage, greed wins again.
by sysguest | 2025-12-11 07:19:28+00:00
idk isn't pager operation the textbook example of "trying to avoid civilian deaths" while getting your job done?

why is it "genocide"? is becoming hezbollah determined at birth? is hezbollah a race? does average civilian use walkie-talkie?

even if hezbollah was a race, after its civilian attack on 2023 (beheading babies, raping and killing even foreigners), I wouldn't even care about what those guys get (also, don't say "humanity" like you represent the whole "humanity")

if you ARE talking about palestinian civilians, I don't think israel can do anything more gentlemen-ly to them other than pager-operation: the other option is carpet bombing and direct invasion (which is a completely another topic)
by remus | 2025-12-11 07:19:46+00:00
In the EU 'golden visa' schemes are typically about investing a particular amount in the economy of the country. Exact amounts vary, but it's usually along the lines of x00,000 euro in property in the country (mortgage free value) or x00,000 euro in government bonds or x00,000 euro in a business within the country

Usually this gets you residency for some years conditional on the investment staying within the country, and potentially a path to citizenship after some years of living in the country.
by coffeefirst | 2025-12-11 07:20:34+00:00
This is also a story about marketing.

At this point, the level of puffery is on par with claiming a new pair of shoes will turn you into an Olympic athlete.

People are doing this because they’re told it works, and showing up to run a marathon with zero training because they were told the shoes are enough.

Some people may need to figure out the problem here for themselves.
by dnhkng | 2025-12-11 07:22:54+00:00
Fair points, but the deal is still great because of the nuances of the RAM/VRAM.

The Blackwells are superior on paper, but there's some "Nvidia Math" involved: When they report performance in press announcements, they don't usually mention the precision. Yes, the Blackwells are more than double the speed of the Hopper H100's, but thats comparing FP8 to FP4 (the H100's can't do native FP4). Yes, thats great for certain workloads, but not the majority.

What's more interesting is the VRAM speed. The 6000 Pro has 96 GB of GPU memory and 1.8 TB/s bandwidth, the H100 haas the same amount, but with HBM3 at 4.9 TB/s. That 2.5X increase is very influential in the overall performance of the system.

Lastly, if it works, the NVLink-C2C does 900 GB/s of bandwidth between the cards, so about 5x what a pair of 6000 Pros could do over PCIE5. Big LLMs need well over the 96 GB on a single card, so this becomes the bottleneck.

e.g. Here are benchmarks on the RTX 6000 pro using the GPT-OSS-120B model, where it generates 145 tokens/sec, and I get 195 tokens/sec on the GH200. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mm7azs/openai_...
by dajt | 2025-12-11 07:23:16+00:00
This is a massive pain at my work, same as I'm sure most other comments are saying.

I use Platform.IO for firmware development and can't build my firmware unless I hotspot my phone. I would say that's a PIO bug unless there is a flag I don't know about, but it's exposed by this nuisance of a firewall.

The devs where I am spend much of our time hotspotted to our phones with the corporate network never connected so IP goes out over the mobile network.

Whenever possible we use 'do not verify server certs' flags in libs and commands which is not ideal.
by dJLcnYfsE3 | 2025-12-11 07:23:35+00:00
It is always going to be controversial but after discovery of prions - needle shifted to "self-replicating means nothing and viruses are also dead". Then scientists also found viruses large enough that they get infected with other viruses, and parasitic cells that are missing most parts required for metabolism, so it is getting more fuzzy again.
by shakna | 2025-12-11 07:25:12+00:00
Apple's keyboard receives more information, to put it simply. It doesn't get told that a touch was at a particular point, but the entire fuzzy area. Allowing you to use circular occlusion and other things to choose between side-by-side buttons and override the predictive behaviour when it is the wrong choice.

A third-party maker gets a single point - usually several in short succession, but still it requires more math to work out where the edges of the finger are pressing, to help determine which direction you're moving. So most just... Don't.
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-12-11 07:25:38+00:00
Yep, almost always in rich world "labor shortage" = I can't / don't want to pay a livable wage.

Over here in Europe my country has a sky high unemployment, yet picking tomatoes is mostly done by immigrants from Southeast Asia. The pay for that hard work is so bad that most natives won't bother, but it's okay if your plan is to save for a few years with absolute minimum budget, and then return to somewhere with much lower cost of living. I guess it's just the same with Latin American migrants in America.

Japan has historically been pretty anti-immigration, so they might prefer robots over this arrangement.
by mlyle | 2025-12-11 07:25:59+00:00
The problem is, 2750 + 750 injured is less than 4000, and it doesn't make sense that none of the injured were targets but >30/42 of those killed were.

We're talking about a tiny amount of explosives in each pager. Sure, it could lightly wound a bystander under perfect circumstances, but it's not going to create a big confluence of major injuries. <6 grams of PETN--we're talking about a risk of injury at roughly arm's reach.
by crabmusket | 2025-12-11 07:26:19+00:00
Here's an excerpt from APL showing what I mean about the connections to the other patterns. This isn't the whole pattern, there's a lot between the problem statement and summary. Annotations in brackets are mine.

---

Short Passages (132)

[Context, or pre-links]

The Flow Through Rooms (131) describes the generosity of light and movement in the way that rooms connect to one another and recommends against the use of passages. But when there has to be a passage in an office or a house and when it is too small to be a Building Thoroughfare (101), it must be treated very specially, as if it were itself a room. This pattern gives the character of these smallest passages, and so completes the circulation system laid down by Circulation Realms (98) and Building Thoroughfare (101) and The Flow Through Rooms (131).

[Problem statement]

Long, sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture. In fact, the ugly long repetitive corridors of the machine age have so far infected the word "corridor" that it is hard to imagine that a corridor could ever be a place of beauty, a moment in your passage from room to room, which means as much as all the moments you spend in the rooms themselves.

[Pattern contents here]

[Pattern summary]

Keep passages short. Make them as much like rooms as possible, with carpets or wood on the floor, furniture, bookshelves, beautiful windows. Make them generous in shape, and always give them plenty of light; the best corridors and passages of all are those which have windows along an entire wall.

[Elaboration, or post-links]

Put in windows, bookshelves, and furnishings to make them as much like actual rooms as possible, with alcoves, seats along the edge - Light on Two Sides of Every Room (159), Alcoves (179), Window Place (180), Thick Walls (197), Closets Between Rooms (198); open up the long side into the garden or out onto balconies - Outdoor Room (163), Gallery Surround (166), Low Sill (222). Make interior windows between the passage and the rooms which open off it - Interior Windows(194), Solid Doors With Glass(237). And finally, for the shape of the passages, in detail, start with The Shape of Indoor Space (191)
by hamandcheese | 2025-12-11 07:26:23+00:00
> not on stuff that from a practical point of view is totally irrelevant.

The modern era we live in has far, far too much of this attitude. It's the same force eroding craftsmanship, attention to detail, and human dignity.

I find it quite reasonable for someone to care about the presentation of official government communications.

And just so we are clear, I also think Rubio is a horrible person.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-11 07:26:25+00:00
I find that the more senior you become, the less you rely on software design patterns.

Juniors often think that learning design patterns is some kind of career hack which will allow them to skip ahead a decade of experience... There is some utility in many design patterns but the problem is that juniors often miss the nuance and the motivation behind the patterns and they tend to misuse them; often creating more complexity than they would have created had they not used design patterns.

There are situations where design patterns may be useful but they're much more rare than most people think. A lot of juniors seem to think that every problem requires them to apply a design pattern from their toolbox. They try to frame every problem within the constraints of design patterns that they know. This can create problems.

In fact, there are many coding patterns which are far simpler than 'design patterns' and much more useful, but nobody talks about them because they're too trivial to discuss. For example, I've seen people write code which relies heavily on design patterns but then that same code uses an O(n^2) nested loop to find items that are common between two arrays. There is a simple 'pattern' you can use to store the items of the first array in a Set or HashMap and then finding common items is O(n) because Set and HashMap lookups are O(1)... Very useful pattern but I don't believe it has a name. I use it literally ALL the time. The idea of storing intermediate state in some kind of HashMap is a game-changer IMO but there's no name for that pattern of coding. In general, knowing what data structure is most appropriate for various scenarios is a game changer... But still, don't abuse. Basic data structures like arrays are fine most of the time.

Anyway, it's good to absorb the wisdom behind some design patterns but you should not try to fit every problem to them and dont say stuff like "For this problem, I applied Design Pattern X" - If you do, senior engineers will know you're a junior. If you use a design pattern correctly, it will probably not look exactly like in the textbook. It's kind of hard to give it a name. It may be a mix of patterns. It's the principle that counts. Reality is too complex for rigid design patterns.

On the other hand, some design patterns are too common and obvious to deserve a name. For example, the factory pattern is super common... I use it all the time but it's so basic and obvious that I will sound like a total noob if I go around calling my function "socket factory pattern"... I will call it "Utility function to obtain a socket" or something. I will never refer to it as a factory pattern, it's a bit cringe.
by jMyles | 2025-12-11 07:26:28+00:00
> None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced.

...a literal nobel laureate, a literal Einstein scholar, and literally the author of the most cited paper in the history of open publishing were all censored.

Multiple scholars of the Hoover Institution. The director of Oxford Center for EBM. An author of the most widely-assigned textbook in preventative epidemiology. Two editors-in-chief of BMJ publications. Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! The British Journal of Medicine was censored from Facebook dude!

Tenured professors form Yale, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard, and Standard (several from Stanford in particular) had their work either totally removed or subject to shadowban-style censorship.

What can you possibly be talking about? I'm broadly anti-credentialist, but I can't fathom not noticing what happened: The world's foremost experts were silenced; we all watched it happen.

Let's not mince words here: there was a _thunderous_ chorus of the world's top experts opining against lockdowns. And social media depicted something entirely different, and entirely false. It wasn't like... close. Lockdowns never gained anything resembling mainstream support in the actual real world of epidemiology.

David Katz, Michael Levitt, Carl Henegan, Monica Ghandi, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad, Eran Bendavid, Sunetra Gupta, John fucking Ioannidis (my personal favorite author of medical science for over a decade prior to COVID19, and arguably the most accomplished medical scientist of our generation)... I can go on and on and on. How on earth are you conducting your "smell test"?!

All the most impressive minds of our age were cast aside so some second-stringers from suburban Virginia, who had been collecting a paycheck from NIH and CDC but not doing anything resembling continuing education at their alma maters, could babble nonsense about interdiction and hold aloft the Imperial study which they obviously didn't understand (and which all of us who read it knew it was destined to retracted from the word go).

There were a tiny few serious academics who endorsed lockdowns. And some were genuine experts who simply got it wrong. I respect Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch enormously, and I give them credit for sticking their head above the parapet - I think they genuinely believed in horizontal interdiction and, although they were absolutely wrong, I don't think they were intentional being propagandistic.

And I don't think they went out intending to be amplified as they were. I only wish their other work were amplified as much as when it was convenient for the lockdown narrative.

...but it's simply, totally false that accomplished academics and experts weren't censored. I can't even approach that with a straight face.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-11 07:26:32+00:00
>We were talking about a system that takes a typed description of what you want as input and outputs code. There is plenty of software, even with well-defined inputs and outputs, which do not do that.

You are trying to assert an equivalence between compilers and AI systems that simply does not exist. Sure, you could abuse the English language to try to elevate "vibecoding" to the level of "software engineering", and denegrate the AI to the level of a basic compiler. But the rest of us know better and won't accept that. Your line of reasoning about historical job titles and roles also fails.

>But there is a particular type of software that does exactly that. We call it a compiler in my circles.

Compilers don't take "descriptions" as input. They take code as input. The output is perhaps a different kind of code, but it is still code. There has never really been a software engineer or developer who wrote only imprecise English. You don't legitimately get those titles without being competent at using some kind of programming language (as opposed to natural language).

>It was written to express my intent. Your (mis)interpretation does nothing to change my intent and is, frankly, irrelevant.

This is exactly why natural language is unsuitable for writing software. People like you constantly try to abuse the meaning of words to manipulate people. No amount of rhetoric is going to make a vibecoder actually be a software developer or software engineer. Even if you get people to debase the English language, they'll be forced to come up with new words to describe what they actually mean when they speak of morons using AI vs people who actually know what they are doing. I hate how much time is wasted in arguments over what is a reasonable use of words and why it is not good to constantly change the meanings of words.

I'm done with this conversation. I think you're just trolling us at this point. I've made my point and I'm done beating a dead horse.
by matthewsh | 2025-12-11 07:26:48+00:00
And then struggled to manage Reddit...then scaled to as many platforms as possible (text, whatsapp, etc) then shut it all down then built out an entire API just to shut it down (apparently, can't confirm). They can't even get dark mode to work by default on their own website. Suspended from Twitter/X. Founder, Anush, making comments about "replacing engineers with AI" (source: https://x.com/anushkmittal/status/1979372588850884724), although that could be a joke, using their absolute dogshit "talk" platform.

And speaking of their chat platform...it's literally horrible. Slow to load, terrible UX, disjointed UI, no accessibility options, AI chatbots everywhere and you can't even tell their AI without clicking their profiles. It's like if Slack was made by a 12 year old.

Seriously, to put it in perspective I'm on a MacBook Pro M3 (so not that old) and a fiber, gigabit network. I click one chat and it can take up to 5 seconds to load the channel. JUST TO LOAD THE CHANNEL. It legit fires off like 30 fetch requests each time you load a channel. It's insane. I can't even blame NextJS for that, it's straight up them probably "vibe coding" everything.