MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moribvndvs | 2025-12-25 12:18:26+00:00
As a reader interested in Framework and looking for honest feedback in the wild, this was a really frustrating blog entry. It feels like at every turn you’re coming up with conflicting requirements and impossible demands that even your X1 doesn’t meet. For example: regarding the MacBook, the worry about long term support for Asahi is understandable, but one of your main criticisms is that it has the same battery life as other Linux laptops? You wanted a bigger, repairable laptop and didn’t expect it to be larger or heavier? You preferred the slightly more washed out red of your old laptop, but didn’t tell us whether you could fix it with a display setting or why having more vibrant colors or having to adjust display settings is a bad thing for your use case? Have you considered just turning on a light rather than working in a dark room (please turn on a light, I destroyed my eyesight working like that)? I’m devastated to read you found the battery life simply par and that it used a little bit of electricity after suspend for 8 hours like every other laptop on the market, and that you were able to turn the power led off but not in your preferred location.

At the end of the day, you’re not required to like a thing for any reason you see fit, but I very much hope you figure out what you actually need and that such a device actually exists on this planet before you purchase another one.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-12-25 12:23:46+00:00
I think this is kind of cynical. I often adopt open source tools because I want to avoid vendor lockin. And so do many. It's not like I say, "Wow. Another code base to dive into and spend hours trying to understand." Nope. I just want the assurance that I can do it if I ever need to do so.
by csomar | 2025-12-25 12:24:47+00:00
Nothing. Open Source is dying. The model to finance open source work (well-off suburban american dads or as a portfolio show off) no longer apply. The old generation that believed in this model is retiring and for the new generation it pays better to "network", leet code, or spam your resume to thousands of employers.

Now couple that with the fact that supply-chain control is profitable (legally or illegally); I think the next 5-10 years will be interesting.
by daneel_w | 2025-12-25 12:25:13+00:00
From my personal experience building a few AI IVR demos with Asterisk in early 2025, testing STT/TTS/inference products from a handful of different vendors, a reliable maximum latency of 2-3 seconds sounds like a definite improvement. Just a year ago I saw times from 3 to 8 seconds even on short inputs rendering short outputs. One half of this is of course over-committed resources. But clearly the executional performance of these models is improving.
by constantius | 2025-12-25 12:25:31+00:00
They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source rugpull in the process.

Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries.

https://zulip.com/

https://wekan.github.io/
by torginus | 2025-12-25 12:26:31+00:00
>You can do per-display DPI just fine on X11 (through xrandr), it's just the major toolkits don't support it. GTK, for example, reads a single global DPI value from XSETTINGS; there's no reason why it has to be that way.

I remember people complaining about the GTK file picker not having a preview for more than a decade, and at some point it sort of became a meme.

When it finally got added, the PR was like a 2-300 lines.
How do you validate video pipeline changes for ML models?
by iamdani | 2025-12-25 12:28:22+00:00
How do people validate that a change to video data (encoding, preprocessing, annonimization etc.) won’t break models later?

We’ve seen cases where encoding was changed, psnr/ssim barely moved, video looked great - yet model behavior changed dramatically.

How do you validate video data changes before training?
Or is the only real answer 'retrain and find out'?
by jyunth | 2025-12-25 12:29:02+00:00
Interesting. I imagine quite a few issues would seem to stem out of the inherent nature of generative AI, we even see several in these demos themselves. One particularly stood out to me, the one where the man is submerged, and for a good while bubbles come out quite consistently out of his mask, and then suddenly one of the bubbles turn into a jellyfish. At a specific frame, the AI thought it looked more like a jellyfish than a bubble and now the world has a jellyfish to deal with now.

It'll surely take a looot of video data, even more than what humans can possibly produce to build a normalized, euclidean, physics adherent world model. Data could be synthetically generated, checked thoroughly and fed to the training process, but at the end of the day it seems.... Wasteful. As if we're looking at a local optima point.
by uecker | 2025-12-25 12:29:19+00:00
I am not sure what you saw, but on regular Linux processes of the user can spy on each other anyway. In any case, X had the concept of untrusted clients basically forever but nobody cared to invest even the small amount of work necessary to make it work well because nobody thought it would make a different. That this was later used as a major argument against X convinced me that this is not at all about technology.
by pharx | 2025-12-25 12:29:21+00:00
But if they are ambitiously overloading their schedule with task they can’t handle on their own, they don’t get to complain about the workload they voluntarily signed up for.

And that’s even beside the point as email in not to blame. They would still be voluntarily overloaded in the era of snail mail with letters stacking up on their table.
by mgaunard | 2025-12-25 12:29:35+00:00
There are times where a big company needs to build something new (albeit within a constrained ecosystem and a very narrow swimming lane).

To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.

You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.
by markerz | 2025-12-25 12:30:16+00:00
> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction. If a company requires 13 people to sign off on a hire, it… implies a fear of making mistakes… The company with 13 rounds was fishing for a reason to say "no”

I realized this at my current job. The decisive interview decision and feedback impressed me. Once on the inside, I could see how the “bias for action” and push for decisiveness permeated the whole company. PRs get approved timely. Meetings push for a conclusion. When someone complains about being stuck, neighbors will offer advice or even a helping hand. I’m so much more productive here than anywhere previously, and I owe it to the culture. They WANT people to succeed. But success comes with risk of failure, so the culture needs to accommodate some failure to allow people to safely take risks.

I’m my interview, I misunderstood the question and presented a solution. The interviewer tried to correct me but I didn’t understand what my mistake was. They encouraged me to just go for it. I eventually realized what they meant, I corrected myself and all of it was a stronger yes signal for them. I push forward, see mistakes, pivot fast, and iterate quickly on feedback.

Interviewers are often unsupportive or looking for a reason to say no. It screams that they’re not really “desparate to hire” and in-fact, may be difficult to work with.
by lupusyndrby9 | 2025-12-25 12:32:16+00:00
Isn’t that kind of a lesson learned though? Hitchhiking is illegal for a reason. We don’t let children run as freely outdoors . A lot of states are rewriting or adding exemptions to statutory limits on pressing charges and suing for certain crimes because they happened during a period of time where people assumed you could trust people more. Being cautious and distrustful of strangers with mental issues is a very productive way of thinking. I get people think it’s a fren because fren shaped but give em a couple bucks , and contact a professional to get them help. It sucks there are so many mentally ill people on the streets. That doesn’t make them any less dangerous and the honest truth is there’s a weird line between personal freedom and mental illness that means it’s their right to be a crazy homeless persons. You can clean em up set them up in apartment but you can’t force them to use their benefit payments to pay the rent, keep their apartment clean, or take their medicine. Help them if you can , but please please also don’t forget that people are dangerous. Use some common sense, the last thing anyone needs is more people in the news getting hurt by people with mental illness . It’s just makes it that much harder to get compassionate care for the rest.
by pastor_williams | 2025-12-25 12:32:54+00:00
I bought a framework 16 shortly after it came out. My one gripe is around the track pad and the modules on either side of it. The fit there is not great. I really wish they would sell a full width track pad piece because the seams are imperfect. That said after the first month it hasn't bothered me. Definitely something I would change but not something that I notice or am inconvenienced by in daily use.
by rramadass | 2025-12-25 12:34:37+00:00
> I kept adding new material, and a text consisting of math 'selections'

That is what makes it so interesting to a "mathematically inclined" layman; a smorgasbord of Mathematics! More value for the time/money ;-)

If MAA does not understand that there is huge market for Mathematics targeted towards Computer Programmers, they are just dumb. Programmers are the ones with the money and the interest in learning Mathematics presented in a manner more to their understanding.

Please do find some other low-cost publisher to publish this; "Dover Publications" might be a good one since they publish a lot of classics particularly if you position this as a modern update to the Engel book.

For example; John Stillwell positioned his Elements of Mathematics: From Euclid to Gödel as a sort of modern update to Felix Klein's Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint. From the preface;

This book grew from an article I wrote in 2008 for the centenary of Felix Klein’s Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint. The article reflected on Klein’s view of elementary mathematics, which I found to be surprisingly modern, and made some comments on how his view might change in the light of today’s mathematics. With further reflection I realized that a discussion of elementary mathematics today should include not only some topics that are elementary from the twenty-first-century viewpoint, but also a more precise explanation of the term “elementary” than was possible in Klein’s day.

So, the first goal of the book is to give a bird’s eye view of elementary mathematics and its treasures. This view will sometimes be “from an advanced standpoint,” but nevertheless as elementary as possible. Readers with a good high school training in mathematics should be able to understand most of the book, though no doubt everyone will experience some difficulties, due to the wide range of topics...

The second goal of the book is to explain what “elementary” means, or at least to explain why certain pieces of mathematics seem to be “more elementary” than others. It might be thought that the concept of “elementary” changes continually as mathematics advances. Indeed, some topics now considered part of elementary mathematics are there because some great advance made them elementary...
by roblabla | 2025-12-25 12:34:59+00:00
While that's true, linux _tends_ to follow the rules a bit better, and not change how APIs work from under your feets. For instance on Linux, permission checks are done when you open a handle. An LSM like SELinux can only allow or deny your rights to open the handle at the permission level you requested, that's it. It cannot allow the handle to be opened, but with less privileges than requested, nor can it do permission check at operation time. So once your open is successful, you can be pretty sure that you've cleared the permission checks bar, and are good to go.

This makes writing robust code under those systems a lot easier, which in turns makes debugging things when it goes wrong nicer. Now, I'm not going to say debugging those systems is great - SELinux errors are still an inscrutable mess and writing SELinux policy is fairly painful.

But there is real value in limiting where errors can crop up, and how they can happen.

Of course, there is stuff like FUSE that can throw a wrench into this: instead of an LSM, a linux security product could write their own FS overlay to do these kind of shenanigans. But those seem to be extremely rare on Linux, whereas they're very commonplace on Windows - mostly because MS doesn't provide the necessary tools to properly write security modules, so everyone's just winging it.
by criley2 | 2025-12-25 12:35:59+00:00
I have played around pretty significantly with the markdown context idea but managing it by hand is pretty tough.

- I take chinese tutoring lessons on italki with a tutor who uses notion (copy paste in markdown)

- I copy/paste our notion notes in markdown into a repo for storage

- I use AI to summarize lessons and to keep general context on progress

- I use AI to generate a voice AI lesson plan, such as 10 words to focus on, reviewing a specific human tutoring session, or some conversational focus area.

- I start the advanced voice AI with the context

Unfortunately the AI still loses the plot pretty quickly and devolves into free form conversation. It struggles significantly to enforce any kind of structure that would be helpful for structured learning. I haven't tried this in a few months though, maybe newer models are improving.
by jongjong | 2025-12-25 12:36:04+00:00
Yeah, I mean if anybody invited me into their home in such situation, given the current society we live in. There's a very high chance their wife would become my girlfriend. I would probably act autistic when the husband gets home. Anything to avoid being homeless.

I would perceive it as a moral act too... I mean the husband is a lawyer. It wouldn't be difficult to find a narrative framing which would make me the good guy.
by integralid | 2025-12-25 12:36:08+00:00
>The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset.

The open source community really needs to stop with the "just do everything i want for free" mindset.

I mean, open source does not mean you're entitled to free support, and free in free software is not about money. I think people depend too much on those projects and then act entitled.

Of course the open source bait and switch done by companies is a shitty behavior worth calling out, but the companies exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected.
by roenxi | 2025-12-25 12:36:37+00:00
(1) It seems unlikely that the Russians would care about Ukraine having a Jewish president. Wikipedia suggests the Nazis killed around 3 Russians for every 2 Jews who died in the Holocaust and the Nazis never got to fully implement the plan [0] where they seriously tried to wipe out Slavic populations. "Nazi" to the Russians presumably means something different than Jew-hater. They don't need ideological tropes like the Americans do to justify why the Nazis were a unique evil - they were in the direct ad explicit Nazi firing line.

> If Russia wanted to annex Ukrainian separatist states, it could have done so before they invaded.

(2) You're not being very clear about your meaning when you say this. The obvious reading to me is that Russia had alternative routes to gain control of Ukrainian separatist states, which seems too weird to be what you mean - if that is the case then that would suggest they are invading because something political provoked them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
by ruszki | 2025-12-25 12:36:42+00:00
> I'm not a fan of APIs that surprise.

It really depends on what you got used to. C++ was the first language, which, I would say, learned. I’m still surprised to day that traversing a set is not in order by default.

In this specific case, emplace should be your default option, and you should really know why that’s the case, and why you have this many options.
by spicyusername | 2025-12-25 12:37:50+00:00
I started using C# recently for a hobby project writing a game engine on top of Monogame, and I have been very surprised at how nice of a language C# is to use.

It has a clean syntax, decent package management, and basically every language feature I regularly reach for except algebraic data types, which are probably coming eventually.

I think the association of .NET to Microsoft tarnished my expectations.
by jorvi | 2025-12-25 12:38:00+00:00
I always enjoy how Thinkpad bros have been shit talking MacBooks, when they have had the best battery life, screen, hinge, case, bluetooth, fan noise and other amenities for more than two decades now. They were the first to have WiFi.

Apple figured out pretty soon that a laptop doesn't need to be a drag racer, it needs to be a Volvo.
Show HN: Snipplle – an open-source snippet manager
by alf_UMi | 2025-12-25 12:39:14+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the author of Snipplle.

Snipplle is an open-source snippet manager built to help developers organize and reuse code snippets across projects.

This is an early beta. Right now the focus is on core workflows: managing snippets, organizing them into collections, and pulling them into local projects via a CLI.

I’m especially interested in feedback around real-world workflows: how you currently store snippets, what’s missing, and what would make a tool like this actually useful long-term.

The project is fully open source here: https://github.com/snipplle/snipplle

There’s also a cloud at https://snipplle.com
by csomar | 2025-12-25 12:39:29+00:00
I wouldn't trust it without a deeper inspection. I've had Claude do a workaround (ie: use a javascript interpreter and wrap it in Python) and then claim that it completed the task! The CoT was an interesting read on how his mind think about my mind (the user want ... but this should also achieve this ... the user however asked it to be this ... but this can get what the user want ...; that kind of salad)
by constantius | 2025-12-25 12:40:19+00:00
Knives were too, and yet I'm not calling people to use forks instead. There is a difference between military contractors and generic tools.

Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point given your assumption.
by amluto | 2025-12-25 12:41:24+00:00
I'm amused by the burying of the non-lede until half way through the paper. I, too, can maintain a 59-bit repetition code for over two hours on my quantum laptop (it's just a normal laptop, but it definitely obeys the laws of quantum mechanics):

Initialize the coded bit, using a 59-qubit repetition code that corrects bit flips but not phase errors, in IPython:

In [1]: A = 59 * (False,)

Write a decoder:

In [2]: def decode(physbits):
...: return sum(physbits) > len(physbits)/2.0

Wait two hours [0]. I'll be lazy and only decode at the end of the two hours, but if I wanted error correction to get the full advantage, I would periodically run the error correction algorithm and fix detected errors. Here's the decoding!

In [3]: decode(A)
Out[3]: False

Holy cow, it worked!

I'm being rather tongue-in-cheek here, of course. But it's genuinely impressive that my laptop can stick 59 bits into DRAM cells containing a handful of electrons each, and all of them are just fine after several hours. And it's really really impressive that this research group got their superconducting qubits to store classical states well enough that their rather fancy error correcting device could keep up and preserve the logical state for two hours. [1]

But this isn't quantum error correction going FOOM, per se. It's classical. A bit-flip-corrected but not phase-flip-corrected qubit is precisely a classical bit, no more, no less.

The authors did also demonstrate that they could do the same trick correcting phase flips and not bit flips, but that's a tiny bit like turning the experiment on its side and getting the same result. Combining both demonstrations is impressive, though -- regardless of whether you look at the DRAM cells in my laptop as though the level is the Z basis or the X basis, they only work in one single basis. You cannot swap the role of level and phase in DRAM and get it to still work. But the researchers did pull that off on their two-hour-half-life device, and I find that quite impressive, and the fact that it worked strongly suggests that their device is genuinely 59 qubits, whereas no one could credibly argue that my laptop contains giga-qubits of DRAM. Fundamentally, you can do classical repetition using a repetition code, but you cannot do quantum computation with it. You need fancier, and more sensitive-to-errors, codes for this, and that's what the second half of the article is about.

[0] I didn't actually wait two hours. But I could have waited a week and gotten the same result.

[1] The researchers' qubits are nowhere near as good as my DRAM. They had to run their error correction a billion times or so during the course of their two hours. (My DRAM refreshes quite a few times over the course of two hours, and one can look at DRAM refreshes as correcting something a bit like a repeptition code.)
by cantalopes | 2025-12-25 12:43:16+00:00
I find always find it kind of funny when an article starts with "At [company], our mission is to be the world’s [the product outranking competitors in its domain]".

I mean, come on, unless you really are a nonprofit trying to save the planet or something (no, building a better X is not saving the planet), your mission is to get rich and raise into a monopoly in your field
by uecker | 2025-12-25 12:43:20+00:00
Yes, but I think in the case of Wayland also management had other priorities, i.e. GUI for mobile and/or entertainment systems.

But this is all ok, I think the main problem is that somehow too many in Linux community did not see that the technical arguments for Wayland were not actually too convincing and that giving up decades of compatibility across UNIX systems and beyond is a mistake.
by simonw | 2025-12-25 12:43:50+00:00
I've not heard about Bing using vector search, at least outside of their image search feature https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04914

Information about how Bing text search works appears to be pretty sparse though.

One of the great mysteries to me right now is how ChatGPT search actually works.

It was Bing when they first launched it, but OpenAI have been investing a ton into their own search infrastructure since then. I can't figure out how much of it is Bing these days vs their own home-rolled system.

What's confusing is how secretive OpenAI are about it! I would personally value it a whole lot more if I understood how it works.

So maybe it's way more vector-based than I believe.

I'd expect any modern search engine to have aspects of vectors somewhere - some kind of hybrid BM25 + vectors thing, or using vectors for re-ranking after retrieving likely matches via FTS. That's different from being pure vectors though.
by Izkata | 2025-12-25 12:43:57+00:00
> which allows for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components

Wait so is this turning Wayland into a client/server model like X11, where eventually it could support existing window managers and other stuff separate from the compositor?

I remember a year or two ago wondering if that would ever happen and I think I only got one reply saying it wouldn't happen because it was unnecessary.