MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dontlaugh | 2025-12-30 15:10:12+00:00
I think that’s definitely the case with 4K, and we’ve seen set detail design drastically improve lately as a response.

I don’t see how it’s the case for frame rate, except perhaps for CGI (which has also improved).

I think just like with games, there’s an initial surprised reaction; so many console-only gamers insisted they can’t see the point of 60 fps. And just like with games, it only takes a little exposure to get over that and begin preferring it.
by optymizer | 2025-12-30 15:10:18+00:00
I personally found the text hard to read (both because of the typeface and the small size), the animations distracting during scrolling (while I'm trying to skim the content), and the background colors too dark for dark text on them with jarring full white (#FFF) colored text.

I understand they're trying to go for a whimsical and fun feeling, but imo as implemented it is far from "really well made".
by svara | 2025-12-30 15:10:23+00:00
But it does? What do you think it optimizes other than individual fitness?

I think I understand the GP pretty well. Cheating, or defection in the language of evolutionary theory, is subject to frequency based selection, meaning it is strongly selected against if its frequency is too high in the population. It's not a stable strategy.

It can be a winning strategy for a few individuals in a cooperative environment, yes, but it breaks down at a point because the system collapses if too many do it.

And yet, cooperative systems are common and stable, which is my point.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-12-30 15:10:29+00:00
This is such a tired argument.

Could people write scientific code without python? If they can't, did they really do it in the first place?

Could people write code without use after free bugs without using a GC'd language? If they can't, did they really do it in the first place?

Could people make a website without WYSIWYG editor? If they can't, did they really make a website?
by Verdex | 2025-12-30 15:11:06+00:00
My gaming PC isn't compatible with windows 11, so it was the first to get upgraded to Linux. Immediate and significant improvement in experience.

Windows kept logging down the system trying to download a dozen different language versions of word (for which I didn't have a licence and didn't want regardless). Steam kept going into a crash restart cycle. Virus scanner was ... being difficult.

Everything just works on Linux except some games on proton have some sound issues that I still need to work out.
by jrmg | 2025-12-30 15:11:11+00:00
There’s something to what you’re saying - but it’s also something of a spectrum.

Our need to turn up the volume in dialog scenes and turn it back down again in action scenes (for both new and old content) got a lot less when we added a mid-range soundbar and sub to our mid-range TV (previously was using just the TV speakers). I’m not sure whether it’s sound separation - now we have a ‘more proper’ center channel - or that the ends of the spectrum - both bass and treble - are less muddy. Probably a combination of the two.
by weslleyskah | 2025-12-30 15:11:13+00:00
Exactly. And this is why a whole dimension of collecting rare footages is quite dead now. This is why piracy through these great public trackers still matters.

Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.
by Cyph0n | 2025-12-30 15:11:35+00:00
strncpy doesn’t handle overlapping buffers (undefined behavior). Better to use strncpy_s (if you can) as it is safer overall. See: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/strncpy.html.

As an aside, this is part of the reason why there are so many C successor languages: you can end up with undefined behavior if you don’t always carefully read the docs.
by regularfry | 2025-12-30 15:12:13+00:00
There's definitely a philosophical shift that you can observe happening over the last 12-15 years or so, where at the start you have the interpreter as the centre of the world and at the end there's an ecosystem management tool that you use to give yourself an interpreter (and virtual environments, and so on) per project.

I think this properly kicked off with RVM, which needed to come into existence because you had this situation where the Ruby interpreter was going through incompatible changes, the versions on popular distributions were lagging, and Rails, the main reason people were turning to Ruby, was relatively militant about which interpreter versions it would support. Also, building the interpreter such that it would successfully run Rails wasn't trivial. Not that hard, but enough that a convenience wrapper mattered. So you had a whole generation of web devs coming up in an environment where the core language wasn't the first touchpoint, and there wasn't an assumption that you could (or should) rely on what you could apt-get install on the base OS.

This is broadly an extremely good thing.

But the critical thing that RVM did was that it broke the circular dependency at the core of the problem: it didn't itself depend on having a working ruby interpreter. Prior to that you could observe a sort of sniffiness about tools for a language which weren't implemented in that language, but RVM solved enough of the pain that it barged straight past that.

Then you had similar tools popping up in other languages - nvm and leiningen are the first that spring to mind, but I'd also throw (for instance) asdf into the mix here - where the executable that you call to set up your environment has a '#!/bin/bash' shebang line.

Go has sidestepped most of this because of three things: 1) rigorous backwards compatibility; 2) the simplest possible installation onramp; 3) being timed with the above timeline so that having a pre-existing `go` binary provided by your OS is unlikely unless you install it yourself. And none of those are true of Python. The backwards compatibility breaks in this period are legendary, you almost always do have a pre-existing Python to confuse things, and installing a new python without breaking that pre-existing Python, which your OS itself depends on, is a risk. Add to that the sniffiness I mentioned (which you can still see today on `uv` threads) and you've got a situation where Python is catching up to what other languages managed a decade ago.

Again.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-30 15:12:20+00:00
As somebody who does moral philosophy on a daily basis I find this entire website insulting

Headlines like “Reconciling Consequentialism, Virtue Ethics and Deontology” are absurd given the lack of any depth in the resulting text.

It’s a pretty website that does absolutely nothing to make progress on resolving moral issues while also attempting to demonstrate that its all solved through this person’s lens
by Carrok | 2025-12-30 15:12:27+00:00
From the linked press release (https://www.sgpc.gov.sg/detail?url=/media_releases/astar/pre...)

> Among children whose parents read to them frequently at age three, the link between infant screen time and altered brain development was significantly weakened.

It sounds a bit like the problem might not be so much "heavy screen time" as "heavy screen time, plus no alternative stimulation". Not defending heavy screen time at all, just thought it was an interesting tidbit.
by mcramblett | 2025-12-30 15:12:50+00:00
Hi HN! My name is Mike Cramblett. I made a one-prompt novel generator using Gemini 3 for you to try.

This is an early beta (v0.4), but I’m releasing it as a public repo because the results are surprisingly fun. There's a sample novel in the examples/ folder ("GitHub-Man Saves the Universe!") that I generated from just a title.

The Architecture

Instead of a single long context window, I built a recursive pipeline:
Initial Prompt -> Story Bible Generator -> Outline Maker -> Chapter Writer -> Continuity Auditor -> Repeat.

The "Secret Sauce" (SCI)
I noticed standard LLM characters sound the same. So I created a linguistic fingerprinting technique called SCI (Stylistic Compression Induction). I prompt the Story Planner to assign a "voice anchor" to each character (e.g., "Responds in apocalyptic revelations of cryptic brevity"). It forces the model to filter dialogue through that specific stylistic lens.

Anti-Slop Measures
I added a rolling "banned phrases" list. The Summarizer Agent reads the new chapter, identifies "AI-isms" (like "The air was thick with..."), and adds them to a negative constraint list for the next chapter. The final list of banned phrases is hilarious. It's basically a map of the model's own clichés.

Meta-Note
I have a CS degree (Harvey Mudd '02) but I didn't write the React/TypeScript code by hand. I prompted Gemini's code assistant to build the whole stack in "free developer mode" while I acted as the PM/Debugger. It was a wild way to build software. I can read the code to debug it, but the AI wrote the syntax.
Repo is open source (MIT). Would love to hear if the SCI technique works for your prompts.
by password54321 | 2025-12-30 15:13:11+00:00
2026 is going to be about going all in on automating software development. This is where the money is currently at as software developers need compute and what could justify all the data centers being built. It is much harder to convert students with limited money or people who don't care about accuracy or the highest end models as much in a lot of other fields. The thing most people even got excited about by the end of this year is obviously Claude Code. If they can solve software development the bubble may take longer than expected to burst.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-12-30 15:13:31+00:00
The METR study cited here is very interesting.

"In the METR study, developers predicted AI would make them 24% faster before starting. After finishing 19% slower, they still believed they'd been 20% faster."

I hadn't heard of this study before. Seems like it's been mentioned on HN before but not got much traction.
by smarx007 | 2025-12-30 15:14:01+00:00
To test 'limit > 0' according to MC/DC, you need only two values, e.g. -1 and 1. There may be other code inside the branch using limit in some other ways, prompting more test cases and more values of limit but this one only needs two.

But yes, exhaustively testing your code is a bit exhausting ;)
by tuesdaynight | 2025-12-30 15:14:22+00:00
I understand their struggles because I lived through them. However, after I got better at OLD, I understand how it gets tiring hearing about it after a while, specially from people who are clearly on a bad path. For example, treating like a market (which I don't consider a good approach) but not accepting their current value is not enough for creating any demand. And nowadays, with the gym culture being mainstream, it's getting even harder if you don't even try to be more "valuable".
by jennyholzer3 | 2025-12-30 15:14:27+00:00
I think LLMs have aggressively facilitated the rise of illiteracy in people attending software development university programs.

I think graduates of these programs are far, far worse software developers than they were in the recent past.

edit: i think you mean "irrelevant", not "irreverent". that being said, my response is an expansion of the point made in my comment that you replied to.
by shakna | 2025-12-30 15:14:39+00:00
If the function is equivalent to a no-op, and not explicitly marked as volatile for side-effects, it absolutely can elide it. If there is a side-effect in hardware or wider systems like the OS, then it must be marked as volatile. If the code is just code, then a function call that does effectively nothing, will probably become nothing.

That was one of the first optimisations we had, back with Fortran and COBOL. Before C existed - and as B started life as a stripped down Fortran compiler, the history carried through.

The K&R book describes the buddy system for malloc, and how its design makes it suitable for compiler optimisations - including ignoring a write to a pointer that does nothing, because the pointer will no longer be valid.
by Joiblumen | 2025-12-30 15:14:41+00:00
Yes, seems like both audio and video are following a High Dynamic Range trend.

As much as I enjoy deafeningly bright explosions in the movie theater, it's almost never appropriate in the casual living room.

I recently bought a new TV, Bravia 8ii, which was supposedly not bright enough according to reviewers. In it's professional setting, it's way to bright at night, and being an OLED watching HDR content the difference between the brightest and darkest is simply too much, and there seems to be no way to turn it down without compromising the whole brightness curve.
by sneela | 2025-12-30 15:14:54+00:00
As much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves.

Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled reading them -- once in front of a class :)

This is why my favorite sans-serif typeface has been (and will always be) IBM Plex Sans [1]. It's an open font [2]. I have all my laptops and desktops set to using the IBM Plex typefaces, including browser overrides. If only there were a way to do it system-wide on my Android phone...

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/

[2]: https://github.com/IBM/plex/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Preview: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text...
Show HN: Summit – local AI meeting insights
by nLight | 2025-12-30 15:15:11+00:00
Summit is a local-first macOS app for meeting recording and transcription.
All audio processing, transcription, and summarization happens on your Mac - nothing is sent to the cloud (unless you chose to).

Built for privacy-sensitive work such as NDAs, legal, healthcare, consulting.

Features:

- Works with any call app: zoom, meet, teams, etc.
- Automatic call detection
- On-device speaker identification
- Custom summary templates (decisions, action items, notes)
- Supports online and in-person meetings

Would love feedback from people who care about local-first software and privacy.
by danabramov | 2025-12-30 15:15:14+00:00
I’m so tired of reading LLM slop articles. I don’t mind someone using AI assistance but it should be embarrassing to put your name next to something you so obviously didn’t write.

I don’t remember who said it but I really like this summary: posting LLM slop as your own writing destroys the reader/writer contract. Normally you’d expect the writer to have spent more effort on a piece than the reader. But now the reader is the one who’s spending more effort, trying to interpret a chain of words from nobody’s mind.

This should be embarrassing to post.
by cainxinth | 2025-12-30 15:15:19+00:00
These days I generally use LLMs as a universal recommendation engine. I put together a list of things I like from a category and ask “What is missing?”

Or sometimes I’ll input some of my blog posts and personal essays or even just copy and paste a huge chunk of my hn submissions and comments, and ask it to recommend books that would appeal to this person.
by MrBingley | 2025-12-30 15:15:23+00:00
I am going to disagree with almost all of the advice about studying abroad or joining a club. Those are well-intended, but they are addressing the symptoms, not the cause. Judging from these descriptions:

> I’m socially anxious and keep to myself

> small talk tends to bore me

> it’s exhausting always having to text them to hang out, if I don’t then we never talk again

It's highly possible that you have undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. I say this because I am reading a book right now about ASD[0] and a lot of this is ringing true, especially the part about being confused why friends are dropping you. Speak to a psychologist and see what they think (or read the book first, and then speak to them). I am 30 now and am just cluing in that I might be on the spectrum, and oh boy do I wish I had caught it when I was younger. (It's also possible that you don't have ASD but some other condition like avoidant personality disorder, but whatever it is, it is so much easier to solve it once you've figured it out.)

[0]: https://www.isthisautism.com/
by nLight | 2025-12-30 15:15:26+00:00
Hi HN! My name is Dima, and I'm the founder of Summit.

I built this because I kept running into a hard limit with existing meeting tools: I couldn't use them for NDA-covered calls or internal discussions, since audio and transcripts had to be uploaded to third-party servers. On top of that, juggling multiple call apps made built-in summarization hard to use even when it was technically compliant.

That's why Summit takes a different approach: everything runs locally on macOS - recording, transcription, speaker identification, and summarization. Nothing leaves the machine, and there's no account or cloud backend.

The tradeoff is that it's more resource-intensive than cloud tools, and accuracy depends on the hardware you're running on. I spent a lot of time optimizing the local tool chain (e.g. smaller on-device models like Qwen) to make this practical on Apple Silicon. I tested it on a standard corporate MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM, which works well; more memory lets you run larger models, but 16 GB is enough.

I believe in local-first AI and would love feedback from people here who've thought about it:

– Is fully on-device processing something you'd personally value?
– Are there privacy or compliance use cases I'm missing?
– What would you want to inspect or control in a tool like this?

Happy to answer any technical questions.
by seec | 2025-12-30 15:15:39+00:00
I have had Safari syncing bugs since basically 2016.
But now I can't be bothered to even use it, no matter how good it gets.

Chrome extensions, functionning ad blocking (without having to pay for a stupid Apple blessed extension) and just generally more usefull feature set is the real reason Google is winning.

Apple can't even be bothered to try making a cross platform browser, because he would cost them too much money or whatever (not that the pile of cash they are sitting on is getting a lot of valuable use).
by glenngillen | 2025-12-30 15:15:41+00:00
You just reminded me that a few years ago I was doing some product research and one of the questions I'd ask people was what technical communities they turned to regularly. To keep up with news, if they had a question to ask they needed an answer to (this was pre-LLM hype days). HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and various Slack communities dominated the results for people I spoke to in the USA. I was shocked by how much private WhatsApp groups dominated amongst the respondents from Africa (Nigeria representing the overwhelming majority of people who I spoke to).

At the time it felt to me they were missing out on so many other useful resources. Maybe I was wrong. It's interesting to see things trending in a similar direction now.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-30 15:16:01+00:00
If you are at an arm's length from a proper amplifier/speaker setup, why are you using a tiny screen to watch movies? (that was a rhetorical question)

Phone/tablet/laptop etc. in my top comment was not a technological limitation, like "oh no, we don't have a port or protocol to connect o speakers and so we can't use them". It was a logistical limitation. Like being physically in place without speakers or possibility to even buy them. Traveling, renting, having big family and only one set of speakers, and so on. Situations where you can't just pluck a Dolby setup from a thin air but do still watch movies.

Here is a datapoint - in the whole world around 1-2 *billion* headphones are sold, every single year. I would bet that at least a double digit percentage of those numbers had been used to watch a movie at least once. Proposing that all those people in all those situations bought themselves a surround speaker setup just to understand voice track in the movies is an inane take.
by tidwall | 2025-12-30 15:16:20+00:00
Or this.

func fetchUser(id int) (user User, err error) {
resp, err := http.Get(fmt.Sprintf("https://api.example.com/users/%d", id))
if err != nil {
return user, err
}
defer resp.Body.Close()
return user, json.NewDecoder(resp.Body).Decode(&user)
}
by mgrat | 2025-12-30 15:16:34+00:00
I've worked at a number of non-tech companies the past few years. They bought every SaaS product, Palantir, Databricks, multi-cloud, their dev teams adopted every pattern popularized by big tech and the results were always mixed. Any gains were wiped out by being buried under technical debt. They had all the data catalogs & 'ontologies' with none of the governance to go make it work. Turns out that benefiting from all this tech requires you to re-organize and change your culture. For a lot of companies, they're just not going to see big gains from AI or tech in general at this point.
by sarymismail | 2025-12-30 15:16:36+00:00
I realized I was paying a large sum of money for ChatGPT, Luma (video), Gemini, and Grok. I didn't want 5 tabs open; I wanted one interface that just "knew" which model to use.

So, I built Ask-AI.

How it works (The Tech) Instead of a simple wrapper, I built a routing engine in Node.js/Vercel that analyzes user intent before sending the request:
News/Current Events? → Regex detects "news", "price", "latest". Routes to Grok 3.
Video Prompt? → Detects "create video", "animate". Routes to Luma Dream Machine.
Audio/PDF Upload? → Routes to Gemini Pro (for its native multimodal context window).
Logic/Code? → Routes to GPT-4o, GPT 5.2 or o1.

The Launch Stats (Day 10) I soft-launched 10 days ago on the Play Store.
Installs: 1,170+ (100% organic/ASO).
Conversion Rate: 24.9% (Store listing visitors -> Installs).
CAC: $0.00.

The "Retention Bug" My retention looked terrible at first (~20% user loss). I dug into the logs and realized ~170 uninstalls came specifically from Russia and Iran, where the OpenAI/Gemini APIs are geo-blocked. My app was crashing for them. I’ve since geofenced the app, and retention in supported regions has stabilized around ~30%.

Features I'm testing:
Podcast Mode: Takes any chat thread/document and generates a 2-way audio discussion (like NotebookLM but integrated into the chat).
Voice Journal: Hands-free voice notes that auto-tag and save to a vector store (Knowledge Base).
I’m looking for feedback on the routing logic—does it feel seamless, or can you tell when it switches engines?
by zahlman | 2025-12-30 15:16:37+00:00
Hard links, in fact. It's not hard to do, just (the Rust equivalent of) `os.link` in place of `os.copy` pretty much. The actually clever part is that the package cache actually contains files that can be used this way, instead of just having wheels and unpacking them from scratch each time.

For pip to do this, first it would have to organize its cache in a sensible manner, such that it could work as an actual download cache. Currently it is an HTTP cache (except for locally-built wheels), where it uses a vendored third-party library to simulate the connection to files.pythonhosted.org (in the common PyPI case). But it still needs to connect to pypi.org to figure out the URI that the third-party library will simulate accessing.
Show HN: VideoReview – an on-prem, Frame.io-like video review tool for game dev
by KirisameMarisa | 2025-12-30 15:17:01+00:00
I built VideoReview because tools like Frame.io work well for external reviews,
but were hard to use in our actual game development workflow.

In our studio, reviews often involve a large number of short cutscene clips
on internal or restricted networks.
so we needed a lightweight, self-hosted solution.

After switching to VideoReview:

- feedback became more focused

- fewer “which frame are you talking about?” moments

- review cycles got noticeably shorter

It’s a small, on-prem tool built for internal teams, not client delivery.
I’d love feedback from people who regularly review animation or gameplay footage.