MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-12-30 20:36:18+00:00
Two things I find very strange about the criticisms of sortition, as opposed to elections:

1) There are very few prerequisites for electoral candidates, mostly just age minimums (with no maximums). In some but not all cases there's a residency requirement, and in the case of the POTUS, a birthright citizenship requirement. Otherwise, there is no specific requirement for intelligence, knowledge, experience, ethics, etc. Basically, any random citizen who's old enough can run, and win, as long as they can somehow convince enough other people to vote for them. And there are some incredible dumbasses who get elected; I'll mention my own Senator Ron Johnson as particularly noteworthy in that department, but the list is quite long IMO.

2) The random voters who are so distrusted by critics of sortition are the very same people who are entrusted with voting for the candidates in elections that are supposedly superior to sortition. How exactly is that supposed to work, where that outcome, election outcomes, are magically better than the outcomes of voters deliberating among themselves?

What I like about sortition is that I think the odds are a lot better to select honest, good-intentioned, non-corrupt people by lot than by election. The latter tends to pick out the power-hungry, and in a political system where campaigns are privately financed, elections also tend to pick out the financially corrupt.

The situation would be a lot different if for example we had stringent standardized tests as prerequisites for political office, but we don't. Ironically, you have to pass the bar to be a lawyer, but you don't have to pass the bar to be a lawmaker.
by ndiddy | 2025-12-30 20:36:23+00:00
> There was a whole cottage industry of folks modding these CPUs as a small side hustle for people who were not comfortable with soldering onto CPU pins if you wanted to put these into a SMP system.

When Intel switched from Slot 1 to Socket 370, there was a market for "slocket" adapters that allowed Slot 1 motherboards to take Socket 370 CPUs. The best of these adapters worked out a way to re-enable SMP on Celerons by tweaking the pin layout to disable the lock Intel had added. What made the BP6 so popular is that it was a native dual-slot Socket 370 motherboard that had this modification built in so it could use unmodified dual Celerons out of the box.

> Performance really did mostly scale linearly with clock speed back then - but for a single CPU. The dual CPU setups were not nearly as efficient due to software not being as multi-threaded as it is today. The big win were folks with two monitors (rare!) who could run apps on their second monitor while playing games on the first. Typically you would only see frame-rate increases with CPU clock - and of course the very start of the serious 3D accelerator (3dfx, nvidia, ATI) scene back then.

Even if you only had one monitor, multitasking was FAR better on a dual-CPU machine than on a single CPU system. For example, if you were extracting a ZIP file, one CPU would get pegged at 100% but the system was still responsive due to the second CPU not having any utilization. If you use a dual-Celeron BP6 system, it's a much nicer and more modern feeling experience than using a single-PII system even with the faster CPU with more cache.
Show HN: SU_N an Adaptive Mesh Refinement Engine
by RAMJAC | 2025-12-30 20:36:27+00:00
Maybe somebody out here has a need for this. It features:

Linear octree storage with Norton ordered blocks! It's kinda like p4est. It even has runtime partitioning!
It has an MPI backend! Turn that "home lab" into a "HPC".
It supports gauge lattices! Model a nuke! In zig!
Does it work? Download and find out!

Tests and benchmarks will show you how to make a kernel, API usage, and some examples for running a model.
by tauchunfall | 2025-12-30 20:36:30+00:00
I think, the joke about Germany and Italy should team up is a reference to the new CEO of Deutsche Bahn, Evelyn Palla, who is from Italy. The "to make the trains run on time" gives a hint here, because this is her declared task.

Not about Germany, Italy, and Japan, forming some sort of axis, I guess.
by deaux | 2025-12-30 20:36:46+00:00
Hah, this one can go on Wikipedia as an example for "chicken or the egg"! IMO, there's probably a number of other fonts that could've been chosen rather than Inter as default Figma font, and if they had been, they'd now be more ubiquitous than Inter. Of course, we'll never know. Unless someone here is looking to do a research study into popularity of fonts over time compared to popularity of Figma and seeing how strong the correlation is - maybe a weekend project for someone into typography ;)
by hosh | 2025-12-30 20:36:51+00:00
Biomimicry, not invention. He reasoned that the DNA is a vast library for transforming molecules from one to another, and therefore, ecosystems are capable of breaking down pollutants.

In practice, there are multiple vats. The first stage has algae growing, which sequesters the heavy metals. The next stages follow other kinds of ecosystems, such as organisms from swamps. He will mix samples from multiple ecosystems that normally don’t mix so that some kind of novel, self-organizing ecosystem can form around the pollutant.

Then it is measuring and monitoring the contaminants. With the superfund site, he was tracking presence of the top ten pollutants on the EPA list. However, he also shows how people can use much simpler, non-industrial tests — using samples from say, uncontaminated lake water nearby and use a microscope to see if the water being treated will kill those microorganisms. This allows for remediation to be executed by people who don’t have access to labs, but still need a way to test their water.

A much simpler version of this that follows the same design principles is capable of local, onsite treatment of ordinary black water.
by nineteen999 | 2025-12-30 20:37:14+00:00
> to dismiss this as a profound advantage is to definitely sell the idea more than a little short.

Nah not really what he's saying. He's saying that if you throw out all the security affordances provided by page tables and virtual memory, it outweighs the "profound advantage" (which as he mentions, is arguable anyway since user/kernel context switch is a negligible cost in most modern systems).

You're selling a great deal in order to buy not much. It's a poor tradeoff.
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-30 20:37:17+00:00
> But no LLM used for that?

Well, I mean, I self-hosted stable diffusion to be able to generate the teaser images and the award images (for the ranks in the Game Over Dialog).

I only implemented the initial SD paper [1] back then so I have no clue whether the u-net architecture changed when it comes to the semantic mapping of the text/labels. Did that change and is Stable Diffusion 3 now an LLM, actually?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10752
by jweather | 2025-12-30 20:37:44+00:00
Very challenging and fun. Score 1695 and mistakes 315 when I gave up and started Googling things. Did not do so well on (rot13)Nzrevpna ICf, pnegbbavfgf, be FAY pnfg zrzoref. Pbzcyrgryl zvffrq gur ncbpelcuny obbxf bs gur Ovoyr nf jryy. Gung jnf zrna!
by hero4hire | 2025-12-30 20:37:46+00:00
Gamers do the same thing.

AI frame-gen
Film grain
Chromatic aberration
Motion blur

Once the TVs became video cards with filtering and fake refresh rates this was always our fate.

Monitors and default video card drivers have had issues in the past. You'd think the TVs would update their filters with as much spyware data mining they do. But alas, your TV will likely never improve by software in any significance. History has proven that.

Disabling all the features to the hardware spec is best, never connecting a smarttv to the net. Interested in any true exceptions.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-30 20:38:27+00:00
> By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion

That's pretty much backwards. The industrial revolution was the first time in human history where people could get rich on a very large scale via some way other than pillage and conquest. If you think "capitalism" started in the late 18th century and is essentially coterminous with industry (which is quite nonsensical since you had forms of capital as far back as ancient farming societies, but that's the way many scholars choose to use the term) that's exactly what let us choose something that was not plunder and conquest.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-30 20:38:35+00:00
Alpine is really good for servers.

Man I love alpine even though I don't use it so much but alpine does hold a special place in my heart for some reason (and i think the reasons are good)

Tinycore is another one which holds a special place in my heart, partially because its the most no BS simple alpine-like os that I have seen which is rather focused on the consumer side, so you can get GUI systems super quickly and minimalist.

The minimalist tinycore iso with gui and terminals ran on 21-40 MB :) let that sink in

They showed as 0.0% or 0.1% on my 8 gig computer.

I used tinycore to take my really old laptop which my brother used to game on mostly and was super dead, it was a dell mini pc with intel atom 1 gig of ram 32 bit, probably 10-15 years old

I ran tinycore on it with no problem and ended up with wifi access and then even ran modern firefox browser and ended up even running a website like https://pomodorokitty.com/ on it

Man,do i love them both.

I genuinely just wanted to create a service which could just boot tinycore gui servers in the browser perhaps via novnc for people to play with but I seriously wondered who might pay for the project

Oh btw oops forget that you can already do that by just downloading the iso of tinycore and then going to copy.sh/v86

In fact that inspired me to create the project but one of the issues of copy.sh/v86 is that its ephemeral and runs directly in your browser so if you close it whereas I thought of having a mini-server-like tinycore where I can get a gui mini server and can quickly open/close it with terminal and even heck modern browsers.

Everyone should try out tinycore just once imo. The simplicity of 21 MB is mind boggling to me. Makes one really wonder what bloat really is I suppose, definitely a fun experience.

Oh also I love alpine because I ran it in my phone using UserLand and I loved it although running python in alpine was a bit of mess on my phone and I think I ended up doing some wizard magic or something using g-compat in the end as well to run it. Although I think termux is pretty good and even better than UserLand in this context because UserLand runs emulated where Termux doesn't I guess but not sure.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-30 20:38:50+00:00
That just makes it incredibly silly. A good argument from the current administration would have been to pick Public Sans and argue: We paid good money to have a good, generic, license free font developed for the government, and the previous administration went with a font that will cost us money in terms of licensing (not sure how true that might be, but it's potentially true, if used outside Microsoft Word).

But the current Trump administration has a fun way of forgetting everything done during his first presidency. Even the smart choices.

I can't imagine how much all this rebranding is costing the US taxpayers.
by Avamander | 2025-12-30 20:38:56+00:00
Do you have a stereo setup?

I suspect downmixes to stereo and poor builtin speakers might be heavily contributing to the issue you describe. Anecdotally, I have not encountered this issue after I added a center channel.

Nor do I have any issues with the loudness being inconsistent between scenes. I suspect that might be an another thing introduced by downmixing. All the surround channels are "squished" into stereo, making the result louder than it would have otherwise been.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-12-30 20:38:57+00:00
> Most men don't understand what women have to go through in everyday interactions and most women don't understand the same for men.

Probably true. This is entirely different from the previous assertion you made though.

> And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional problem proves my point I feel.

It doesn't, and you have not addressed anything I said which might make your point.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-12-30 20:39:21+00:00
I’ve had similar concerns.

At some point, few people even understand the whole system and whether all these layers are actually accomplishing anything.

It’s especially bad when the code running at rarified levels is developed by junior engineers and “sold” as an opaque closed source thing. It starts to actually weaken security in some ways but nobody is willing to talk about that.

“It has electrolytes…”
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-30 20:39:41+00:00
It's an unpopular opinion, but my belief is that trying to go all-in on one paradigm is the actual mistake. There's several types of awkwardness that arise when a UI library is strictly declarative, for example.

On Apple platforms, I've had a lot of success in a hybrid model where the "bones" of the app are imperative AppKit/UIKit and declarative SwiftUI is used where it's a good fit, which gives you the benefits of both wherever they're needed and as well as an escape hatch for otherwise unavoidable contortions. Swift's nature as something of a hodgepodge enables this.
by physicsguy | 2025-12-30 20:39:48+00:00
I work for a US based company from the UK. I'd be quite reluctant mostly for the hassle factor - international travel is a pain, now I have a family I don't want anything other than a super easy trip when travelling for work, I don't usually have to travel, so if it's going to be a nightmare I'd rather not go. I've heard of colleagues having to take burner phones to China and stuff in the past and noped out of that, and it feels like it's not far off that for the US these days, so while I quite like the US in general it does put me off enormously.

On another note, we're having our next international team get together in Canada rather than SF. Make of that what you will.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-30 20:39:57+00:00
Who said either was easy or able to be automated currently? I'm talking about actual users of tools trying to automate, not hype-driven investors or journalists. Both programming and executive decision making are hard, don't make the mistake of thinking your job hard or special while others' are easy, it's the same exact thing artists tried to do when Stable Diffusion came out. Turns out, it's all hard.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-30 20:40:10+00:00
One could probably use VoidLinux or Gentoo with glibc I suppose if one might want leaner than arch but more heavier than arch

Although VoidLinux's iso size I think is larger than ArchLinux or something which doesn't make that much sense but I don't really know but both are good references to check out.
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-30 20:40:36+00:00
Could be that the avatar's speech is conflicting with an ongoing speech or sound track. Couldn't replicate it what you wrote yet, but gonna try to debug this a little more.

I had to put the initial things in a click listener, and then it's 3 seconds after the initial click when the cookie consent banner is shown (due to AudioContext API limitations and that they have to be a user gesture event that .resume()s the audio context instance).

> I suggest a special URL parameter so that you can link people to a slightly deeper step in the process where It's obvious what they should be interacting with.

The Debugger Views here show more details, and you can play the game just fine and toy around with it:

https://cookie.engineer/design/consent/index.html
by aeyes | 2025-12-30 20:40:42+00:00
Maybe you are running a desktop environment which never changes but Gnome has been constantly broken in many different ways for the last 5+ years. At times it felt more like a developer playground than a usable desktop environment. KDE is more stable nowadays but it still breaks in mysterious ways from time to time.
I also had major issues for some time when Qt6 started rolling out.

And Arch itself also needs manual interventions on package updates every so often, just a few weeks ago there was a major change to the NVidia driver packaging.
by Emergency5606 | 2025-12-30 20:40:51+00:00
I'm not sure how you would define "successfully," but I've created 3 different Windows apps using nothing but vibe coding (I'm not a coder) that I use for work and one app I use for exercise (a basic, browser based Tabata program that for whatever reason does more than any android app I've been able to find, and for free). They're fairly simple things, but they get the job done in ways that did not exist for me before.

And, again, I'm not a coder and only know the absolute basics of programming. This is not something I would have been able to do without AI assistance.

There's also the fact that many programmers working on software today both big and small use AI to one degree or another, maybe not to program the whole thing from scratch, but definitely to help ease the process. It's an invaluable tool.
by radial_symmetry | 2025-12-30 20:40:56+00:00
I promise I only self promote when it is relevant, but this is exactly what I am building https://nimbalyst.com/ for.

We build a user-friendly way for non-technical users to interact with a repo using Claude Code. It's especially focused on markdown, giving red/green diffs on RENDERED markdown files which nobody else has. It supports developers as well, but our goal is to be much more user friendly than VSCode forks.

Internally we have been doing a lot of what they talk about here, doing our design work, business planning, and marketing with Claude Code in our main repo.
by throwaway3060 | 2025-12-30 20:41:00+00:00
Yes, just because the Rome statute claims jurisdiction doesn't make it true, if the jurisdiction in question didn't agree.

In the US, this has all the legal power of Joe Sixpack declaring legal power, or a Russian court. If the ICC tried, the US would tell them to pound sand (or more likely, increase sanctions).

Since the US is not a signatory, as far as they are concerned, the ICC is just a random organization claiming to hold powers it doesn't have.
by civancza | 2025-12-30 20:41:54+00:00
i am about to incorporate my first business, https://querypanel.io. I vibe coded it, but i reviewed every line of code. I created the architecture on my own so i would say it was spec driven.
I have 15+ years of experience in engineering and i think AI is a good thing if you consider your self as an engineer. It speeds things up. Specially opus 4.5 or gemini 3 pro.
by robotnikman | 2025-12-30 20:42:39+00:00
>I run local LLMs infrequently, and every single prompt makes my beefy PC sounds like a jet engine taking off. It's a great reminder to not become codependent.

I would try setting the GPU to run at a lower power level. I set my GPU power level to 80% and it becomes much quieter, and only runs maybe 5% slower at most.

Also I 100% agree with the rest of your comment. We can only power the current growth we are seeing for so long.
by the_snooze | 2025-12-30 20:42:47+00:00
Yeah, I feel like our form of representative democracy is the least bad option. At the very least, office-holders aren't entitled to their office beyond their term unless they're re-elected.

The fundamental problem is that governing is boring, complicated, and unfulfilling to most people. The most impactful elections to citizens' day-to-day lives (i.e., local offices, state legislatures, and primaries for those) have absolutely abysmal participation rates, even in states that bend over backwards with voter accessibility.
Show HN: Write Notes on Images
by sailorganymede | 2025-12-30 20:43:04+00:00
Sometimes, I get sent resumes to critique and it was hard to make comments on things like formatting or which sentences didn't make sense. So I made this app to communicate those annotations better.

Later on, I realised it's actually pretty useful to just write notes on any image. I use it to fill out lean canvases and other charts.

At least now I can tick off the "write a note taking app" checkbox on my developer career bucket list.
by captainkrtek | 2025-12-30 20:43:33+00:00
My biggest problem with usage of an LLM in coding is that it removes engineers from understanding the true implementation of a system.

Over the years, I learned that a lot of one's value as an engineer can come from knowing how things actually work. I've been in many meetings with very senior engineers postulating how something works arguing back and forth, when quietly one engineer taps away on their laptop, then spins it around to say "no, this is the code here, this is how it actually works".
by its-kostya | 2025-12-30 20:43:42+00:00
I am not positioned well to speak to it but a coworker who has spent decades in telcom said that another problem is the certificate authority that holds/controls the certificates to provision these sims. Just the consolidation of who is involved in securing the sims.

With physical sims, only your carrier has the encryption keys to be able to provision (and run e.g. a java program on the sim). With esims, that is not as tightly controlled. Coworker recommended I read about the "sim jacker" exploit, but I have not yet. If anyone is curious, I pass it along.
by deaux | 2025-12-30 20:44:12+00:00
..literally everything that isn't a recent, up and coming B2B SaaS. So >90% of the software written today.

To give but one example, effectively all of the >$300B mobile app market. Or all enterprise software that can't run on Electron. Or any company that cares about image/branding across their products, which is every single company past a certain size (and don't come at me with "but hot AI startup uses Shadcn and are valued at X trillion").
Desktop‑2FA 0.5.0
by wrogistefan | 2025-12-30 20:45:11+00:00
I’ve been working on a small open‑source project called desktop‑2fa — a local‑only TOTP generator designed for people who prefer offline, reproducible tools over cloud‑based authenticators.

Version 0.5.0 just landed. The main focus of this release was stability, reproducibility, and tightening the workflow around packaging and publishing. Highlights:

• 100% test coverage
• reproducible builds
• strict CI/CD safety checks to prevent accidental releases
• Pydantic v2 migration
• improved documentation and onboarding
• cleaner CLI and error handling

It’s still a simple tool, but the goal is to make a trustworthy, transparent, desktop‑first 2FA solution without accounts, sync, or telemetry.

Repo: https://github.com/wrogistefan/desktop-2fa
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/desktop-2fa/

Feedback is welcome — especially around packaging, security assumptions, and workflow design.
by throwforfeds | 2025-12-30 20:45:15+00:00
I'm the same, I haven't lived in a house with a TV since I left my parent's house at 18 (I'm in my 40s now) and whenever I'm in someones house with one on I'm just flabbergasted that people watch things that look like they do on their TVs.

I was at my parent's house the other day for Christmas and tried to start watching Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai, but the TV made everything look so terrible that I couldn't continue with it. I was having a hard time figuring out what was just from his style and what was whatever crap the TV was trying to do to it on it's own. I'm amazed people don't realize things just look like shit on their TVs now?
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-30 20:45:33+00:00
I like keeping old branches but a lot of places ditch them, never understood why. I also dislike git squash, it means you have to make a brand new branch for your next PR, waste of time when I should be able to pull down master / dev / main / whatever and merge it into my working branch. I guess this is another reason I prefer the forking approach of github, let devs have their own sandbox and their own branches, and let them get their work done, they will PR when its ready.