MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nirvdrum | 2025-12-26 02:49:19+00:00
Having immutable objects by default isn’t incredibly commonplace outside of functional languages. It certainly isn’t unique to Ruby and seems out of place in a discussion comparing Ruby to Python. Fortunately, you can defensively freeze any objects you’re passing around to avoid the most common issues with mutable objects.

Immutable strings is a more popular programming language feature and Ruby has a mechanism for opting into that. It’s so commonplace that the complaint usually isn’t that a string can be modified, but rather that every source file includes a magic comment to prevent that. Besides data safety, the VM can optimize frozen strings, so popular linters will flip that setting on for you. String mutability isn’t a practical issue for modern codebases. And, as language design goes, it’s kinda nice not needing to use a parallel set of classes for mutable and immutable string data IMHO.

With that said, the magic comment is a wart and folks are looking at making immutable strings the default. But, there’s a strong desire to avoid breaking the world. The Ruby Core team is keen to keep the lessons learned from the Python 2 -> 3 migration in mind.
by chews | 2025-12-26 02:50:47+00:00
I worked at medtronic in the early 2000's (early paradigm pumps) and were evaluating wireless protocols and security... at the time we determined it was impossible to secure, once the FDA approved another device maker that did have connectivity there was a scramble to catch up. (this was palmos/pocketpc era).
It was fun work but I always remembered how insanely detailed the code was, 8bit low power microcontrollers (some 16bit) but really really really tight C code.
Then the demand for remote control happened and that really crapped the bed.
https://www.medtronic.com/en-us/e/product-security/security-...

The amazing developer Scott Hanselman built on a PalmOS app to store readings and if I recall correctly wore 2 pumps with fast/slow insulin... he had a cybernetic pancreas in the mid-2000's.
by olowe | 2025-12-26 02:52:00+00:00
> I’ve spent a decade doing frontend work.

Think about it this way: you've spent a decade writing software.

> Does it make sense to change direction at this point?

Changing direction isn't a binary thing. You can aim, say, 4.5 degrees to the left to change your trajectory ever so slightly. This is possible because whether you're working on CRUD forms or self-driving car data analytics pipelines many principles of software engineering are the same. For example good software is usually simple, clear, and portable [1].

Specialise in an industry vertical that is not just web development. Let's use healthcare as an example. If you're doing dropdowns and modals in healthcare software - try and understand if those widgets could be easily used in other healthcare software. Why or why not? Could that same dropdown be implemented in a native app using GTK and/or WinUI? Perhaps given the type of data you're working with a dropdown isn't the best way that it could be represented. Try loading up some disease definitions into Typesense[2] and presenting a more free-form text search for particular diseases. From there you can think beyond UI widgets and think more about general problem solving.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming
[2]: https://typesense.org
by jetc | 2025-12-26 02:52:49+00:00
My friend and I built this because we were tired of how "effective" the Instagram algorithm has become. I went on Instagram to send a DM, and ended up doomscrolling for 30 minutes.

We want to stay connected with others without being exploited for engagement.

- Bypasses the "Explore" page: No suggested reels or ads.

- Direct Messaging via MQTT: Real-time chat without the feed looming in the background.

- Intention-driven: see posts and stories from friends only when you intend to, supports images in terminal (Sixel, Kitty, iTerm2 protocol)

The app is built with TypeScript and Ink (React for CLI). We also ended up open-sourcing two libraries for Ink during the process: ink-picture (for terminal image rendering) and wax (a routing framework for Ink).

We'd love to hear user feedback to make the app better. Looking for contributors.

Share with us your thoughts on social media, attention vs connections, and building terminal apps.
by bdcravens | 2025-12-26 02:53:32+00:00
I depend on a pump and CGM (currently that's a Dexcom G7 and Omnipod, but I've used other brands as well).

I like the technology, but you have to 1) know your own body and 2) verify if you are uncertain about the readings. Every time I've switched devices I've interacted with diabetes educators, and they pretty much always tell me to always be prepared to verify manually (with an old-school finger stick and test strips).

Additionally, it's not always the fault of the technology, but often where meatspace and technology interface. When you insert a CGM, there's always a risk of the canula not going into the skin correctly. (usually it's a spring-loaded insertion tool and shoot a needle into your skin quickly, but it can mess up if the amount of pressure applied is wrong etc)
In such a case, the sensor that measures your blood will often, where you can't see, sit on top of the skin. This results in insanely low readings. That happens to me a few times a year (I swap out the sensor every 10 days), and you have to listen to how your body feels relative to the readings, and replace the sensor if necessary.
by vel0city | 2025-12-26 02:54:24+00:00
As a parent I largely agree with this take. Most toys people buy my kids are essentially cheap plastic trash that won't last a season of interest but emotional toil to try and get rid of.

If you must get something outside of a donation to education savings, please either get a relevant book, something genuinely useful, or some kind of consumable. A pair of fun socks. A good a new backpack. Tickets to a sports game or a museum. A bag of snacks. A few sheets of stickers. New legitimate sports equipment (if they're into the sport and could actually use it). All of these are far better than some cheap plastic noise maker.
by guessmyname | 2025-12-26 02:55:27+00:00
One of my email addresses is {MyNameKP}@gmail.com. “KP” were just random letters I picked years ago and they don’t mean anything. I also own {MyName}@hotmail.com. Someone once asked why I don’t use {MyName}@gmail.com, so I went home to try to sign up for it, but Gmail said the address already exists. I figured someone else had it and might sell, so I emailed them. Gmail auto-replied that the address doesn’t exist. Why can’t I register an address that isn’t there? Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-26 02:55:40+00:00
Fax is still acceptable in parts of healthcare for a reason —
privacy under low-tech constraints is an actual requirement.

Dial-up was slow, but at least the internet still felt human.

Fiber gave us speed, not soul.

Sometimes I miss yelling “Corp Por” into the TUBE —
back when the screen wasn’t a window, but a passage.
by rsync | 2025-12-26 02:55:45+00:00
"... wrongful death lawsuits are typically the only way to hold these companies accountable. Yet, there are very few people who have not agreed Abbott's toxic terms of their proprietary companion application ..."

I (a non-diabetic interested in athletic performance) use an Abbott CGM sporadically and I have absolutely not agreed to any terms of service nor any other agreement of any kind - legal or otherwise.

I bought a purpose-specific, old model iphone from "Back Market" with no SIM card, very briefly allowed it wifi access long enough to download the "Lingo" app, then set the phone to airplane mode. Dedicated, throwaway email and AppleID.

It has never left airplane mode and it works perfectly.

Further, I have no legal relationship nor have I made any agreement of any kind with Abbott.

I highly recommend that any user of these devices do the same.
by esafak | 2025-12-26 02:58:29+00:00
> It exhibits consistent and stable results in tools such as Claude Code, Droid (Factory AI), Cline, Kilo Code, Roo Code, and BlackBox, while providing reliable support for Context Management mechanisms including Skill.md, Claude.md/agent.md/cursorrule, and Slash Commands.

One of the demos shows them using Claude Code. Interesting...
by godelski | 2025-12-26 02:58:56+00:00
Sure, but isn't there still an advantage to this? If two people are silently doing this then they don't influence one another as much, helping find a wider range of solutions as well as identify issues with certain solutions that the other might not have seen.

Instead if you're blurting out your thinking more in unison. Naturally you'll stray less, exploring less.

Of course you want collaboration but I find the magic is going back and forth between alone and together. I even find this helpful when just working by myself, stepping away from the problem or context switching, allowing the problem to distill.
by bdcravens | 2025-12-26 02:59:26+00:00
That seemed odd to me as well (also diabetic). When I'm not being responsible, I can ride out a BG of 300-400 for hours and mostly I'm just lethargic.

That said, my mother in law, who had worse diabetes than me, went without her pump during mine and her daughter's wedding (a bit of vanity about the pump showing through her dress). She was at 600+, and started feeling pretty ill that evening.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-26 02:59:42+00:00
> But https://grep.app/search?f.repo=trifectatechfoundation%2Fsudo... indicated that maybe up to 45 files include unsafe code. That is quite a lot of files. How many modules might that touch? How large are those modules?

I mean, you have the search results right there. You could always take the time to look for yourself instead of "wildly spitballing", especially since the codebase is not that large.

Might want to take a closer look at your search results anyways, since those results include the FAQ, the sudoers man page, and instances of #![forbid(unsafe_code)] and #![deny(unsafe_code)]. Not exactly a promising start...

But since you asked so nicely, by tokei's count and my transcribing file paths, the modules including the `unsafe` keyword account for ~39% (8207/21106) of the total lines of code in the repo. I don't think you'll need to actually look at anywhere near that amount of code, though; from a brief glance through the search results I suspect most of the `unsafe` usages are for FFI calls, and relatively self-documenting/self-contained ones at that. If there were modules with module-wide invariants, I do not appear to have stumbled upon them.
Show HN: Fun sketch – Animate your sketches
by mishu2 | 2025-12-26 02:59:47+00:00
Hello HN,

I created a simple website which lets children (of all ages) sketch something and then animate it using AI. And since it's Christmas, I'm sharing it here for free!

No account required (but because the sketch app allows image uploads and we all know we can't have nice things on the Internet, I will be moderating the submissions before showing them on the front page).

Stack:
- Django web server
- Postgres DB
- Redis for caching
- ComfyUI for the image to video workflow (Wan 2.2 14B I2V)

Let me know what you think. Merry Christmas!
by block_dagger | 2025-12-26 03:00:05+00:00
It’s not a huge impediment but it adds up through: extra lines of sig code I now need to essentially ignore as I read as well as waiting for precommit hooks to check a giant codebase for compliance, plus extra rbi files in git. If engineers followed convention over config and tested types where necessary, no need for inline types. Just use TS if you want types.
by fragmede | 2025-12-26 03:00:05+00:00
I mean, the LLM's words are just generated words, not gospel from the heavens. If you're self-aware enough to be able to extract value from the words, and not go off the deep end with it, which it seem like you are, run it through as many SOTA online models and however many offline models you can fit on your hard drive, and compare all of their advice if you're really that worried about it, but make up a soap opera scenario, like some thing that ends with "and then I slept with her sister" and see just how many of them say "good job getting it in!" and not "you're an asshole", if you need to prove to yourself that, as with everything, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the news.
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-26 03:00:21+00:00
In most cases you can’t use the device without agreeing to the terms of service right?

For example a service I use a lot recently changed their terms of service - there was no way to keep using the service without agreeing.

Might be different for devices or services that don’t need internet to function; but even for those you have some “activation” step nowadays that forces you to agree before “unlocking”
by Brajeshwar | 2025-12-26 03:01:08+00:00
This is one of those articles that pops up here once every few years, and I love it every time. I love these stories of low-hanging, boring businesses that succeed in simple, yet strange and satisfying ways.

And of course, this helps me continue, like many others, to go domain-first on ideas that sound good at interesting times. I have enough domains to be ashamed of in numbers, but I will continue to register more, as more ideas hit me in the shower and on my walks. My wife has seen me walk out of the shower halfway more often than not to check availability and register domains. I’ve also had my share of well-sold domain names, so I don’t regret my hobby/obsession.
by araes | 2025-12-26 03:02:33+00:00
Since you're from the "local" area (Belgium), do you happen to know why the numbers have declined over the years? From this article [1] it seemed like it was hugely popular pre-WWII (3,750) with that article quoting 500 in the modern era.

Less acceptable currently, other alternatives? Still seems famous and popular, just not quite as much as it used to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geel#A_model_of_psychiatric_ca...
by aristofun | 2025-12-26 03:03:07+00:00
Galileo, copernicus, descartes were all christians, also newton.

Some of them were in conflict with the church. Never with christ or god.

If you’re ignorant and uneducated enough to not see the difference between the 2 then there is no point to argue with you. You’re likely brainwashed.

Ps: Also if you didn’t know first western universities started as monasteries with monks seeking the truth in the name of christ.
by g-mork | 2025-12-26 03:04:09+00:00
Some of the more "celebrityish" talks tend to be popular by reputation, but content is often reused a lot, e.g. "10 years of Dieselgate" kind of falls into that. Watched the original, and the followup, and I think also the followup-followup, eventually it's worth checking out new topics instead, even though the presenters could not be faulted in any way.

All of these looked good to me this year: https://halfnarp.events.ccc.de/#e72b9560a7c729d1b38c93ef18a5...
by m4rtink | 2025-12-26 03:04:30+00:00
Even if you can point to some positive outcomes the is the main issue of the whole system being so easy to corrupt and coopt for personal gain & power trips.

You might get lower infant mortality, better access to healtcare ans aeducation (as long as the party considers you worthy) but you will almost immediately get crooks and incompetents in leadership positions, whose only qualities are the set of morals to get to a position of power no matter the cost.

And those leadership positions are appointed by or even part of The Party - and the party is never wrong. There is no free press to critisize them and if you do speak up, then you are logically an spy from The West, undermining the perfect communist utopia & need to be punished.

Only if someone is really epically incompetent they might get purged by the inner circles, but it is even more likely they will purge someone actually doing things right who still has some morals left.

You could be the most ideological communist trzing to build the bright future & will still end up sidelined or worse by the corrupt pigs holding to all the power in the communist state.

When the Soviets crashed the Prague Spring in the 1968 there were some interbrigadists that went to fight agains Francos fascists in Spain during the interwar period with international communist brigades. Only now they were watching soviet soldiers shoot people in the streets and crush them with their tanks...
by godelski | 2025-12-26 03:04:48+00:00
> typing faster takes discipline and effort.

>> ***typing isn't the bottleneck***

I believe you read too fast

> The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.

You've missed the critical part of what I was saying.

While typing I'm doing other things in parallel.

Those other things are things that require you to scrutinize and look at each character. I think the vacuum analogy from the OP is quite apt here. It's much harder to debug other people's code and more so an LLMs.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-26 03:04:51+00:00
The thing that annoys me more is the singular focus on memory safety as if nothing else matters. For example, by most definitions PHP is a "memory safe" language, but it's also full of poor design choices and the things written in it have a disproportionate number of security vulnerabilities. JavaScript is also classically modeled as a gelatinous mass of smoldering tires and npm seems to have been designed for the purpose of carrying out supply chain attacks.

So then we see an enormous amount of effort being spent to try to replace everything written in C with Rust when that level of effort should have been able to e.g. come up with something which is easy enough for ordinary people to use that it could plausibly displace WordPress but has a better security posture. Or improve the various legacy issues with distribution package managers so that people stop avoiding them even for popular packages in favor of perilous kludges like npm and Docker.
by markerz | 2025-12-26 03:05:03+00:00
LLMs will always have the tool call overhead, which I find to be quite expensive (seconds) on most models. Directly using vector databases without the LLM interface gets you a lot of the semantic search ability without the multi-second latency, which is pretty nice for querying documents on a website. E.G. finding relevant pages on a documentation website, showing related pages, etc. Can be applied to GitHub Issues to deduplicate issues, or show existing issues that could match what the user is about to report. There are plenty of places where “cheap and fast” is better and an LLM interface just gets in the way. I think this is a lot of the unsqueezed juice in our industry.
by robocat | 2025-12-26 03:06:52+00:00
Asking ChatGPT for that sort of advice seems like a horrific idea. Trying to learn interactions by written means can only lead to some very alien ideas.

Plus your questions will contain your mistakes, and what you take from any answers would reinforce your misunderstandings rather than correct them.

It's hard to suggest better learning means via the HN medium.

I learnt a lot when I carefully gave attention to a friend I deeply trusted, training my intuition based on their interactions, plus they trusted me enough to sometimes attempt to explain their intuitive reactions.
by olowe | 2025-12-26 03:07:35+00:00
From the author of Redis on MicroQuickJS[1]:

> If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua.

With that in mind we can do a quick search to see how Lua is used. I found an article on Wikipedia titled "List of applications using Lua"[2]. Of course that's not an exhaustive list but it gives you a bit of an idea. Off the top of my head, the places I've personally seen Lua used:

1. modifying DNS responses in PowerDNS

2. neovim plugins

3. video game mods like Factorio

Personally I got into programming by writing shell scripts. I never studied computer science or IT. Instead it was the ability to write basic code for existing software that gave me this accidental introduction to the world of writing logic down as a set of machine-readable instructions. For me, MicroQuickJS is another one of those ways for "power users" (who may themselves be professional software developers) to extend some existing software without getting into the nitty gritty of the big bad upstream dev project.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368706

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_applications_using_Lua
by Williams-19 | 2025-12-26 03:07:44+00:00
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by lubujackson | 2025-12-26 03:08:51+00:00
I will just say this trend of "land acknowledgements" feels like the worst flotsam of liberalism - it is performatively solumn, prescriptive "on behalf" of some marginalized people, but ultimately meaningless. It feels like the liberal version of a "thoughts & prayers" response.

It is especially misguided since the acknowledged "true owners" of the land usually didn't subscribe to the concept of land ownership. The whole concept is just weird and I don't understand the objective. To be appreciative of the land's history? Why would this be required in a college course syllabus?

I say this as a liberal in SF who is part Native American - who the hell wanted this?
by joshuamorton | 2025-12-26 03:08:56+00:00
I mean yes it is unsurprising that people with nearly infinite money are materially impacted by losing half of it.

But neither is at the level they were at before, at least in comparison to the market and economic growth overall.

> Not so. It's a lot worse now because before, people just monopolized fixed quantities of gold. If they made bad bets, their gold holdings would shrink.

Yes, this is precisely the "zero-sum" thing you said is problematic.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-12-26 03:10:19+00:00
I don't know how to find superchat history, but honestly you can just peruse his own twitter here: https://x.com/ATDrummond

The guy has had a long running reputation on this site. Which is why he decided to add this to his profile:

>here from hacker news? don’t be a creep

And by creep, he of course means "don't call me out for advocating for genocide."

His last post is even out right decrying ANY type of immigration, and his second post is being critical of Israel. And mind you, not because of any "normal" sociopolitical commentary, but simply because Israel = Jews and "Jews are bad."
by amha | 2025-12-26 03:11:11+00:00
* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.

* Learn complex analysis!

* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!
by mycall | 2025-12-26 03:11:20+00:00
Have you looked at Titan and MIRAS where they use online/updating associative memory that happens to be read out via next-token prediction?

https://research.google/blog/titans-miras-helping-ai-have-lo...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00663

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13173

Much research is going into these directions, but I'm more interested in mind-wandering tangents, involving both attentional control and additional mechanisms (memory retrieval, self-referential processing).