MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vorpalhex | 2025-12-30 15:44:15+00:00
It seems odd to me that the US supposedly isn't a major power, yet still finances both NATO and the UN primarily and if it lowers it's support it's "leading the destruction of those things".

Likewise if it backs off it's foreign support, hundreds of millions will die.

Are we singularly carrying the worlds on our backs - which sounds hegemonic - are is the US free to stop spending our money on everyone elses problems?

Perhaps the UK or Germany can fund everything for a few decades and be the next major world power for a bit.
by goku12 | 2025-12-30 15:44:36+00:00
Can somebody explain:

1. The exact problem with the Linux ABI

2. What causes it (the issues that makes it such a challenge)

3. How it changed over the years, and its current state

4. Any serious attempts to resolve it

I've been on Linux for may be 2 decades at this point. I haven't noticed any issues with ABI so far, perhaps because I use everything from the distro repo or build and install them using the package manager. If I don't understand it, there are surely others who want to know it too. (Not trying to brag here. I'm referring to the time I've spent on it.)

I know that this is a big ask. The best course for me is of course to research it myself. But those who know the whole history tend to have a well organized perspective of it, as well as some invaluable insights that are not recorded anywhere else. So if this describes you, please consider writing it down for others. Blog is probably the best format for this.
by Asooka | 2025-12-30 15:44:40+00:00
Back when strncpy was written there was no undefined behaviour (as the compiler interprets it today). The result would depend on the implementation and might differ between invocations, but it was never the "this will not happen" footgun of today. The modern interpretation of undefined behaviour in C is a big blemish on the otherwise excellent standards committee, committed (hah) in the name of extremely dubious performance claims. If "undefined" meaning "left to the implementation" was good enough when CPU frequency was measured in MHz and nobody had more than one, surely it is good enough today too.

Also I'm not sure what you mean with C successor languages not having undefined behaviour, as both Rust and Zig inherit it wholesale from LLVM. At least last I checked that was the case, correct me if I am wrong. Go, Java and C# all have sane behaviour, but those are much higher level.
by hosel | 2025-12-30 15:44:57+00:00
Oh woe is me! Sometimes your kid is going to cry. They’ll make a scene. Who cares that’s what children do. That doesn’t mean you throw an iPad in front of them so that they’ll shut up. I swear my fellow millennials are the worst parents because they won’t let their kids ever be uncomfortable for a second, and they’re too afraid of being embarrassed about their crying kids. Meanwhile putting a screen in front of them is just making everything worse long term
by arkt8 | 2025-12-30 15:45:10+00:00
No matter which new technology arises on the horizon... what is tainted is not internet, not AI. Is the entire purpose on follow dollars.

I hated when needed to see Google reports for ads. And be in a rush for SEO. This was a game of rats, no real knowledge, just attempts to satisfy an Algorithm that changed on weekly base.

I quit Facebook / Instagram / Google ads 6 years ago. Why? Because my advertisement was feeding the system on who show concurrent advertisement, collecting habits of MY customers.

So the system is broken. Stop pursuing the american dream and the wild capitalism. This new generation is building immunity to many of these things, at least until their engineers find a way to take control of these minds.

About where to go...
I think we need to be satisfied with less, in the sense we need to buy a new car every year, nor new clothes just for fashion, neither gadgets just by compulsive appeal.

Buy the best you can, use it the most before discard it. Exchange fast food for what your granparents used to be fed. Know that you can be happy by yourself, not by what they said you need in the last 100 years. Life is that, the way is that. But many fall in the western system propaganda.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 15:45:14+00:00
> eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.

There are a lot of different reasons people pirate games, and other stuff, not all reasons apply to everyone, and some reasons on apply to a few.

I used to pirate 99% of the games I played when I was young, because my family simply didn't have money to buy me video games. Once I grew older and had more disposable income, I started buying more games on Steam. Now I have more disposable income than I know what to do with, and I'm back to pirating games, but only for the ones that don't have proper demos available. I probably spent $1000 on games I no longer play and cannot refund, because I'm over the 2 hour limit, and nowadays I pirate the game, and if I enjoy it, I buy it as a way of supporting the developer.

I'm probably not alone with this sort of process, but it's probably also not the only reason other's pirate.
by DougN7 | 2025-12-30 15:45:48+00:00
This can happen sooner than you think too. I asked for what I thought was a simple feature and the AI wrote and rewrote a number of times trying to get it right, and eventually (not making this up) it told me the file was corrupt and could I please restore it from backup. This happened within about 20-30 minutes of asking for the change.
by maxmcd | 2025-12-30 15:45:54+00:00
Quite surprising. It does seem like you can get an https download with

aws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://download.opencontent.netflix.com/sparks/creative-commons-attribution-4-intl-public-license.txt .

Which is hitting the bucket path route at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com/sp...

"aws s3 ls" similarly requests: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...
by neom | 2025-12-30 15:45:56+00:00
I agree with you. I think meta is fine if you have a very very clear value proper to a very very clear ICP that is already repeatably converting and is generally b2c in nature. If you are trying to do anything specialized or b2b message testing on meta, I find their algo really expensive, maybe I'm just shitty at targeting or don't use the platform well but hiring a task rabbit to stand outside a conference or event and hand out fliers seems to be cheaper and higher preforming than anything I've gotten out of meta, and I can still do it from my basement.

These platforms are quite complex, but I feel they are more complex than they need to be, using them, they really feel like they were built out of hybrid consulting discovery to enterprise, with a result that doesn't translate down well to SMB.
by simonw | 2025-12-30 15:45:58+00:00
I see it brought up almost every week! It's a firm favorite of the "LLMs don't actually help write code" contingent, probably because there are very few other credible studies they can point to in support of their position.

Most people who cite it clearly didn't read as far as the table where METR themselves say:

> We do not provide evidence that:

> 1) AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers. Clarification: We do not claim that our developers or repositories represent a majority or plurality of software development work

> 2) AI systems do not speed up individuals or groups in domains other than software development. Clarification: We only study software development

> 3) AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting. Clarification: Progress is difficult to predict, and there has been substantial AI progress over the past five years [3]

> 4) There are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting. Clarification: Cursor does not sample many tokens from LLMs, it may not use optimal prompting/scaffolding, and domain/repository-specific training/finetuning/few-shot learning could yield positive speedup

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
by vnglst | 2025-12-30 15:46:09+00:00
Oh that's weird. Are you sure it was the basic link and not the one with count down mode?

The one I shared in the parent is for the New Year's countdown: https://tetris-time.koenvangilst.nl/?mode=countdown&to=2026-...

The basic link should show the current time, even at high speeds: https://tetris-time.koenvangilst.nl/?speed=10

Oh wait, I just tested it on a higher speed (20) and I see what you mean. It's drawing over the existing Tetrominoes! I'm going to max the speed at 10.
by zahlman | 2025-12-30 15:46:21+00:00
> This is something I generally believe, but I think it's particularly important for things like languages and runtimes: the idea of installing things "on" the OS or the system needs to die.

Python has been trying to kill it for years; or at least, the Linux distros have been seeking Python's help in killing it on Linux for years. https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/ is the latest piece of this.
by hunter-gatherer | 2025-12-30 15:46:29+00:00
I'm a parent (age 7 and 5 now). We had a strict no screen policy before the age of two, which really meant the oldest saw very little until after the second was born. It isn't that hard to live a normal life without screen in the home. I think a big part of the problem nowadays is making sure home is for home stuff. Not just work, but all other non-home stuff (preparing taxes, discussing bills, online banking, online health insurance bullshit, and so on) has infiltrated our homes. I've found that reserving a block of time to tackle that stuff instead of trying to do it throughout the makes parenting more manageable without giving children a screen.

Both my kids really struggled at night for years, and I sypmpathize with the lack of sleep.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-30 15:46:39+00:00
The pivot point was Windows 95.

Competition. In the first half of the 90s Windows faced a lot more of it. Then they didn't, and standards slipped. Why invest in Windows when people will buy it anyway?

Upgrades. In the first half of the 90s Windows was mostly software bought by PC users directly, rather than getting it with the hardware. So, if you could make Windows 95 run in 4mb of RAM rather than 8mb of RAM, you'd make way more sales on release day. As the industry matured, this model disappeared in favor of one where users got the OS with their hardware purchase and rarely bought upgrades, then never bought them, then never even upgraded when offered them for free. This inverted the incentive to optimize because now the customer was the OEMs, not the end user. Not optimizing as aggressively naturally came out of that because the only new sales of Windows would be on new machines with the newest specs, and OEMs wanted MS to give users reasons to buy new hardware anyway.

UI testing. In the 1990s the desktop GUI paradigm was new and Apple's competitive advantage was UI quality, so Microsoft ran lots of usability studies to figure out what worked. It wasn't a cultural problem because most UI was designed by programmers who freely admitted they didn't really know what worked. The reason the start button had "Start" written on it was because of these tests. After Windows 95 the culture of usability studies disappeared, as they might imply that the professional designers didn't know what they were doing, and those designers came to compete on looks. Also it just got a lot harder to change the basic desktop UI designs anyway.

The web. When people mostly wrote Windows apps, investing in Windows itself made sense. Once everyone migrated to web apps it made much less sense. Data is no longer stored in files locally so making Explorer more powerful doesn't help, it makes more sense to simplify it. There's no longer any concept of a Windows app so adding new APIs is low ROI outside of gaming, as the only consumer is the browser. As a consequence all the people with ambition abandoned the Windows team to work on web-related stuff like Azure, where you could have actual impact. The 90s Windows/MacOS teams were full of people thinking big thoughts about how to write better software hence stuff like DCOM, OpenDoc, QuickTime, DirectMusic and so on. The overwhelming preference of developers for making websites regardless of the preferences of the users meant developing new OS ideas was a waste of time; browsers would not expose these features, so devs wouldn't use them, so apps wouldn't require them, so users would buy new computers to get access to them.

And that's why MS threw Windows away. It simply isn't a valuable asset anymore.
by simpaticoder | 2025-12-30 15:46:43+00:00
I'm a parent and I have no idea what you're talking about. Especially that thing about not being able to get away for a shower... That seems ridiculous like it's coming from another species from another planet! I mean kids are ultimately people. You care for and love them but they neither want nor need your attention 100% of the time, not even as an infant. The vibe I get is the parents who go through this are super nervous and anxious about their kids well being so they create this unnecessary and unrealistic demand on themselves that they can't meet. The sad irony is that when the relationship is so fraught the poor child really only sees you as a nervous wreck so of course they're attachment will itself become anxious. I really enjoy being a dad and my kids are great and every time I hear this characterization of it it kind of pisses me off. Sure maybe I'm just lucky, my personality is well suited to it or the kids are genetically suited to being good kids or whatever, but something tells me the vast majority of humans have a positive experience being a parent or else the species wouldn't continue to exist.
by dustbunny | 2025-12-30 15:46:57+00:00
> you will stagnate if you don't learn to use the new tools effectively

I've been going the other way, learning the old tools, the old algorithms. Specifically teaching myself graphics and mastering the C language. Tons of new grads know how to use Unity, how many know how to throw triangles directly onto the GPU at the theoretical limit of performance? Not many!
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 15:47:23+00:00
As far as I can tell, `pip` by itself still doesn't even do something basic as resolving the dependency tree first, then download all the packages in parallel, as an basic example. The `uv pip` shim does.

And regardless if you use only uv, or pip-via-uv, or straight up pip, dependencies you install later steps over dependencies you installed earlier, and no tool so far seems to try to solve this, which leads me to conclude it's a Python problem, not a package manager problem.
by _factor | 2025-12-30 15:47:31+00:00
Going a level deeper, more information can be gleaned for how closely modern technology mimics kids toys that don’t require manuals.

A punch card machine certainly requires specs, and would not be confused with a toy.

A server rack, same, but the manuals are pieced out and specific, with details being lost.

You’ll notice anything with dangerous implications naturally wards off tampering near natively.

Desktop and laptop computers depending on sharp edges and design language, whether they use a touch screen. Almost kids toys, manual now in collective common sense for most.

Tablet, colorful case, basically a toy. Ask how many people using one can write bit transition diagrams for or/and, let alone xor.

We’ve drifted far away from where we started. Part of me feels like the youth are losing their childhoods earlier and earlier as our technology becomes easier to use. Being cynical of course.
by eterps | 2025-12-30 15:47:38+00:00
What are popular charm/bubbletea based TUIs? I use TUIs often, but for some reason none of them are based on charm/bubbletea? Might be coincidence though.

While I appreciate Charm's aesthetics, I worry it leans too heavily on GUI paradigms, like popovers and buttons, rather than prioritizing the optimal keyboard efficiency used in traditional text-based interfaces.
by ukuina | 2025-12-30 15:47:55+00:00
This article simply reinforces existing (and outdated) biases.

Complex legacy refactoring + Systems with poor documentation or unusual patterns + Architectural decisions requiring deep context: These go hand in hand. LLMs are really good at pulling these older systems apart, documenting, then refactoring them, tests and all. Exacerbated by poor documentation of domain expectations. Get your experts in a room weekly and record their rambling ideas and history of the system. Synthesize with an LLM against existing codebase. You'll get to 80% system comprehension in a matter of months.

Novel problem-solving with high stakes: This is the true bottleneck, and where engineers can shine. Risk assessment and recombination of ideas, with rapid prototyping.
by everdrive | 2025-12-30 15:47:57+00:00
A lot of the time, AI allows you to exercise basic competence at tasks for which you'd otherwise be incompetent. I think this is why it feels so powerful. You can jump into more or less any task below a certain level of complexity. (eg: you're not going to write an operating system with an LLM but you can set up and configure Wordpress if you'd never done it before.)

I think for users this _feels_ incredibly powerful, however this also has its own pitfalls: Any topic which you're incompetent at is one which you're also unequipped to successfully review.

I think there are some other productivity pitfalls for LLMs:

- Employees use it to give their boss emails / summaries / etc in the language and style their boss wants. This makes their boss happy, but doesn't actually modify productivity whatsoever since the exercise was a waste of time in the first place.

- Employees send more emails, and summarize more emails. They look busier, but they're not actually writing the emails or really reading them. The email volume has increased, however the emails themselves were probably a waste of time in the first place.

- There is more work to review all around and much of it is of poor quality.

I think these issues play a smaller part than some of the general issues raised (eg: poor quality code / lack of code reviews / etc.) but are still worth noting.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-12-30 15:48:11+00:00
Ignore the prefix and always treat strncpy() as a special binary data operation for an era where shaving bytes on storage was important. It's for copying into a struct with array fields or direct to an encoded block of memory. In that context you will never be dependent on the presence of NUL. The only safe usage with strings is to check for NUL on every use or wrap it. At that point you may as well switch to a new function with better semantics.
by ChicagoDave | 2025-12-30 15:48:26+00:00
It’s not the advertising or eyeballs.

GenAI allows everyone to build their own stuff and find their customers without ads.

The ad business is doomed.

And if you think Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha are a capturable audience, I gotta bridge to sell you.

You have one slim hope. Engage with smart young people that are savvy at today’s comms and can create and edit their own content.
by jjjbokma | 2025-12-30 15:48:26+00:00
Nice to see another static site generator that uses commonmark. I use it as well in `tumblelog` which is available on [GitHub](https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog/). It's less lightweight as it supports tags, an RSS feed, and a JSON feed. Example site: [Plurrrr](https://plurrrr.com/).
Show HN: I built a reminder app designed to feel uncomfortable on purpose
by dearroy | 2025-12-30 15:48:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve tried dozens of reminder and habit apps over the years.
They’re all polite. Gentle. Easy to ignore.

So I built something intentionally different.

Mom Clock is a reminder app that behaves more like a strict parent than a productivity coach:
– no snoozing
– no “later”
– optional app blocking using Screen Time APIs

The idea came from my own behavior: I don’t need motivation — I need enforcement.

This is not for everyone. Some people hate it. Some people love it.
I’m genuinely curious where HN stands on this tradeoff:
comfort vs. effectiveness.

Happy to answer questions about:
– behavior design
– iOS Screen Time APIs
– what Apple allows / doesn’t allow
– or why I think “nice UX” can sometimes be counterproductive
by Aurornis | 2025-12-30 15:48:55+00:00
> I don't watch TV myself but if I go to someones house and they have the TV on and it's one of those "enhanced" TVs, it boils my blood

Let people enjoy things. If you don’t even watch TV yourself, it shouldn’t bother you how other people enjoy their own TV. If someone enjoys frame interpolation for their private watching, so what?
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-30 15:49:10+00:00
Just to add to your advice to juniors working with AI:

* Force the AI to write tests for everything. Ensure those tests function. Writing boring unit tests used to be arduous. Now the machine can do it for you. There's no excuse for a code regression making it's way into a PR because you actually ran the tests before you did the commit, right? Right? RIGHT?

* Force the AI to write documentation and properly comment code, then (this is the tricky part) you actually read what it said it was doing and ensure that this is what you wanted it to do before you commit.

Just doing these two things will vastly improve the quality and prevent most of the dumb regressions that are common with AI generated code. Even if you're too busy/lazy to read every line of code the AI outputs just ensuring that it passes the tests and that the comments/docs describe the behavior you asked for will get you 90% of the way there.
by knorker | 2025-12-30 15:49:23+00:00
> You seem to be confused on that point

Please stop repeatedly misrepresenting what I said. This is not reddit.

I have repeatedly said that this is about the interpolation, and that I'm NOT judging things actually filmed at higher framerates, as I don't have experience with that.

> Source video at 120 looks no worse than at 24, that’s all I’m saying.

Again, give me an example. An example that is not video games, because that is not "filmed".

You are asserting that there's no such thing as something that's trivially and consistently repeatable, so forgive me for not taking you at your word that a 120fps filmed movie is free of soap opera effect. Especially with your other lying.

So actually, please take your misrepresentations and ad hominems to reddit.

Edit: one thing that looks much better with motion interpolation is panning shots. But it's still not worth it.
by drakythe | 2025-12-30 15:49:40+00:00
> ... couldn't find anything else

Anything else meaning...? Ruby specific TUI library? I've been toying around with a lot of TUI's recently, landed on Textual (Python) for my most recent experiemnt, but Charm has been on my list to try out when I get a chance. There are also a number of other libs that will let you build quite robust applications in a number of languages (Rust, Python, Go, PHP, and those are just the one's I am aware of).
by danabramov | 2025-12-30 15:49:43+00:00
I started with VB6 so I'm sometimes nostalgic for it too but let's not kid ourselves.

We might take it for granted but React-like declarative top-down component model (as opposed to imperative UI) was a huge step forward. In particular that there's no difference between initial render or a re-render, and that updating state is enough for everything to propagate down. That's why it went beyond web, and why all modern native UI frameworks have a similar model these days.