MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Wax On, Python' – learn Python dojo-style
by d416 | 2025-12-14 15:52:49+00:00
Hello HN,

I built "Wax On, Python", a browser-based Python 'dojo' that focuses on syntax precision through repetition and muscle memory.

https://waxonpython.com

The Problem: When learning to code, it's easy to copy-paste or gloss over syntax. Many tutorials explain the logic but don't force you to actually type the code. Sometimes beginners encounter basic syntax errors (missing colons, wrong indentation, mismatched braces etc) once they graduate to script writing.

The Solution: Inspired by a classic fictional tale, this app takes an approach as if lessons are given by a 'strict sensei': - Drills: You are given code snippets and must type them exactly character-for-character. - Immediate Feedback: Typo? 'FOCUS!' 'SLOPPY.' Correct? 'GOOD.' - Muscle Memory: starting with simple print statements and building up to loops, classes, and eventually pandas dataframes. - Philosophy: Between drills, you get philosophical Sensei wisdom explaining the why behind the concepts (eg: 'Variables are buckets', 'Indentations are choices' etc).

The tech... - Runs entirely in browser. Code executes locally so no servers or latency. - Runs a Pyodide Python REPL in-browser so user can see real errors as they make them. Includes Pandas package for data science drills. - Stack: vanilla js, HTML, css.

Why I made it I run a Python Learning Group at work and wanted a good engaging starting point for anyone who is curious about Python regardless of their professional or technical background - the goal being to make syntax automatic so you don't have to think about it, freeing the mind for higher-level logic, and giving people a sense of the learning journey they are about to embark on.

Any feedback on curriculum pacing and the "tough love" approach would be helpful - does it work in your case? would love to hear it.

Note: the app was actually blocked at work due to strict wasm rules implemented in Zscaler :(
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-14 15:53:00+00:00
Found CopperSpice it looks to be a very currently maintained hard fork of Qt with a strong focus on modernizing it to use C++ 20 features including safe pointers, they got rid of the meta-object compiler in favor of C++ templates and loads of other features.

Still looking into it, but figured it would be something HN might be interested in.
by watwut | 2025-12-14 15:53:09+00:00
My main point was that books are not treated as an entertainment anymore. It is education, chore, character development, duty. I am from generation that read more and a lot of that was us being bored and anything fun. All of that is tiktok/youtube now.

You did not had to go out of your way to find fun books, they came to you. There was kids journals with mini reviews of books and sometimes asked parents to buy one, because review sounded cool. Kids do not read kids journals either, they watch youtube and no youtube channel recommends books.

But, adults do not read for fun anymore either. The sort of demographics that read dumb books dont read at all. Those who read more sophisticated books watch more sophisticated shows. Basically only people who regularly read are those who are consciously seeking education.

---------------

School libraries do not have pulp novels in them and if they did quite a few parents would call riot. Including people who complain on HN that kids are not assigned <insert whatever novel written for adults dealing with adult relationships that go over kids heads>.

Kids cant go to normal libraries unless someone drives them or accompanies them. And that someone has typically educational goal in mind, so that feeling you can pick pulp/junk and not be judged is not there.

> Also TikTok and YouTube aren’t free FFS, they’re commodifying your data

I dont think kids care about that. Or most of the population, which includes their parents and teachers.

> kids can have book clubs just like adults do I would often hang out and talk to other kids about the books we both enjoyed reading.

Kids don't have book clubs. To be honest, adult book clubs are something I have seen only in the movies. If you organize a book club for kids, it is another educational activity like math club. It can lead to some kids liking reading/math ... but it does not mean there is overall "math is fun" culture existing.
by larusso | 2025-12-14 15:53:15+00:00
Yes. In the example of gradle I setup all specifics to the well know lifecycle tasks: check, assemble and in some cases publish. Some projects are more complicated specifically when you can really use the rule of: 1 project one assembly. See android with apk vs bundle. Here you may need more specific tasks. But I try to bind CI (be it Jenkins or GitHub actions) to only know the basic interface. But I meant specifically the believe that build systems and tooling around is too complicated and unnecessary.
by tuna74 | 2025-12-14 15:53:27+00:00
Some movies like Avangers End Game are presented in 16X9 Dolby Vision on Disney+ vs 1X2.35 HDR10 on UHD Blu-ray. You can look up comparisons on Youtube if you want to.

So it is not always the case that the UHD disk is better in all aspects.
by raggi | 2025-12-14 15:53:35+00:00
So you’re correct that covering the broadest general case is problematic. You have to block code from doing IO of any form to be safe.

In general though getting to a fairly predictable place is possible and the typical case of key material shouldn’t have highly arbitrary stacks, if you do you’re losing (see io comment above).

https://docs.rs/zeroize/1.8.1/zeroize/ has been effective for some users, it’s helped black box tests searching for key material no longer find it. There are also some docs there on how to avoid common pitfalls and links to ongoing language level discussions on the remaining and more complex register level issues.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-14 15:55:11+00:00
> An easy to point at example is the coding agent that removed someones home directory that was circulating around. I'm not saying a human has never done that, but it's far less likely because it's so far out of the realm of normal operations.

And it would be far less likely that the human deleted someone else's home directory, and even if he did, there would be someone to be angry about.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-12-14 15:56:10+00:00
I can't help but notice (yeah, I know, lots of stupid takes start with this) that many articles about vibe coding and AI enablement describe how you can write an agent which will help you vibe-code an application which is wrapping some model to generate even more applications that largely do more of the same.

Nobody is writing a tutorial on how to use ML to make a robot to fold laundry. Instead, it's you spend tokens to spend more tokens to spend even more tokens. At this point, the word "token" starts bearing unwelcome connotations with "tokens" from NFTs and Brave's "BAT" fads.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-14 15:58:09+00:00
I understand his argument.

Here are the reasons why I don’t buy it:

1. I’m not claiming that Fil-C fixes all security bugs. I’m only claiming that it’s memory safe and I am defining what that means with high precision. As with all definitions of memory safety, it doesn’t catch all things that all people consider to be bad.

2. Your program would crash with a safety panic in the absence of a race. Security bugs are when the program runs fine normally, but is exploitable under adversarial use. Your program crashes normally, and is exploitable under adversarial use.

So not only is it not likely to be present or exploitable, but if you wrote that code then you’d be crashing in Fil-C in whatever tests you ran at your desk or whenever a normal user tried to use your code.

But perhaps point 1 is still the most important: of course you can write code with security bugs in Fil-C, Rust, or Java. Memory safety is just about making a local bug not result in control of arbitrary memory in the whole program. Fil-C achieves that key property here, hence its memory safe.
by chubot | 2025-12-14 15:58:15+00:00
There is a bunch of AI slop in there ... It does seem like the author probably knows what he's talking about, since there is seemingly good info in the article [1], but there's still a lot of slop

Also, I think the end should be at the beginning:

Know when your indexes are actually sick versus just breathing normally - and when to reach for REINDEX.

VACUUM handles heap bloat. Index bloat is your problem.

The intro doesn't say that, and just goes on and on about "lies" and stupid stuff like that.

This part also feels like AI:

Yes. But here's what it doesn't do - it doesn't restructure the B-tree.

What VACUUM actually does

What VACUUM cannot do

I don't necessarily think this is bad, since I know writing is hard for many programmers. But I think we should also encourage people to improve their writing skills.

[1] I'm not an SQL expert, but it seems like some of the concrete examples point to some human experience
by array_key_first | 2025-12-14 15:58:31+00:00
It's algorithmically based - if the algorithm is built to promote certain patterns, those will be promoted.

Populist messaging, such as extremist right-wing stuff, does well on a lot of platforms because it optimizes engagment. It's purposefully stupid, simple, and outrageous. That's a recipe for success on Twitter, Facebook, and some others.
by pdimitar | 2025-12-14 15:59:13+00:00
I am not selling you anything so you're starting off from a wrong premise.

What I said is that you should consider your experience prone to a bubble environment and as such it's very anecdotal. So is mine (a mix), granted. Which only means that neither extreme dominates out there. Likely a normal bell curve distribution.

What I did say (along with others) was that a little bit of technical discipline -- accentuating on "little" here -- nullifies the stated benefits of microservice architecture.

And it seems to me that the microservice architecture was chosen to overcome organizational problems, not technical ones.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-14 15:59:23+00:00
All modern search engines (except Kagi) seem to do this and I find it incredibly disrespectful and worse than useless.

I avoid DDG and all search engines that do this. Forcing me to manually sort through garbage because you didn't want to render an empty page is a huge waste of my time. If you don't respect my time, I'm just not gonna interact with your service.

Do better.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-14 15:59:28+00:00
Before committing to purchasing two of these, you should look at the true speeds that few people post. Not just the "it works". We're at a point where we can run these very large models "at home", and it is great! But true usage is now with very large contexts, both in prompt processing, and token generations. Whatever speeds these models get at "0" context is very different than what they get at "useful" context, especially in coding and such.
by KomoD | 2025-12-14 15:59:34+00:00
> (Effectively) no limit on the size of the uploaded data

Except there is, it's 2GB or 100GB, you said it yourself.

> Send up to 2 GB in a single upload

> Store up to 2 GB of data

> Send up to 100 GB in a single upload

> Store up to 100 GB of data

I uploaded a file and now I can't download it because the download endpoint is a 404.
by giardini | 2025-12-14 16:00:48+00:00
People sometimes react to AI software as they might to a "Ouija board". E.g.:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ouija+board+vs+chatgpt&t=ffab&ia=w...

Oops! Lots of spooky stuff! One of them is a funny story:

"AI Is a Digital Ouija Board"

https://jameshirsen.com/2025/03/30/ai-is-a-digital-ouija-boa...
by sunrunner | 2025-12-14 16:00:54+00:00
Perhaps because, amongst the other solid reasons already posted:

Demand is the real bottleneck: New tools expand who can ship, but they don’t expand how many problems are worth solving or audiences worth serving. Adoption tends to concentrate among "lead users" and not "everyone".

App store markets are power-law distributed (no citations sorry, it's just my belief): A tiny slice of publishers captures the most downloads/revenue. That’s discoverability, not "lack of builders".

Attention and distribution are winner-take-most: Even if creation is cheap, attention is scarce.

The hidden (recurring) cost as other commenters point out is maintenance: Tooling slashes first release cost but not lifecycle cost.

Problem-finding outweighs problem-solving: If the value of your app depends on users or data network effects, you still face the "cold start problem".

"Ease" can change the meaning of the signal: If anyone can press a button and "ship an app" the act of shipping stops signaling much. Paradoxically, effort can increase personal valuation (the IKEA effect), and a lower cost to the creator as seen from the outside kills the (Zahavi) signal.

And finally, maybe people just don't actually want to use and/or make apps that much? That's not to say that good apps aren't valuable, but the ubiquity of various platforms app stores implies that there's some huge demand, but if most app usage is concentrated amongst a small number of genuine day-to-day problem solving tools that already have heavy hitters that have been around for years, an influx of new things perhaps isn't that interesting.
Show HN: GitPow a cross-platform, open-source Git GUI with unique features
by markrai | 2025-12-14 16:01:08+00:00
The core philosophy behind GitPow! is that the user should be in-charge of what they want their Git client to be:

- View commits grouped by month/year (or not) - View the commit graph vertically, or horizontally - Diff view actually shows image (or relative size change) - Timestamps v.s. plain english dates - you choose. - User defines what a "stale branch" means.

You get the idea - it's your software, and you should be able to set it up based on your workflow.

It's a work in progress. Please contribute, if you are experienced in Rust/TS/JS, or even if you have any ideas/features.

Since there is a purely passion project, and there is zero monetary incentive, so much is possible here. The Tauri front-end makes things particularly flexible in terms of development.
by kragen | 2025-12-14 16:01:12+00:00
The Apple's technical quality was head and shoulders above the other PCs of the epoch. It did much more with less hardware than its contemporaries like Altair, IMSAI, Osborne, Kaypro, TRS-80, Heathkit, the PET, the Atari 400, the TI-99/4, Datapoint's products, and the VT100, which contained all the hardware needed for a PC without being programmable. That's a big part of why those other smart kids' companies mostly failed: their products were uncompetitive with things like the Apple and the Commodore 64.

Woz had a serious brain injury in a plane crash in February 01981 (https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/220512), and I think that's when he lost his technical edge. Also, though, he was more interested in flying planes and organizing rock concerts at that point. You could imagine an alternate history where Apple took CPU design in-house in 01981 instead of 02011 or whenever.

Burrell Smith was using PALs in the first Macintosh prototypes in 01979, and the eventual Macintosh was built around the so-called Integrated Burrell Machine (replaced with more expensive but less risky PALs for the final design), which was critical to getting a competitive product out the door. The Apple III that year did have a custom "Integrated Woz Machine", not designed by Woz, and while its hardware design was disastrous, that was in spite of the IWM, not because of it. There was still plenty of opportunity for Woz's specialty of ultra-efficient digital logic design to provide a competitive edge.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-14 16:01:42+00:00
> It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.

That's just how populist messaging works, even before the internet. You say outrageous stuff on the radio and then people listen - just ask Adolf Hitler.

We know, for sure, it works - particularly when the medium is new and people haven't built up a strong sense of discernment.

Like social media. Uh oh.
by t0mas88 | 2025-12-14 16:01:48+00:00
I've mostly seen this done for things where there is no prefect commercial tool because it's a small market.

For example a flight school that I work with has their own simple rental administration program. It's a small webapp with 3 screens. They use it next to a SaaS booking/planning tool, but that tool never replaced their administrative approach. Mainly because it wouldn't support local tax rules and some discount system that was in place there. So before the webapp they used paper receipts and an spreadsheet.

I think the challenge in the future with lots of these tools is going to be how they're maintained and how "ops" is done.
by chneu | 2025-12-14 16:01:52+00:00
The only folks using Apple TV in 2026 are like 60+ yrs old.

I've literally not seen one in anyone's home for probably 5+ years. And even then nobody used them.

Apple TV was one of those products that relatively few people bought but they were loud about buying it, so it seemed more popular than it was. Then other services like Roku($20) quickly replaced it.

I'm in the USA.
by ekipan | 2025-12-14 16:02:24+00:00
I've not tried jj yet so I can only speak to impressions, and those impressions appeal to me a lot. My understanding is that jj amends all the changes in _now_ so there's only one place where changes live: the commit graph. No index, no uncommitted worktree. Just commits. And then jj supposedly gives you a lot more freedom to move through and mutate the commit graph directly, rebasing dependent work for you automatically.

So instead of having to `git add -p` several times to pick apart changes from the worktree, the worktree always goes into the graph and you can `jj split` to pick them apart after.

jj split # split latest commit into two jj edit @- # go back one jj describe # change message jj split # whoops, insert commit in the middle jj edit @+ # move forward again $EDITOR myfile # do some changes jj st # amend the changes and show status jj edit def # jump elsewhere in the graph jj squash # put two commits together and auto-rebase its descendants jj new abc # start working after latest # etc etc
by madeofpalk | 2025-12-14 16:02:46+00:00
I’ve started to get more and more paranoid about this. It’s tough when you’re running untrusted code, but I think I’ve improved this by:

not storing SSH keys on the filesystem, and instead using an agent (like 1Password) to mediate access

Stop storing dev secrets/credentials on the filesystem, injecting them into processes with env vars or other mechanisms. Your password manager could have a way to do this.

Develop in a VM separate from your regular computer usage. On windows this is essential anyway through using WSL, but similar things exist for other OSs
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-14 16:02:48+00:00
I think it may be about the absolute memory address to the secret being stored, which may itself be exploitable (ie you’re thinking about the offset value, rather than the pointer value). it’s about leaking even indirect information that could be exploited in different ways. From my understanding, this type of cryptography goes to extremely lengths to basically hide everything.

That’s my hunch at least, but I’m not a security expert.

The example could probably have been better phrased.
by ahmaliic | 2025-12-14 16:02:55+00:00
Hi HN. I built a tool for international calls and for a full month I built what felt right to me.

But then I started getting emails from users with feedback about features and I wanted a better way to gather feedback. I started looking for feedback collection tools. Got a few suggestions but I didn't want to spend 30 minutes integrating a third party tool.

Mostly because my users would have to go at a third place to post feedback. I wanted somehting more direct so I prompted claude to build somehing similar to insignto by marclou but inside my app.

40 minutes later I had my own in-app tool to gather feedback. And 24 hours after launch I got my first user feedback on the in-app tool

Lesson learned: even a tiny feedback loop beats building in isolation.

Future plan: I think feedback collection is crucial and I want to build something simple and fast for other developers to gather in-app feedback / feature requests. Maybe publishing it as an npm package will be best? I'll think about it and see where this takes me.

Checkout callspark if you want to make cheap international calls with no installs, and no subscriptions.

Cheers!
by jijijijij | 2025-12-14 16:03:46+00:00
> You can be discriminated against a job based on health records.

Just to make this clear, probably EU-wide, you can't legally be discriminated against. However, it's gonna be hard to prove leaked data won't be illegally integrated in e.g. ATS models, or was attributed as skill issue when it popped up during manual background checks.

Although, infectious disease like HIV or dystopian scenarios like eugenics are probably the classical discrimination examples for these privacy implications, I don't think they are very likely to be discriminated against (outside of jobs where discrimination is legal and require disclosure anyway, e.g. health workers, food industry etc.). It's easy to dismiss those worries, since most people aren't affected. But common issues with mental health (e.g. depression), hidden disabilities and chronic disease (e.g. PMS), or potentially severe recurring disease (e.g. cancer) realistically are going to be much more impactful. Everything which statistically increases chances to fall out the work force due to health reasons - especially in combination with strong labor protections.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-14 16:04:26+00:00
https://stateline.org/2025/11/21/trump-allows-more-foreign-a...

And most of his ICE raids on farms were in blue states where he could care less about farmers since because of the electoral college, there votes don’t matter.

https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/11/immigration-californi...

As far as Memphis, the rest of mostly Red Tenessee could care less what happens to black people in Memphis. He was invited in by the governor to save face.

On the other hand, if you expect me to argue that most of America gives two shits about what happens to minorities, you are arguing with the wrong person.

Of course as someone who sees a minority every time he looks into the mirror and he whose still living parents grew up in the segregationist south, I have never had any illusions about the US.

I’ve been able to navigate it quite successfully though
by lurk2 | 2025-12-14 16:04:39+00:00
> Sydney

“Sydney has 18,000 Airbnb listings, of which 80% are whole homes. This equates to around 3.2 Airbnb listings per 1,000 residents or 0.9% of Sydney’s private homes.” [0]

This is about half of the usual 2% figure I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which is what the numbers are for London, Los Angeles, and New York City (before the ban).

> Barcelona

Barcelona has 19,410 listings, of which 11,828 are whole-house-apartment listings.[1]

[0]: https://matusik.substack.com/p/airbnbs

Note that the author is pulling his data from here:

[1]: https://insideairbnb.com/sydney/
by stephen | 2025-12-14 16:04:45+00:00
Thanks for the reply! That all makes sense!

As a potential user, I'd probably be thinking through things like: if I have a ~small-fleet of 10 ECS tasks serving my REST/API endpoints, would I run `client.query`s on these same machines, or would it be better to have a dedicated pool of "live query" machines that are separate from most API serving, so that maybe I get more overlap of inherited queries.

...also I think there is a limit on WAL slots? Or at least I'd probably want not each of my API servers to be consuming their own WAL slots.

Totally makes sense this is all "things you worry about later" (where later might be now-/soon-ish) given the infra/core concepts you've got working now -- looking really amazing!