MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nico | 2025-12-23 20:17:41+00:00
Super interesting. Some time ago I wrote some code that breaks down a jpeg image into smaller frames of itself, then creates an h.264 video with the frames, outputting a smaller file than the original image

You can then extract the frames from the video and reconstruct the original jpeg

Additionally, instead of converting to video, you can use the smaller images of the original, to progressively load the bigger image, ie. when you get the first frame, you have a lower quality version of the whole image, then as you get more frames, the code progressively adds detail with the extra pixels contained in each frame

It was a fun project, but the extra compression doesn’t work for all images, and I also discovered how amazing jpeg is - you can get amazing compression just by changing the quality/size ratio parameter when creating a file
by cactacea | 2025-12-23 20:18:05+00:00
> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid).

Preseed is not new at all:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

RH has also had kickstart since basically forever now.

I've been using both preseeds and kickstart professionally for over a decade. Maybe you're thinking of the graphical installer?
by cxr | 2025-12-23 20:18:07+00:00
It wouldn't fix the issue of semantics, but "language skins"[1][2] are an underexplored area of programming language development.

People go through all this effort to separate parsing and lexing, but never exploit the ability to just plug in a different lexer that allows for e.g. "{" and "}" tokens instead of "then" and "end", or vice versa.

1. <https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&prefix=true&query=cxr%2...>

2. <https://old.reddit.com/r/Oberon/comments/1pcmw8n/is_this_sac...>
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-23 20:18:19+00:00
The US uses private health insurance instead of a national health service, which explains more than all of the difference in taxation compared to the median country in Europe. If you added what people in the US are paying for health insurance to what they're paying in state and federal taxes, they're paying more than people in Europe do. But if you adopted a public insurance system in the US then the taxes would have to go to that rather than providing revenue to cover existing spending.

The US also has an incredibly cost-inefficient healthcare system, and despite constant attempts to pin it entirely on the insurance companies, the cost problems are primarily related to regulatory capture by healthcare providers and the AMA, which are independent of the funding model. Medicare pays more than countries in Europe do for people in the same age group, because the government can't e.g. limit the number of medical residency slots at the behest of the AMA and then magic away the doctor shortage when they're the ones paying. Which again points to it being a spending problem rather than a revenue problem -- if they'd address the efficiency issues then they wouldn't need such a large government budget.

US per capita government spending is the highest of any economy in the top 30 by GDP. There are only four countries that spend more per capita at all, the largest of which is Norway, which nor only has a public health system included in their number, it also has less than 6 million people and gets a significant proportion of the money from state-owned oil and gas reserves.

If you tried to close the gap with higher taxes then the taxes would come from people in the US, lowering US GDP unless there was a corresponding increase in productive government spending -- which there wouldn't be if you were using it to cover the deficit, because that money otherwise comes from the purchasers of US debt, who are foreign investors, the Fed (when they create new money to buy US treasuries), and large US institutions that buy treasuries to use them as collateral (and thereby result in an economically productive domestic use). Those are the arguments the "deficits don't matter" people make -- in any given year, lower deficits would e.g. reduce inflation a little, but not a lot else. The real problem is that every year's deficit gets recapitalized, and then the interest compounds and turns into a significant long-term problem.

But the "deficits don't matter" people are right in the sense that lowering the deficit wouldn't do much for the economy in the current year. Which means that taking money from economically productive things in order to close it would be bad. Whereas taking money from economically unproductive inefficiencies would be a lot better. Which brings us back to, why is US spending so high when substantially all other countries do it for less?
by sathvikchinnu | 2025-12-23 20:18:22+00:00
Hey HN! I built Lume.js after getting frustrated with framework overhead on simple projects.

The problem: 80% of websites don't need a full framework. Vanilla JS works great except for one thing: reactivity. You end up with spaghetti code manually tracking which DOM elements to update.

What Lume does: Adds reactivity to vanilla JS using only web standards. data-bind attributes (valid HTML5) + ES6 Proxies. No JSX, no v-model, no x-data. No build step unless you want one.

Size: 1.5KB gzipped (vs 42KB React+ReactDOM, 18KB Vue, 15KB Alpine).

Philosophy: Inspired by Go - do one thing well. Lume makes HTML reactive. Everything else (routing, validation, etc.) is optional addons or separate libraries.

I rewrote the core three times over two months to get automatic dependency tracking without memory leaks. Ended up with 114 tests and full coverage.

The repeat addon for list rendering is experimental (API might change), but everything else is stable.

Would love feedback, especially on:

API decisions (explicit state() wrapping vs automatic)
Tradeoffs (bundle size vs features)
Use cases I'm missing
Links:

Website: https://sathvikc.github.io/lume-js/
GitHub: https://github.com/sathvikc/lume-js
Design decisions: https://sathvikc.github.io/lume-js/#docs/design/design-decis...
by jiveturkey | 2025-12-23 20:18:46+00:00
> change the defaults over time

however this breaks backward compatibility, as you noted. in the golden age of unix it was critical to maintain backward compatibility so that local tooling didn't magically break.

HP-UX seems to have an env var UNIX95 that affects XPG4 compliance in operation/output. Solaris always had a /usr/xpg[46] path (and /usr/ucb). GNU tools have POSIXLY_CORRECT. and so on.

I never liked using any of those because then you're on some other system, or in a break glass situation, and none of the tooling works as you expect. In the today world of a near monoculture of linux, it's fine I guess. And there's no reason today that complex commands like `ss` shouldn't be controllable via env var.

love your blog, thanks for the link.
by dralley | 2025-12-23 20:18:47+00:00
But that would be silly, because all of the code and binaries is already available via CentOS Stream. There's nothing in RHEL that isn't already public at some point via CentOS Stream.

There's nothing special or proprietary about the RHEL code. Access to the code isn't an issue, it's reconstructing an exact replica of RHEL from all of the different package versions that are available to you, which is a huge temporal superset of what is specifically in RHEL.
by lossolo | 2025-12-23 20:19:24+00:00
And again you're linking to your site. Maybe try pasting the few relevant sentences instead of constantly pushing your content in almost every comment. That's what people find annoying. Maybe link to other people's stuff more, or just write what you think here on HN.

If someone wants to read your blog, they will, they know it exists, and some people even submit your new articles here. There's no need to do what you're doing. Every day you're irritating more people with this behavior, and eventually the substance won't matter to them anymore, so you're acting against your own interests.

Unless you want people to develop the same kind of ad blindness mechanism, where they automatically skip anything that looks like self promotion. Some people will just see a comment by simonw and do the same.

A lot of people have told you this in many threads, but it seems you still don’t get it.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-23 20:19:43+00:00
You apparently need video for the 45 seconds window you then get before preventing catastrophic things to happen. From TFA:

> You’re watching the AI type code from 45 seconds ago
>
> By the time you see a bug, the AI has already committed it to main
>
> Everything is terrible forever

Is this satire? I mean: if the solution for things to not be terrible forever consists in catching what an AI is doing in 45 seconds (!) before the AI commits to trunk, I'm sorry but you should seriously re-evaluate your life plans.
by meesles | 2025-12-23 20:19:53+00:00
I think at certain calibers of work, like graphics programming in lower level languages, the best you can do is be readable and clear to others who are experts in your field. In other words, you aren't the target audience. There is likely no way to write this specific kind of code in a way that satisfies all audiences. I'm willing to concede then that the 'best' way to write this type of code is determined by the ones writing it, not us with standard views on software.
by anonysource | 2025-12-23 20:20:13+00:00
Are you a sponsor of this guy after all? Getting paid to respond to all web comments regarding it? It's quite weird why you have been responding to all these posts with all the passion.

With that said... I work at Microsoft on Windows OS, and the main point that was mentioned is indeed true: this is a claim of this engineer only and his team, and it just seems to be a plan totally misaligned with Windows OS vision of how things should be in 10 years. We won't get rid of C++ code anytime soon, the goal is to keep in hybrid state, not to get rid of things. This is unfeasible to do in mature products given all Windows OS processes to ship code.
by yegle | 2025-12-23 20:21:09+00:00
I've heard good things about Moore Threads. Who knows, maybe the consumer GPU market is not a duopoly after all, Nvidia exiting the market would be a good thing longer term by introducing more competitions.

My general impression is that the US technology companies either treat competition from China seriously and actively engage, or Chinese tech companies will slowly and surely eat the cake.

There are numerous examples: the recent bankruptcy of iRobot, the 3D printer market dominated by Bambu Labs, the mini PC market where Chinese brands dominates.
by dist-epoch | 2025-12-23 20:21:36+00:00
There is huge demand right now to create sandboxes for agents. VMs are one way, and Clan one solution for VM management.

Maybe they are not the right solution, but they are working on the right problem.

Of course, they don't say the focus on agents, but if the solution works with them, it doesn't matter that it was built for gamers.
by vishnuharidas | 2025-12-23 20:21:54+00:00
"Maximum text contrast" requirement removed from WCAG 3.0 draft, leaving #FFF text on #000 background a valid contrast ratio, but not accessible for many users.

Previous draft: https://www.w3.org/TR/2024/WD-wcag-3.0-20241212/

Related discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42762054
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-23 20:23:15+00:00
Volvo has more people working for it in China than in Sweden.

Volvo builds more cars in China than it does in Sweden.

Volvo is owned by the Chinese.

Arguably more of the design for Volvo cars is done in China. It depends on whether you consider the visible design more important or the powertrain.

Volvo is part Swedish, but it's much more "Chinese-Swedish" than "Swedish-Chinese".
by javier2 | 2025-12-23 20:23:22+00:00
Yeah, I suppose this workflow is not for everyone. I can only imagine Valve has very specific issue or requirements in mind when they hire contractors like this. When you hire like this, i suspect what one really pay for is a well known name that will be able to push something important to you to upstream linux. Its the right way to do it if you want it resolved quickly. If you come in as a fresh contributor, landing features upstream could take years.
by rmason | 2025-12-23 20:24:20+00:00
Looked it up and an Autoland system costs approximately $33,000 installed. Cirrus aircraft have a parachute and replacing one of them is between $18-30,000 depending on the size of the aircraft.

Autoland is an automatic system but is dependent on making it to an airport. If your engine quits that may not always be possible. You have to manually activate a Cirrus parachute but you have much greater flexibility on where you can land as any farm field or even large parking lot will do.
by kelnos | 2025-12-23 20:24:46+00:00
I tried to do it a few years ago (condo building). Most installers wouldn't touch buildings with more than 2 floors (we have 5). I assume it's an insurance issue, but was super weird to me since SF has so many buildings (even SFHs) taller than 2 floors.

I did find an installer who claimed they'd do it, but after a site visit -- where the guy taking measurements said everything looked fine -- my sales rep emailed to say they were dropping me as a prospective client, and bizarrely refused to tell me why when I asked.

Then NEM3 took effect and solar-only (with no battery storage) became financially infeasible. I should look around again, probably, since battery prices have gone down... though I'll probably have to wait until reasonable people are in power again nationally, who restore financial incentives for this stuff.
by voxleone | 2025-12-23 20:24:47+00:00
If i had to give advice to young programmers, it would be this: be comfortable with set theory and notation. It’s interesting that once you collect use cases, sketch the objects, and express everything in a set-theoretical fashion, the programs almost write themselves. You can even feed this set-theoretic notation directly to an LLM and get code in return. It’s a perfectly honest way to incorporate LLMs into your workflow.
by collingreen | 2025-12-23 20:25:22+00:00
I don't think that's a good read if the post you're implying this at. I think a more charitable read would be something like "people break rules for convenience so if your security relies on nobody breaking rules then you don't have thorough security".

You and op can be right at the same time. You imply the rules probably help a lot even while imperfect. They imply that pretending rules alone are enough to be perfect is incomplete.
by benbristow | 2025-12-23 20:25:25+00:00
Unfortunately still loads of hurdles for most people.

AAA Games with anti-cheat that don't support Linux.

Video editing (DaVinci Resolve exists but is a pain to get up and running on many distros, KDenLive/OpenShot don't really cut it for most)

Adobe Suite (Photoshop/Lightroom specifically, and Premiere for Video Editing) - would like to see Affinity support Linux but hasn't happened so far. GIMP and DarkTable aren't really substitutions unless you pour a lot of time into them.

Tried moving to Linux on my laptop this past month, made it a month before a reinstall of Windows 11. Had issues with WiFi chip (managed to fix but had to edit config files deep in the system, not ideal), Fedora with LUKS encryption after a kernel update the keyboard wouldn't work to input the encryption key, no Windows Hello-like support (face ID). Had the most success with EndeavourOS but running Arch is a chore for most.

It's getting there, best it's ever been, but there's still hurdles.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-23 20:25:26+00:00
Feel the same way here. Can't help but get the vibe that big tech wants to lock consumers out, eliminate the ability to have personal computing/self-hosted computing. Maybe in tandem with governments, not sure, but it's certainly appetizing to them from a profit perspective.

The end goal is the elimination of personal ownership over any tech. They want us to have to rent everything.
Show HN: MinuteShark Time Tracking for Freelancers
by a-abit | 2025-12-23 20:26:28+00:00
I wanted to get feedback on my project MinuteShark.
As a freelance developer, I was frustrated by needing to use a time tracker, a project manager, and a note taker - each of which had too many features and buttons and pages for me.

I needed something basic I could use to get my freelance work done.

I personally love it.
I would love to know if you guys think it hits the spot as well. Am I on the right track?

You can see it here https://app.minuteshark.com/#/register

Thanks for your feedback!
by viraptor | 2025-12-23 20:26:29+00:00
In practice we've been doing setting the threshold of what we care about for a long time already, with firmware, operating systems, libraries, etc. You can always go one level deeper if you want more. Did you want to know how readline works? What about terminal control characters? What about pty? What about the input? The keyboard interface? HID? Device drivers? USB? Packet transmission? Serial interfaces? Electrical connections? Signal integrity?

LLM code provides just another type of available abstraction where we can stop in learning, but not really something entirely new.
by alabhyajindal | 2025-12-23 20:27:16+00:00
I agree that there is signal, and that phrasing his original post as you pointed out would have been better.

My issue is that the cost, in terms of time, for these experiments have really gone down with LLMs. Earlier, if someone played around with the posted project, we knew they spent a reasonable amount of time on it, and thus care about the subject. With LLMs, this is not the case.
by tzs | 2025-12-23 20:27:47+00:00
A while back I did the math on if Social Security did work by just taking my contributions and investing them on my behalf what shape would my account be in now.

What I found is that if they took my contributions and my employer's contributions on my behalf each month and put them into one year T-bills, with maturing bills rolled over into new one year T-bills, if I retired now (a couple years before my full retirement age) there would be enough to pay out something like 90-95% of my monthly benefit for the rest of my expected lifetime.

I didn't try to find the actual amounts of contributions for each month. I just took that total for the year and assumed it was spread equally across all 12 months. For T-bill rates I used the rate from the last day of the month.

I did a similar calculation for Medicare. With the same kind of setup my Medicare account would have had enough when I turned 65 to pay the unsubsidized monthly premium for a good marketplace plan on my state's ACA marketplace for the rest of my expected lifetime.

This suggests that a system that works like they say 1 in 4 thinks it works could be viable. Make it so if someone dies before their account runs out the remainder is used to pay people who have lived longer than their expected lifetimes.
by w10-1 | 2025-12-23 20:29:38+00:00
Yes, and the terms are much more protective for enterprise clients, so it pays to pay. Similar to a protection racket, they (Z.ai et al) raise a threat and then offer to relieve the same threat.

The real guarantee comes from their having (enterprise) clients who would punish them severely for violating their interests, and then sliding under the same roof (because technical consistency of same service?). The punishment comes in the form of becoming persona non-grata in investment circles, applied to both the company and the principals. So it's safe for little-company if it's using the same service as that used by big-company - a kind of free-riding protection. The difficulty with that is it does open a peephole for security services (and Z.ai expressly says it will comply with any such orders), and security services seem to be used for technological competition nowadays.

In fairness, it's not clear the TOS from other providers are any better, and other bigger providers might be more likely to have established cooperation with security services - if that's a concern.
by srpinto | 2025-12-23 20:29:43+00:00
I've been using Gemini / Antigravity to make a virtual pet for my kids using Love2D / lua. I never coded in my life and have no intention of learning (but I've been learning a lot about game systems and logic, which has been fun). The game is coming along very well and it looks very pretty (I'm a professional illustrator) and if I decide to publish it, no one will care the code is made in AI. It's very high effort, to be honest. You'd had to look into the code to know AI made it.

I now get why so many people are making AI art. I see their "work" as an illustrator and it is absolute slop, but I can see now how it might be fun and even liberating for people who don't make a living with it. So I now think twice before calling AI art "slop". Sure, it may be slop, but it's making a lot of people happy and probably opening up new carreer paths for people.

And yes, I've been affected financially because of this... but I get it.
by Arainach | 2025-12-23 20:29:46+00:00
Kernel improvements are interesting to geeks and data centers, but open source is fundamentally incompatible with great user experience.

Great UX requires a lot of work that is hard but not algorithmically challenging. It requires consistency and getting many stakeholders to buy in. It requires spending lots of time on things that will never be used by more than 10-20% of people.

Windows got a proper graphics compositor (DWM) in 2006 and made it mandatory in 2012. macOS had one even earlier. Linux fought against Compiz and while Wayland feels inevitable vocal forces still complain about/argue against it. Linux has a dozen incompatible UI toolkits.

Screen readers on Linux are a mess. High contrast is a mess. Setting font size in a way that most programs respect is a mess. Consistent keyboard shortcuts are a mess.

I could go on, but these are problems that open source is not set up to solve. These are problems that are hard, annoying, not particularly fun. People generally only solve them when they are paid to, and often only when governments or large customers pass laws requiring the work to be done and threaten to not buy your product if you don't do it. But they are crucially important things to building a great, widely adopted experience.
by keyringlight | 2025-12-23 20:30:14+00:00
If you look at AMD's CPUs there's indications they do that. When Zen1/1+/2 came out they were priced below intel's products as they needed to rebuild mindshare with their promising new chips, from Zen3 onwards where they started building a performance lead in many categories as well as core count they jacked the prices up because they could demand it.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-23 20:30:29+00:00
I was surprised by this one that only showed up lower in the document:

- Date: only Date.now() is supported. [0]

I certainly understand not shipping the js date library especially in an embedded environment both for code-size, and practicality reasons (it's not a great date library), but that would be an issue in many projects (even if you don't use it, libraries yo use almost certainly do.

https://github.com/bellard/mquickjs/blob/main/README.md#:~:t...