MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SoundlyFM, a minimal radio app for background listening
by onecookie | 2025-12-20 11:45:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I built SoundlyFM, a minimal radio app for people who like live radio as background sound while working, driving, or studying.

I wanted something very simple. No playlists, no recommendations, no endless choices. Just live voices playing in real time.

Before this, I tried physical radios, large streaming platforms, and various radio apps. None of them felt right. Some were noisy or limited, some were overwhelming, and many were filled with ads.

SoundlyFM is designed around a few specific use cases.

- On macOS, it lives in the menu bar and starts playing with one click.

- On iPhone, it supports background playback and a sleep timer.

- In the car, it works well over Bluetooth, with quick station switching and access to local traffic radio.

The app is intentionally not algorithm driven. Stations are manually curated, closer to old school radio than a modern content feed. The interface is very minimal, play, pause, switch station, favorite. No ads.

It supports both iOS and macOS and includes thousands of global stations, which I continue maintaining and expanding based on feedback.

Landing page: https://soundlyfm.com/

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6754501543

I built this mainly for myself and use it daily, especially on macOS. Happy to hear feedback or answer questions.
by incrudible | 2025-12-20 11:45:49+00:00
There's a fair bit of survivorship bias in there. Few games are considered "great". Roughly half the games get canned during development. So while it may be impossible to make any game in a reasonable amount of time without creating some sort of mess, nobody would argue that a worse process isn't detrimental to the project. It could be the difference between a game being good-but-flawed and a masterpiece, or between "not salvageable" and "shippable".

Moreover, the "survivability" of the process goes beyond just one project. Jon got so burned out on the C++ language that he'd rather create his own language for the next project than use it again. If he didn't have to do that, he'd likely be working on the next title already.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-12-20 11:46:47+00:00
Serious question (read: not trolling):

They say the files have no record of anyone else who can be charged. Files aside then, what about the girls / women who were the victims? Why haven’t they been asked? At the very least, a documentary on Netflix? It’s as if the victims don’t exist.

Mind you, I understand, they have to be willing, but not one of them is willing? Is this telling of the level of power and money of the men involved?
by Roark66 | 2025-12-20 11:47:43+00:00
Having just finished a "hobby size" setup of Rook-Ceph on 3 n100 mini pcs, with every service to fit in a couple hundred MB of ram (one service needs up to 3Gb when starting, but then runs around 250MB) I'd ask why not ceph?

At work I'm typically a consumer of such services from large cloud providers. I read in few places how "difficult" it is, how you need "4GB minimum RAM for most services" and how "friends do not let friends run Ceph below 10Gb".

But this setup runs on a non dedicated 2.5Gb interface (there is VLAN segmentation and careful QoSing).

My benchmarks show I'm primarily network latency and bandwidth limited. By the very definition you can't get better than that.

There were many factors why I chose Ceph and not Garage, Seaweed or MinIo. (One of the biggest is that ceph does 2 birds with one stone for me - block and object).
by mikaelaast | 2025-12-20 11:49:18+00:00
Are we sure that unrestricted free-form Markdown content is the best configuration format for this kind of thing? I know there is a YAML frontmatter component to this, but doesn't the free-form nature of the "body" part of these configuration files lead to an inevitably unverifiable process? I would like my agents to be inherently evaluable, and free-text instructions do not lend themselves easily to systematic evaluation.
by spacecadet | 2025-12-20 11:49:57+00:00
Speak softly and carry a big stick. Im a fairly private person. Id also end my life in defense of freedom and autonomy... I read posts like this and I cant imagine what an extremist like this is trying to protect? To continue living a life in shadow? Well, when the time comes that his giant "machine" the governments all poorly maintain and utilize finally awakens and results in concentration camps... you better forget all you knew about dumb technology, hope you have a big stick.

To think, "no presence" = no problems. If I were a dumb machine, I just might decide to pick up all citizens with birth certs that are also internet ghosts. What was the point then?
by menaerus | 2025-12-20 11:50:20+00:00
They can't hire the best talent because the most experienced people will not leave their homes to chase a high-risk role with questionable remuneration by relocating their whole life to Paris or London.

This goes to show how leaders in Mistral don't quite get that they are not special as they seem to think they are. Anthropic or OpenAI also require their talent to relocate but with stakes that are at least a high reward - $500k or $1M a year is a good start that is maybe worth investing into.
by Aachen | 2025-12-20 11:52:52+00:00
> these bugs, especially low-hanging fruits, shouldn't be discoverable by some random kids. These billion dollar companies should have their own security researchers [...]

I'm twice this kid's age and have been doing this hobby-turned-work as long as they have. I can tell you the work we do is no different. It doesn't matter if you're 16 or 64 or what your credentials are or salary is. We're all just hackers. Hacker ethos is judging by skill, not appearance. Welcome to hacker news :P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics item #4

> Twitter paid these kids each between $1 and $20.

The submission doesn't say they've even contacted Xitter. I thought it was in the title just to drop names that we've heard of that used this dependency. Did you legit find somewhere that they got ≤20$ for an exploitable XSS on the x.com or twitter.com domains? That is definitely a strangely low amount but then I'm not surprised by anything where Elon is involved. It could also have been a silent fix without even replying to the reporter; I've had that often enough. But yeah from X I would expect a few hundred dollars at least and from old twitter (or another legit business) more than that (as Discord demonstrated)
by thdrtol | 2025-12-20 11:53:25+00:00
It is amazing how quick a country can turn into a corrupt dictatorship.

Airbus has the ability to move their data to another location, but it is very problemetic that all people with a social account can't. Sure, you can delete your Facebook account but it will take years for you profile to be gone because we all know your data is sold to other parties.

My only option is to keep in mind that everything I put online will one day be read by some evil entity. Even my IP address that Hacker News might store (I don't know, but servers log stuff).
by digikata | 2025-12-20 11:53:27+00:00
I would guess by now none have that internally. As a rule of thumb every major flash density increase (SLC, TLC, QLC) also tended to double internal page size. There were also internal transfer performance reasons for large sizes. Low level 16k-64k flash "pages" are common, and sometimes with even larger stripes of pages due to the internal firmware sw/hw design.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-20 11:53:32+00:00
The current U.S. President has insisted that Europeans are freeloading. Given that he’s been the primary proponent of this idea, and given that he’s been cutting off aid and has made cutting off this “freeloading” the central plank of his defense strategy, the U.S. defense budget must have gone down significantly right?

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5656174-trump-si...

> The bill approves a record $901 billion in military spending for fiscal 2026

Oh…
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-20 11:54:31+00:00
> Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless?

Obviously, they're useless and counter-productive.

There's no rational reason to think that there is a significant difference between people with different skin/eye/hair colour or between genders, but it's obviously a simplistic tribal belief. What we end up getting is a huge amount of wasted talent because of tribal politics - imagine how many Einstein-like intellects have died in poverty with no access to education.

It seems to me that people use racism and misogyny to help them stockpile wealth which is a big detriment to society - rather than working together, we have people working against other people.

Even the idea of "races" is itself flawed and has no meaningful basis apart from "they look different".
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 11:54:57+00:00
This region is by far the most heavily subsidised in the UK in reality, which is confirmed by the number of expensive infrastructure projects there such as this one.

London is effectively kept going by these infrastructure projects and so many UK government agencies and businesses being headquartered there. Even the monarchy plays a role, as a massive gravy train mostly based there. All that money keeps other businesses in London going. Every time someone pays UK taxes in any form they are supporting jobs and physical facilities based there. The BBC is another one. People throughout the UK are forced to pay a licence fee that is mostly used to produce content in and about London.

This is part of a repeating pattern. London took massive amounts of resources such as coal, metals and manufactured goods from other parts of the UK which are now in poverty. The North Sea Oil boom of the 1980s, was used to prop up the London stock market, and only a fraction of that money stayed within Scotland which was suffering industrial decline at the time. (Aberdeen has surprisingly little to show for the oil boom and is now a city in heavy decline.)
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-20 11:55:01+00:00
> We must all become deviations

Already there friend.

I feel that I have nothing to hide, but I do my darnedest to ensure that it costs a maximal amount of time and effort to find that out.

If a random stranger (law enforcement or otherwise) wants to know shit about me, then I'm immediately creeped out and the last thing I want to do is make (online) stalking of me an easy task. The harder it is, the more likely they'll give up and move on to someone else (pending their reasons).

As it should be for everyone.

Edited to add: One thing I can tell you from experience: law enforcement only look for things that will confirm their suspicions. They do not look for counter evidence, no matter how obvious it is or how easy it is to find - even within government records to which they would already have access.

As such, beware what trail you leave, if it suits the right (wrong) agenda, it will be used to point in the worst possible direction.
by bloomingeek | 2025-12-20 11:55:41+00:00
I think the author is trying to say in today's world we face a sort of moral/societal vacuum of privacy. The more we try to remain private, whether by being an open book or by some type of digital way, it's basically futile or will eventually be broken.

My spin, as a recovering perfectionist, is when you've done everything you can to be "innocent" and the political or whatever wind changes, the pit of despair is a real and devastating thing. When this happens, sometimes the decisions that are made are desperate.
by bartread | 2025-12-20 11:56:52+00:00
They’d have to be hiring recent graduates for you to hear that perspective.

And, as much as what I’ve just said is hyperbolically pessimistic, there is some truth to it.

In the UK a bunch of factors have coincided to put the brakes on hiring, especially smaller and mid-size businesses. AI is the obvious one that gets all the press (although how much it’s really to blame is open to question in my view), but the recent rise in employer AI contribution, and now (anecdotally) the employee rights bill have come together to make companies quite gunshy when it comes to hiring.
by kokau | 2025-12-20 11:57:02+00:00
Hey HN

I kept seeing founders stuck for weeks on branding before even shipping an MVP. So I built Brandolia — an AI that generates a complete brand identity in ~60 seconds.

You enter:

Brand name

Industry

It generates:

Logo

Color palette

Typography

Slogan

Brand storytelling

Marketing angles

No designers. No prompts. No endless iterations.

This started as an internal tool for my own SaaS projects… then friends asked for access… then it turned into a product.

Would love your feedback:

What part of branding slows you down the most?

What would you never trust AI with in branding?

https://brandolia.io
OpenAI might train on responses API data
by kissgyorgy | 2025-12-20 11:57:53+00:00
The quote from their Chief Scientist in the official documentation is quite suspicious:

the hidden chain of thought allows us to “read the mind” of the model and understand its thought process. For example, in the future we may wish to monitor the chain of thought for signs of manipulating the user.

If they don't train on it, they are definitely reading the reasoning tokens.

https://developers.openai.com/blog/responses-api
by cube2222 | 2025-12-20 11:58:09+00:00
It's so nice that skills are becoming a standard, they are imo a much bigger deal long-term than e.g. MCP.

Easy to author (at its most basic, just a markdown file), context efficient by default (only preloads yaml front-matter, can lazy load more markdown files as needed), can piggyback on top of existing tooling (for instance, instead of the GitHub MCP, you just make a skill describing how to use the `gh` cli).

Compared to purpose-tuned system prompts they don't require a purpose-specific agent, and they also compose (the agent can load multiple skills that make sense for a given task).

Part of the effectiveness of this, is that AI models are heavy enough, that running a sandbox vm for them on the side is likely irrelevant cost-wise, so now the major chat ui providers all give the model such a sandboxed environment - which means skills can also contain python scripts and/or js scripts - again, much simpler, more straightforward, and flexible than e.g. requiring the target to expose remote MCPs.

Finally, you can use a skill to tell your model how to properly approach using your MCP server - which previously often required either long prompting, or a purpose-specific system prompt, with the cons I've already described.
by reactordev | 2025-12-20 12:00:27+00:00
I think you’re getting hung up on semantics and you’re hyper focused on the kernel.

Nothing you said contradicts my point and in fact, corroborates it. So I’m not sure what your point is.

Yes, Darwin is a mix of Mach, xnu, and BSD code. No where did I say macOS is the FreeBSD kernel. No where do I mention kernel. So while you argument for why I’m wrong is lengthy, it still says it was derived from BSD. Which is exactly what I said. There are parts of FreeBSD in macOS kernel. There are parts of XNU and Mach. There are parts OpenBSD and NetBSD. Majority of the base OS (including userland) is BSD.
Raycaster (YC F24) Is Hiring a Research Engineer (NYC, In-Person)
by levilian | 2025-12-20 12:00:31+00:00
Raycaster (raycaster.ai) (YC F24) builds a document IDE for high-stakes, regulated work in life sciences (CMC / quality / regulatory). The product turns messy, versioned documents (PDFs, Word redlines, tables) into a structured workspace where agents can search, cite, reconcile changes, and help draft.

We’re hiring a Research Engineer who can both (1) ship production systems and (2) help define the research direction for the company. There’s room to publish technical deep dives, benchmarks, and papers from day 0.

What you’ll do: - Build and ship core agent workflows: orchestration, retrieval, tool use, guardrails, evals - Work on document pipelines + versioning + reliability/observability - Turn research ideas into production features (and sometimes the other direction) - Help design benchmarks/datasets for high-stakes document tasks; potentially publish

What we’re looking for: - Strong engineering fundamentals (distributed systems / performance / reliability) - Comfortable implementing and iterating on evaluation (not just demos) - Product taste: you notice UX details and can build end-to-end - Able to learn a domain quickly and ask sharp questions

Nice to have: - Prior publications, open-source, or technical writing

Logistics: - NYC (Hudson Yards), in-person 5 days/week - Compensation: base + founder-level equity (details in process)

To apply, email: founders [at] raycaster.ai Include: a link to work you’ve shipped (GitHub/projects) and 1–2 examples of research/evals you’ve built (can be informal).
by st_goliath | 2025-12-20 12:00:31+00:00
That literally is quick access, it does the same thing in both cases, trying to get rid of the linear scan and having to plow through data unnecessarily.

If the archive is on a hard disk, the program reads the directory at the end and then seeks to the local header, rather than doing a linear scan. Or the floppy motor, if it is a small archive on a single floppy.

If you have multiple floppies, you insert the last one, the program reads the header and then tells you what floppy to insert, rather than having to go through them one by one, which you know, would be slower.

In one case, a hard disk arm, or the floppy motor, does the seeking, in the other case, your hands do the seeking. But it's still the same algorithm, doing the same thing, for the same reason.
by deaux | 2025-12-20 12:00:58+00:00
Where in this post's article are you seeing this pattern?

> Parsing a known HTML structure

In most cases, HTML structures that are being parsed aren't known. If they're known, you control them, and you don't need to parse them in the first place. If they're someone else's, who knows when they'll change, or under what condition they're different.

But really, I don't see the stuff you're talking about happening in prod for non-one-off usecases. I see LLMs used in prod usecases exactly for data where you don't know exactly what its shape will be, and there's an enormous amount of such cases. If the same logic is needed every time, of course you don't have an LLM execute that logic, you have the LLM write a deterministic script.
by ljosifov | 2025-12-20 12:01:26+00:00
Not for SSD specifically, but I assume the compact design doesn't hurt: duckdb saved my sanity recently. Single file, columnar, with builtin compression I presume (given in columnar even simplest compression maybe very effective), and with $ duckdb -ui /path/to/data/base.duckdb opening a notebook in browser. Didn't find a single thing to dislike about duckdb - as a single user. To top it off - afaik can be zero-copy 'overlayed' on the top of a bunch of parquet binary files to provide sql over them?? (didn't try it; wd be amazing if it works well)
by shrubby | 2025-12-20 12:02:06+00:00
I am trying to burn my bridges well enough not to be accepted to the clan of complacent narcissists.

I'm well aware of the possible and even unavoidable consequences of the current trajectory.

But this is a conscious decision to try to shape the norm so that the current dystopian zillionaire future would not happen fully.

My reasoning is most likely the humanely typical post-hoc rationalization and strategic reasoning, but I try to think good old MLK quote fits it.

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"
by jonway | 2025-12-20 12:03:33+00:00
That doesn't sem very plausible, how many people are driven away from CounterStrike or like League of Legends because the graphics weren't as good as Cyberpunk or whatever?

Theres a LOT of games that compete with AAA-massive-budget games on aggregate like Dwarf Fortress, CS, League, Fortnite, people are still playing arma 2, dayz, rust, etc Rainbow Six: Siege still has adherents and even cash-payout tournaments. EvE: Online, Ultima Online, Runescape, still goin'

These games have like no advertising and are still moneymakers. Eve and UO are like 20 and 30 years old. Heck, Classic WoW!
by deaux | 2025-12-20 12:05:21+00:00
If you know you need them though, do use them. There are four MCP servers I use regularly and they're enormously useful. They're all around the same topic though - pulling in context/data from sources. One is dual-use, in that I occasionally also use it for things like dashboard generation.

I will say, when using MCP be selective about which tools you enable. A lot of the time they come with say 30 tools and you only personally care about 5 of them. The other 25 are just rotting your context.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-20 12:06:04+00:00
The way I understand it is today is when I board on an Airbus I enter an hybrid of a mechanical and digital machine. I understand there is a lot of complex and sensitive software embedded/hosted on that plane that hopefully are not gonna kill me.

So computers are actually core to their business. They probably almost invented things like PLM too.

Nothing Airbus does is easy, this is why there are only about 2 companies like that in the world. This is why I do not see why their hosting have to be outsourced...
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 12:07:13+00:00
The real reason London is rich at all is because it was a trading depot with the continent. It made money from goods leaving England, and entering England. Later on, like Paris, it became wealthy off running an overseas empire, and when that empire vanished it turned to nearer territories.

London has centuries worth of investment from everywhere else based on that. That money has stayed there, and money is spent constantly on infrastructure which helps it make more money. Contrast this with Liverpool, Cardiff or Belfast which suffered decades of decline for various reasons and a fraction of the investment.

If the capital had been moved to Liverpool back at some point in the Middle Ages, then that would have remained a wealthy city instead of becoming a basket case in the eighties. The presence of the civil service and government alone would have kept Merseyside wealthy, and would have made it a huge tourist centre. Bigger than now, and even that was mostly to do with the Beatles.

By the way, the state funded Wembley refit cost more than the construction of the Scottish Parliament. Guess which one got all the negative press?
by deaux | 2025-12-20 12:07:23+00:00
> All public MCP server I’ve seen have been a disaster with too many tools and tokens polluting the context.

People like to shit on Copilot's UX but something it does well is making it incredibly easy to switch off individual tools you don't need per MCP server. In general I've found its MCP story the best out of all of them (Codex/CC/Gemini), it utilizes VSCode extensions integration very well.
by re-thc | 2025-12-20 12:07:45+00:00
> Is it even possible to truly own everything yourself?

Even if you do there's still more to it e.g. blacklists of different kinds e.g. known proxies, spam listings, etc that would still mean you need to kick out your client.

Then there's the bad clients you need to deal with e.g. if they send DoS from your network. Even if you don't get a report it will eat up your limited resources and you may be subject to revenges and bring down your infrastructure.

Conclusion: there's lots to it but so does every business. That's just life.