MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ilaksh | 2025-12-27 00:40:30+00:00
Another thing in the category of abusing font capabilities is Harfbuzz (OpenType engine) WASM, which if compiled into an application allows fonts to basically run any code. A few examples are an LLM or a Tetris font. Apparently this WASM support is in the font rendering for Chrome and Firefox supposedly.

I was really tempted to try to use it to make a Harfbuzz OS.

https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/
by gnabgib | 2025-12-27 00:40:32+00:00
(2014) Popular in:

2021 (570 points, 339 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001

2015 (156 points, 69 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284202

2014 (355 points, 196 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-27 00:40:57+00:00
I highly disagree. You are judging a book by it's cover. Capitalization is no different from handwriting. Substance matters, capitalization and grammar are superficial. If meaning is captured then capitalization does not intrinsically matter.

You are correct that people judge documentation off of grammar and punctuation. But this is not a rational or logical thing people do. But I can't blame you or others, I mean after all the world believes in religion, myths and other fantasmic spiritual things with no solid evidence as backing. It's normal. I just felt HN was above that. Guess I'm wrong.

>...seems shallow / callous.

Seems that way only because you're not thinking deep enough. Think carefully whether it is rational or logical to judge the works of say Einstein because he had a grammar error or bad handwriting. The two are completely orthogonal and that is the rational perspective.
by iinnPP | 2025-12-27 00:41:17+00:00
Not that person, but yes. You have entirely missed the ability to simply view and understand what's inside your own body.

Where your interpretation means someone else needs to follow your whim for their own problem, despite the legalese stating otherwise.

I think that is an absurd position and I am sorry to feel the need to have to be blunt about it.
by admeza | 2025-12-27 00:41:58+00:00
Yes, I did say:

> I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios.

The exercise I did is useful in part because I don't even think it's that unrealistic. We can't all sleep in your bed, and we all don't want to send notable people emails using AI, but it's not hard to imagine a future where our inboxes are flooded with AI spam like this. It's already happening. Look at what goes on with job postings. Someone posts a job posting which says to apply by sending an email to a certain email address. The email address gets thousands of emails of job applications, but most of them are AI bullshit. Then the person that posted the job uses AI to try to filter out the bullshit ones. Maybe the protocol in this case usually isn't SMTP and it's happening via other means, but my point stands. This is just spam.
by orionblastar | 2025-12-27 00:42:12+00:00
Harris spent $1.5B on her campaign and lost. How can you explain that? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/harris-campai... DNC is $16M in debt now: https://nypost.com/2025/12/24/us-news/dnc-drowning-in-nearly...

What is going on?
by subdavis | 2025-12-27 00:42:26+00:00
I signed up and started a VM. Didn’t really expect the default chat interface at boot. I’m currently on my iPad and would probably have bookmarked it for later, but now I’m playing with it. Cool idea :)

Edit: it comes out of the box with screenshot capabilities. The defaults on this are very well considered. Im impressed within the first 15 min.
Edit2: this is very neat. I will be recommending it to my non-coder friends who don’t really have the local setup to use Claude but would like to try a Claude-like tool.
by optionalsquid | 2025-12-27 00:42:32+00:00
Speed is one of the main reasons why I keep recommending uv to people I work with, and why I initially adopted it: Setting up a venv and installing requirements became so much faster. Replacing pipx and `uv run` for single-file scripts with external dependencies, were additional reasons. With nox adding uv support, it also became much easier and much faster to test across multiple versions of Python
by fluoridation | 2025-12-27 00:42:41+00:00
The type of tired is "really". What happens is not that there's some additional information that I'm not communicating in that one sentence, but rather that the time it takes you to read "they're both really tired" is not enough for your mind to dwell on the idea and empathize with the characters. Now, if I instead were to write "They're both really tired. They're super tired. Oh man, they're so tired. They're so tired, you've never been this tired in your life", that would be extremely shitty writing, but it would give you time to ruminate on the information.
by saisrirampur | 2025-12-27 00:42:50+00:00
Great question! I believe this behavior is by design in logical decoding. Based on my reading and previous chats with committers, this is my understanding: logical decoding is not stateless, and on reconnection it loses the current transaction state (open transactions, subtransactions, snapshots, catalog state, etc.) that is required for decoding. As a result, a reconnection triggers reading WAL from restart_lsn in order to reconstruct that state.

There may be room for improvement in PostgreSQL, by persisting this state to help these reconnections, but I think this is non-trivial and complex than I think, because of the guarantees PostgreSQL must provide around correctness, consistency and reliability.

Also, based on what I’ve read, physical replication does not have this issue because it directly ships WAL files (instead of contructing a txn) and reconstructs state on the standby.

I’ll let PostgreSQL committers/contributors chime in too on this for a more precise analysis. :)
by avhception | 2025-12-27 00:43:18+00:00
Well, I don't know why it didn't work out for you. But my AMD experience has improved fundamentally since the fglrx days, to the point where I prefer AMD over Nvidia.
You said you don't know why people say that AMD has improved so much, but it definitely rings true for me.

I said "LLM lens" because you were talking about hardware typically used for number crunching, not graphics displays, like the MI300. So I was suggesting that the difference between what you hear online about the driver and your own experience might result from people like me mostly talking about the 2d / 3d acceleration side of things while the experience for ROCm and stuff is probably another story altogether.
by CharlesW | 2025-12-27 00:43:25+00:00
> I write predominantly in Swift…

If it's okay to mention my own project, I'd appreciate it if you could check out https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (open source) and let me know what you think. It's focused on modern Swift, with specialized skills for helping developers get to strict Swift 6 concurrency.
by collinmanderson | 2025-12-27 00:44:17+00:00
> the conversation here keeps collapsing back to "Rust rewrite good/bad." That feels like cargo-culting the toolchain instead of asking the uncomfortable question: why did it take a greenfield project to give Python the package manager behavior people clearly wanted for the last decade?

I think there's a few things going on here:

- If you're going have a project that's obsessed with speed, you might as well use rust/c/c++/zig/etc to develop the project, otherwise you're always going to have python and the python ecosystem as a speed bottleneck. rust/c/c++/zig ecosystems generally care a lot about speed, so you can use a library and know that it's probably going to be fast.

- For example, the entire python ecosystem generally does not put much emphasis on startup time. I know there's been some recent work here on the interpreter itself, but even modules in the standard library will pre-compile regular expressions at import time, even if they're never used, like the "email" module.

- Because the python ecosystem doesn't generally optimize for speed (especially startup), the slowdowns end up being contagious. If you import a library that doesn't care about startup time, why should your library care about startup time? The same could maybe be said for memory usage.

- The bootstrapping problem is also mostly solved by using a complied language like c/rust/go. If the package manager is written in python (or even node/javascript), you first have to have python+dependencies installed before you can install python and your dependencies. With uv, you copy/install a single binary file which can then install python + dependencies and automatically do the right thing.

- I think it's possible to write a pretty fast implementation using python, but you'd need to "greenfield" it by rewriting all of the dependencies yourself so you can optimize startup time and bootstrapping.

- Also, as the article mentions there are _some_ improvements that have happened in the standards/PEPs that should eventually make they're way into pip, though it probably won't be quite the gamechanger that uv is.
by tikhonj | 2025-12-27 00:44:30+00:00
If you're doing something forgettable, what makes you think the workaday Java or Python programmer would find it innately motivating?

Alternately, if you have the sort of work or culture that taps into people's intrinsic motivation, why would that work worse with Haskell or Clojure programmers than anybody else?

People are interested in different things along different dimensions. The way somebody is motivated by what they're doing and the way somebody is motivated by how they're doing it really don't seem all that correlated to me.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-27 00:45:26+00:00
No. Why would it be? I hate it when people come up with defense based off of linguistics. Your defense is essentially "technically correct" sounds like "technical documentation" therefore one applies to the other because of the word "technical". That's an incidence of language and NOT of reality. Let me frame if from a rational and logical perspective:

Technical documentation is not a math proof. Its purpose is to transfer a working mental model to a human reader so they can make correct decisions. A document can be locally, pedantically correct and still be globally misleading if it emphasizes edge cases, omits constraints, or frames abstractions in a way that causes readers to generalize incorrectly.

In practice, what matters is not whether every sentence can be defended in isolation, but whether the document reliably produces correct outcomes in the hands of its intended audience. A simplification that is technically incomplete but operationally accurate is often better documentation than a perfectly correct description that obscures the dominant behavior of the system.

Engineers learn this the hard way. If you have ever followed documentation that was “technically correct” yet caused you to design the wrong thing, you already know this distinction matters. Correctness is necessary to an extent (and not to an excessive extent), but it is not sufficient. The goal is truthfulness at the level of use, not just sentence level defensibility.
by oogali | 2025-12-27 00:46:30+00:00
I sometimes joke that Kubernetes is a mass experiment in teaching people how to write Go via YAML.

The giant nested YAML you come across is the input (pre-deserialization)/output (post-serialization) for the declared types:

https://github.com/kubernetes/api/blob/master/core/v1/types....

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I am the only person that finds humor in this.
by kulahan | 2025-12-27 00:47:10+00:00
Nope, it still wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. Nobody cares if the UK wants to pretend to be Asian or American or simply “not living on a continent” or whatever worthless distinction they’re clinging to. They’re European. Chinese are Asian. Brazilians are South American.

They’re the ones deviating from the usage the rest of the world uses. It would be identical to them pretending they’re the only ones driving on the correct side of the world. Nobody cares.
by orsenthil | 2025-12-27 00:47:28+00:00
- Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

- My Gita, Devdutt Pattanaik

- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande

- Moonshot: Inside Pfizer's Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible, Albert Bourla

- Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case

- The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic, Joe Miller

- Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green

- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne and Gary Gianni (Illustrator)

- El Deafo, Cece Bell

- Acts of God, Kanan Gill

- Marvels of Modern Science, Paul Severing

- Empire of AI, Karen Hao
by rldjbpin | 2025-12-27 00:47:30+00:00
the core argument boils down to value proposition purely from an end user who does not care about the laptop's usp.

as a fairphone of laptops, it still seems like a much better deal imho. the core performance is not much worse than the competition. the user-facing hardware, while not as good as the best, it is quite in the same ballpark as other windows or linux laptops.

also a lot of quirks are starting to be solved by the community, which seems to be in a healthy state. the pixels and macbooks have enjoyed this in the past, despite their own quirks mainly due to network effects. plus rarely one could opt out parts not needed while ordering the laptop.
by eru | 2025-12-27 00:47:40+00:00
> That feels like cargo-culting the toolchain [...]

Pun intended?

Jokes aside, what you describe is a common pattern. It's also why Google internally they used to get decent speedups from rewriting some old C++ project in Go for a while: the magic was mostly in the rewrite-with-hindsight.

If you put effort into it, you can also get there via an incremental refactoring of an existing system. But the rewrite is probably easier to find motivation for, I guess.
by Epa095 | 2025-12-27 00:47:44+00:00
It is actually extremely common in Europe (as I linked to in a sibling chat), with 30-40% of kids having it at any time.

With those rates, my guess is that you probably had it several times, but just thought your bum was itching for no reason (or you were one of the asymptomatic cases). I think the awareness of it has gone up, now it's common to let the kindergarten know if you suspect it in your child, and they send a message to the other parents.
by kaycebasques | 2025-12-27 00:48:53+00:00
Sometimes you get a big price swing but it was on a low volume day. In those cases it's less interesting because it could be just one big buyer pushing the market around. The fact that it was nearly a double digit jump on a single day, and with high volume, is much more newsworthy. It means that a lot of people agreed that silver should be priced 9% higher than it was yesterday. With low volume, the price jump has a higher chance of being a fluke/noise from some uninformed/fringe market participants pricing the asset in silly ways. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pricediscovery.asp
by npunt | 2025-12-27 00:49:11+00:00
I don't think the medium of short form video is redeemable. Its occasional positives are the delivery vehicle for the many negatives, the sugar coating around the poison. It's rotten by just about any measure: properties of the medium, what types of business it attracts, messages that thrive, how well it reflects reality, aggregate effects on people across a variety of outcomes, the aftertaste of using it, etc.

I think the best question to assess it is does this make us better people or not, and to what degree? From what I have seen, the answer is it seems to be pretty significantly de-skilling us in attention, agency, nuance, psychological wellbeing, etc. It makes us more vulnerable to influence and manipulation. The businesses that benefit the most from deploying it are advertising-based, which naturally leads to surveillance and algorithms and pace of consumption that maximizes addiction. The messages that perform best are emotional and attention seeking. There is no information quality control. The consumption pattern it suggests leaves no room for thinking, processing emotion, or nuance.

The personal crusade I'm on is to build a competing product at the quality level of TikTok/Insta that diverts interest & attention toward books, which as a medium is both a lot more of a known quantity and whose consumption naturally results in longer attention spans, greater literacy, and all the nth order consequences of written culture. It's great that things like BookTok exist but ultimately that energy & activity needs to find its way over to a healthier home.
by eru | 2025-12-27 00:49:13+00:00
> You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money).

Money is indeed a great lubricator.

However, it's not black-and-white: office politics is a long standing term for a reason.
by DoctorOW | 2025-12-27 00:50:53+00:00
Simpler and easier seems to be the answer. How much does it cost to spread 8gbs RAM across some VMs? Most providers require additional of how many VMs over how many hours, what the specs kf each are specifically, etc. Then once you have it you're setting up an SSH key or shared password depending on use and they make the authentication simpler as well. Maybe wouldn't be great for a huge business but it's you just wanted the ability to play with an isolated server, it might be worth it.
by slg | 2025-12-27 00:50:54+00:00
>you can just disagree with reasons rather than this performative rhetoric

This is such a bizarre trend that seems to have gotten much worse recently. I don't know if it's dropping empathy levels or rising self-importance, but many people now find the idea of someone genuinely disagreeing as a completely foreign idea. Instead of meeting a different viewpoint with some variation of "agree to disagree" many more people now seem to jump to "you actually agree with me, you're just pretending otherwise".

Non-tongue-in-cheek discussion of the Mandela Effect is a parallel phenomenon. "My memory can't possibly be wrong, this is evidence of our understanding of physics being wrong!"

Just a couple small things that make me worry about the future of society in the midst of a discussion about one huge thing that makes me worry about the future of society in AI.
by TeodorDyakov | 2025-12-27 00:50:57+00:00
I think of it this way. If you dropped Einstein with a time machine two thousand year ago, people would think he is some crazy guy doing scribbles in the sand.
No one would ever know how smart he is. The same is with people and advanced AGI like Gemini 3 Pro or Chatgpt 5.2 Pro.
We are just dumber than them.
by mrexroad | 2025-12-27 00:51:39+00:00
FWIW, I’m mildly dyslexic and likely read slower than most. This year I’ve made it a goal to un-do many of the coping strategies I’d developed over the years to keep pace, and instead really focus on stopping and looking up phonetics for words I couldn’t easily sight (kindle is clutch here). On the plus, it also means I’ve had to become rather deliberate about what I read and when I read it — HN, newspapers, and Reddit all took back seat this year (and I couldn't be happier).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-27 00:52:21+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Bamonte

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Amongst_Ruin

https://web.archive.org/web/20071127100324/http://www.perryb...

https://web.archive.org/web/20251226223206/https://www.thecu...
by socketcluster | 2025-12-27 00:52:31+00:00
I've also become something of a text maximalist. It is the natural meeting point in human-machine communication. The optimal balance of efficiency, flexibility and transparency.

You can store everything as a string; base64 for binary, JSON for data, HTML for layout, CSS for styling, SQL for queries... Nothing gets closer to the mythical silver-bullet that developers have been chasing since the birth of the industry.

The holy grail of programming has been staring us in the face for decades and yet we still keep inventing new data structures and complex tools to transfer data... All to save like 30% bandwidth; an advantage which is almost fully cancelled out anyway after you GZIP the base64 string which most HTTP servers do automatically anyway.

Same story with ProtoBuf. All this complexity is added to make everything binary. For what goal? Did anyone ever ask this question? To save 20% bandwidth, which, again is an advantage lost after GZIP... For the negligible added CPU cost of deserialization, you completely lose human readability.

In this industry, there are tools and abstractions which are not given the respect they deserve and the humble string is definitely one of them.
by godelski | 2025-12-27 00:52:37+00:00
5 years isn't that long. I've been doing 3X that and I'm constantly learning new things. Not even about new language features but even languages I've been using that whole time. New ways to problem solve. New algorithms. New tools.

Not finishing things can be okay but also not. An important skill to learn is what's good enough. And to write good enough to be easily upgradable. It's important to write code to be flexible for this reason. It's also important to realize it's okay to completely throw away code. But also this is the reason comments are so important. Don't just write what functions do but also write how you envision the design. Even if you can't get to it now. Then when you or anyone else comes back (after lunch, next week, next year, whenever) there's good hints about all that. Knowing how to get up to speed and be effective fast. If anything this helps agents even more. Commenting is a vastly under appreciated skill and only becoming more valuable
by hengery | 2025-12-27 00:53:09+00:00
Hey, thanks for checking the network tab. You are right to be vigilant.
To be 100% clear:
The scripts are Vercel Speed Insights (for monitoring page load speed/Core Web Vitals). They are anonymous and GDPR-compliant.
More importantly: The actual data you paste (your JSON/text) is processed strictly client-side in your browser memory. It is never sent to my server or Vercel.
I used 'No tracking' to mean 'No ad-tech/user-fingerprinting', but I see how that's imprecise given the performance scripts. I'll clarify the copy to say 'Client-side processing & Ad-free'.
Appreciate you keeping the standard high!
by tikhonj | 2025-12-27 00:53:33+00:00
Different programming languages come with different schools of thought about programming and different communities of practice around programming.

If you take a group of people who are squarely in the enterprise Java school of thought and have them write Rust, the language won't make much of a difference. They will eventually be influenced by the broader Rust community and the Rust philosophy towards programming, but, unless they're already interested in changed approaches, this will be a small, gradual difference. So you'll end up with Enterprise Java™ code, just in Rust.

But if you hire from the Rust community, you will get people who have a fundamentally different set of practices and expectations around programming. They will not only have a stronger grasp of Rust and Rust idioms but will also have explicit knowledge based on Rust (eg Rust-flavored design patterns and programming techniques) and, crucially, tacit knowledge based on Rust (Rust-flavored ways of programming that don't break down into easy-to-explain rules). And, roughly speaking, the same is going to be true for whatever other language you substitute for "Rust".

(I say roughly because there doesn't have to be a 1:1 relationship between programming languages, schools of thought and communities of practice. A single language can have totally different communities—just compare web Python vs data scientist Python—and some communities/schools can span multiple languages. But, as an over-simplified model, seeing a language as a community is not the worst starting point.)