MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by patcon | 2025-12-14 22:25:09+00:00
Glad I shared if it serves you!

> LLMs have inherited the statistical structure of the symbiont without the host: pattern without grounding.

I like this. I think it's not too far a leap to suggest something like "soul" without "body" -- a spirit in the truest sense. I think there's real value in the things we've believed ourselves to be made of though deep time, though without evidence or proper provenance. I suspect we've always been grappling to find language for the unnameable things.

Some of my own [somewhat outdated] reflections on language from the time I came across it, in case you're interested :) https://nodescription.net/notes/#2019-07-13
by zby | 2025-12-14 22:27:03+00:00
This week I vibe coded an golem-forge (https://github.com/zby/golem-forge) - exploration of prompting as programming. Since then I found https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono and https://github.com/johnlindquist/mdflow and I think I'll rather use these existing tools to explore my idea. But I think it might be still interesting project because it is entirely vibe-coded - I don't even know Typescript (I know some Javascript from before React - but none of the new stuff). I did not look into the Typescript code at all - only at what the LLM presented to me when editing it and the docs. At some point I discovered that when I tried to have a core logic and two UI packages the LLM put only types in the core package - so I had drive a hard refactoring - but it worked.

I haven't yet tried this very extensively - but another profound change in programming that this showed me is that it is now very easy to borrow parts of Open Source libraries. It used to be that you could only base your work on a library - borrowing parts of projects that were not designed to be shared (used as libraries) was prohibitive - but with llms it is entirely possible to say: "now please borrow the UI ideas from project X" and it does that. Maybe you need to add some planning.

The project is about 27kloc now.
by GlacierFox | 2025-12-14 22:28:31+00:00
Utterly perplexing you've backed off with a scathing 'Sorry, I can't engage' after literally contracting yourself plain as day a few comments up.

I think you can't understand his analogy no? Without taking it literally to the point of making it your entire life's purpose to counter the point?

How about this: You have a 1 in 100,000 chance of eating an M&M which literally drains your bank account and you have to eat hundreds or possibly thousands of M&M's per day.

(some of your dreaded hyperbole for transactions)

Would you dig in to that bowl? There's shouldn't be a miniscule percentage chance of your entire livelyhood being ripped away and locked forever without recourse simply by using a certain payment platform. Is that fair? Or are you still intent on stepping on the cosmic merrigoround of potential ruin without a care in the world?
by happytoexplain | 2025-12-14 22:29:24+00:00
> poorly designed String API

Nope nope nope.

I have to agree strongly with my sibling commenter. Every other language gets it horribly wrong.

In app dev (Swift's primary use case), strings are most often semantically sequences of graphemes. And, if you at all care about computer science, array subscripting must be O(1).

Swift does the right thing for both requirements. Beautiful.

OK, yes, maybe they should add a native `nthCharacter(n:)`, but that's nitpicking. It's a one-liner to add yourself.
by physicsguy | 2025-12-14 22:29:32+00:00
I’m in my 30s but the UK English reading choices weren’t very inspiring when I studied and you could pass the exams without ever reading full texts so of course that’s what schools encouraged.

I remember doing sections of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth but we never did the whole thing. We did read Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls but that was it for books/plays. Poetry we had a book called Anthology where we had to read and re-read many poems for analysis.
by aezart | 2025-12-14 22:29:43+00:00
We had this problem, 119 services that all got their dependencies from a shared domain. Individual services had to depend on the exact version of libraries provided by the domain. It made updates essentially impossible.

Eventually we were forced by a licensing change to move to containers, which fixed that issue but substantially increased our research usage, we went from 16 GB of RAM for the entire domain to 1.5 GB per service, with similar increases on CPU.
by sureglymop | 2025-12-14 22:29:59+00:00
Database transactions. Sometimes, when you require exceptionally high throughout and performance, it can be a viable strategy to batch multiple operations into the same transactions in order to reduce roundtrips, io and network latency.

Of course, it comes at the cost of some stability. However I was just curious if such an abstraction could support such use cases. Thank you for the link to the paper!
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-14 22:30:05+00:00
I used to have PDFs on my Kindle, you used to be able to email them to your Kindle, I think Amazon killed that functionality, I believe you can plug it to your computer and mount it and drop in the PDFs but I don't know if it needs to be in a specific directory, just be weary of image heavy PDFs they may not load at all.
by girvo | 2025-12-14 22:30:07+00:00
> Then ends up with frontend that's tightly coupled to the representation at the time as well, when "in the context of A I also need to know E" could've been a specialized type hiding those details.

GraphQL clients are built to do exactly that, Relay originally and Apollo in the last year, if I’m understanding what you’re saying: any component that touches E doesn’t have to care about how you got to it, fragment masking makes short work
by agumonkey | 2025-12-14 22:30:09+00:00
I kinda fear that this is an economic plane stall, we're tilting upward so much, the underlying conditions are about to dissolve

And I'd add, that recent LLMs magic (i admit they reached a maturity level that is hard to deny) is also a two edged sword, they don't create abstraction often, they create a very well made set of byproducts (code, conf, docs, else) to realize your demand, but people right now don't need to create new improved methods, frameworks, paradigms because the LLM doesn't have our mental constraints.. (maybe later reasoning LLMs will tackle that, plausibly)
by computerdork | 2025-12-14 22:30:26+00:00
For me, it’s always having website productivity blockers on all my browsers across all my various devices (and for the most part, not installing news apps on any devices either). Haven’t simplified my digital life, but at least it’s very restricted. Yeah, if even one device doesn’t have one installed, feel like am vulnerable to having hours sucked away.

And actually, still browse the web and watch YouTube, but just on my non-work days.
by dsmurrell | 2025-12-14 22:30:36+00:00
A few weeks ago I built a very simple metrics tracker that I had been looking for myself... a middle ground between complex observability platforms and tracking a number yourself and then finding a way to visualise its change over time.

I had had the idea and the domain registered for years and recently just took the leap to put it out there.

https://spikelog.com
by ck2 | 2025-12-14 22:31:01+00:00
If you live in US, get a tracfone with an annual 1500 minute plan for around $20-$30

You can just get a fliphone clamshell, they still do those and don't need a full smartphone (ironically the clamshell still runs android)

They boot fast and battery can be pulled after

This is how I do all the 2-factor that demands real SMS
by infinet | 2025-12-14 22:31:28+00:00
Sticking head into a barbecue oven for 10 minutes might get rid of lice, but expecting cooking smoke kill bugs is absurd. People use the three stone and hearth fire not because they want the smoke, but because they do not know better. Combustion is a complicated process, it generates CO2, H20, CO, H2, CH4. The higher the temperature, the more thorough the burning. It requires the right amount of air, enough to burn all the biomass, but not too much that carries heat away thus lowers the temperature. Higher temperature also transfer heat more efficiently to the cookware. Only a well designed stove can do that. These are not things that can be figured by meditating in front of an open fire.

Saving fuel is a matter of life and death in the ancient world. Winter is brutal to the poor largely because gathering fuel is difficult, especially in areas that have supported large population for centuries.
by culi | 2025-12-14 22:31:38+00:00
Well I'd love to hear some concrete examples if you have any on hand! I was of the same opinion as you until I refactored a project of mine to use JSDoc.

Since any TypeScript type can be expressed in JSDoc, I imagine you're mostly thinking of generics. At least that was my main sticking point. JSDoc does actually have generic slots with the @template tag. Actually using them in practice is a little unintuitive but involves typing the return type. E.g. for a function it'd look like this:

/** @type {ReturnType<typeof useState<Book[]>>} */ const [books, setBooks] = useState();
by vldszn | 2025-12-14 22:31:55+00:00
I’m working on a Free and Open-Source Invoice Generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com/?template=stripe

GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

Features:

- No sign-up, works entirely in-browser

- Live PDF preview + instant download

- VAT EU support + custom tax format coming very soon

- Shareable invoice links

- Multi-language (10+) & multi-currency

- Stripe and default templates

- Mobile-friendly

Would love feedback, contributions, or ideas for other templates/features.
by K0nserv | 2025-12-14 22:32:36+00:00
On Thursday I learned about ulid[0] which I think really neatly solves the problem of text representation for UUID v7. However, I also like the idea of prefixed ids, although I haven't used them in anger.

Yesterday I built most of a Postgres extension, using the excellent pgrx[1] project, that build on ulid to add prefixes. With it you get something like this

plid=# SELECT gen_plid('u'); gen_plid --------------------------- u_06DHRQH6SJT7N2WEQK4910R (1 row)

The aim is for it to be the same size as a UUID in storage, but I haven't quite gotten there yet.

I haven't pushed it to GitHub yet, but it's fairly done at this point.

0: https://github.com/ulid/spec

1: https://github.com/pgcentralfoundation/pgrx
by quirino | 2025-12-14 22:33:01+00:00
Tried it out now, pretty nice.

Note that apps built from the SDK don't have access to the full history, only up to some cutoff. I tried a couple over the years and wrongly concluded Spotify deleted your history after some time.

The data download does contain everything, which was a very pleasant surprise. I didn't think I'd ever see the data from the couple years gap in my last.fm.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-14 22:33:08+00:00
Of course it’s not exempt from criticism. But suggesting something is permanent and final when it expressly is not is a poor criticism.

All software has bugs. Plus, not every bug is in the test suite. There are open bugs in all of the software shipped by every distro. Software can be ready for use even if there are know bugs in corner cases. Regular coreutils has open bugs as well.
by yassi_dev | 2025-12-14 22:33:34+00:00
I've been working on several internal tools that act like extensions for the django admin.

- https://github.com/yassi/dj-redis-panel - https://github.com/yassi/dj-cache-panel

This week I'm taking a break from my next project in this series (celery related) to try to participate in game jam related to programming language creation:

- https://itch.io/jam/langjamgamejam

I encourage others to participate I e
by systemtest | 2025-12-14 22:34:03+00:00
I had a lot of hobby projects. Some home automation. Some would scrape websites for archival purposes. Maybe a seedbox and an arr-stack. Total monthly cost of a bit over €60 for all of them. Didn't really add anything to my life and the upkeep took about an hour every month, even with auto-updating as much as possible, sometimes things broke or required manual updating (+migration).

None of them were open to the public, I SSH-tunnel into them. All stuff just for myself.

I backed everything up locally and shut them down. They should be auto-removed at the next billing cycle.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-14 22:34:35+00:00
> The well-established facts are that Homo sapiens and related species are 100% social animals

You are 100% correct. I was collapsing a concept too far for the metaphor. The more precise way I should have days it was:

“Humans aren’t eusocial”

It’s going to require the whole of humanity to shed the tribal affiliations in order to survive the transition to the post human world. The human species can’t expand our cortexes fast enough to becoming eusocial and so can be modeled as antisocial on the scale necessary to maintain anything but the remnants of a species.

Also to be clear I don’t personally feel in a dark or whatever place that you’re describing. I am a beautiful family and thriving friend groups and extremely engaging work I’m actively causing all of this to happen so I’m telling you this is a warning not because I’m trying to argue with you I’m telling you what’s happening and you should do something to prevent it.

I’m simply saying if you desire for the plurality of humanity to be the primary driver for action on the planet, then humans need to organize at the scale required to manage the global externalities of the machine automation wave that is going to absolutely decimate the majority of the population inside capitalism.

That is not my opinion that is a fact of life and until people recognize that it’s going to be a absolute bloodbath both metaphorically and literally between capital powered by robotic forces/ labor and the rest of people who have no work and are unable to survive in such a society.
by smeej | 2025-12-14 22:34:42+00:00
This was taught by default in my elementary school. I found it frustrating, though, because I don't actually read a word at a time. I've always processed blocks of text, a few lines together. I can read one word at a time if someone needs me to for some reason, but I don't do it by default.

When I was young, I thought it was so strange that they would slow people down like this. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized the way my brain flipped the "on" switch for reading was different from how most people read.
by paulhebert | 2025-12-14 22:35:15+00:00
Daily Baffle looks nice!

I’m not totally sure! Marketing is not my strong suit.

I think my biggest advantages are:

- It’s sticky. A good percentage of players keep playing once they start

- Organic sharing. Lots of people have told me they shared it with friends and family. (I also built a “share” feature)

The pattern so far has been:

- I share it or someone else shares it somewhere.

- There’s a big spike of people trying it out.

- I get some new players.

- The player count stays roughly steady until it gets shared somewhere else that gains traction.

It was featured by Thinky Games. Sharing here got people interested. Someone shared it on Metafilter and that got a lot of views. Other folks have shared it on other sites that have led to smaller bumps.

But I’m still experimenting.
by stryan | 2025-12-14 22:36:37+00:00
My biggest project is still Materia[0], a tool for deploying applications with Podman Quadlets. This month I presented it to the Podman User Group's community meeting, which was pretty exciting since I've never presented in a community setting like that before. Otherwise I've been trying to focus on bugfixes, minor feature additions, and working with user feedback so it's not just me fixing my own problems :) . The latter is really fun since I've already run into someone using it in a way that's very different than how I'd imagine it.

Not coding related, I've been on what I've been calling "The Grand Project" for a bit over a year now where I listen to every single album I own (around 855 albums/singles/eps/etc. As of this moment I'm at 828) at least once. It's been a real trip essentially going through my whole life musically and I'm hoping to write a blog post somewhere about it.

[0] Project site: https://primamateria.systems/ Source Code: https://github.com/stryan/materia
by acdha | 2025-12-14 22:36:51+00:00
Deficits are a policy choice, not an inevitability. The budget was balanced at the turn of the century but Republicans under G. W. Bush decided that meant they could cut taxes, especially for the rich. They did that again for both Trump terms, before COVID. Unlike the financial crisis or pandemic, there was no emergency driving those decisions and the massive debt increases were entirely voluntary.
by DannyBee | 2025-12-14 22:36:53+00:00
Depends wildly on the finish. For boiling, i just wouldn't worry.

Most of the toxic fumes/etc come from breaking molecular bonds. There is a minimum temperature, and below that temperature, it just doesn't really occur.

If it starts happening, regardless of whether there is visible smoke/vapor, the finish will quite obviously visibly degrade. Either it will flake off, slough off, or you will just be able to remove it with your fingernail.

Take polyurethanes - they mostly start releasing toxic fumes at 300-400F just about the second they get to that temperature. Below that, nothing.

This is because that's the temperature at which the isocyanate bonds start to break, even if there is no flame. You will not see smoke or vapor. But it will become essentially non-protective and flake off or otherwise visibly degrade.

At a much higher temperature (700-800F) you would break down the polyol, which point it will likely flat out ignite, and burn with a very thick, toxic smoke. People used to actually think polyurethane foam was non-flammable. It's highly flammable. It just has a high ignition temperature. In houses, you are now required to cover it with some form of fire barrier or otherwise meet E-84 criteria through additives, etc.

We don't worry too much about this for wood pieces, because the only time they are exposed to this level of heat is when something is already on fire :)

Also keep in mind that things that are called polyurethanes may or may not actually be polyurethanes.

There is the "colloquial" name that you often find for a finish in marketing literature, and then the actual chemistrsy.

A good example is water-based lacquers, which are usually just acrylic resins.

Most polyurethanes are actually polyurethanes of some sort. Everything else is often a wacky mix.
by mikeayles | 2025-12-14 22:37:07+00:00
I'm currently working on something that lets you describe a hardware product in plain English and get actual manufacturable files out — PCB, enclosure, firmware, the lot.

Very early days still. Whilst I created a fork of toon for Kicad (called TOKN (https://www.mikeayles.com/#tokn)), with the intention of using a reduced token format to generate schematics using LLM's, I could get the models to follow the syntax correctly, but they didn't have the knowledge. So I was then going to create a whole RAG system, but got distracted by this current project.

There are people out there doing AI schematic generation, like flux.ai (which is incredible (and incredibly well funded)), but 90% of products, especially at proof of concept stage, are basically a microcontroller, some power, probably usb, and some IO, bluetooth/wifi if you're lucky. So we can use a library of pre-validated subcircuits and slots them together on a grid. Routing's deterministic, so if it compiles, it works. (sorry, deeppcb & Quilter!)

The enclosure side is more fun: once the PCB's done you've got real dimensions to work with (board size, mounting holes, where the connectors poke out), so I use an image model to generate some concept art, then feed that to an openscad generating model as visual inspiration alongside the hard constraints.

Basically trying to get a full hardware product pipeline done automatically.
by Doxin | 2025-12-14 22:37:36+00:00
I agree misinformation is a big problem. Possibly the biggest problem of our time, right next to global warming. But as it stands now, as a queer person, you can find a spot on the internet with like-minded people. Even when closeted. Hell when closeted it's the only place you can find like-minded people.

If we require people identify themselves online you drive all closeted queer people away, into solitude, into feeling no one will ever understand them. That's not worth the price of admission.

We need a better solution than that.
by breatheoften | 2025-12-14 22:37:37+00:00
I'm more and more convinced of the importance of this.

There is a very interesting thing happening right now where the "llm over promisers" are incentivized to over promise for all the normal reasons -- but ALSO to create the perception that the "next/soon" breakthrough is only going to be applicable when run on huge cloud infra such that running locally is never going to be all that useful ... I tend to think that will prove wildly wrong and that we will very soon arrive at a world where state of art LLM workloads should be expected to be massively more efficiently runnable than they currently are -- to the point of not even being the bottleneck of the workflows that use these components. Additionally these workloads will be viable to run locally on common current_year consumer level hardware ...

"llm is about to be general intelligence and sufficient llm can never run locally" is a highly highly temporary state that should soon be falsifiable imo. I don't think the llm part of the "ai computation" will be the perf bottleneck for long.
by patcon | 2025-12-14 22:38:11+00:00
I think this just means you're from a respected country or IP block (or email or phone carrier), and so your existence online doesn't provoke suspicion? :)

I know some people dislike being reminded of this, but I share it because I'm personally always grateful to notice a new edge of it in my own experience: it's perhaps a dimension of privilege (which is neither good nor bad, just something to know that one [might] have, often in some subtle or hidden dimensions and not in others)
by mochidusk | 2025-12-14 22:38:39+00:00
I'm working on brand new type of collaborative whiteboard that allows anyone (or team) to drag-n-drop items from their devices onto the board.

The problem I'm solving: On a team, people and their files are scattered everywhere.

Solution: A canvas that attempts to open (and edit) as many file types as possible (images, xlsx, pdf, docx, cad). This means you can have people and files on the same page.

It's the only whiteboard that can natively render docx and pdf so far; these can also be edited directly on the board without having to use dedicated software.

It has a built-in Drive where you can store/backup files that syncs across your devices.

There's a few widgets such as Kanban, sticky notes, cards.

And of course, there's agentic LLM (Gemini 3 Pro) that can take actions such as viewing the board, reading documents on the board, and editing items on the board. For example, you can tell it to read a pdf, then write a spec sheet (in docx), or create tickets on a kanban.

I'm launching a private beta next month if anyone is interested in testing it out and giving feedback.
by culi | 2025-12-14 22:38:54+00:00
It's certainly more verbose but certainly not a limited subset. You can copy paste any typescript Type or Interface in a jsdoc @typedef. As I stated in the article, it's still the TypeScript language service that's analyzing either JSDoc-defined types or TypeScript defined types. It's typescript all the way down

But JSDoc lets you do pretty much everything that isn't a runtime feature of TypeScript (e.g. enums, namespaces, etc). Even generic slots are supported