MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alecco | 2025-12-29 11:11:52+00:00
For a while CPUs kept getting significantly faster every year. Then ram kept getting bigger. Then NVMe came along and brought 200-1000x IOPS.

So writing optimized software was niche and overshadowed by the huge gains of hardware. People and corporations didn't care. They preferred fast feature delivery. Even when optimizing techniques like multi-tenant servers, we ended up having heavy containers wasting RAM and resources. And most apps switched to web frameworks like Electron where each one has its own huge web browser. Most people didn't care.

I hope this shortage has a silver lining of untangling the mess and refactoring the sea of bloat. But I know it's more likely some trick will be found to just patch it up a bit and only reduce the pain up to the new equilibrium level. For example something idiotic like Electron sharing resources across multiple apps and taking huge security risks. Corporations love to play false dichotomies to save pennies.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-29 11:11:59+00:00
This is about the 'Digital Euro', which seems to be both:

- a central bank digital currency, and

- a system for transferring this currency between people and businesses

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

It's not clear to me that it replaces Visa/Mastercard. If you have a problem with a vendor and you've paid by card, you have a chargeback as a last resort. Not so with cash or a CBDC.
by SuperNinKenDo | 2025-12-29 11:12:56+00:00
Currently reading through Robert Fagles' translation of the Odyssey - a superb page turner, though my father would say lacking compared to some of the older, less approachable translations - and it has a great breakdown in the opening notes of the various academic zeitgeists for understanding the composition of the poems, in particular these constructions - I belive written by Bernard Knox.

Would reproduce it here, but it's long, and obviously still under copyright. However if this post piques anybody's interest, you should be able to find a copy.... wherever copies may be found... and I highly recommend checking it out, if just for the relevant intro, if not for the translation - which I personally do rate.

I believe this post adds an interesting angle to the discussion that isn't particularly explored in the introduction to Fagles, but the Fagles introduction adds a lot of Academic-Historical context to how these literary techniques have interacted with Academic trends at various times to inform people's understanding of the pieces.

Together with the OP, the two make for great reading.
by curtisblaine | 2025-12-29 11:13:25+00:00
> Very bad faith interpretation. You know full well that's not what is meant when this phrase is employed.

I hope you're willing to extend this charitable way of interpreting intentions to the hyperboles made by the far right in their slogans. What if a anti-immigration group came out with the "eat the aliens" slogan? Should they be allowed to chant that? Make signs?

> Should we extend free speech to groups actively trying to suppress it

Again, it cuts two ways. Should we extend free speech to groups trying to suppress public discourse by deplatformimg, cancelling and banning people they don't like from speaking in campuses?

> You're completely muddying the waters, you know what is a genocide. And throwing in a line about trans people for some reasons

I only mentioned trans people because not believing their self appointed sexual identity was famously equated to erasing and genociding them. As you see, the waters are indeed very muddy. You see them clear just because you already made up your mind about what kind of speech you want to allow and what kind of speech you want to ruthlessly ban.
by apexalpha | 2025-12-29 11:13:25+00:00
If you backup the entire VM you are just backing up the Linux kernel itself and all the (GNU) tools with it.

Seems like a waste to me.

Backup your docker config and your data, that's what you actually need. The rest is just available online if you ever need it.

>Besides sometimes you need to run software that is not available on linux.

Really, like what?
by brailsafe | 2025-12-29 11:14:03+00:00
I can say that I haven't held off quite this long in the past for an OS update on mac, I wonder how long I'll stick it out.

I did buy the M4 Pro 16" 48gb last year, and am incredibly happy with it hardware-wise, so it'll stay on Sequoia as long as I can get away with.
by boerseth | 2025-12-29 11:14:19+00:00
> Brainf*ck is the antithesis of modern software engineering. There are no comments, no meaningful variable names, and no structure

That's not true. From the little time I've spent trying to read and write some simple programs in BF, I recall good examples being pretty legible.

In fact, because the language only relies on those few characters, anything else you type becomes a comment. Linebreaks, whitespace, alphanumeric characters and so on, they just get ignored by the interpreter.

Have a look at this, as an example: https://brainfuck.org/chessboard.b
by ajuc | 2025-12-29 11:14:19+00:00
> Instead of trying to frame things in terms of a mood or a feeling, it's better to try to understand things in terms of what is likely and unlikely to happen.

Emotions are influencing your thinking, whether you realize it or not. It's better to include them in your model of reality.

It's like modeling the lens you use in your camera. If you do that - you can correct for at least some distortions.
by bytesandbits | 2025-12-29 11:14:21+00:00
it might work, it worked for Thailand. Yet in my experience EU solutions either work very well or fail spectacularly. Particularly when the EU commission is the main driver, they generally become just bureaucratic poodles. However I think this one will work. Yet it will take many years to build (side effect of slow-moving EU) and many more years to adoption. In any case, forget about this for at least 5 years. I do welcome it, but I think it should have happened 15 years ago and I dont understand why it took so long. And I might still be proven wrong and this won't work at all, and yet I wouldn't be surprised. But again this worked for Thailand, so in theory this could be done in EU.
by pjerem | 2025-12-29 11:14:21+00:00
European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.

It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-29 11:14:44+00:00
> including more than 30,000 women and children according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry – figures the UN considers reliable.

Lol, yeah. Thank god we have such paragons of honest reporting as Iran-Qatar coalition of losers and their band of mercs and terrorists. Where would we get reliable info if not for them.

What next? Maria Zakharova nominated for Pulitzer?
by keepamovin | 2025-12-29 11:15:22+00:00
Hello HN — I made GOOD (aka BANG!), a tiny Web Components UI toolbelt built for joy. Dev joy. Minimal keystrokes, intuitive ergonomics, web grain. If you know the web, you know this. I wanted dev work to feel effortless, tools to get out of the way, and just to enjoy it. Real HTML/CSS/JS, no build, no parallel conceptual model. Minimal cognitive overload - at least for me. And that's why I built it. For me.

Maybe you like it, too. Maybe the ergonomics fit. Or maybe it doesn't. But we're all wired differentl, And i guess: build the tools that you know you need to do the work that you love. :)

Tech side: no build, no VDOM, just direct DOM updates and “bang tags” (HTML comments that upgrade into custom elements). Components live as simple files (markup.html, style.css, script.js), async templating just works, and you can lazy or super‑lazy load big UI.

Docs + demos: https://crisdosyago.github.io/good.html/
Love over fear! :)
by torginus | 2025-12-29 11:15:24+00:00
Very interesting talk, will definitely watch when I have the time!

XNA was very influential for me as well - when I was in high school, I tried to get into 3D game dev, and I started with Frank. D Luna's otherwise excellent book on DirectX gamedev - man that thing was a tome. However, having to learn DirectX, C++, linear algebra, shaders, WIN32 API, COM etc. at the same time (which to be fair were explained very thoroughly by the book), was just too much for me back then, not to mention the absolute pain of trying to get models and assets in the game.

Later on I discovered XNA, and it was a breath of fresh air for me - a much easier language, good IDE support and a decent way of importing assets, and an much nicer API made it so much easier to get started.

And the truly great thing about it was that it didn't dumb things down or hide stuff from the developer - it merely provided sane defaults, and utility functions so that you didn't have to engage with all that complexity at once.

I think Unity was also great as well, at least in the beginning (the first decade of existence), but it's chief issue is that Unity's 'dialect' of C# was very different from how you programmed in regular C# (or mostly any other engine) - my feeling is that Unity should've spun their own language/runtime rather than trying to make C# into what it wasn't designed to be.
by iamkonstantin | 2025-12-29 11:15:45+00:00
Nice. This also means sex workers (which are a legal and protected profession here) will finally be able to use the full range of card services without being subjected to the prudish views of Visa/Master Card. Same for adult entertainment websites and generally any service that doesn't align with the "US man in charge mindset". I think that alone makes it worth it.
by kevin061 | 2025-12-29 11:15:46+00:00
You have lost faith in the EU because they want to do exactly what you want ...?

Does the Thai payment system work in a German restaurant? Then why should the EU one work in Malaysia?

Can you pay with WeChat in France? Can you pay with CashApp in Ireland?

This is a very silly comment. I for one more than welcome this new payment system.
Ask HN: How to get good at RAW image editing?
by leononame | 2025-12-29 11:16:27+00:00
Today, I've stumbled across a post [0] on the front page talking about how RAW camera data is processed into an acceptable image. It had a quote that struck with me:

Additionally, applying the curve to each color channel accidentally desaturated the highlights. This effect looks rather good — and is what we’ve come to expect from film — but it’s has de-yellowed the star. It’s possible to separate the luminance and curve it while preserving color. On it’s own, this would make the LED Christmas lights into an overstaturated mess, but combining both methods can produce nice results.

I think of myself as a decent hobby photographer, but I'm really bad at turning the RAW images into nice pictures. I've extensively used the "Auto" button on Lightroom and after ditching Adobe due to their price hike I've tried out RAWTherapee and Darktable/Ansel, but I mostly play with the luminance/contrast/saturation sliders until it looks nice without understanding what I do.

Reconstructing overexposed areas nicely or achieving certain visual effects is luck, same with getting the colors I'd like.

There is a ton of material out there, but I have the feeling I can't judge what is good and what is just blogspam, slop or low effort content.

I don't mind using commercial tools, but apart from learning the tool I also would like to learn and understand the underlying process.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415225
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-29 11:16:28+00:00
I visited China last year. I had a lot of issues accessing some known VPN services. My main tool to avoid censorship was using my foreign roaming and then I used VLESS on my VPS. Both approaches worked for me.

I'm not sure about rate limited by few megabytes per second, as I had rate limits like few bytes per second, when I tried to use ssh as a proxy. Few megabytes per seconds sounds like a perfect connectivity to me.
by uecker | 2025-12-29 11:17:31+00:00
Your problem is not the C committee but your lack of understanding how optimizing compilers work. WG14 could, of course, specify that a compiler has do exactly what you tell it to do. And in fact, every compiler supports this already: Im most cases even by default! Just do not turn on optimization. But this is not what most people want.

Once you accept that optimizing compilers do, well, optimizations, the question is what should be allowed and what not. Both inlining "memset" and eliminating dead stores are both simply optimizations which people generally want.

If you want a store not to be eliminated by a compiler, you can make it volatile. The C standard says this can not be deleted by optimizations. The criticism with this was that later undefined behavior could "undo" this by "travelling in time". We made it clear in ISO C23 that this not allowed (and I believe it never was) - against protests from some compiler folks. Compilers still do not fully conform to this, which shows the limited power WG14 has to change reality.
by moooo99 | 2025-12-29 11:17:43+00:00
> Why should water be public infra but food is not?

The main reason why infrastructure of any kind (water, sewage, etc) is a public infrastructure - even in largely privatized economies - is that infrastructure is essentially a natural monopoly. Food on the other hand isn't and it can largely be traded as a commodity (which is, at least in my opinion, a major reason why our food system is so broken).
by yablak | 2025-12-29 11:17:44+00:00
> We would like to keep our small code-model. What other strategies can we pursue?

Move all the hot BBs near each other, right?

Facebook's solution: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/bolt%2FREADME...

Google's:

https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-September/135...
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-29 11:18:35+00:00
You don't need to destroy individual countries to achieve peace and prosperity.

We had prosperity befote the EC and we can, and did, achieve peace by a mindset shift after two world wars and free trade. There is a big difference between the original EEC and the EU, too.

Again these are all a posteriori arguments that are repeated ad nauseam to justify a federal Europe and to manufacture consent.
by stefanfisk | 2025-12-29 11:20:04+00:00
”What doesn’t kill your only cripples you for life” best describes its state. I did my best to dry it up ASAP but when I flipped it over water started pouring out of the rear fan grid…

TouchID no longer works, Bluetooth reception is shit and various keys feel sticky/crunchy. I’d keep it as-is if it wasn’t my main work machine.
by boobsbr | 2025-12-29 11:20:28+00:00
Maybe these?

https://patorjk.com/blog/2025/11/02/what-happens-if-you-blur...

https://patorjk.com/blog/2025/03/10/making-a-follow-up-to-su...

https://relativisticobserver.blogspot.com/2012/02/keeping-it...
by perching_aix | 2025-12-29 11:20:35+00:00
Ah yes, after muricans bad, let's have some euros bad.

I learn some amazing things on this site. Apparently the culture agnostic, historical practice of designating words and phrases as distasteful is actually a modern American, European, no actually Globalist, but ah no actually religious, but also no maybe Chinese?, no, definitely a Russian mind virus. Whatever the prominent narrative is for the given person at any given time.

Bit like when "mums is blaming everything on the computer". Just with political sophistry.
by TeodorDyakov | 2025-12-29 11:20:57+00:00
I too noticed that Gemini is very reluctant to start spewing code directly, thats why I prompted it in such a specific manner to trigger the infinite loop.
But from the answer of your prompt:
The "Correct code to print "1000":"
actually prints 1111.
So yeah it is still wrong even for something super simple.
by acheong08 | 2025-12-29 11:20:58+00:00
Currently in China (as a visitor). Wireguard literally just works (to a VPS). Mullvad works as a commercial provider, just slower. Xray-core (vless, Trojan) if you're paranoid. I have my own proxy over syncthing relays https://github.com/acheong08/syndicate which I use to proxy to my home in the UK (residential IP) without exposing any ports.

I get rate limited to around 10mbps in Chongqing. Was slightly higher in Beijing.
by kolektiv | 2025-12-29 11:21:12+00:00
> a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can

Really? Can they? Because in a functioning democracy you generally have recourse to courts, tertiary adjudication of various forms, a (relatively) free press that you can try and interest in taking up your story, etc. In a brutal dictatorship you're likely to have none of those, and to go missing in the night if you try and suggest that you should.

It's absolutely right to oppose politicians you disagree with - that's what political engagement is all about! But beyond a certain level, hyperbole (and the general sense of "they're all the same") simply does serve to undermine not just democracy, but any rationale for political engagement vs. simple rioting.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-12-29 11:21:13+00:00
It is an interesting idea, but let’s not assume autistic traits make you more talented in anything. There certainly is very highly intelligent people with autistic traits that are able to use hyper-focusing to help them work very hard and succeed in academia or at work. I doubt any rational person is looking for ”a cure” for the Alan Turings and Albert Einsteins of this world. Nor even for a regular, albeit slightly odd, chap like myself, who likes reading books alone with his cat and studying math instead of seeing other people.

However there are people with severe autism that makes it more or less impossible for them to communicate with other people or live independently. If these people could have their life improved it might make huge difference to them and their families.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-12-29 11:21:26+00:00
A thought occurs. GPUs have a limited lifespan. Gpus die after 1-3 years of use.[1] Just in time to train an LLM or two. The data centers themselves without the GPUS is like 40% of the cost from what I hear. In 3 years from now when the boom ends, they are going to be empty warehouses, with very good networking and cooling.

[1]. https://ithy.com/article/data-center-gpu-lifespan-explained-...
by juliie | 2025-12-29 11:21:35+00:00
I'm also not a native English speaker, but I've decided to avoid using AI for formatting or changing the tone of what I write. That tends to result in extremely generic outputs that "feel" AI, no matter how much effort I put into writing it.

Asking for it to point out mistakes, without providing alternatives, seems like a better way to actually get better at writing.

Prompting the Ai to use a specific tone might result in something that's less generic, but imo that's not the right place to spend efforts.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-29 11:21:38+00:00
I do not remember "evidence that any of this stuff really works" about curing an existing cancer, but there was rather strong evidence in large-scale studies with various lab animals, in which a mutagen agent created tumors when they were fed normally, but no tumors appeared when they were malnourished, either by eating a reduced amount of protein, or by eating the normal amount of protein, but with a bad amino-acid profile.

Both forms of malnutrition would diminish the capacity of synthesizing proteins, which would affect mainly a fast-growing organ, like the tumors. Presumably this slowed down the growth of the tumors, allowing time for the immune system to react and suppress them in their incipient form.

Unfortunately, malnutrition as a prophylactic measure does not really work, as it enhances the risk of other diseases, even if it might lower the risk of cancer.

The method described in the parent article might have better chances, but it seems likely to work only with a cancer that has been discovered very early.
by isodev | 2025-12-29 11:23:32+00:00
Some corrections:

- The EU is not a state, it's a governance body composed of representatives from individual member states. Every state is responsible for implementing their take on the directive.

- "EU poor track record on fostering innovation" - many things you use online have been researched and conceptualised in the EU. Even if they go elsewhere for funding, don't mistake where "innovation" happens and where it gets packaged by VC money for sale and enschitification.

- compliance costs: I think that's only expensive for companies who intend to to sell or otherwise do something shady with user data. Remember, not collecting data makes you instantly compliant with zero cost.
by moooo99 | 2025-12-29 11:23:46+00:00
I still fail to see the regulation inflation. It is not like there was an absence of regulation before the EU. But now once you comply with EU regulation, you have access to a significantly larger market than before, where you had to comply with national regulations.

So yeah, depending on what market your institution is from, you might see an increase in regulation. But changes are, once you expand beyond national borders, you have less regulation to deal with as compared to before the EU.
by noosphr | 2025-12-29 11:24:08+00:00
Stuff like this is fascinating. Truly the road not taken.

Tin foil hat on: i think that a huge part of the major buyout of ram from AI companies is to keep people from realising that we are essentially at the home computer revolution stage of llms. I have a 1tb ram machine which with custom agents outperforms all the proprietary models. It's private, secure and won't let me be motetized.
by dangus | 2025-12-29 11:24:31+00:00
> It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations with a distinct personality.

You can buy a kid’s tiger electronics style toy that plays 20 questions.

It’s not like this LLM is bastion of glorious efficiency, it’s just stripped down to fit on the hardware.

Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application.

Including Jira in the conversation doesn’t even make logical sense. It’s not a desktop application that consumes memory. Jira has such a wide scope that the word “Jira” doesn’t even describe a single product.
by yablak | 2025-12-29 11:24:44+00:00
Yes, but it can be more of a pain keeping track of pairs. In production though, this is what's done. And given a fault, the debug binary can be found in a database and used to gdb the issue given the core. You do have to limit certain online optimizations in order to have useful tracebacks.

This also requires careful tracking of prod builds and their symbol files... A kind of symbol db.
by mathverse | 2025-12-29 11:25:07+00:00
>SEPA is instant and no fees outside the EU too, like Norway and UK.
This is not the point. They need to be in SEPA for it to work.

>It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?

The point is Thailand managed this due to economic, capitalist needs across different countries and cultures.

The EU is a union and did not even manage to do that as well as Thailand.