MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-12-27 16:13:17+00:00
The MRuby embedding API isn't a whole lot like Lua's. Lua is a fantastic experience to embed. You might have to futz with the registry to store Lua objects in a C struct, but the abstraction allows you to almost never have to actually worry about the VM internals or the GC directly. Mruby is a lot more like Ruby. Raw objects are exposed to you, you have to turn off strict aliasing because inheritance is implemented by the old "common meta struct as first member" idiom, you have to manually trigger VM collecting in long-running C code ( https://github.com/mruby/mruby/blob/master/doc/guides/gc-are... ), getting args in a C function involves a variadic scanf-style function. The most striking difference is documentation. The documentation of the mruby C API is actually "read the headers". There are many seemingly redundant functions that look like they do the same thing, completely without explanatory comments, or minimal inscrutable comments:

/* mrb_gc_protect() leaves the object in the arena */
MRB_API void mrb_gc_protect(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);
/* mrb_gc_register() keeps the object from GC. */
MRB_API void mrb_gc_register(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);
/* mrb_gc_unregister() removes the object from GC root. */
MRB_API void mrb_gc_unregister(mrb_state *mrb, mrb_value obj);

I'd rather work with Ruby as a language than Lua, but I'd much rather work with Lua than Mruby for the documentation and API alone. If mruby had anything close to the Lua reference documentation, I'd be all over it. As-is, embedding mruby kind of sucks, which is a real shame.
by qkeast | 2025-12-27 16:13:38+00:00
Some highlights from this year include:

- The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

- The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

- A Frog In The Fall (And Later On) by Linnea Sterte (A graphic novel)

Overall I'm at 65 books on the year—I maintain a reading list[1] on my personal site that has the rest.

[1] https://quinnkeast.com/reading
Show HN: SQL Data Builder – Visual schema and query builder
by tkrenn06 | 2025-12-27 16:14:44+00:00
Hi HN!

I’ve been building SQL Data Builder, a web-based visual database management tool that makes creating and managing SQL databases way easier — no SQL syntax knowledge required. It’s a part of the VPS Commander suite but fully usable on its own:What it does

Visual table designer with drag-and-drop column & relationship editing

Interactive ER diagrams that update as you design

Inline data editing & filtering in a spreadsheet-like view

Automatic SQL code generation so you can learn from your actions

Works with real databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite

Web-based, no installation — just open your browser and connect
VPS Commander

Why I built it
I was tired of heavyweight, desktop-only tools and outdated UIs that make simple schema design and querying slower than it needs to be. I wanted something:

Fast to learn and productive from the first click

Accessible from anywhere without installing

Helpful both for beginners and seasoned developers. I’m sharing this not just for feedback, but to find out how visual DB workflows resonate with devs who deal with schema design and ad-hoc data tasks every day.

Happy to answer questions about design, implementation, UX choices, or future features! Thanks!
Show HN: LLM Sorter – Python package to sort lists of items using LLM calls
by dkalola | 2025-12-27 16:14:45+00:00
Just a quick experiment I thought of building. Limited practical usage, for sure.

A Python library that uses LLMs as comparators for semantic sorting. Sort any list by meaning, tone, complexity, urgency, or any criteria expressible in natural language. This library uses an OpenRouter API key to interface with LLM providers.
by foota | 2025-12-27 16:15:09+00:00
I'm not trying to be too pc, but you can't really tell based on someone's name where they were born.

That said, the US only has some 5% of the worlds population (albeit probably a larger proportion of the literate population), so you'd only expect some fraction of the world's researchers to be US born. Not to mention that US born is an even smaller fraction of births (2.5-3%, by Google), so you'd expect an even smaller fraction of US born researchers. So even if we assume that we're on par with peer countries, you'd only expect US born researchers to be a fraction of the overall research population. We'd have to be vastly better at educating people to do otherwise, which is a longshot.

Obviously this makes turning away international students incredibly stupid, but what are we to do against stupidity?
by treetalker | 2025-12-27 16:15:13+00:00
Thanks for sharing this, and for providing lots of detail about the use of LLMs (to tutor during development). I appreciate the candor and additional explanation of how to prompt in order to achieve a similar process.

One question that wasn't answered in the readme: Can queries be saved and reused? That is the main feature I'm looking for: queries that are selectable as if they were folders or custom feeds.
by jupe69 | 2025-12-27 16:15:28+00:00
I built a SwiftUI app to manage Homebrew packages visually. Pure native, ~15MB, no Electron.

Core features:
- Package management (search, install, uninstall, upgrade)
- Services dashboard (start/stop/restart brew services, auto-refresh)
- Taps management
- Brewfile import/export
- Diagnostics (brew doctor, disk usage, cleanup)
- Mac App Store integration via mas CLI

The Services view was the main thing I wanted - I run PostgreSQL, Redis, and nginx through Homebrew and got tired of typing `brew services list`. Now I can see status at a glance and control everything with one click.

Also added mas integration, which I haven't seen in other Homebrew GUIs. If you use `brew install mas`, Taphouse can manage App Store apps too - unified package management.

Free version covers basics. Pro is $4.99 one-time for bulk operations, menu bar icon, auto-updates, etc.

Built with SwiftUI, targets macOS 14+. First Swift project after years away from coding (was in management). Would appreciate any feedback.

https://taphouse.multimodalsolutions.gr
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-27 16:15:38+00:00
unlike others, i like the site and the initial prompt.

Lost me at "verify email" though. Why get so creative, yet limit yourself to archaic "email". Why do *YOU* the provider need me to have an email or a phone?

Look, mullvad can provide vpn services without email or all that nonsense. If you want people who will use ssh to order things, these are the same people that would get your service because you're not asking for dumb things like email. It's the first thing you ask of potential users, and it's an obstacle preventing them from giving you their money!

You can issue users a recovery/access key and/or let them user their ssh public key and trust they know how to manage that on their own. If you have messages for them, display that when they login. This sort of stuff differentiates your service, ssh does too, but it's cosmetic and gimmicky. I would prefer a rest-api over ssh anyways, but ssh is cool too.
by fogus | 2025-12-27 16:16:17+00:00
Using "performative" as a pejorative is dismissive. I like to read and I like to write. These are my hobbies and as a result posts like this come out. I will not apologize for finding certain topics exciting and being excited by a desire to share my excitement with the world. You say that the "Internet would be a better place if it'd be full of content like this post." I agree, and so I share.

By the way. I don't like beer.
Show HN: Year in Review – Breakout with your GitHub contributions
by r4mimu | 2025-12-27 16:16:19+00:00
Hi HN! it's year-end, so I built a very responsible way to review my GitHub year: turn my contribution calendar into a Breakout level and smash through it.

gh-kusa-breaker is a terminal Breakout game where each day on your GitHub contribution graph becomes a brick (more contributions = tougher brick). It uses `gh` auth and GitHub’s GraphQL contributionCalendar.

Try it:
gh extension install fchimpan/gh-kusa-breaker
gh auth login
gh kusa-breaker

In Japanese we call the contribution graph "kusa"(grass). Now you can literally break it.

Repo + demo: `https://github.com/fchimpan/gh-kusa-breaker`.
Feedback welcome.
by rkomorn | 2025-12-27 16:17:26+00:00
I'm arguing that "it's their life, so they'll be more careful than 'the man'" is tenuous.

There have been many people who "made informed decisions" about their medical treatments over the advice of professionals and ended up being wrong. They don't count as thrill seekers.

Even in other threads on HN, you'll find takes on this topic ranging from "I don't trust my device, so I do finger tests every day" to "I trust my vibes and my device and don't do finger tests anymore" which tells me there's a pretty wide spectrum along which hackers might fall.

I'm not at all arguing that it's impossible that someone would do a good job of hacking their device, let alone do better than pharma/med companies.

I just don't buy that everyone who hacks away at it will inherently do a better than said companies because their life is at stake. There are way too many examples of people taking their lives in their own hands and getting it wrong.
by consumer451 | 2025-12-27 16:18:12+00:00
Apologies for replying to myself, I am fumbling in my ignorance here, and genuinely curious if anyone could share any other valuable/interesting things from this "movement." In all other cases of people calling themselves "rationalists," it has been a huge red flag for me, as a fallibilist.

I guess Dwarkesh Patel is part of that community? Well, his interviews are quite interesting, at least in the sense of seeing into a world that I otherwise don't see regarding AI researchers, and his questions are often quite good. Also, after interviewing many leading researchers and being on the hype train, he eventually did say a few months ago "yeah, we ain't there yet," after trying to use leading tools to make his own podcast. That's intellectual honesty that is greatly missing in this world. So, there is that? I am also a huge fan of his Sara Paine pieces, at least on her part.
by eviks | 2025-12-27 16:18:54+00:00
> Then any solutions is broken in this way.

Nope, you're just doing the same thing - purposefully ignoring the issue to make your non-solution comparable...

> Even my bluetooth speaker comes with a manual.

... in this case - the length and scope of the manual. First, you can operate the speaker without the manual or with just a single read of the manual- so spend a few seconds to learn how to pair (but you might not even need that as "hold to pair" might be something you remember from other devices), then the power/volume buttons require no manual because you've operated such buttons your whole life.

> Same as not reading ffmpeg manual

Of course it's not the same, the ffmpeg manual isn't a tiny page of 5 items, and no other apps will help you learn the peculiarities of ffmpeg. Also, the whole point of intuitive UI with "typed info" is that you don't need to read that huge manual to do the basics as you can simply follow the structure laid out by someone more knowledgeable

> ffmpeg on Window is so far the beaten path that it may as well be in Mordor. I would gladly bet that someone that knows how to run ffmpeg on windows also knows how to find the documentation for it.

Who would take that irrelevant bet? The issue isn't in finding! the manual!

> Why would I find the perfect query?

To prove that your solution works. I know it doesn't and challenge you to prove otherwise. Your suggestion is worse than asking users to Google, because at least there users will likely get the correct top result in a few tries for common needs

> Do you go in the library and then find the correct line of the correct book in one go?

No, I open an app and pick the correct format from the drop-down menu correctly in one go

> Or do you consult the list of books of books for a theme, select a few candidates, consult their index, and then read the pages?

Oh man, even in your fantasies you can't come up with a good workflow! No wonder you're fine suggesting everyone wastes a lot of time aproposing empty queries
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-27 16:20:16+00:00
>Hocus Pocus

I read this during the same time I was copyediting a good friend's Vietnam memoir. As a staff sargeant [E6], my buddy saw/did some things — including lobbing a girl's head off as she stepped in front of his rocket trajectory — but we both crossed eyes when I explained what the calculation on the last page of HP resulted in: survivor's remorse of rape & pillaging.

How many little half-Sargeants must being running around 'Nam...
by doginasuit | 2025-12-27 16:21:28+00:00
I also don't understand the reaction. The AI Village seems to be based on a flawed understanding of LLMs and what they are capable of but at least it is an open project and useful as knowledge gathering. Annoying spam emails are about what I would expect, but it is useful as an earnest demonstration of their effectiveness. I can understand anger at the direction of the tech in general, and there is something grotesque about the emails, but I can find much more disturbing spam if I go check my inbox. It seems like an overreaction.
by cyclotol | 2025-12-27 16:21:59+00:00
Yet another board which will never have proper upstream support because the SoC vendor refused to implement the ARM BSA standard which would provide EFI/ACPI support instead of relying on undiscoverable devices only exposed through device tree. ACPI isn't perfect but it's way better than device trees which are seldom updated so the device will remain stuck with old kernels.
by kibwen | 2025-12-27 16:22:06+00:00
No, crates.io isn't locked to Github. crates.io uses Github as an identity provider, but there's nothing stopping them from adding more. Furthermore, they've avoided tying themselves to Github in other ways, for example, by resisting all the people just telling them to allow using Github usernames as package namespaces, specifically to prevent them from being locked to Github.
by 613style | 2025-12-27 16:22:10+00:00
Non-physicst here. Hopefully someone can correct me or elaborate. My understanding is that what's being described is smaller scale decoherence inside the proton. Normally, the universe only asks protons the question: "are you a proton?" and it's like "Yep I'm a proton." (What's your baryon number? What's your charge? etc)

When we blast it with higher and higher energies, we're asking new questions: "What are the momenta of your quarks? What's your color field arrangement?" There are many possible answers to those questions and we're now starting to see the landscape of them.

So having different answers based on how you look is really answering different questions, just like asking an electron: What's your momentum? What's your location?
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-27 16:23:35+00:00
>Everything is easier in hindsight isn't it? Especially with such a complex problem.

These sorts of statements are far too often as a justification to dodge responsibility used by those who at the time just poured more virgins into the volcano in a obviously vain attempt to change the weather (or whatever metaphor for "clearly not gonna work but ideologically convenient" you want to use).
by raverbashing | 2025-12-27 16:24:42+00:00
1 - Understand the main processes that sales orgs use (MEDDIC or its variations) - you don't need to follow it in all its details but yes in the general idea

2 - Understand what is the problem you're solving and how companies can benefit from it

3 - Understand how companies actually do procurement

4 - Outbound sales are the ones that sucks the most. A rejection is just a rejection, don't take it personally (one part of having actual sales people is being a more impersonal process - they care about the sales but a rejection is taken less personally)
by dahart | 2025-12-27 16:25:12+00:00
One of the examples of digital commons in the article is Wikipedia itself, which is privately owned, so now you can be sure the Wikipedia article does backup my claim at least a little.

The Microsoft example in this subthread is GitHub, not Windows. Windows is not a digital commons, because it’s neither free nor finite. Github is (or was) both. That is the criteria that Wikipedia is using to apply the descriptor ‘commons’: something that is both freely available to the public, and comes in limited supply, e.g. bandwidth, storage, databases, compute, etc.

Wikipedia’s article seems to be careful to not discuss ownership nor define the tragedy of the commons in terms of ownership, presumably because the phrase describes something that can still happen when privately owned things are made freely available. I skimmed Investopedia’s article on Tragedy as well, and it seems similarly to not explicitly discuss ownership, and even brings up the complicated issue of lack of international commons. That’s an interesting point: whatever we call commons locally may not be a commons globally. That suggests that even the original classic notion of tragedy of the commons often involves a type of private ownership, i.e. overfishing a “public” lake is a lake owned by a specific country, cattle overusing a “public” pasture is land owned by a specific country, and these resources might not be truly common when considered globally.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-27 16:25:17+00:00
Yeah I've got hourly backups out to multiple remote servers. My dev machine is in essence fungible. If it gets hosed, I'll wipe the drive and drop a good backup in. If it catches fire, I'll pick up a different machine and drop in the good backup.

I have more important things to waste my time on than writing absurd sandboxes to run AI agents without guardrails in. What even?
by Honga | 2025-12-27 16:25:18+00:00
While is was taking MPH I'd take 10mg three times a day (male, 76kg). The times I'd taken twice that amount would turn me into a face twisted gargoyle. 40mg would be unpleasant for sure.

I met a couple of doctors at a party once who would take 60mg recreationally each before going dancing. Seemed unreal.
by jancsika | 2025-12-27 16:26:05+00:00
I don't understand the dichotomy. What's the situation where I'd ever be forced to choose between, say, UTF-8 or Linear Pulse-Code Modulation?

This reads like someone who got really excited about a subject but only ever learned to communicate in breathless "Ford vs. Chevy" kid-argument style.

We all like text here. Stop selling.

Edit: clarifications
by UncleMeat | 2025-12-27 16:27:26+00:00
I would be very surprised if no interesting art could be made with LLMs. But, like a camera, it produces a distinct kind of art to other tools. We do not say that a camera produces a painting. Instead photography is its own medium with its own forms and techniques and strengths and weaknesses.

Using photography to claim that obviously all good writing will be LLM replacements for current writing is... odd.
by matt_s | 2025-12-27 16:27:36+00:00
It’s fundamentally not viable in the sense of mass adoption. Security conscious and tech nerds (like HN audience) might do it but mass adoption, aka crossing the chasm from early adopters and onwards, isn’t feasible because all the aunts, uncles and grandma’s out there aren’t going to pay for it or switch.

If those user types haven’t moved en masse off twitter to <insert some replacement> then what would compel people to move, and pay for something they don’t pay for with money?

If by existing relationships you mean only like 2 degrees of separation then its implied that there is no global posting, no viral capability and probably no businesses or politicians on it (all amazing features I would love). Basically a family and friends network. A huge difficulty would be how to price it, one time fee for a family tree? The largest costs are going to be bandwidth and storage. If you go no video/images then what pulls people in?

Company structure might be key too. If it’s built as employee owned and operated with a small profit goal, it might take longer to grow but odds are enshitification or corrupt management can be avoided.
by skybrian | 2025-12-27 16:28:07+00:00
I did a brief news search for something from a more neutral party and found this article:

Federal retirement processing has slowed substantially this year due to DRP. As OPM continues modernizing retirement systems, another application surge looms.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dar...

They seem to think the new systems helped:

> Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade.

> Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM.

> “OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network.

> But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications.

> “A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”
by whakim | 2025-12-27 16:29:42+00:00
> Most of the time you don't need a different Python version from the system one.

Except for literally anytime you’re collaborating with anyone, ever? I can’t even begin to imagine working on a project where folks just use whatever python version their OS happens to ship with. Do you also just ship the latest version of whatever container because most of the time nothing has changed?
by kibwen | 2025-12-27 16:30:27+00:00
I mean, it's sort of the other way around. Cargo was built to be able to natively understand git-based dependencies, in the sense that you can bypass a crate registry and instead just point it directly at a git repo. That means that Cargo already had to have the ability to clone git repos, and so when it came to decide how to implement the index (which looks pretty similar to a git repo if you squint), choosing to use git required them to add literally no new dependencies and almost no new code.

Let's also keep in mind that the use case mentioned in the OP is specifically about the index, which is just the datastructure that informs the version resolver how to resolve versions. When it came time to replace the git-based index, Cargo didn't replace it with a specialized database, it replaced it with HTTP endpoints (which are probably just backed by an off-the-shelf database). It's not clear what sort of specialized database would be useful to abstract this for other package managers.
by Muromec | 2025-12-27 16:30:34+00:00
Its the kernel drivers, not firmware. There is no bios or acpi, so the kernel itself has to support a specifc board. In practice it means there is a dtb file that configures it and the actual drivers in the kernel.

Manufacturers hack it together, flash to device and publish the sources, but dont bother with upstreaming and move on.

Same story as android devices not having updates two years after release.
by jeremyjh | 2025-12-27 16:31:33+00:00
I thought the same, but it’s not quite like either of those things. It has their same benefits but way more flexibility with its VM model. It offers auth, and will forward most ports for developer access.

All this was totally lost on me from looking at the website. “I already have tilde and sdf, I don’t need this.”

If I hadn’t looked into the comments I would still think that.