MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-12-26 23:28:56+00:00
Coming from 14 years of Perl, and dabbling in Perl 6, I don’t consider Rust a “large language”… but like Perl (and to an extent C++) I do find people craft their own dialects over time via osmosis.

And I don’t see anything bad about this!

After 11 years of full-time Rust, I have never needed to use Pin once, and it’s only having to do FFI have I even had to reach for unsafe.

Unless you memorise the Rust Reference Manual and constantly level up with each release, you’ll never “know” the whole language… but IMHO this shouldn’t stop you from enjoying your small self-dialect - TMTOWTDI!
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-26 23:29:16+00:00
> Linus rants

Linus is arguing against a strawman that Conservancy never actually argued. See https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/dec/24/vizio-msa-irrelev... for details.

> Which brings us to the question: what is this guy going to do with (presumably) the kernel source?

https://openaps.org/
by anthonj | 2025-12-26 23:29:51+00:00
Uhm I don't know, I used to have a dumb phone in middle school. And since then I have always read the time in 24h format in my life. But I never struggle to read a conventional clocks, nor I get confused about the am/pm 12h format. The concept around the clock is just too simple to just forget.

This sounds like a case of sloppiness of their educators.
by timeforcomputer | 2025-12-26 23:29:58+00:00
Stephen King - The Bachman Books, Different Seasons

Five of those books Nobel Prize physicists wrote about the future of physics

Red Rising first trilogy

Three short stories by Takeshi Kitano

Two books by Hans Reichenbach on relativity

The collected papers of Hermann Helmholtz

Starship Troopers

Seven Graham Greene novels

Yukio Mishima's first three translated novels

Jennifer Coopersmith's books on the history/meaning of energy and least action

Einstein - Sidelights on Relativity (early expository papers)

The Fisherman, The North Water (both just ok)

Two Kobo Abe novels

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine

Paul Bowles' books (I have one left)

Popular lectures of Lord Kelvin

Oppenheimer - The Open Mind
by teddyh | 2025-12-26 23:30:38+00:00
Rather crucially, the license itself does not say that you have the right to the source code. It is only the separate written offer which gives you that right. If you did not receive such an offer, you don’t have any right to it. But then, the company has already, unquestionably, violated the GPL, and the company can be sued immediately. Specifically, you don’t have to first ask the company for the source code! The lack of a written offer is in itself a clear violation.
by pico303 | 2025-12-26 23:32:34+00:00
Maybe I’m not smart enough to grasp all these flowery words, but is this suggesting if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests and without compensating me as long as your sales and marketing is better than mine?

I don’t think Rockchip learned from the ffmoeg code. They simply copied it outright without attribution.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-26 23:32:47+00:00
The recipient of that object code is the medical device supplier, not the end-user.

It's subsequently transferred to you after presenting a prescription, without any accompanying offer of source code.

In other words, assume you are the second owner in all cases when it comes to certified medical equipment.

AFAIK if you find an Android phone in the trash, you are not entitled to source either since you never received the offer of source during a purchase transaction. You know that little slip of paper you toss as soon as you open some new electronics that says "Open Source Software Notice".
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-26 23:33:34+00:00
Ehh, I'm not sure it's fair to call the FSF dynamic linking absolutists. They only care about any of this because they've boxed themselves into a corner. They want to prevent people from writing proprietary wrappers around copyleft programs, but they don't want a license so restrictive that proprietary and copyleft programs are forbidden from interacting, and Freedom 0 means they can't explicitly prohibit a copyleft program from being used for suchandsuch purpose.
by kpcyrd | 2025-12-26 23:33:55+00:00
The author seems a little lost tbh, it's starting with "your users should not all clone your database" which I definitely agree with, but that doesn't mean you can't encode your data in a git graph.

It then digresses into implementation details of Github's backend implementation (how is 20k forks relevant?), then complains about default settings of the "standard" git implementation. You don't need to checkout a git working tree to have efficient key value lookups. Without a git working tree you don't need to worry about filesystem directory limits, case sensitivity and path length limits.

I was surprised the author believes the git-equivalent of a database migration is a git history rewrite.

What do you want me to do, invent my own database? Run postgres on a $5 VPS and have everybody accept it as single-point-of-failure?
by farhaven | 2025-12-26 23:35:08+00:00
If you're looking for a similar event, you might want to check out GPN - Gulaschprogrammiernacht (https://gulas.ch).

It skews a bit more German, but it's essentially a smaller "summer congress" that used to have free attendance until this year (tickets now cost 10€ to cover the breakfast, IIRC). A lot less people there, but the general vibe is very similar.
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-12-26 23:36:45+00:00
George Orwell showed us that small languages constrain our thinking.

A small language but with the ability to extend it (like Lisp) is probably the sweet spot, but lol look at what you have actually achieved - your own dialect that you have to reinvent for each project - also which other people have had to reinvent time after time.

Let languages and thought be large, but only used what is needed.
by ghaff | 2025-12-26 23:37:03+00:00
I don't know exactly. Maybe $400K; haven't had appraised recently. One neighbor has a Christmas tree farm. The other has a pasture with horses. I don't personally have a huge amount of land--a bit over 4 acres. Don't do anything personally with my land.

But, basically, while CA is complicated (because of the geography) you can generally get away from walking to things in a city and there are a lot cheaper options in other cases. Lot of exurbs even around generally expensive cities--and even when lots of companies are out there as well.
by teddyh | 2025-12-26 23:37:26+00:00
> But GPL is a contract

Not according to the original reasoning by its creators, but opinions differ wildly. However, this is irrelevant to the point; the written offer, which is separate from the GPL, is what is failing to be honored, not the GPL. If you did not receive such a written offer, the GPL, in itself, makes no guarantee that you have the right to the source code.
Ask HN: Practical AI setup for staying on top of personal messages?
by sunsetMurk | 2025-12-26 23:37:48+00:00
End-of-year reflection: I’ve let messages pile up, and I want a sustainable way to maintain the relationships I care about.

Most of my personal backlog is on iPhone/iMessage, and I’m looking for a mobile-first system. I’m also juggling work + personal logistics, so I need something that works in short batches vs. being “always on”.

I’m looking for success/failure stories and practical setups using AI for triage + drafting across texts/email/voicemail. I’m not looking to auto-send replies—just help deciding what to reply to and drafting something I’ll send myself.

Questions I’d love input on:

- What workflow finally stuck (batching, queues, reminders, templates, “SLA” rules)?
- What failed (tone mismatch, hallucinations, too much friction, privacy concerns, social blowback)?
- Which tools were worth it (clients, plugins, Shortcuts, local vs cloud), and why?
- Any prompt patterns that reliably produce short, warm, context-aware replies?

If you built something custom (scripts/Shortcuts/agents), I’d love the rough architecture.
by numbsafari | 2025-12-26 23:37:56+00:00
This year:

- I read the entire “Frog & Toad” collection. Probably about 30 times, some stories more.

- “Little Shrew’s Day”… probably 25 times.

- Many of the “Construction Site” series books, especially the OG “Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site”. The “Garbage Crew” and “Airport” books featured heavily.

- Started to mix in some “Pete the Cat” titles.

- “Detective Dog Nell” got a lot of air play.

Lots of others, but those are definitely the frequent fliers.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-12-26 23:38:09+00:00
> Finding a modern alternative to Matomo

And not a hint on why.

> Matomo has barely evolved in terms of UI, and it feels pretty dated now

It's so sad what my Phillips screwdriver barely evolved in the last 100 years. D'oh!

> It has a few gotchas like this weirdness around updating it in its Docker image.

I'm just clicking the update button in the web UI and waiting a minute.

> Umami is a NextJS app with PostgreSQL

Aaaaand? It would be somewhat understandable if you ran metrics for the hundreds of sites. But you only have two. So - why? Why is this even matters for you?

> no plugins

Ah, the famous 'but I don't need MMS [despite everyone in the world uses them]' line of thinking. BTW you could, you know, just not installing any plugins in Matomo - it would be effectively the same result as not having a plugin support in Umami.

> reduced feature set

Five years ago? Maybe. This is one of the reasons I didn't bother with repairing it when my installation quietly died on itself. But looking at the current list it's hard to say Umami has 'a reduced feature set'.

> that their Cloud hosted version has an import feature, but it’s not open source

And a hard pivot to the 'cloud-first' was another reason why I decided not to bother with Umami anymore. It was heavily advertised as an open source and open source alternative to the other solutions on the market and now you can't even find what you can self-host it on the front page! Of course if don't count . Contribute . as a such description. No mention of self-hosting on Pricing at all.

> Now, I’m free to say goodbye to Matomo, and save resources.

How much resources do you save?

Overall I'm glad what you found a way to preserve the data instead of just throwing it away - and even shared the story and tools to everyone.
by nateb2022 | 2025-12-26 23:38:22+00:00
> And these, IMO, are more prevalent than the positive ones overall.

If a problem is this widespread, a conference is arguably the best place to address it.

> but there are also numerous bad examples of AI use

which should be discussed publicly. I think we all have a lot to learn from each others' successes and failures, which is where coming together at a conference can really help.
Show HN: ISON – Data format that uses 30-70% fewer tokens than JSON for LLMs
by maheshvaikri99 | 2025-12-26 23:38:28+00:00
ISON (Interchange Simple Object Notation) - a data format optimized for LLMs and Agentic AI.

The problem: JSON wastes tokens. Curly braces, quotes, colons, commas - all eat into your context window.

ISON uses tabular patterns that LLMs already understand from training data:

JSON (87 tokens):
{
"users": [
{"id": 1, "name": "Alice", "email": "alice@example.com"},
{"id": 2, "name": "Bob", "email": "bob@example.com"}
]
}

ISON (34 tokens):
table.users
id:int name:string email
1 Alice alice@example.com
2 Bob bob@example.com

Features:
- 30-70% token reduction
- Type annotations
- References between tables
- Schema validation (ISONantic)
- Streaming format (ISONL)

Implementations: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, C++
9 packages, 171+ tests passing

pip install ison-py # Parser
pip install isonantic # Validation & schemas

npm install ison-parser # JavaScript
npm install ison-ts # TypeScript with full types
npm install isonantic-ts # Validation & schemas

[dependencies]
ison-rs = "1.0"
isonantic-rs = "1.0" # Validation & schemas

Looking for feedback on the format design.
by peab | 2025-12-26 23:38:44+00:00
I think there are probably lots of thorough critiques, but for me it boiled down to this:

Langchain claimed to be an abstraction on top of LLMs, but in fact, added additional unecessary complexity.

Prompt management was such a buzzword when langchain came out, but 99% of LLM use cases don't need prompt management - GitHub and strings works just fine.
by OldSchool | 2025-12-26 23:39:17+00:00
Wow, looks terrifying!

I can only speak for medically-administered intravenous Ketamine, but I would describe it as like relatively effortlessly floating inside of the non-physical space inside of you and meeting yourself in metaphor, all the while completely aware. The biggest risk seemed to be temporarily becoming a relatively inanimate part of the infrastructure there, and even that was a sort of pleasant and satisfying state.
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-26 23:39:22+00:00
Among non-fiction what stood out to me was David Bentley Hart's All Things are Full of Gods, great book also very fun to read written as a Platonic dialogue. To me one of the most compelling theologians today.

Bruno Maçães, World Builders. Good book on the impact of technology in geopolitics has been consistently interesting.

Among fiction re-read a lot of Lovecraft, noticed that I like the Dream Quest stories more than the horror these days which surprised me. But they're more compelling to me now because of how much you can see Lovecraft as a person in them.

The last three Dune books. Liked the last two about the Bene Gesserit a lot, was surprised how much I disliked God Emperor given the praise it gets, but it honestly reads like Frank Herbert posting twitter hot takes as a worm with no story

Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger. Among the best novellas I've ever read, very different in tone from most of his books.

Shūsaku Endō, Silence. Book about a Jesuit mission in early Edo Japan. My favorite Japanese book in a long time.

Among technical books, re-read The Mythical Man Month, probably more relevant than it ever was in an age of artifical man-hours added to projects. Robert Seacord Effective C, after not having written C in a long time. Really good intermediate level book for modern C. Also making my way through The Little Schemer as a replacement for advent of code in the second half of the month this year.
by orliesaurus | 2025-12-26 23:40:11+00:00
The most surprising part of uv's success to me isn't Rust at all, it's how much speed we "unlocked" just by finally treating Python packaging as a well-specified systems problem instead of a pile of historical accidents. If uv had been written in Go or even highly optimized CPython, but with the same design decisions (PEP 517/518/621/658 focus, HTTP range tricks, aggressive wheel-first strategy, ignoring obviously defensive upper bounds, etc.), I strongly suspect we'd be debating a 1.3× vs 1.5× speedup instead of a 10× headline — but 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?
by RomanPushkin | 2025-12-26 23:40:24+00:00
> the JVM is simply more employable

How do you know it? Today you have to re-assess what you've learnt in the past. If you think JVM is "simply more employable" and haven't tested the waters in last 1-2 years, chances are you're just wrong.

The feeling I have: more simpler the tech is (and JVM/Ruby/other CRUD), the highest salary cuts you're getting. And you're actually less employable.

It is that counter-intuitive, because it's one person with a coding agent vs a team in the past.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-26 23:40:33+00:00
When people say things like:

> there was way too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work.

They are communicating something real, but perhaps misattributing the root cause.

The purely abstract ‘ideal’ form of software development is unconstrained by business requirements. In this abstraction, perfect software would be created to purely express an idea. Academia allows for this, and to a lesser extent some open source projects.

In the real world, the creation of software must always be subordinate to the goals of the business. The goals are the purpose, and the software is the means.

Languages that are academically interesting, unsurprisingly, attract a greater preponderance of academically minded individuals. Of these, only a percentage have the desire or ability to let go of the pure abstract, and instead focus on the business domain. So it inevitably creates a management challenge; not an insurmountable one, but a challenge.

Hence the simplified ‘these people won’t do the work!’.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-12-26 23:41:07+00:00
Just because you don't see the "far left" doesn't mean it isn't there. Would you consider CDU in Germany to be conservative or even Christian right now? I've been far left all my life until I noticed how fake it all is. Sane goes for the right. now I'm just following truth. It's a lonely path.

All the best & I hope you had a Merry Christmas as well.
by dtagames | 2025-12-26 23:41:22+00:00
Personally, I'm against anything that goes against the standard LLM data formats of JSON and MD. Any perceived economy is outweighed by confusion when none of these alternative formats exist in the training data in any real sense and every one of them has to be translated (by the LLM) to be used in your code or to apply to your real data.

Any tokens you saved will be lost 3x over in that process, as well as introducing confusing new context information that's unrelated to your app.
Show HN: Reverse Engineering (Kind of) SQLite in Go
by richardknop | 2025-12-26 23:42:12+00:00
I have been working on reverse engineering SQLite in Go. Not exactly as I am borrowing some features from other databases so it is not a 1 to 1 exact replica but the main idea is the same and I have been keeping it as close as possible. A simple embedded single file database. It's an ongoing effort but I wanted to share what I have done so far after over a year.
by timeforcomputer | 2025-12-26 23:42:41+00:00
Hyperion is awesome. Each story could be its own novella but especially the priest's tale. I also loved the consul's tale. I haven't read the rest yet because I am unsure how the story will go without that structure as I wasn't too invested in the space politics, but I hear it is good. Also if you haven't read, The Terror by Dan Simmons is also great and strikes historical/horror like I feel hyperion does scifi/horror
by AngriestLettuce | 2025-12-26 23:42:59+00:00
>>> #!/usr/bin/env python3
>>> import inspect
...
>>> def frobnicate(unfrobbed: any) -> None:
... frame = inspect.currentframe().f_back
... for name in [name for name, value in frame.f_locals.items() if value is unfrobbed]:
... del frame.f_locals[name]
for name in [name for name, value in frame.f_globals.items() if value is unfrobbed]:
... del frame.f_globals[name]
...
>>> foo = open("bar.txt")
>>> answer = frobnicate(foo)
>>> print(foo)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "hackers.py", line 20, in <module>
print(foo)
^^^
NameError: name 'foo' is not defined

Be careful with the absolutes now :)

Not that this is is reasonable code to encounter in the wild, but you certainly can do this. You could even make it work properly when called from inside functions that use `fastlocals` if you're willing to commit even more reprehensible crimes and rewrite the `f_code` object.

Anyway, it's not really accurate to say that Python passes by reference, because Python has no concept of references. It passes by assignment. This is perfectly analogous to passing by pointer in C, which also can be used to implement reference semantics, but it ISN'T reference semantics. The difference comes in assignment, like in the following C++ program:

#include <print>

struct Object
{
char member{'a'};
};

void assign_pointer(Object \*ptr)
{
Object replacement{'b'};
ptr = &replacement;
}

void assign_reference(Object &ref)
{
Object replacement{'b'};
ref = replacement;
}

int main()
{
Object obj{};
std::println("Original value: {}", obj.member);
assign_pointer(&obj);
std::println("After assign_pointer: {}", obj.member);
assign_reference(obj);
std::println("After assign_reference: {}", obj.member);
return 0;
}

$ ./a.out
Original value: a
After assign_pointer: a
After assign_reference: b

Just like in Python, you can modify the underlying object in the pointer example by dereferencing it, but if you just assign the name to a new value, that doesn't rebind the original object. So it isn't an actual reference, it's a name that's assigned to the same thing.

ANYWAY, irrelevant nitpicking aside, I do think Python has a problem here, but its reference semantics are kind of a red herring. Python's concept of `const` is simply far too coarse. Constness is applied and enforced at the class level, not the object, function, or function call level. This, in combination with the pass-by-assignment semantics does indeed mean that functions can freely modify their arguments the vast majority of the time, with no real contract for making sure they don't do that.

In practice, I think this is handled well enough at a culture level that it's not the worst thing in the world, and I understand Python's general reluctance to introduce new technical concepts when it doesn't strictly have to, but it's definitely a bit of a footgun. Can be hard to wrap your head around too.
by maheshvaikri99 | 2025-12-26 23:43:02+00:00
Fair point, but I'd push back on "none of these alternative formats exist in training data."

ISON isn't inventing new syntax. It's CSV/TSV with a header - which LLMs have seen billions of times. The table format:

table.users
id name email
1 Alice alice@example.com

...is structurally identical to markdown tables and CSVs that dominate training corpora.

On the "3x translation overhead" - ISON isn't meant for LLM-to-code interfaces where you need JSON for an API call. It's for context stuffing: RAG results, memory retrieval, multi-agent state passing.

If I'm injecting 50 user records into context for an LLM to reason over, I never convert back to JSON. The LLM reads ISON directly, reasons over it, and responds.

The benchmark: same data, same prompt, same task. ISON uses fewer tokens and gets equivalent accuracy. Happy to share the test cases if you want to verify.
by peab | 2025-12-26 23:43:10+00:00
I'm not familiar with it. My first question would be: Are there any prominent projects that use it?

A lot of these frameworks are lauded, but if they were as good as they claim you would run into them in all sorts of apps. The only agents that i ever end up using are coding agents, i think they're obviously the most popular implementations of agents. Do they use langchain? No, i don't think so. They probably use in house logic cus it's just as easy and gives them more flexibility and less dependencies
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-26 23:43:29+00:00
> But then, the company has already, unquestionably, violated the GPL, and the company can be sued immediately.

You were right up to this point. Medical devices requiring a prescription must be obtained via specialized suppliers, like a pharmacy for hardware. These appliances are not sold directly to end users because they can be dangerous if misused. This includes even CPAP machines.

In theory, that written offer only needs to go to the device suppliers. Who almost universally have no interest in source code. When the device is transferred or resold to you, it need not be accompanied by the offer of source.

If that was true, anyone reselling an Android phone could open themselves up to legal liability. Imagine your average eBayer forgetting to include an Open Source Software Notice along with some fingerprint-encrusted phone.