MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wpm | 2025-12-19 17:24:13+00:00
The M.2 form factor isn't that conducive to having lots of them, since they're on the board and need large connectors and physical standoffs. They're also a pain in the ass to install because they lie flat, close to the board, so you're likely to have to remove a bunch of shit to get to them. This is why I've never cared about and mostly hated every "tool-less" M.2 latching mechanism cooked up by the motherboard manufacturers: I already have a screwdriver because I needed to remove my GPU and my ethernet card and the stupid motherboard "armor" to even get at the damn slots.

SATA was a cabling nightmare, sure, but cables let you relocate bulk somewhere else in the case, so you can bunch all the connectors up on the board.

Frankly, given that most advertised M.2 speeds are not sustained or even hit most of the time, I could deal with some slower speeds due to cable length if it meant I could mount my SSDs anywhere but underneath my triple slot GPU.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-12-19 17:24:24+00:00
Eh, there's literally always something like this being told and doom and gloomed over. When I was 21 I heard almost the identical statement you said. Covid being the exception.

The only thing that matters is if YOU care. Do you like software? Do you want to learn and make something that was unatainable to you a year ago?

There's also a major difference between college and work so you shouldn't sweat it so much.
by bisonbear | 2025-12-19 17:24:29+00:00
As a fellow Mandarin learner - this is super cool! Intuitively makes a lot of sense for the "full immersion" component of language. I love to see exciting uses of AI for language learning like this instead of just more slop generation :)

I haven't dug into the github repo but I'm curious if by "guided decoding" you're referring to logit bias (which I use), or actual token blocking? Interested to know how this works technically.

(shameless self plug) I've actually been solving a similar problem for Mandarin learning - but from the comprehensible input side rather than the dictionary side:

https://koucai.chat - basically AI Mandarin penpals that write at your level

My approach uses logit bias to generate n+1 comprehensible input (essentially artificially raising the probability of the tokens that correspond to the user's vocabulary). Notably I didn't add the concept of a "regeneration loop" (otherwise there would be no +1 in N+1) but think it's a good idea.

Really curious about the grammar issues you mentioned - I also experimented with the idea of an AI-enhanced dictionary (given that the free chinese-english dictionary I have is lacking good examples) but determined that the generated output didn't meet my quality standards. Have you found any models that handle measure words reliably?
by jonway | 2025-12-19 17:24:53+00:00
I just wanted to note that Firefox reached out to me as a user and requested a video call to discuss how I used one of their features.

I declined, but later they reintegrated their request with a servey, which I did accept.

These requests were presented through a dialog box attached to an extension (which many Firefox features are, internally, built-in extensions.)

I really want Firefox to succeed. Please enhance our security, privacy, ensure a performant browser AND I also like the project that Mozilla undertakes (rip send) hope to see more in the future.
Agentic AI startup ideas with $100M+ potential in 2026
by suhaspatil101 | 2025-12-19 17:25:03+00:00
Most startups don’t fail in a dramatic way. They fade out over months or years while founders keep telling themselves they’re close.

What actually kills them isn’t lack of effort or talent, it’s the absence of a clear stopping rule.

Without predefined criteria for success or failure, any small signal can be interpreted as progress.

A few users feel like traction. A polite conversation feels like demand. Activity replaces evidence, and “don’t quit” becomes a justification to stay stuck.

The founders who escape this earlier decide something uncomfortable upfront. They define what must happen within a fixed window for the idea to survive.

If it doesn’t happen, they walk away before sunk cost takes over.

I started applying this after realising how much time disappears between “almost working” and “quietly abandoned.”

That approach eventually became startupideasdb. com, built around kill criteria instead of inspiration.

If you’ve been “almost there” for longer than you planned, this may be worth reading sooner rather than later.
by waffletower | 2025-12-19 17:25:06+00:00
Regardless of correctness, as a DSP dork I really identified with the question: "What kind of a monster would make a non-power of two ring anyway?" I remember thinking similarly when requesting a power of two buffer from a 3rd party audio hardware device and having it correct to a nearby non-power of two. Latency adding ringbuffer to the rescue.
by AndyKelley | 2025-12-19 17:25:16+00:00
C doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.

IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.

Intellisense/autocomplete doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.
by Agentlien | 2025-12-19 17:25:47+00:00
I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars.

Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
by pengaru | 2025-12-19 17:25:48+00:00
What's the market size for such a sokoban puzzle game?

I've watched a few of Blow's programming streams which usually spanned both Jai and sokoban development, this was years ago when the sokoban game was clearly an unpolished development mule for the language.

It never seemed like a wise use of resources to try polish that turd of a game concept, certainly not for 9 years. Am I wrong?
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-12-19 17:25:56+00:00
If you want to nitpick, I can point out that the full quote is "Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint"; stress on "about", and those aren't paintings.

Besides the comment started by saying that "medieval European art generally sucked", so it covers the work I mention.

That's if you want to nitpick. If you don't, both those works are hallmarks of medieval art and while they're not necessarily exemplars, it is important to remember that there were still artists who knew their stuff in and out in medieval times and the Renaissance didn't come out of nowhere.

Edit: I travel through Europe by train a lot (mainly France and Italy but also Switzerland and Germany occasionally) and I visit museums, cathedrals, and art galleries in every city I stay. I have seen a lot of medieval art because those places just seem to have it lying around by the bucketload. There is a broad range in quality, but I have seen some very high quality woodcuts and, indeed, paintings, although those tend to be religious icons. Sculptures also, but mainly in statues of saints on the outside of cathedrals (see e.g. the Rouen cathedral). I'm trying to say that I'm not some kind of art authority or expert on medieval art, but I have seen my fair share of it, and no, Europeans didn't just suck at art in the medieval. I think what happened is there was a lot of mostly religious art that was lower quality, sort of like you can find plenty of slop on the internet today, but there were still skilled artists that created shockingly good art. You'd be more likely to find it in the palaces of the rich and powerful, I reckon, because they were the ones who could afford/support talented artists, as opposed to more ordinary craftsmen, who would be paid less. For the same reason you might find less of the good art lying around than the rougher, cruder kind, because the former was more expensive and thus harder to obtain. This also goes for religious art, which tended to include a smorgasboard of art forms, from painted icons and sculptures to reliquaries and liturgical equipment like communion chalices. But good medieval art existed, I've seen it, and it wasn't that rare.
by jorvi | 2025-12-19 17:26:26+00:00
Squishing it down to <12px I can see that problem, even when compared to other good coding fonts like Jetbrains Mono or a font designed for readability like Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono / Next.

Definitely was too quick with my judgement. Still, it just looks really out of place at bigger font sizes and it makes me wonder if there isn't a more elegant solution out there.
by dfabulich | 2025-12-19 17:27:15+00:00
Mozilla's problem is unsolvable.

Firefox gets 90% of its funding from Google, putting Google effectively in control of Mozilla.

Ideally, Firefox would be financially supported by its users, like Wikipedia. But that requires ads nagging users to donate, preferably on a subscription plan.

Most of Firefox's users block ads, and they refuse to pay Mozilla a dime under any circumstances. Their users are freeloaders, providing no value to Firefox's other users or to Mozilla.

It would be nice if Mozilla could ignore the freeloaders and simply nag for donations anyway, but if the freeloaders leave and Mozilla tries to serve its donor users, they'll lose all of their Google funding and die.
by pojntfx | 2025-12-19 17:27:27+00:00
I ran across "Are We Decentralized Yet" recently, which shows how decentralized services are in practice: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

A lot of people try and deflect from Bluesky's governance issues by pointing at the fact that you _could_, in theory, self-host it or use another instance to bypass it. In practice though, that's something almost nobody does (unlike with the fediverse), which allows the company behind it to make decisions like this for effectively everyone with no checks whatsoever.
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-12-19 17:27:27+00:00
They I understand it: There was a deal to ban TikTok unless ownership changes --- the original intention was no Chinese involvement, but now it seems "ownership change" means the ownership is amicable to the current president. There was also something of a grace period for when that ban went into effect if TikTok could show they were actively in the process of finding a new owner. The current president basically just kept insisting that grace period was in effect while he constructed a bid for ownership that aligned with his and his friends (business) interests.

Basically, Congress did not do its job and ignored the very law they voted for.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-19 17:27:30+00:00
> Point is: if that problem is solvable without me, that's the win condition for everyone.

The problem is solvable without you. I don't even need to know what the problem actually is, because the odds of you being one of the handful of the people in the world who are so critical that the world notices their passing is so low, I have a better chance of winning a lottery jackpot than of you being some critical piece of some solution.
by happytoexplain | 2025-12-19 17:27:33+00:00
Is that actually the rationale, or are you guessing? It seems weak, if true, since:

- An article reporting X does not or can not necessarily always explain why X.

- Removing "Why" can (and does) destroy some titles, and submitters aren't always going to notice it was changed under their nose and fix it before submitting (or they will consciously trust the bad change, if they are not themselves an experienced reader of the language).

- Removing "why" doesn't seem to have any impact aside from saving a tiny bit of space and a tiny bit of annoyance for the small subset of people who are opinionated writers and dislike seeing the "why" trope in the cases when it is truly unnecessary.

It's not like we're talking about the "You won't believe why..." trope. Then I could understand.
by b33j0r | 2025-12-19 17:27:47+00:00
You implemented type-checking. For a project this ambitious, I am surprised here.

“Generics” should mean that the compiler or interpreter will generate new code paths for a function or structure based on usage in the calling code.

If I call tragmorgify(int), tragmorgify(float), or tragmorgify(CustomNumberType), the expectation is that tragmorgify(T: IsANumber) tragmorgifies things that are number-like in the same way.

For a compiled language this usually means monomorphization, or generating a function for each occurring tuple of args types. For an interpreted language it usually means duck-typing.

This is not a bad language feature per se, but also not what engineers want from generics. I would never write code like your example. The pattern of explicit type-checking itself is a well-known codesmell.

There is not a good usecase for adding 2.0 to a float input but 1 to an integer input. That makes your function, which should advertise a contract about what it does, a liar ;)
by metadope | 2025-12-19 17:28:42+00:00
> a foundation I made for myself

Creative thinking requires an intent to be creative. Yes, it may be a delusion to imagine oneself as creative, one's thoughts to be original, but you have to begin with that idea if you're going to have any chance of actually advancing human knowledge. And the stronger wider higher you build your foundation-- your knowledge and familiarity with the works of humans before your time-- the better your chance of successful creativity, true originality, immortality.

Einstein thinks nothing of import without first consuming Newton and Galileo. While standing on their shoulders, he could begin to imagine another perspective, a creative reimaging of our physical universe. I'm fairly sure that for him, like for so many others, it began as a playful, creative thought stream, a What If juxtoposition between what was known and the mystery of unexplored ideas.

Your intent to create will make you creative. Entertain yourself and your thoughts, and share when you dare, and maybe we'll know if you're regurgitating or creating. But remember that you're the first judge and gatekeeper, and the first question is always, are you creative?
by furaha_damien | 2025-12-19 17:29:32+00:00
I’ve been building Agent Ledger, a tool for developers and teams shipping AI agents and LLM apps. Once an agent starts chaining models, tools, and retries, a single request stops looking like “app → result” and starts looking like a mini distributed system. When it goes wrong, normal logs don’t explain why the agent made a sequence of decisions, and billing dashboards don’t tell you which step caused the spend.

Agent Ledger turns each run into a structured, replayable timeline (prompt → LLM calls → tool calls → results/errors) and tags every step with tokens, latency, provider/model, and USD cost (plus total run cost). It also flags obvious degenerate behavior like repeated tool calls / loops, and makes it easy to compare runs to spot regressions after prompt or tool changes, etc

It’s currently a lightweight Node/TypeScript SDK + Python SDK plus a simple web UI for browsing sessions. I’d love feedback from anyone operating agents in production—what signals are most important, what’s missing vs your current tracing setup, and what would you want next (prompt diffs, alerts, guardrails, replay, integrations, etc.).
by dahateb | 2025-12-19 17:30:21+00:00
I find a that actually a disturbing assumption. I've learned a lot from reading other peoples code, seeing how they were thinking and spotting errors, so the good and the bad. I believe that in order to actually write good code its important to actually understand what is the context of the task which basically requires a lot of code reading, which is also sometimes quite enjoyable when you have competent authors. Reading code is an essential part of the game. If you cannot do that you'll just create huge balls of mud with or without ai usage. Though using ai will speedrun the mud so yeah, there is an argument for not using it.
by umanwizard | 2025-12-19 17:30:27+00:00
So it's not fortnite at all. It's something owned by the same company that happens to also own fortnite. That is actually a huge stretch.

Imagine if I said "I have to pilot a 747 just to change the temperature of my house" (because Honeywell makes both passenger jet avionics and thermostats).
by stuffn | 2025-12-19 17:30:39+00:00
I feel a divide w.r.t. this topic. I'm old now and grew up when the internet was full of small groups of nerds. People knew each other (rarely by name), often times you weren't identifiable at all. You made friends strictly on the content of your character and clout chasing wasn't really a big thing. Even in hacker circles "clout chasing" was mocked.

Around the time social media emerged all of this changed. People started voluntarily using their real names and photos. They share intimate details about their life to complete strangers. They demand attention, they want to be noticed, they want a "record". It's trivial to piece together enough across anyones social media accounts to pin point where they live, possibly where they travel (sometimes daily), etc.

Subsequently we have children who are being born and raised by this system. It makes sense to me to fence these kids away from the internet. I take the more extreme stance of fencing children away from the entire internet until at least they're teens but I have also watched it turn from a place where you can learn to a very dangerous place for anyone not smart enough to remain anonymous.

Should the federal or state government regulate this? I don't know. What I do know is every bit of data on education. child rearing, health, etc have shown that the average person in the west is completely and utterly incapable of rearing children. Someone has to step in. We are getting to be past the point "it's the parents responsibility" works when the second and third order effects dramatically shift society and it's culture. Either we begin severely punishing parents for failures to thrive (e.g. prison time) or we enact laws like this. I am not against the idea of putting parents in prison for child neglect for their iPad kid, and investigating and potentially removing children from a home when their grades in school have a pattern of being excruciatingly poor despite intervention.

Legislators have a far easier time legislating ID laws than child neglect laws, however, and these ID laws are easier to swallow given existing infrastructure.
by meheleventyone | 2025-12-19 17:31:13+00:00
You’re mixing the principle of democracy up with the process which is necessary to uphold the principle. It’s quite clear that the issue with the democratic process in the US is not with the language used by Democrat voters. What’s unhealthy for democracy is the continued flouting of the process by Trump and the enablement of that by Republicans. I can definitely understand it feels bad when people compare you to fascists though but y’know stop enabling fascist things. The idea that it’s actually the language causing it is very silly.
by pgedge_postgres | 2025-12-19 17:31:33+00:00
Thanks for asking!

Our MCP server does understand how to explore and understand the database schema, and if the knowledgebase package is installed (which you can install from our Enterprise repos, or build one yourself with whatever content you like), it has semantic search capabilities over all the PostgreSQL, pgAdmin, PostGIS, pgEdge and other docs so it has a full understanding of the database and technologies used in it, even if the chosen LLM hasn't been trained on them or only has partial training on them. It can even perform semantic searches over any data you might have embeddings for in the database, provided you configure it to use the correctly embedding LLM, allowing arbitrary semantic searches of content in databases of which it has no prior schema knowledge.

Ours is the only MCP server for Postgres that is fully featured, fully supported by an actual Postgres company AND works with any existing Postgres database on any standard version of Postgres from v14 on.

Note that the MCP server is far better optimised than using psql; it uses lots of tricks to manage token budget, and has tools specifically designed to make database interaction easier, faster, and more efficient.
by tsazan | 2025-12-19 17:31:37+00:00
That solves bandwidth. It fails on tokens. JSON syntax is heavy. Brackets and quotes consume context window. More importantly, Schema.org is a dictionary of facts. It lacks behavior. It defines what a product is, but not how to sell it. It has no concept of @SEMANTIC_LOGIC or @BRAND_VOICE. We need a format that carries both data and instructions efficiently. JSON-LD is too verbose and too static for that.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-19 17:32:05+00:00
Still can't believe people buy their stock, given that they are the closest thing to a James Bond villain, just because it goes up.

I've been tempted to. "Everything will be terrible if these guys succeed, but at least I'll be rich. If they fail I'll lose money, but since that's the outcome I prefer anyway, the loss won't bother me."

Trouble is, that ship has arguably already sailed. No matter how rapidly things go to hell, it will take many years before PLTR is profitable enough to justify its half-trillion dollar market cap.
by eitau_1 | 2025-12-19 17:32:08+00:00
there are some observations of mine:

- when the browser is not in the visible workspace, chromium's cpu usage actually goes to 0 whilst firefox's usually oscilates around 5%

- every new window costs 30mb of ram for chromium and 100mb for firefox

- this one is weird, but when lightly using firefox while overall ram usage spilled well into swap, often after some time terminal emulator process will get swapped-out as if firefox eventually touched memory used by every tab sitting in the background
by rdiddly | 2025-12-19 17:32:37+00:00
The point is that it's an ad. No company spends money on a joke just to make a joke. Not the end of the world, although it's interesting that all the end of the world stuff comes directly out of that joke and its universe as it were. Take the joke seriously and extend its logic as far as it will go, and you get the end of the world. It's a thought experiment, or that's how I read it anyway.
by wishfish | 2025-12-19 17:32:52+00:00
Buy DRM free when you can. Not only is this convenient for you but will hopefully help nudge the market. When you can't, buy the book from one of the easily cracked sources (Kobo, Google, Adobe DRM).

Or you can save yourself the bother of removing DRM by buying the book from wherever and then downloading a copy from Anna's.
by e28eta | 2025-12-19 17:33:00+00:00
> For example: did you know there's no way to run a system upgrade (like to 26.2) via SSH

I did not know this. I thought the `softwareupdate` command was built for this use case, and thought it worked over ssh. It sure looks like it should work, but I don’t have a mac I can try it on right now.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-19 17:33:01+00:00
I get what you're saying but let's be real: 99.99999% of modern software development is done with constant internet connectivity and is effectively impossible without it. Whether that's pulling external packages or just looking up the name of an API in the standard library. Yeah, you could grep docs, or have a shelf full of "The C++ Programming Language Reference" books like we did in the 90s, but c'mon.

I have some friends in the defense industry who have to develop on machines without public internet access. You know what they all do? Have a second machine set up next to them which does have internet access.