MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by radiator | 2025-12-25 16:23:52+00:00
In connection to Mike Pall's comments on the status of v3.0 made last November, I would like to mention this post [1] of his, back in 2017. Mike Pall had proposed replacing LuaJIT’s 64-bit NaN-tagging with a variable-sized slot design to support larger pointers and unboxed value types. Also translating source directly to executable SSA form, without bytecode generation. Such changes might be part of the complete architecture change under consideration for v3.0.

[1] https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Few-questions-about-Lu...
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-25 16:24:15+00:00
We didn't see any of the toys in the article , but had a lot of other magnetic and combinable toys. The big advantage over Lego was building sizeable things with fewer blocks.

Duplo blocs come close, but they are pricey (hard to gift second hand toys) and you can only stack them when the other toys interlock in more interesting ways. For small kids, building an articulating shape the size of their arm with 4 or 5 blocs is really magical.
Show HN: Another Voice dictation and voice-to-prompt for macOS
by mgsgde | 2025-12-25 16:26:04+00:00
WhisperShortcut is a macOS menu bar app for voice dictation and voice-to-prompt across your system.

I built this after paying monthly for a transcription app and wanting Cursor's voice-to-prompt feature everywhere. Press a shortcut, speak, get text in clipboard. Works in emails, Slack, Teams, code editors—anywhere.

Three modes:

Transcription: Shortcut → speak → text in clipboard. Uses Gemini Flash for speed (lowest latency). Whisper available for offline.

Voice-to-Prompt: Select text, press shortcut, speak instruction. Gemini processes selected text + voice instruction. Result goes to clipboard. Like Cursor's prompt-on-selection, but system-wide.

Read Aloud: Select text, press shortcut, speak command (or stay silent). If command: applies prompt first, then reads result. If no command: reads selected text directly.

Use cases: dictating prompts in Cursor, formatting messages, summarizing articles.

Native Swift/Cocoa app. Open source. Daily driver for me.

https://github.com/mgsgde/whisper-shortcut

Demo: https://youtu.be/yz8cbaI6NYQ.
by emptysongglass | 2025-12-25 16:26:25+00:00
I own a Framework 13. It is one of the worst machines I've ever owned. I am not misunderstanding the value proposition. For the amount of money I paid I expect a machine that sleeps when I close the lid, does not run out of battery when sleeping in a day and a half, has decent battery life with mixed use (with the upgraded battery), has speakers that aren't actual garbage (with the upgraded speakers), and sells an expansion storage module marketed as capable to run an OS that actually runs an OS without randomly turning off because of power draw issues.

To top that all off, at one point (I don't know if he's still employed) Framework hired a dedicated Linux community person who gaslighted customers with actual issues telling them it was their fault.

If this was any other mainstream PC seller, people would rightfully dump on them all day long. Instead, we are treated to long apologia from people like yourself because of "the vision".
by kenjin4096 | 2025-12-25 16:28:05+00:00
Thanks :), that was indeed my intention. I think the previous 3.14 mistake was actually a good one on hindsight, because if I didn't publicize our work early, I wouldn't have caught the attention of Nelson. Nelson also probably wouldn't have spent one month digging into the Clang 19 bug. This also meant the bug wouldn't have been caught in the betas, and might've been out with the actual release, which would have been way worse. So this was all a happy accident on hindsight that I'm grateful for as it means overall CPython still benefited!

Also this time, I'm pretty confident because there are two perf improvements here: the dispatch logic, and the inlining. MSVC can actually convert switch-case interpreters to threaded code automatically if some conditions are met [1]. However, it does not seem to do that for the current CPython interpreter. In this case, I suspect the CPython interpreter loop is just too complicated to meet those conditions. The key point also that we would be relying on MSVC again to do its magic, but this tail calling approach takes more control into the writers of the C code. The inlining is pretty much impossible to convince MSVC to do except with `__forceinline` or changing things to use macros [2]. However, we don't just mark every function as forceinline in CPython as it might negatively affect other compilers.

[1]: https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/issues/183
[2]: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/121263
by olvy0 | 2025-12-25 16:28:10+00:00
There's also bflat [0]. Not an official Microsoft product, more of a passion project of a specific employee.

"C# as you know it but with Go-inspired tooling that produces small, selfcontained, and native executables out of the box." Really impressive. Self contained and small build system.

[0] https://github.com/bflattened/bflat
by jtrn | 2025-12-25 16:28:28+00:00
This is totally improper reporting of the study.

When enough words, framing, and unstated important premises are omitted, it crosses over from the realm of incomplete or misleading into plain outright lying in my worldview.

They claim "Reverses advanced AD in mice." What they did is reverse symptoms in genetic models.

They claim to "Restore NAD+ homeostasis," ignoring that NAD might not even be causally related to Alzheimer’s, just a side effect. It’s like saying we cured a house fire because we efficiently removed the ashes after the fire. It’s the Tau thing all over again.

The claim: "Conservative molecular signatures" when in reality, 5xFAD mice are poor predictors of human clinical success to such a degree that it’s statistically more common for mice studies to NOT transfer to human biology than to do so.

They also make unsupported claims like "Safer than NAD+ precursors (supplements)," when this is a pre-clinical assumption. No human toxicity trials are mentioned in this context, and there are always MASSIVE differences when switching to real human studies. It might be correct, but there’s no basis to say that based on this study.

Also, the senior author owns the company. The paper has the hallmarks of a "pitch deck" for the drug.

In short, it seems to me that the claim of "Full Neurological Recovery" is misleading to patients. It fails to prove that fixing NAD+ in humans will stop the disease, only that it works in mice engineered to have the disease, and only by assuming that their specific measure is a 1-to-1 with the clinical presentation of the disease. The results are likely the "best case scenario" presented to support the commercialization of P7C3-A20.

Here is the COMMON SENSE question peer-reviews should have asked.
Is low NAD+ the fire, or just the ashes?

Why should we believe this works in humans when the last 500 'cures' in 5xFAD mice failed?

Are you regrowing a brain, or just cleaning up a dirty one?

How does one molecule fix five unconnected problems simultaneously? The Context: The drug fixed inflammation, blood-brain barrier, amyloid/tau (protein folding), and memory (neuronal signaling). Drugs rarely hit four distinct biological systems with 100% success....

Where is the toxicology report that proves 'safer than supplements'?
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-25 16:28:32+00:00
You can teach a 4~5 yo kid to clean up. Below that it probably comes down to personality/level of awareness, and it's probably a lost cause for 2 year olds and below.

Then you'll want an adult to deal with the body fluids and other nasty stuffs.

PS; what I mean by "teach a 4-5 yo kid" is really spending a lot of time with them rehearsing cleaning and drilling it down. It pays dividends, but you'll be spending months and months, if not years, doing the cleaning with them at a slower pace than if you did it just yourself.
by thefaux | 2025-12-25 16:28:44+00:00
Sometimes someone genuinely has a clear vision that is superior to the status quo and is capable of executing it, improving quality, performance and maintainability. The challenge is distinguishing these cases from the muddled abstractions that make everything worse. This argument feels a bit like "no one gets fired for buying IBM." Blanket advice like this is an invitation to shut down thinking and stymie innovation. At the same time, the author is not wrong that imposing a bad abstraction on an org is often disastrous. Use your powers of reason to distinguish the good and bad cases.
by softwaredoug | 2025-12-25 16:28:50+00:00
For an AI agent to do a good job at customer support, you would need to

1. literally document everything in the product and keep documentation up to date (could be partially automated?)

2. Build good enough search to find those things

3. Be able to troubleshoot / reason / abstract beyond those facts

4. Handle customer information that goes against the assumptions in the core set of facts (ie customers find bugs or don’t understand fundamental concepts about computers)

5. Be prepared to restart the entire conversation when the customer gets frustrated with 1-4 (this is very annoying)
by shawnz | 2025-12-25 16:28:54+00:00
Keep reading:

> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer. The pharmacological approach in this study, however, uses a pharmacologic agent (P7C3-A20) that enables cells to maintain their proper balance of NAD+ under conditions of otherwise overwhelming stress, without elevating NAD+ to supraphysiologic levels.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-25 16:29:02+00:00
> declining service quality, higher complaint volumes, and internal firefighting

LLMs are a great technology for making up plausible looking text. When correctness matters, and you don't have a second system that can reliably check it, the output turns out to be unreliable.

When you're dealing with customer support, everyone involved has already been failed by the regular system. So they're an exception, and they're unhappy. So you really don't want to inflict a second mistake on them.
by serf | 2025-12-25 16:29:05+00:00
>weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.

one would hope that one ability of an 'omniscient and omnipotent' AI would be greater understanding.

When speaking of the divine (the only typical example of the omniscient and omnipotent that comes to mind) we never consider what happens when God (or whoever) misunderstands our intent -- we just rely on the fact that an All-Being type thing would just know.

I think the understanding of minute intent is one such trait an omniscient and omnipotent system must have.

p.s. what a bar raise -- we used to just be happy with AGI!
by luma | 2025-12-25 16:29:42+00:00
I think it means one should read the very next sentence:

> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer. The pharmacological approach in this study, however, uses a pharmacologic agent (P7C3-A20) that enables cells to maintain their proper balance of NAD+ under conditions of otherwise overwhelming stress, without elevating NAD+ to supraphysiologic levels.
by eesmith | 2025-12-25 16:29:45+00:00
Are you referring to the violin plot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_plot and in Matplotlib as https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot....

It's in essence a histogram for the distribution, with smoothing, and mirrored on each side.

It looks nice, but is not without well-deserved opposition because 1) the use of smoothing can hide the actual distribution, 2) mirroring contains no extra information, while taking up space, and implying the extra space contains information, and 3) when shown vertically, too often causes people to exclaim it looks like a vulva.

In an HN discussion on the topic, medstrom at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766519 points to a half-violin plot at https://miro.medium.com/v2/1*J3Q4JKXa9WwJHtNaXRu-kQ.jpeg with the histogram on the left, and the half-violin on the right, which gives you a chance to see side-by-side presentation of the same data.
by susam | 2025-12-25 16:29:55+00:00
> Since I might have peoples' attention for a moment (Can no longer edit my original post). Might I suggest the King William's college quiz this Christmas? https://kwc.im/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/GKP_2025_26.pdf

Since you have people's attention for a moment, may I invite everyone taking the above GKP quiz to also visit a small and humble quiz tool I have been growing over the past few months?

https://susam.net/nq.html

It is essentially a collection of today-I-learnt (TIL) items but captured in the form of short, five minute quizzes. I hope it is fun!

By the way, thank you for sharing the GKP link. I like how beautifully that document is typeset.

Merry Christmas, HN!
by apayan | 2025-12-25 16:29:58+00:00
I just pulled the DirectConnect prices from the AWS API, and I think there is still a per/GB charge. Here's a description of a random direct connect point in Amsterdam (Equinix AM3).
https://gist.github.com/arashpayan/a91c46c3787ac610e7884b77b...

If I'm reading the description correctly, egress from there is 2 cents/GB, while the regular price for egress (less than 10 TB) from eu-south-1 is 9 cents/GB.
by andreashaerter | 2025-12-25 16:30:05+00:00
I've been using ThinkPads with Linux since the T410, T420, T430, T480s, and several others. For me, they've consistently delivered an "everything works out of the box" experience with Ubuntu and/or Fedora, including things like SmartCard readers. I'm currently on a Lenovo X13 Gen 6 (AMD), and the only component that required any tinkering was the 5G WWAN due to FCC unlock issues (see: https://github.com/lenovo/lenovo-wwan-unlock/issues/68
).

One thing many people don't realize is that some Lenovo models can be ordered with Fedora pre-installed. That's a pretty strong signal for Linux compatibility.

I've been watching Framework for years, and among my Linux-using colleagues we have ThinkPads, Frameworks, and Tuxedo machines, so comparisons are easy. I really want to like Framework, but recurring firmware issues, noise (!!), and the lack of built-in 4G/5G antennas have pushed me toward Lenovo every time. That said, I do like the modular idea. I even use a small USB-C adapter permanently to protect the port from wear, almost all docking/monitor issues I've seen over the years came down to worn cables or ports. In that sense, Framework's modules are genuinely appealing.
by Calavar | 2025-12-25 16:31:22+00:00
Because Ruby is just a better thought out language than Python is. It had a sane package management story 15 years before Python. It doesn't rely on weird hacks like exception throwing for iterator control flow. It doesn't have nearly as many warts and footguns on basic operations (for example, in Python csv.writer(file).writerows(rows) is broken unless you remembered to set the newline mode on the file; in Ruby file.write(rows.to_csv) just works). Thanks to a sane VM design it's mainline JIT can actually run code faster than interpreted code (something that CPython's JIT can't do [1])

Many Pythonistas are woefully ignorant of what's going on outside their siloed community.

[1] https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-reflections.html
by cornholio | 2025-12-25 16:31:24+00:00
I think it was mostly a branding exercise, Salesforce wanted to signal to its customers that they are on top of this whole AI thing and there is no need to go to some unknown AI startup to "AIfy" their business. So they wanted to capitalize on FOMO / fear of being disrupted while using a bad labor market to improve profitability. They succeeded in this and made news around the world, but maybe not so many new customers.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-25 16:31:43+00:00
There's no good evidence that supplementation with NMN, NR, etc. increases the risk of cancer in healthy people. There's some speculation that it might be risky for people with cancer to take those supplements, but the picture is far from clear. Some papers even suggest that they can be beneficial. (e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10177531/ )

In terms of risk-benefit analysis, if this stuff actually cures Alzheimer's, then even a 10x increased risk of cancer (all types) is acceptable, as Alzheimer's is frequently a fate worse than death whereas cancer can be managed whilst keeping your personality and sanity intact. In reality, the increased risk of cancer from something like NMN is perhaps 1.005x. To all appearances, totally negligible.

The problem, for Pieper, is that NMN/NR/NADH are ubiquitous and cost pennies per dose. So, if they work (big if), this new research is unmonetizable. The team leads would win a Nobel Prize, but Big Pharma gigabucks are out of the question. Let's see what happens.
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-25 16:32:26+00:00
> The worst toy is one with many pieces that my kids dump on the ground and then play with for only 2 minutes.

One of my favourite toys was Mouse Trap. I never once actually played the game. Building it and setting it off once or twice was plenty.

I agree with some of the sentiment of this blog but I also think it’s discarding a perfectly valid side to toys and play.
by dyauspitr | 2025-12-25 16:33:18+00:00
Since no one else is going to be cynical I will do it. This is a heartwarming story. However, it seems like that by taking this man in they got a live in maid along with an additional source of income. The fact that he is autistic and along with his disposition also probably made him feel “safe” to the husband around the women and girls in the house.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-12-25 16:33:22+00:00
And when they can't undo their mistake will they accept the consequences, or will they cry to the government that there are no workers available to do the jobs so national policy must be modified to give Salesforce an even larger firehose of candidates to ignore? Companies complain endlessly that there isn't a huge stable of unicorns for them pick and choose from but those 4000 experienced staff were known good workers and they dumped them anyway to chase fantasies. Salesforce will demand the government fix their mistake for them. The larger the company, the more they expect to never have to pay for their mistakes.
by bjoli | 2025-12-25 16:33:26+00:00
Ruby is a lot less awful than Python in my opinion. That is of course a very subjective opinion. The only reason I write more Python than Ruby is that ruby lacks the libraries I need.

Somewhere along the line Python got all the momentum, and ruby got none and now python is better if you just want to get shit done.

But man. I wish it was the other way around. I have one code snippet that summarises what I dislike about python:

if input() == "dynamic scope?":
defined = "happyhappy"
print(defined)

Seeing that I understand why I see yuck in just about every corner of python.

Edit: in ruby it also works, but the variable is at least always defined.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-25 16:33:39+00:00
My reading of both those reports isn't that lead can't be safely recycled without contamination, but rather that countries with low regulations and oversight aren't recycling lead batteries in a safe manor.

In fact, the second link is more about the problem with using smelting to recycle lead. That requires a lot of power and thus emits a lot of CO2.

Is it the case that lead acid batteries are being primarily recycled through exports?
by gordon_freeman | 2025-12-25 16:34:37+00:00
Folks who have some extra time this Christmas, do check out the tv show Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s not your typical action packed sci-fi show but is very slow burning, philosophical kind of show which I found very smart.

Turns out my best 2 tv shows of last couple of years are on Apple TV: Severance and Pluribus
by tetromino_ | 2025-12-25 16:34:42+00:00
Interesting point of view. But it's common for a man to get a work tool as present (e.g. a drill or a set of wrenches), with the obvious implication that the man will usually be the one who will have to use that tool to fix things around the house - and I have never seen anyone find that offensive. So what makes the vacuum cleaner different?
by e38383 | 2025-12-25 16:35:29+00:00
"attempted" would be more accurate IMO.

I still think that the word redacted is meant to destroy the original text, it might not remove the metadata (e.g. length).

Redaction is done mostly in ways with a possibility to reveal the underlying text, but all this is not redacted in my understanding of the word. I always liked the english word for this – the german word "schwärzen" just means to "blacken" the text and this was never the same for me.

But after further research I must agree with you, it just means to obscure or remove, but not clearly just remove. I have been using it for years in a stronger meaning that it's really meant.

One more but: we hopefully can all agree that putting a black bar over some text which still is just copy/pasteable is not even obscuring.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-25 16:36:23+00:00
That is a very good question.

Plants grow tall to be able to gather light, instead of staying in a shadow.

Fungi and many other terrestrial organisms that reproduce like fungi (e.g. slime molds and myxobacteria) grow above the ground only in order to be able to launch their spores into the wind.

It does not seem possible to explain the size of Prototaxites by the need of launching spores in the wind.

The only plausible explanation is that it was tall in order to ensure access to light.

If it was not a plant, it might have had a symbiotic relationship with a phototrophic living being, which grew on the surface of Prototaxites, i.e. either a blue-green alga (Cyanobacteria) or a green alga, exactly like the present lichens. Prototaxites could have provided access to light, water and minerals, while the alga would have provided food.
by alwa | 2025-12-25 16:36:34+00:00
It also reminds me that systems can’t fix situations like this. The system of “care,” as the story alludes to the autistic person experiencing in their youth, often looks a lot more like warehousing the people on the margins of society, often in unpleasant (and almost always in institutional) conditions. Some kinds of humanity can only ever happen person-to-person, and it’s a great treasure for everyone involved to encounter such an opportunity and choose to take it up.
Ask HN: What is the international distribution/statistics of HN visitors?
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-25 16:37:13+00:00
Dear all,

do we have an statistics on visitor location/country here?

Would be curious: Is it US-centered? How much people from LatAm or SEA? EU?

Maybe there was a question like this in the past, but I couldnt find it.

(Maybe this is a question for @dang?)
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-25 16:37:52+00:00
Yeah I can't see a source for the internal admissions of regret.

If we take out the AI part of this and treat it like any other project, if what they admit is true, it represents a massive failure of judgement and implementation.

I can't see anyone admitting that in public, as it would probably end their career, or should do at least. Especially if a company is a "meritocracy"
by nickff | 2025-12-25 16:37:53+00:00
Take a look at Figure 7 on this page, which indicates that (annual) overdose deaths have more than doubled since 2018: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

If have lived anywhere with a significant drug-addict (opioid or fentanyl) population through this time period, you’ve seen the increase; if you haven’t, you may be lucky for it.