MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-07 00:12:14+00:00
"Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to."

Before RPI existed, I always made filesystem images for USB sticks in NetBSD so that writes never touched "disk" ("diskless"). This allows me to remove the USB stick after boot, freeing up the slot for something else

BSD "install images" work this way

I have been using the RPi with a diskless NetBSD image since around 2012; there are no SD card writes, the userland is extracted into RAM

I can pull out the SD card after boot and use the slot for something else

If I want data storage, I connect an external drive

It's been wild to read endless online complaints from so-called "technical" RPi users for the last 13 years about SD card wear and tear

To me, it's another example of how it's possible to have a solution that is as old as the hills and have it be completely ignored in favor of a "modern" approach that is fatally-flawed
by jon871 | 2025-12-07 00:12:39+00:00
Just founded private and secure anonymous "Huipla" meta search engine that respects your privacy. The site uses proxy technology that protects your own searches on the site and not even the search results sources know your IP address or other device and location information. When you click on the search results on the site, the site cleans the links of the results from all possible tracking methods and thus the target page does not know from which site you arrived and your search information is not spread to other parties. This is a privacy first search engine. It does not look like mainstream search engines visually but invests heavily in privacy and improving search results, among other things by developing natural language technology etc.
by jsw | 2025-12-07 00:12:42+00:00
MacOS user here. So many times over the last decade I’ve journeyed to get terminal Emacs working with my litany of weird keybindings. But I always end up back in the GUI.

I switched to Colemak about 15 years ago and thought it would be a good idea to rethink all my Emacs keybindings, since my muscle memory was shot in that transition. (I don’t recommend this in hindsight.)

I have yet to get a terminal working fully like the GUI. Partly because I refuse to install a third-party key mapper.

Anyway, just tried this and Alacritty. It’s the closest I’ve got to fully working. My guess is another hour of tweaking and I could maybe get all the way there.
by runarberg | 2025-12-07 00:13:50+00:00
Yeah, I looked it up yesterday and saw that artificial cognition is a thing, though I must say I am not a fan and I certainly hope this term does not catch. We are already knee deep in bad terminology because of artificial intelligence (“intelligence” already being extremely problematic even with out the “artificial” qualifier in psychology) and machine learning (the latter being infinitely better but still not without issues).

If you can‘t tell I find issues when terms are taken from psychology and applied to statistics. The terminology should flow in the other direction, from statistics and into psychology.

So my background is that I have done both undergraduate in both psychology and in statistics (though I dropped out of statistics after 2 years) and this is the first time I hear about artificial cognition, so I don‘t think this term is popular, and a short internet search seems to confirm that suspicion.

Out of context I would guess artificial cognition would mean something similar to cognition as artificial neural networks do to neural networks, that is, these are models that simulate the mechanisms of human cognition and recreate some stimulus → response loop. However my internet search revealed (thankfully) that this is not how researches are using this (IMO misguided) term.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-84784-001

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08606

What the researchers mean by the term (at least the ones I found in my short internet search) is not actual machine cognition, nor claims that machines have cognition, but rather an approach of research which takes experimental designs from cognitive psychology and applies them to learning models.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-07 00:14:00+00:00
>isn't an ecological disaster

I don't disagree, but at the same time, building the same cars we did in 1960 now would ensure the atmosphere would be incandescent in the next few years.

If you look at things like US energy consumption per capita it leveled off in the 1970s and has decreased since, so it is possible, but we're not getting those thing we had during the days of insane energy usage.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-07 00:14:06+00:00
> make surplus is a few tens of thousands, way to small to make up an army

...why would you populate your army solely with the surplus? The point is you have a buffer that you can burn without immediately impacting your demographics for the long term.

> that is not the reason why men and not women go to war

It's a serious theory [1]. (It's more correct to say the surplus and it share a common cause.)

[1] https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_931
by wlonkly | 2025-12-07 00:14:50+00:00
It's a pretty big coincidence that the thing that someone mentioned in passing about in this earlier post[1] happened to come true some days later, from a 4-day-old Reddit account.

The legal advice subreddits are, unfortunately, often the target of some creative writing exercises. I feel like this is probably one, but acknowledge we'll never know for sure.

Either way it's a terrible ad and fridges shouldn't have ads.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...
by goshtasb | 2025-12-07 00:15:16+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Acuity because I was tired of fact checkers that only focus on true/false data points while ignoring the manipulation embedded in the structure of the text.

We know that a story can be factually accurate but structurally dishonest (like using zombie facts from 2022 to imply a crisis in 2025, or using higharousal emotional language to force a behavioral response).

Acuity is a forensic analysis engine that scores content (0-100) based on three specific vectors: 1. Reality Anchoring: Does it cite existent sources? (We use a "Freshness Protocol" to handle breaking news latency). 2. Tribal Engineering: Does the text use In Group/Out Group framing to bypass critical thinking? 3. Intent Analysis:Is the language Descriptive (Journalism) or Prescriptive (Commanding/Coercive)?

The tech stack: - Core: Python (FastAPI) on Render. - Intelligence: A hybrid pipeline using Grok (for unmoderated structural analysis) and Tavily (for real-time swarm verification). - Scraping: We implemented a pincer movement for ingestion: - Desktop: A Chrome Extension (Manifest V3) using activeTab to read DOM text directly (bypassing blocking). - Mobile: A React Native (expo) app that integrates into the native iOS/Android Share Sheet. - Hard Targets: We use Firecrawl to handle sophisticated anti-bot countermeasures when serverside scraping is required.

The hardest problem: Mobile distribution was a nightmare. We realized users wouldn't copypaste URLs. We ended up building a native Share Extension that allows you to "Share" a paywalled article from Safari/WSJ directly to Acuity. On iOS, we use the NSExtensionJavaScriptPreprocessingFile to extract the text from the active webview, allowing us to analyze paywalled content without breaking encryption or logging ineffectively giving the user "xray vision" for their own screen.

It's currently in Alpha. I’m not selling user data (the business model is B2B data licensing for AdTech later, not consumer surveillance).

I’d love feedback on the scoring logic specifically if you find false positives where it flags legitimate opinion pieces as manipulation.

Thanks!
by Mcwee | 2025-12-07 00:15:41+00:00
Guys We need to rise up against this. If it gets any worse than you will be stuck trying to find jobs instead of doing what you want. It like the Gatlin gun all over again. Ai was created to take the jobs we don't want but now it's taking the ones we want. Not to mention the data centers are horrible for the environment because of the cooling system. It's also used to make cp and no one does anything.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-12-07 00:15:58+00:00
This didn't occur to me until reading this, but what if the next generation doesn't understand what a web page is in the same way that mobile devices keep the younger generations from understanding how to interact with a filesystem?

What if there's a generation that doesn't know how to get information from a primary source because all they know is asking one of three tech giants a question and getting an answer they don't even realize is opaque and editorialized?
by pruufsocial | 2025-12-07 00:16:08+00:00
I built freepodcastmastering.com as a no-signup tool for creators who just want great-sounding audio fast. It launched and immediately ranked #1 on Google for “free podcast mastering,” which surprised me because there was no marketing, no backlinks, nothing. Traffic started flowing right away. The tool includes 19 themes, and a random one loads each visit until you pick your favorite, which makes the experience surprisingly fun for something as routine as audio post-processing. Under the hood it outputs the same level of mastering quality you’d get from the major paid service LANDR, but without a paywall. Sharing the launch story, how it ranked instantly, what I learned about idea quality, and why tiny niche tools can still break through.
by omnicognate | 2025-12-07 00:16:48+00:00
And that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code.

Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.

Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".
by reactordev | 2025-12-07 00:17:00+00:00
Blame the barista. The quality has gone down significantly over the last decade. It’s either a tall in a venti cup. A flat white when it should be a white mocha. Or a mocha. In the end, it’s still a quick service restaurant. Training is an expense. Now they just press buttons. If my local cafe could deliver me coffee that would be great, until then I’m short on time and hit the drive thru.

Say this next time: “Cappuccino, whole milk, no foam” and see what they do.
by redrix | 2025-12-07 00:17:28+00:00
Thank you for putting together and maintaining Frinkiac!

I use Frinkiac multiple times a week to share memes with friends. We all grew up watching S1-8 weeknights over dinner and can quote those episodes almost flawlessly.

Would love to read some blog posts on how the site works, anecdotes from 10 years of maintaining it, legal troubles faced (etc)!
by araes | 2025-12-07 00:17:30+00:00
> played a few DM-Morpheus bot matches

This part is one of the features that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough. Unreal Tournament was one of the first franchises to have bot behavior that was well thought out, relatively realistic and challenging, and most importantly worked for every single one of the game types included (including multi-player team objectives).

In addition to just being able to play single player in what would have normally required a functioning online environment and WWW connection for other franchises, you could also fill out large teams with bot players if you could not find enough actual humans to log in and join your game.

Gametypes like Team Deathmatch and Assault were then viable for single or small groups even when you didn't have a great (or completed lacked) WWW connection.
by fruitworks | 2025-12-07 00:17:56+00:00
the upgradability and interchangibility of parts in the framework ecosystem are needed to sustain a shelling point.

As for the PC ecosystem, there are no good x86 cpus with good power effciciency. Maybe geohot would like https://metacomputing.io/products/metacomputing-arm-aipc ? Framework 13 does not have his specific touchpad complaint
by cxr | 2025-12-07 00:19:26+00:00
> let's zoom on this issue root cause. It is the classical developer intolerance for tool that are not "as they wish/think", which is very common among technical people, but is a POV, I mean this "tool oriented" workflow, where this little feature/customization matters so much in your life (instead of adapting a bit and do not care), that I believe is a problem in our industry

k

Prospective Zig contributors can just adapt a bit and not care about the fact that the project isn't hosted on GitHub, then.

Right?
by pixl97 | 2025-12-07 00:20:15+00:00
I mean things that take hard physical labor are typically self limiting...

I do nerdy computer things and I actually build things too, for example I busted up the limestone in my backyard in put in a patio and raised garden. Working 16 hours a day coding/or otherwise computering isn't that hard even if your brain is melted at the end of the day. 8 - 10 of physically hard labor and your body starts taking damage if you keep it up too long.

And really building houses is a terrible example! In the US we've been chronically behind on building millions of units of houses. People complain the processes are terribly slow and there is tons of downtime.

So yea, I don't think your analogy works at all.
by chrchr | 2025-12-07 00:20:41+00:00
DankLinux provides packages for the Niri scrolling Wayland compositor and related tools, targeting popular mainstream distros: Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and Ubuntu. Niri and related tools are still too bleeding-edge to appear in Debian or Ubuntu's official repos, so if you're interested in Niri and don't want to assemble the long list of prerequisites to compile everything yourself, this is an easy way to try it out.

While it pains me as a normie Gen-Xer to recommend anything "dank", using Niri along with DankMaterialShell [1] for configuration and launching apps lets you quickly put together a reasonably complete desktop using this repo. I've been building my own Niri binaries for a few months now, and I'm very happy that I can finally retire my build environment.

[1] https://danklinux.com/docs/dankmaterialshell/installation
by guiambros | 2025-12-07 00:20:43+00:00
Current OMSCS grad student; three down, seven to go. Loving the program so far.

The content is great, and most of it is available on Open Courseware, YT, etc, but here's what else you get by officially going through the program:

- the amazing community of TAs

- the assignments

- the feedback on reports & projects (either automated, or through TAs)

- the collaboration with other students on Ed, Discord, Slack, etc

- the forcing function of deadlines, having to study for exams, etc

- free access to academic libraries, IEEE, ACM, O'Reilly, etc

- access to software and services, educational packages from GitHub, Wolfram, Google Colab Pro, student discount in a bunch of places, etc

Another underrated aspect is GT's ability to preserve rigor of the program overall, despite the scale and number of students in some courses (the most popular ones have 1,000-1,500 students per semester).

If you're on the fence on applying, I strongly recommend you do. The program is affordable enough that there's no harm in trying for a few semesters to see if matches what you're looking for.

Glad to answer any questions.
by vacuity | 2025-12-07 00:21:14+00:00
> The problem is that no-one can easily understand how their brain works compared to other people. People on both sides don't talk about it enough or openly enough. If you look at the science it quickly descends in to endless confusing/impenetrable psychiatric terminology.

It's not just how the "science" is conducted, or limited to a fixed number of sides. Everyone doesn't quite know what anyone else experiences. We all just throw around symbols, hoping someone gets what we mean by what we say, and assuming that we know what others mean by what they say. The meat of what we know and experience never gets transmitted faithfully to anyone.

To be certain, many people do have conditions that, say, I will never have. But that doesn't make me "normal" or those people "abnormal". The definition of a disorder by showing harm to living one's life is a good start, but fraught with the complexity of analyzing things in an implicit social context. If it seems that someone has a problem, I'll consider it a problem, not only if it seems sufficiently and officially abnormal.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-07 00:21:46+00:00
I don't think you have an accurate view on what makes an algorithm slow.

The actual constraints on what makes hardware or software slow are remarkably similar. It's not ultimately the transforms on the data which slow down software, it's when you inject conditional logic or data loads. The same is true for hardware.

The only added constraint software has is a limited number of registers to operate on. That can cause software to put more pressure on memory than hardware does. But otherwise, similar algorithms accomplishing the same task will have similar performance characteristics.

Your example of the bitshift is a good illustration of that. Yes, in hardware it's free. And in software it's 3 operations which is pretty close to free. Both will spend far more time waiting on main memory to load up the data for the masking than they will spend doing the actual bit shuffling. The constraint on the software is you are burning maybe 3 extra registers. That might get worse if you have no registers to spare forcing you to constantly load and store.

This is the reason SMT has become ubiquitous on x86 platforms. Because CPUs spend so much time waiting on data to arrive that we can make them do useful work while we wait for those cache lines to fill up.

Saying "hardware can do this for free" is an accurate statement, but you are missing the 80/20 of the performance. Yes, it can do something subcycle that costs software 3 cycles to perform. Both will wait for 1000 cycles while the data is loaded up from main memory. A fast video codec that is easy to decode with hardware gets there by limiting the amount of dataloads that need to happen to calculates a given frame. It does that by avoiding wonky frame transformations. By preferring compression which uses data-points in close memory proximity.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-07 00:23:27+00:00
Just to put the market into perspective, the UK was looking to build an undersea cable to push power from Morocco but canceled it [1]. That cable would have provided somewhere around 8% of the power to the UK and the whole project was slated to cost 25bn pounds (~$33b USD). Imagine sahara solar shipping could provide that but also supply (cheaper) to Spain, Italy, etc. As the tech gets better and cheaper the Americas could become customers too. Suddenly Timbuktu becoming an energy hub for the world doesn't sound as crazy as, well, it sounds.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/uk-morocco-renewable-energy-xlink...
by bgwalter | 2025-12-07 00:23:46+00:00
They were in Afghanistan and the U.S. would have no problems with setting up other EU countries as proxies against Russia in order to get Russia out of countries like Syria and Venezuela (as has now happened, courtesy of the Ukrainians).

The Venezuelan escalation happened after the Alaska Summit, and God knows what tradeoffs were made there verbally and with full deniability.

A strong army is only good if you have a strong, independent foreign policy. German chancellors used to be able to contradict the U.S., but that is no longer a given.
by nuuuwan | 2025-12-07 00:24:05+00:00
We cannot hope to understand floods without first understanding the #rivers that shape them.

This repository offers GeoJSON maps of Sri Lanka’s rivers, extracted from from https://www.hydrosheds.org.

(Each color in the map represent a river basin. The colors have been picked at random)

@Github Repo: https://github.com/nuuuwan/lk_rivers

#SriLanka #Ditwah
by anonym29 | 2025-12-07 00:24:32+00:00
Because both sides are funded and armed by much larger players using their respective proxies to deplete the resources of the other side. NATO is using Ukraine like a bullet sponge to deplete Russian resources, China is using Russia as a bullet sponge to deplete NATO resources. NATO sends Ukraine equipment, happy to send hundreds of thousands of Ukranians who have no say in the matter to their deaths. China sends Russia raw materials and manufacturing equipment for weapon systems, happy to send hundreds of thousands of Russians who have no say in the matter to their deaths.

Western defense contractors and Chinese industrial suppliers profit. Russians and Ukranians alike die.
by krackers | 2025-12-07 00:24:40+00:00
This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it.

For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-07 00:26:12+00:00
In my opinion pitting our youth against theirs man to man means we have already lost anyway. Lots of people that don't deserve it would have to die. We need to be able to destroy them at the push of a button so they don't even think about invading us. And then we don't need to order kids around to their deaths.

In other words we need a nuclear umbrella. Now that America is no longer our friend we need to build our own. It has worked very well to keep us safe since the 50s. And I don't think the French + English ones are sufficient deterrence anymore.
by m000 | 2025-12-07 00:26:19+00:00
You probably have no idea what you're talking about. Mandatory conscription (which I have personally served) is for a fixed term, so your livelihood is not tied to the army paying your salary. It's more of a semi-unpleasant mandatory intermission in your life plans.

Also, if you have decades of mandatory conscription then there is no slope to slip. Germany on the other hand is now on a slope, since they regress from a fully professional army back to conscription. How much down they will slip, remains to be seen.