MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-12-29 05:42:00+00:00
If you ever want to put the cost of something into context, remember that Mark Zuckerberg spent $77 billion on the Metaverse.

I went looking for an article I read a decade ago about the challenges of supplying water to NYC and maintaining the aging infrastructure. Part of the "race" to build new capacity is so they can actually turn off some of this supply for extended periods to repair it. Millions of gallons of water leaks or is just unaccounted for every day.

I didn't find it but this [1] kind of goes into it.

And since you can't turn the water off (generally), you need to do repairs in fairly extreme environments and use materials that don't corrode over very long periods of time. IIRC some pump or valve infrastructure was made out of manganese bronze for this purpose.

[1]: https://nysfocus.com/2024/11/27/new-york-water-leaks-drought
by czmilo | 2025-12-29 05:42:39+00:00
Case study on structured JSON prompt engineering for AI image generation. Analyzes 4 real-world examples that achieved high engagement (513+ likes, 13K+ views) using hierarchical JSON schemas instead of natural language prompts. Each example demonstrates how structured data enables precise control over subject, environment, lighting, camera settings, and technical parameters. Includes complete JSON templates covering identity preservation, composition, negative prompts, and quality constraints. Useful for developers working on prompt optimization, AI image APIs, or studying the shift from text-based to structured prompt interfaces.
by rastrian | 2025-12-29 05:43:04+00:00
Mostly “boring” stuff where the type system pays rent fast:

- Domain/state machines (payments/fulfillment-style workflows): modeling states + transitions so “impossible” states literally can’t be represented.
- Parsers/DSLs & config tooling: log parsers, small interpreters, schema validation, migration planners.
- Internal CLIs / automation: batch jobs, release helpers, data shapers, anything you want to be correct and easy to refactor later.
- Small backend services when the domain is gnarly (Servant / Yesod style) rather than huge monoliths.

If you’re learning it beyond CS exposure, I’d start with a CLI + a parser (JSON/CSV/logs), then add property-based tests (QuickCheck). That combo teaches types, purity, effects, and testing in one project without needing to “go full web stack” on day 1.
by unethical_ban | 2025-12-29 05:44:51+00:00
It's important to have principles and to speak up for them around others, and to get your information from sources of truth.

But it is not important for most people to be plugged into a news mainline every day to read about the latest absurdity of our flailing country. Until or unless there is mass unrest and sustained protests or a general strike, the only thing we can do is vote and boycott, and if you live in a swing district or state, write a politician.

I think "escaping the internet" by stopping news consumption most of the week would benefit most of us, rich and poor, all races, unless you need realtime updates for your safety.
by cyberax | 2025-12-29 05:45:50+00:00
You are right, that particular article alone doesn't spell it out completely. But other articles from this author do: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/6/15/a-parallel...

The cited article alone simply admits that upzoning won't result in cheaper housing. Because the market is broken (and only socialized housing can fix it), but we must do upzoning anyway.
by arjie | 2025-12-29 05:46:13+00:00
I use personal software: https://overmod.org/

If I'm being entirely honest I made it in a very 'scratch-my-own-itch' way so you're better off just writing it yourself. Example idiosyncratic choices I went with: all lists are public, allow subscribing to other people's lists, no login required for lists, only Google Chrome support. I doubt anyone else shares those preferences.
by palmotea | 2025-12-29 05:46:48+00:00
> My feed is full of AI generated shorts summarizing books, animes, movies. The original piece name is never mentioned, and it tells the story in a very descriptive way, such as "The man was alone in the woods when...".

I've seen these, but I don't think the ones I've seen are AI generated (except sometimes for the video thumbnail). They tend have appropriate clips from the movie matched to what's being described, and I'd be surprised if an AI model could do that.

My guess is they're human generated attempt to profit off a movie while avoiding copyright enforcement from the movie's owners.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-29 05:47:08+00:00
Exactly, and this is what the deal has always been when you are an employee in a for-profit corporation. You do what the company asks you to do, and they pay you for your time. This is not "late-stage" anything it's the way it's always been.

If you want to save the world, join the Peace Corps or at least a non-profit.
by tim-tday | 2025-12-29 05:47:17+00:00
This isn’t what you asked but I would remove all social media from your phone. Nothing makes you lonelier than social media. Facebook and instagram should be the first to go. TikTok as well. Delete them and watch if you start to feel better.

As for the other. Most friends I’ve ever met went like this: meet at an event relating to a shared interest (first you have to go to things, next you have to talk to people): find a person I genuinely like and respect, talk to them, do something together (study, eat, coffee), listen more than you talk, try to be as good a friend to them as possible.

And I’m easy. Anyone wants to be my friend and I’ll be theirs. (So long as they treat me as a friend —don’t get me started about people who claim to be friends but who don’t treat me like a friend). This leads me to having some really weird friends. This also leads me to having friends who always treat me right.

I’m an introvert so I tend to prioritize small numbers of deep connections over many shallow friendships. Everyplace I go I find the person I like best and I try to get to know them. I talk to them, listen, hear what they’re about, engage with things they find interesting.

At 19 you’ve never had a friend? I honestly don’t believe it. I suspect you’re experiencing a depressive episode that is clouding your memory. Every child has had a friend. In grade school or middle school. Call your mother and ask her (I’m serious). I honestly think you’re not remembering clearly. It happens, I don’t know how to fix it, but looking for it might’ve a start. (If you haven’t I’d start looking for something you’re doing that drives people away. But I honestly don’t think you could be doing something without knowing it)

Join clubs for things you find interesting. Get a job doing things you find interesting. Do favors for people, ask favors of people. Look for friendships in unlikely places. I once became friends with a professor who I did computer work for. We just got along. He invited me over for dinner with him and his wife. I was on his Christmas list (he made mix cds for people, I still have two he made me)
by rastrian | 2025-12-29 05:48:24+00:00
I really don’t like the argument calling “industrial usage” just because a main company or FAANG aren’t using the tech stack, but arbitrary under the hood are doing basically the same stuff with internal toolings that should be entirely under the language features, not under a system design library.

But your take about modern Java is correctly, and they adopt this style under internal projects for some workflows.
by johng | 2025-12-29 05:48:39+00:00
This definitely reminds me of DJB's supervise. They specifically mention it. I see a lot of patches to DJB software on his page.. looks like whoever wrote this is a fan of the DJB style, as am I. Very neat. Haven't thought about DJB in a long time.

Edit: Ahh, I found this linked from his page. It all makes perfect sense now. https://skarnet.org/software/skalibs/djblegacy.html
by bayesnet | 2025-12-29 05:49:06+00:00
I have an Equinox EV which, as I understand it, just runs Android and has no CarPlay or AAuto support. I thought that I would miss CarPlay but I don’t at all from a UX point of view.

What I do miss is the carefree feeling that I can drive somewhere without my car telling GM and Google about it. It is extraordinarily creepy that they know when I’ve had a bad morning and need a McMuffin or whatever. I use a burner Google account but given that the GM account must be associated with my actual identity I don’t think it does much.
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-29 05:50:56+00:00
Use Firefox with maximum tracking protection and use a PiHole with FTL as your DNS to block advertisement. Add uBlock Origin for the occasional cookie and WebRTC denial.

Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.

For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).

My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?
by Jach | 2025-12-29 05:51:04+00:00
It was released February 2022, that's only almost 4 years ago. 4-5 years is a good target for a refresh, I'll be somewhat surprised if there's not a new one in 2027, but any more frequently doesn't really make sense as the important components aren't improving in price/capability fast enough, and the initial release was and still is very capable rather than woefully inadequate. The motivations for upgrading are also different from a phone or more general laptop. I think the most common ranking of priorities for improvement would be: having various games run at all (mostly a software problem, Steam Deck already supports hardware ray tracing that various games now require), similar price range, better active battery life, physically lighter, and last would be higher graphical fidelity/performance. The things further down can't compromise the things higher up. Battery life advances being slow is kind of the killer.

There's a point that they could prioritize selling to new owners over existing owners looking to upgrade, and having a more capable device would help with that, but I think the marginal increase is probably not very big. The Steam Deck estimated sales were at 4 million units earlier this year, but that's still a relatively small portion of the whole PC gaming market (132m monthly active users on steam alone by 2021). It has been a big success for them, but it still exceeded their expectations, so I think they also would be skeptical of any large marginal improvement of new owner sales for what would likely be a minor improvement on the important specs. There's also competition from Windows handhelds whose sales don't suggest a large market just wishing Valve had a slightly more capable device that they'd pay more for.
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-29 05:51:15+00:00
I spent the last week reading a great deal about SDR and researching the current radio market, realized I really missed listening to the radio and figured I better get back to it now while there are still radio stations to listen too. Ended up ordering a Tecsun PL-880 since if I am going to use the computer for this, I might as well just stream. I still might dig into SDR if I end up wanting more than what the Tecsun offers since I have no interest in having a pile of radios or even a large desktop radio.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-12-29 05:52:01+00:00
Today, people probably stay home in safe states - if you vote Democrat or Republican in California - you already know how the state is going to be called. Same can be said for Alabama. Why waste your time for a sure thing?

Some 65% of the population voted last time. Last cycle, there were some jokes about how only votes in the handful of battleground states mattered. A popular vote policy could activate a lot of non-voters who suddenly felt like their voice could have an impact on the result. How that would shake up, I am not sure. I have heard that most republican voters are already participating, there are significantly more democrats who stay home.
by moezd | 2025-12-29 05:52:12+00:00
This is just a coping mechanism.

We know that C-level doesn't understand the tech they are evangelizing at all, and we know that at some point, they end up approving a lot of new middle management hires that are just as power hungry as they are, so the feedback loop from the shop to the top is sealed off. These two catastrophes seal the fate of any company.

If your company is still not infected with these, you can still call plausible deniability or oversight or whatever excuse for them, and true, they are human. But if I look into their eyes and see nothing but desire for power, that's a toxic company and no amount of "healthy cynicism" will help me with that.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-29 05:52:13+00:00
> one well-known characteristic of markets is that imbalances tend to, over-time, self correct.

That's not true for all markets, least of all for "free" markets which not only "tend" to become monopolized, they do end up as Robber Baron lands on steroids.

If you were right, there would be no need for anti-monopoly regulation or even for any market regulation, and I wouldn't have to repeat twice that a market is just a set of regulations.

> But the idea that GPU prices rising is the end of the world is just silly.

Nobody claimed that but it can't be disproved either :) On the other hand, you seem to think we should be concerned only with problems that provably lead to the end of the world. I'm not sure how wise that is.

> Or maybe it’s not a long-standing trend

Or maybe it is? Should we close our eyes and rely on chance or just use the opportunity to fix what clearly is a systemic problem in the fundamentals of the US market and economy - it's quite clear that the problem isn't limited to just RAM and GPUs.
by bobnarizes | 2025-12-29 05:53:44+00:00
Floxtop never creates or changes your folder structure. You decide where files should live by creating categories. A category has two things:

1. A short description of what kind of files belong there

2. A specific folder on your Mac as the destination

When you drop unsorted files into Floxtop, it looks inside each file, understands what it’s about, and compares it with your categories. Instead of picking a single place, Floxtop suggests the five most likely destinations, ordered by confidence.

Nothing happens automatically:

- Files are never moved on their own

- You review the suggestions and decide what gets moved

- If a file doesn’t clearly belong anywhere, it stays untouched

Floxtop helps you decide where things belong — the final action is always yours.
by mhitza | 2025-12-29 05:54:07+00:00
It's been just 2 years since the OLED release, I think we're closing in on a refresh. Unless a deck is a year away from a generational bump. A refresh could include the updated joysticks featured on the Steam controller, though.

Till then I'd think I'd do more good for Valve to focus on their steam app and store experience.
by arjie | 2025-12-29 05:54:30+00:00
That is true. In fact it relates to one of current America's greatest truths: coordination problems here are much more difficult than many technological problems. This is what makes many of those "oh so you take those autonomous vehicles, put them on a track for efficiency reasons, then link them together so they can transport more people, and voila! you have a train!" comments ring hollow.

Building a train requires coordination. Building an autonomous vehicle requires technological innovation and convincing a few people at the top levels of government. The specifics matter (and the Abundance guys have done a great job summarizing them) but it's due to an entrenchment of certain styles of laws.

So the answer to "why do Americans build self-driving cars to ease transport when Europeans just built subway systems?" is "we do these things not because they are hard, but because they're actually much easier than the other thing you find easy".
by EvansWilson | 2025-12-29 05:55:44+00:00
Ken Fisher is not betting on a recession. The billionaire founder of Fisher Asset Management has just revealed his latest portfolio, and the message is loud and clear: Buy the Winners.

With assets under management swelling to over $276 billion in late 2025, Fisher has doubled down on the technology sector while building a fortress in financials. If you want to invest like a billionaire, you need to look at the "Heavyweights" driving his returns.

Ken Fisher 12 stock picks: The "All-Weather" Blueprint

The core of the portfolio is not about finding obscure penny stocks; it is about aggressive sizing in the world's most dominant companies. The latest Ken Fisher 12 stock picks reveal a strategy focused on high-margin tech and deep-value banking.

Here is the breakdown of the top 12 convictions driving the fund:

NVIDIA (NVDA): The #1 holding (5.71%). Fisher is betting that the demand for AI chips is nowhere near its peak.
Apple (AAPL): A massive $13.8B position, signaling faith in the iPhone upgrade cycle.
Microsoft (MSFT): The enterprise AI play remains a top-3 anchor.
Alphabet (GOOGL): Despite regulatory noise, Fisher holds over $9B in Google.
Amazon (AMZN): A key play on both e-commerce resilience and AWS cloud dominance.
Meta Platforms (META): A bet on digital advertising efficiency and the metaverse pivot.
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM): The "arms dealer" of the chip war, vital for the entire tech ecosystem.
Broadcom (AVGO): A critical infrastructure pick for the AI data center build-out.
ASML Holding (ASML): A unique European tech play controlling the lithography market.
Goldman Sachs (GS): A surprising "Overweight" position, betting on a revival in deal-making.
JPMorgan Chase (JPM): The "Fortress Balance Sheet" bank to hedge against volatility.
Salesforce (CRM): A continued bet on the digitization of the global workforce.

The "Barbell" Strategy: Chips and Banks

Investors analyzing the Ken Fisher 12 stock picks will notice a distinct "Barbell" approach.

On one side, Fisher is "All-In" on the AI Infrastructure Trade (NVIDIA, TSMC, ASML, Broadcom). He isn't just buying the software; he owns the hardware that powers it.

On the other side, he is protecting capital with Big Finance (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan). By pairing high-growth semiconductors with undervalued banking giants, Fisher is positioning his fund to win regardless of whether interest rates stay high or fall in 2026.

The Takeaway: Fisher’s strategy for 2025 is simple—don't fight the trend. The biggest companies are getting bigger, and his portfolio is priced for a continued bull run.
by wreath | 2025-12-29 05:56:46+00:00
> Integration testing is of course useful, but generally one would want to create unit tests for every part of the code, and by definition it's not a unit test if hits multiple parts of the code simultaneously.

The common pitfall with this style of testing is that you end up testing implementation details and couple your tests to your code and not the interfaces at the boundaries of your code.

I prefer the boundary between unit and integration tests to be the process itself. Meaning, if I have a dependency outside the main process (eg database, HTTP API etc) then it warrants an integration test where i mock this dependency somehow. Otherwise, unit tests test the interfaces with as much coverage of actual code execution as possible. In unit tests, out of process dependencies are swapped with a fake implementation like an in-memory store instead of a full of fledged one that covers only part of interface that i use. This results in much more robust tests that I can rely on during refactoring as opposed to “every method or function is a unit, so unit tests should test these individual methods”.
by rramadass | 2025-12-29 05:58:03+00:00
They are related but fundamentally different. It is a vital semantic difference (influencing the programming model itself) since destructors are synchronous and deterministic while finalizers are asynchronous and non-deterministic.

It is because of all the problems that the finalize method was deprecated in Java 9 and marked "deprecated for removal"(JEP 421) in Java 18. More details at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56139760/why-is-the-fina... and https://inside.java/2022/01/12/podcast-021/
by eru | 2025-12-29 05:59:54+00:00
Not quite. At the very least, the RAW file is a static file. Whereas your camera chip can make interactive decisions.

In any case, RAW files aren't even all that raw. First, they are digitised. They often apply de-noising, digital conditioning (to take care of hot and dead pixels), lens correction. Some cameras even apply some lossy compression.
by danielcarter25 | 2025-12-29 06:01:47+00:00
If you really want to know, I have seen many fastest growing AI Startups in 2025. So, this legacy is going to continue on 2026 as well. Some of the AI which I'm aware of, AI-Measurement, 3d product configurator, QuickSize, DeepSeek, Perplexity.ai many more others AI companies. And they are going to trend in 2026 as well. Though we'll have some new companies as well in the market.
by petterroea | 2025-12-29 06:01:48+00:00
I was lucky enough to take some introductory courses at the NTNU Colorlab in Gjøvik, Norway. What I learned there changed my view on vision.

Computer imaging is much wider than you think. It cares about the entire signal pipeline, from emission from a light source, to capture by a sensor, to re-emission from a display, to absorption in your eye, and how your brain perceives it. Just like our programming languages professor called us "Pythonized minds" for only knowing a tiny subset of programming, there is so much more to vision than the RGB we learn at school. Look up "Metamerism" for some entry-level fun. Color spaces are also fun and funky.

There are a lot of interesting papers in the field, and its definitely worth reading some.

A highlight of my time at university.
by favflam | 2025-12-29 06:02:13+00:00
The gamble these executives are making is that prosecutors in a different administration will not prosecute them for bribery.

If you watch House of Cards (based loosely on real life), you can see the degree of separation between corporations/lobbyists and Congressmen. These guys participating in building a ballroom are crossing that line. Juries will not have to connect so many dots compared to before in order to put someone in jail.
Ask HN: Ruby 4 and unicorn segfault (kgio) how to get a gem release?
by catatsuy | 2025-12-29 06:03:49+00:00
Hi, I hit a segmentation fault when using unicorn on Ruby 4. It looks related to kgio.

In unicorn master (git), it seems kgio was removed (or unicorn no longer depends on it), so Ruby 4 may work there. But there is no RubyGems release that includes this change.

I can run unicorn from git, but it needs extra “release-time” build steps (generate lib/unicorn/version.rb, build/install ext/unicorn_http with ragel, and copy unicorn_http.so).

Workaround PR (exact steps): https://github.com/catatsuy/private-isu/pull/853
My mail to unicorn-public (may be inactive): https://yhbt.net/unicorn-public/20251227071714.D9328160070@mail.catatsuy.org/T/#u

Question: What is the best way to contact the unicorn maintainer, or request a RubyGems release?