MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bcrosby95 | 2025-12-30 17:37:17+00:00
Like people putting ketchup on a steak, eating pizza with a fork, putting chili in a hand baked loaf of sourdough, using a garbage disposal as another trash can, or generally using the thing someone is knowledgeable about "wrong".

For you it's film, but most people have their thing, and you're probably doing the same thing to something else in your household.
by elktown | 2025-12-30 17:38:20+00:00
> I think it’s obvious who lacks critical thinking.

My critical thinking is sharp enough to recognize that you're the recently banned
ninetyninenine user [0]. Just as unbalanced and quarrelsome as before I can see. It's probably better to draw some conclusion from a ban and adjust, or just leave.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988923
by soldthat | 2025-12-30 17:38:30+00:00
> Someone being oppressed does not justify them then oppressing others.

That’s not the point. A country that has a history of hatred against a group, to the point of ethnic cleansing, and has not changed on the matter, has no legitimacy in critisizing or making judgments on that group.

I think this would be obvious in any other context.
by sinkasapa | 2025-12-30 17:39:13+00:00
Those are both valid reasons to use both languages. The "only" (whether true or not) is what the argument hinges on. It is roughly the same as saying that the only advantage of X is that it is popular, but Y is also popular and has additional advantages, therefore, Y is better than X. That is a valid argument, whether the premises are true or not.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-30 17:39:14+00:00
The super socket 7 motherboards were amazing.

They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though).

Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot.

So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard.

The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.
by Xirdus | 2025-12-30 17:39:18+00:00
Let's stop at the first half. If I pay somebody to dig a ditch. Period. End of story. Let's assume I'm not clinically insane and I actually needed that ditch for something. Is the sum still zero?

Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible.

Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero?
by realityfactchex | 2025-12-30 17:39:23+00:00
Overall, HN is good.

Nowhere else really can you get that concentrated & large a place to weigh in on something and get (fairly) intelligent, (fairly) rapid, (fairly) reasonable, (fairly) fast feedback -- even if you don't agree with all of it.

Or, if you're not weighing in and getting responses, just to read the temperature on any discussion (of interest) and see reasonable views raised and discussed.

PG always said something like, if you want to see how silly some people are just read the bottom-ranked comments on HN.

Well maybe HN doesn't upvote the best. But hype gonna hype. It's the best we have AFAIK.
by lelele | 2025-12-30 17:39:57+00:00
> One day when the well runs dry, you must be able to either pay the actual cost

What multiple of the current cost do you expect? Currently, GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT for Business cost $19/month and €29/month respectively. Even a 10×–20× increase will still be economically viable in a professional setting if the tools continue to save hours of work.
by t43562 | 2025-12-30 17:40:05+00:00
I learned C in about 1989/1990 and have used it a lot since then. I have worked on a fair amount of rotten commercial C code, sold at a high price, in which every millimeter of extra functionality was bought with sweat and blood. I once spent a month finding a memory corruption issue that happened every 2 weeks with a completely different stack trace which, in the end, required a 1-line fix.

The effort was usually out of proportion with the achievement.

I crashed my own computer a lot before I got Linux. Do you remember far pointers? :-( In those days millions of dollars were made by operating systems without memory protection that couldn't address more than 640k of memory. One accepted that programs sometimes crashed the whole computer - about once a week on average.

Despite considering myself an acceptable programmer I still make mistakes in C quite easily and I use valgrind or the sanitizers quite heavily to save myself from them. I think the proliferation of other languages is the result of all this.

In spite of this I find C elegant and I think 90% of my errors are in string handling so therefore if it had a decent string handling library it would be enormously better. I don't really think pure ASCIIZ strings are so marvelous or so fast that we have to accept their bullshit.
Show HN: My Best Sport – Match your body dimensions to sports with AI
by dylanlacom | 2025-12-30 17:40:09+00:00
Hi HN!

This is a silly side project I built for my friends and I. You submit your body measurements and let AI figure out what sport you may have a competitive advantage in, given your dimensions.

How it came about: Some friends and I, who are all past our peak physical years, were chatting it up at the bar, and we got to talking about who among us would still win a race in the sport we played in high school, without any training. Naturally, our current body shape/dimensions became the primary factor in our conclusions. So it got me thinking, what dimensions are _most_ informative in our ability to excel in a sport, and, given these dimensions, what would an LLM have to say about it.

Having shared this among the friend group, the results have been super interesting. In some cases, like mine, the results were surprisingly on target with the sports I actually played in high school and have excelled at in my life. I swam in high school, and specifically free style and butterfly strokes, and this was the first sport, down to the stroke, that the AI chose for me. Second was surfing, which has been my lifelong passion, and something I did competitively in college.

For others, the results have been very unexpected, like a D1 volleyball player who had fencing picked as the top sport.

On the technical side, I'm happy to share some details about what went into this. I challenged myself to "vibe code" as much of this as possible in Typescript, mostly in the interest of seeing how far I could push these gen-AI tools, from design to implementation. This was hit or miss, and required a lot of hand holding to get it production ready. Where it completely fell flat was in the design and construction of the morphing avatar. Spatial awareness still seems like a bridge too far for AI coding tools, and the model had to be built with morphs manually (and frankly it still needs a lot of work). The rest of the stack is:

- Typescript
- SQLite
- OpenAI's GPT 5 model
- Server hosted on AWS EC2
- Frontend is a very basic Next.js page hosted on Vercel.
- WebGL and canvas for the avatar

Anyway, hope this brings a little fun to your day. Give it a shot and LMK your feedback.

URL: https://www.mybestsport.com

- Dylan
Show HN: Tidy- A minimal directory organizer I built to clean my downloads
by supbruhhh | 2025-12-30 17:40:11+00:00
I built tidy for myself because my Downloads folder and various project directories were very cluttered. I wanted a CLI tool, or a script to do that, but had little success, so I built my own. It’s written in Go and uses the Charm (Bubble Tea) TUI framework... Tested working on WSL and it works great for moving all files to their extension based directories easily. I've found it really helpful for keeping my WSL and Linux environments clean. Do give it a go!
by MarkLowenstein | 2025-12-30 17:40:18+00:00
I've got a "smart" TV that I didn't want, but that's the only thing they offer in my price range anymore. Maybe 5 years old. Stopped connecting to Wi-Fi, an actual hardware problem. Bricked. Opened the TV, cleaned the contacts and uncreased some wire strip. Has been working ever since. Most people would have thrown it out and bought another. But I'm the bad guy for using incandescent light bulbs.
by Someone | 2025-12-30 17:40:24+00:00
> I've always wondered at the motivatons of the various string routines in C

This idiom:

char hostname[20];
...
strncpy( hostname, input, 20 );
hostname[19]=0;

exists because strncpy was invented for copying file names that got stored in 14-byte arrays, zero terminated only if space permitted (https://stackoverflow.com/a/1454071)
by rconti | 2025-12-30 17:40:52+00:00
Going from a single CPU to a dual CPU would, in theory, double performance _at best_. In other words, only under workloads that supported multithreading perfectly.

But in the real world, the perceived performance improvement was more than doubling. The responsiveness of your machine might seem 10 or 100x improved, because suddenly that blocking process is no longer blocking the new process you're trying to launch, or your user interface, or whatever.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-30 17:40:56+00:00
>Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches.

This had an interesting side effect: Celerons of that era overclocked extremely well (stable 300 -> 500MHz+), due to the smaller and simpler on-die L2 cache relative to the Pentiums of the era, whose L2 cache was much larger but had to be off-die (and less amenable to overclocking) as a result.

An overclocked dual Celeron could easily outperform the highest-end Pentiums of the era on clock-sensitive, cache-insensitive applications, especially those designed to take advantage of parallelism.
by jandrese | 2025-12-30 17:41:06+00:00
I don't think anybody in this thread read the article.

Strlcpy tries to improve the situation but still has problems. As the article points out it is almost never desirable to truncate a string passed into strXcpy, yet that is what all of those functions do. Even worse, they attempt to run to the end of the string regardless of the size parameter so they don't even necessarily save you from the unterminated string case. They also do loads of unnecessary work, especially if your source string is very long (like a mmaped text file).

Strncpy got this behavior because it was trying to implement the dubious truncation feature and needed to tell the programmer where their data was truncated. Strlcpy adopted the same behavior because it was trying to be a drop in replacement. But it was a dumb idea from the start and it causes a lot of pain unnecessarily.

The crazy thing is that strcpy has the best interface, but of course it's only useful in cases where you have externally verified that the copy is safe before you call it, and as the article points out if you know this then you can just use memcpy instead.

As you ponder the situation you inevitably come to the conclusion that it would have been better if strings brought along their own length parameter instead of relying on a terminator, but then you realize that in order to support editing of the string as well as passing substrings you'll need to have some struct that has the base pointer, length, and possibly a substring offset and length and you've just re-invented slices. It's also clear why a system like this was not invented for the original C that was developed on PDP machines with just a few hundred KB of RAM.

Is it really too late for the C committee to not develop a modern string library that ships with base C26 or C27? I get that they really hate adding features, but C strings have been a problem for over 50 years now, and I'm not advocating for the old strings to be removed or even deprecated at this time. Just that a modern replacement be available and to encourage people to use them for new code.
by coldtea | 2025-12-30 17:41:39+00:00
>But the whole point of Nuremberg was to prevent this, the whole idea of international law was meant to prevent this.

The whole point of Nuremberg was to put on a show against the defeated, and establish the "good guys" who now run international order.

Acts like Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the rest of allied abuses weren't on trial there or elsewhere.
by Defletter | 2025-12-30 17:41:45+00:00
Do you also insist that we treat with proper decorum those who throw out assertions that jetfuel cannot melt steel beams? I notice you have yet to criticise them for posting what is at best misguided and unsubstantiated misinformation, and at worst disinformation. Hardly decorum on their part, is it? Instead, you are hyperfocusing on my "freeze peach", disregarding everything else I said in my comment. I find this to be a boring distraction from the topic at hand.
by dang | 2025-12-30 17:42:11+00:00
Related. Others?

Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912300 - Feb 2023 (179 comments)

Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633792 - March 2021 (86 comments)

Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16197436 - Jan 2018 (15 comments)

Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518 - May 2016 (181 comments)
by ModernMech | 2025-12-30 17:42:24+00:00
+5 insightful. Programming language design is all about having the right nexus of features. Having all the features or the wrong mix of features is actually an anti-feature.

In our present context, most mainstream languages have already handed out shared mutation. To my eye, this is the main reason so many languages have issues with writing asynch/parallel/distributed programs. It's also why Rust has an easier time of it, they didn't just hand out shared mutation. And also why Erlang has the best time of it, they built the language around no shared mutation.
by arka2147483647 | 2025-12-30 17:42:40+00:00
Sadly, all the bug trackers are full of bugs relating to char*. So you very much do those by accident. And in C, fixed width strings are not in any way rare or unusual. Go to any c codebase you will find stuff like:

char buf[12];
sprintf(buf, "%s%s", this, that); // or
strcat(buf, ...) // or
strncpy(buf, ...) // and so on..
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-12-30 17:42:53+00:00
As a high earning single dad, I find that focus on woman cringe worthy. The problems have nothing to do with sex.

One of my older co-workers is a widow and also a single dad for ages.

We -- the 16% of single parents, that are dads in our society -- rarely speak up?

If you want to really get me piss angry: treat me like a "white old men" and totally ignore that I want equal rights for my children (boys _and girls_).

(And no, that doesn't invalid the observations completely. It's just... yeah, I get it 5/6 single parents are woman... still: argh)
by echelon | 2025-12-30 17:43:03+00:00
It's funny to me that I work in film and have more hope and imagination over the use of this technology than people who (presumably) don't make films at all.

As long as humans have dreams it won't be like that. The human spirit and desire to connect to others and tell stories doesn't just suddenly die.

I think the very best lens to look at it is that all of the tens of thousands of kids that go through film school and never get to bring their VFX-heavy fantasy to life now suddenly have voice to match their ambition.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-30 17:43:16+00:00
Agreed. Your point is true and as such too I don't really think that they could really be used for semiconductor industry.

And all other industries also don't really seem to me to have any overlap with the datacenter industry as much aside from having water access and land and electricity but like I doubt that they would get used enough to be justified their costs, especially the costs of the overpriced GPU's and ram and other components

In my opinion, These large datacenters are usually a lost cause if the AI bubble bursts since they were created with such a strong focus of GPU's and other things and their whole model of demand is related to AI

If the bubble bursts, I think that auctioning server hardware might happen but I doubt how much of that would be non-gpu / pure compute related servers or perhaps gpu but good for the average consumer.
by hbcondo714 | 2025-12-30 17:43:18+00:00
https://behavior.today

I cloned Paddle's NextJS starter kit[1] and incorporated my previous reporting code built with Observable Framework[2].

It actually took longer to get the website (domain, terms, privacy) approved by Paddle and my identity verified by its 3rd party than to vibe code the site with Claude Code.

[1] https://github.com/PaddleHQ/paddle-nextjs-starter-kit

[2] https://github.com/observablehq/framework
by dang | 2025-12-30 17:43:34+00:00
This is an excellent submission except that there's another undersea cables thread already on the frontpage:

The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432999

Generally we downweight follow-ups so as to avoid repetition [1, 2]. But once enough time has gone by for the hivemind caches to clear, what is old becomes new again. If you would be willing to email hn@ycombinator.com in, say, a couple months, we could invite a repost and put it in the SCP [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Show HN: Mail Wizard Pro – New Gizzapp email scraper released
by johnboygiz | 2025-12-30 17:44:13+00:00
Are you an email marketing strategiest ? Tired paying for emails leads within your chosen niche ?

If so, Mail Wizard Pro is the perfect software tool to help you find these email marketing leads at the click of a button !

PAY WHAT YOU WANT & START COLLECTING EMAIL LEADS TODAY !
by andsoitis | 2025-12-30 17:44:32+00:00
“People demanding that AIs have rights would be a huge mistake,” said Bengio. “Frontier AI models already show signs of self-preservation in experimental settings today, and eventually giving them rights would mean we’re not allowed to shut them down.

“As their capabilities and degree of agency grow, we need to make sure we can rely on technical and societal guardrails to control them, including the ability to shut them down if needed.”
by mananaysiempre | 2025-12-30 17:45:05+00:00
The other frontpage article on the same topic[1] makes a fairly good case that both Times and Calibri suck in this role (not least because they are default fonts and receive the social connotations of that) and notes in passing that the US Supreme Court uses Century Schoolbook, IMO a solid choice (helped also by their competent formatting) and perhaps a less artsy look than Garamond &co.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432862
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-30 17:45:31+00:00
It gets the name from "rugby football" from the time where both rugby and international football ("soccer") were considered related sports and often shared rules and associations (such as the London Football Association, from which Princeton imported rules to the US, and which eventually started to split as the sports split further).

The change in shape from a round ball to the "handegg" eventually derived from the first American innovation in "rugby football" of the forward pass. Even with the forward pass, the game required kicks into goals for a long while with the "touchdown" a further later innovation (though also influenced by reimporting rugby rules, as it relates to the rugby "try"). Kick offs, punts, field goals, and extra point attempts all still vestigially remain from the rugby origins even as most of the play in between them changed drastically.

American Football is called "football" because it evolved from the "football family". It's like using the term "romance language": Spanish and Italian sound very different today, but they both share roots in Latin. They've also both changed a lot since the days when Latin was a living language.
by Ekaros | 2025-12-30 17:46:04+00:00
I always find water use and farming weird. Living in part of planets where water for farms mostly if not fully rains down from the sky. So it getting on farm land is inconsequential one way or an other.

Still, I do feel there must be some difference between farming and cooling use by evaporation. As at least part of water is run off back to rivers and then seep back to ground water. These again depend largely on location.
by mylifeandtimes | 2025-12-30 17:46:18+00:00
> the dependency to sell to the USA

What interests me about this comment is the statistic that 50% of US consumer spending comes from people in the top 10% of earnings (first google link, probably not the best source: https://www.warc.com/content/feed/top-10-of-wealthy-american...)

So while the US might look like a really juicy market, I start to wonder how much juice is in the lemon?

Why the dependency to sell to the US if 90% of the US population doesn't have the free cash to buy things?

Yes, I know I'm stupid, and look at all the cheap stuff americans buy; I've seen the miles of warehouses from companies like 5 Below. My concern is how long this lasts?
by grepfru_it | 2025-12-30 17:46:24+00:00
Wildcat was unique because it still required you to interact with the BBS. With majorbbs the bbs would be relegated to an internet provider and their bbs would disappear.

Wildcat was like aol for bbs but it immediately brought users to a web browser so they could get internet connectivity while still getting a pop up of the BBs’ services.

What you are missing is that “full isp’s” did not exist until about 1996, 1997. And even then AOL and secondarily Compuserve where the go to providers. Wildcat absolutely challenged that status quo in an independent manner
by franktankbank | 2025-12-30 17:46:28+00:00
What about a single beefcake server that runs dumb terminals throughout your house with a lightweight shim between each device and server. Sexy monitors just sitting there quiet AF. Mega room for coffee cups and niknaks across the desk. Ports for days. This is my dream. I'd keep it by my feet so I could pet it and say good job.
by cgannett | 2025-12-30 17:46:32+00:00
This is further complicated by the difference between direct and indirect value. I build a thing that produces n value and is directly attributable to me. I also do things that help 100 others produce 10% more value themselves but most of that is attributed to themselves producing 10 * n value overall. How will I be rewarded if at all? Most likely as someone who produced n value.
by solatic | 2025-12-30 17:47:24+00:00
100%.

With that said... there is a reason why ML went with Python. GPU programming requires C-based libraries. NodeJS does not have a good FFI story, and neither does Rust or Go. Yes, there's support, but Python's FFI support is actually better here. Zig is too immature here.

The world deserves a Python-like language with a better type system, a better distribution system, and not nearly as much dynamism footguns / rope for people to hang themselves with.
by coldtea | 2025-12-30 17:47:52+00:00
>While it will not control the murderer, it can and will influence it (violence going 10% down is better than 0%)

Idealists create worse outcomes than realists and pragmatists.

Violence going down 10% can be worse than it going down 0%, if the difference comes from reducing counter-violence done by the oppressed - and reducing based on the agenda and whims of the big time abusers responsible for a big chunk of the other 90%.