MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-25 13:10:04+00:00
I'm not an expert, but I very much doubt this.

The FSF calls it a "free license" [1] and I don't think they would if they didn't make the source code available.

Source code available is necessary but not sufficient for Free software, see [2]

> Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

EDIT Oh sorry, you mean for the LICENSE to be available. Never mind then.
by BoxFour | 2025-12-25 13:10:33+00:00
I agree. My point is this is probably unrealistic:

> It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position

You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.

There are some notable exceptions obviously, but those generally require you to be some sort of leading domain expert.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-25 13:10:47+00:00
In the case of something like xzutils, you would perhaps have listed it as low risk, as it's shipped with your OS. After the backdoor incident, you'd have adjusted the risk assessment, and utilities like it. Once you hit a certain level you might question if you truly need the entire xzutils package or if you could replace it.

In other cases you might have a library you depend on, but it's no longer maintained, so it might score really high on risk, meaning that you should probably address that dependency in your next development cycle.

So the SBOM and risk assessment wouldn't necessarily catch vulnerabilities, but it makes it simple to check if you're affect and generally help you manage/reduce your attack surface.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-12-25 13:10:49+00:00
The hidden story is the depth of work required to replace a keyboard on a newer Lenovo. The amount of work is absurd. Easily an hour or two for the casual owner plus use of multiple tools. Don't blame the author for giving up on it.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Lenovo+ThinkPad+X1+Carbon+6th+G...

"Step 26: Remove the seventy-two 0.5mm screws holding keyboard in place."
by _aavaa_ | 2025-12-25 13:11:09+00:00
Wasting it as a “clean” fuel is not clean though. There are emissions at: 1) production, 2) usage, and 3) the averted emissions due to this being used.

As a fuel, the alternatives are electricity for land and biofuels for land and sea.

But as a chemical feedstock the alternator is dirtier hydrogen.

So wasting this as a fuel means that you aren’t replacing dirty hydrogen with it, but rather cleaner electricity.
by jakewins | 2025-12-25 13:12:02+00:00
I tried Basel, Buck2 and Pants for a greenfield mono repo recently, Rust and Python heavy.

Of the three, I went with Buck2. Maybe just circumstance with Rust support being good and not built to replace Cargo?

Bazel was a huge pain - broke all standard tooling by taking over Cargos job, then unable to actually build most packages without massive multi-day patching efforts.

Pants seemed premature - front page examples from the docs didn’t work, apparently due to breaking changes in minor versions, and the Rust support is very very early days.

Buck2 worked out of the box exactly as claimed, leaves Cargo intact so all the tooling works.. I’m hopeful.

Previously I’ve used Make for polyglot monorepos.. but it requires an enormous amount of discipline from the team, so I’m very keen for a replacement with less foot guns
by rvnx | 2025-12-25 13:13:41+00:00
I just needed an example that shows that it is not because you can write a compiler that it means you would be productive in a team at a FAANG.

I edited the post above to make it more clear, that they are not comparable on the human aspect, perhaps I should have insisted more, to not give the impression.

It was clumsy from my side, just that I found it difficult to find better example of someone who is well-known good programmer, wrote their own compiler too, wrote their own image decoder too, but not productive in a corporate environment.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-12-25 13:13:59+00:00
It appears that Ars Technica is not very technical, or up-to-date on tech. Today's "LimeWire" is just a basic centralized WeTransfer-like file transfer service, with a crypto NFT token attached. Real LimeWire, the P2P Gnutella client, has long been dead. Old versions can't connect anymore, probably due to bootstrap servers being offline.

But this entire article is based on Reddit, so that very much explains it.
by BoxFour | 2025-12-25 13:14:16+00:00
I’m not sure why he accepted it, I never pried too much. It was his first big tech job. It’s very possible he still made more money as a first-level manager, so it might’ve still been a net win for him.

He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co. So from both the company’s and his perspective, I suppose everyone’s happy.
Show HN: Open-source WhatsApp inbox for the Cloud API
by aamatte | 2025-12-25 13:14:27+00:00
A WhatsApp Web-style inbox for the Cloud API.

Supports templates, interactive buttons, media, and 24-hour window enforcement.

Built with Next.js and you can deploy it to Vercel in one click.

Uses Kapso for the WhatsApp connection.
by aashirpersonal | 2025-12-25 13:16:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building RAG systems for a while, and I noticed 90% of retrieval failures aren't due to the LLM—they're due to the data. I got tired of debugging hallucinations only to find the retriever had pulled "Page 1 of 5" headers or five duplicate versions of an old policy.

I couldn't find a simple "pandas-profiling" equivalent for unstructured text, so I built this.

It runs locally (CLI) and helps you:

Detect semantic duplicates (using all-MiniLM-L6-v2) to save vector storage costs.

Flag PII (API keys, emails) before they get indexed.

Identify "coverage gaps" by comparing user queries against your docs.

It outputs a standalone HTML report you can show to stakeholders.

Written in Python, open source (MIT). Feedback welcome!

https://github.com/aashirpersonal/rag-corpus-profiler
by funerr | 2025-12-25 13:18:19+00:00
ChatGPT summary:

Prototaxites was a massive, trunk-like organism (up to ~8m tall, ~1m wide) that dominated land ~420–370 million years ago, long before trees or complex plants existed. It looked like a tree, but chemical evidence suggests it didn’t photosynthesize. Internally it was made of interwoven microscopic tubes, unlike plant tissue. It’s often described as a giant fungus, but it doesn’t cleanly match modern fungi either, and some researchers think it may represent an entirely extinct branch of eukaryotic life. In other words, early “forests” may have been dominated by something we don’t have a modern analog for.
by ben_w | 2025-12-25 13:19:02+00:00
When it is their own AI, encourage; anyone else's, prevent.

How do ads work when ever fewer real people are looking at them? Targetting specifically people who don't use AI is one option — I hear there's big bucks in literal fraud ads, and the big players (or at least Musk) do seem somewhat opposed to basic regulatory requirements such as "tell us who paid for these ads".
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-25 13:19:45+00:00
I feel the exact same way. They can be insanely powerful, but the syntax is insanely off-putting.

And the documentation is still pretty sparse.

> Eventually I want to write a good baseline library to use for my source generators -- simplifying finding definitions with attributes, mapping types to System.Type, adding some basic pattern matching for structures -- but haven't found a way to do it that's general enough while being very useful.

I'd use it in a heartbeat. The new ForAttributeWithMetadataName function has been a big help, but everything else feels like a totally different language to me.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-25 13:19:48+00:00
PC Magazine thinks otherwise:

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/framework-laptop-16-2025

I quote: "A DIY Desktop Replacement Dream Machine"

It also outperformed the Asus Zenbook S 16 in their benchmarks, which also has a HX 370 SoC.

The only thing they didnt like was the battery.
by Tyriar | 2025-12-25 13:20:15+00:00
One of the things we should definitely action is hiding it in more places where it doesn't work well, that's one of the key pieces of feedback we got and is tracked in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/282578

For that WSL one specifically we'll get it fixed in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/285037
Show HN: A global synchronized meditation bell website to connect us
by dakinitribe | 2025-12-25 13:20:58+00:00
Inspired by a (not so) recent HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45421067), I (vibe) coded a site where anyone can meditate together with synchronized bells, in real time.

The goal is simple: if it helps people feel connected, even briefly, that's a small victory.

Try it here: https://waake.onrender.com/

Feedback welcome, especially on any improvements you think could make it more calming and communal.

Have done some work so that it chimes in the background, and as PWA but not perfect yet.

Next challenge: scaling to 8,264,566,487 MAU
by dijit | 2025-12-25 13:21:55+00:00
People can’t think anything good of communism because they’re conditioned to feel that way.

Whats interesting is how equal it was for everyone, one comment I got when asking people who lived through the soviet era was that.

“there’s no advantage given to any religion” (hence, new years being the traditional family get together time). and “we were all comrades, men and women”. A lot of what they hear from the US about gender equality falls on deaf ears because thats what they had and they were told was bad.

A weird perspective, but certainly an interesting one.

It’s always difficult to hear things that doesn’t fit our narrative.
The App to Celebrate Food
by ejfhp | 2025-12-25 13:21:57+00:00
I'm building a 'social' app for Android and iOS that's all about food.

It's called Bengodi, like the fantasy place from Boccaccio in the Decameron.

I would like to promote the culture of food, go against the spread of UPF, and help to preserve traditions.
I would like to have people to rediscover the pleasure of cooking and the long term advantages of eating well.

The app is at a good stage, it lacks some graphic design because I'm not able to do it, but for now I just would like to see if the concept works.
There's a lot of cloud backend that costs me money, but I don't like to have ads, so I think it will be available on stores through some levels of subscription. I don't know yet how much will it costs to keep it running, but I'm planning to ask very little money, just to cover the expenses.

This is the elevator pitch generated with the help of Gemini...

Tired of fast food culture overshadowing great cooking? Our app is on a mission to put food and alimentation back where they belong: center stage!
We're a platform where users can share and record their family food culture, helping to preserve priceless food traditions before they're lost. Imagine discovering a hidden gem. We connect you with traditional, local, and uncommon foods right in your area and around the world.
But it's more than just a registry. We inspire users to adopt good habits about cooking and eating well-prepared food, making it accessible and exciting. In short, we’re not just an app, we’re building a community that gets people genuinely passionate about food, one dish, one story, and one tradition at a time.

Now I'm searching for some testers (max 10/20). The app is in closed testing on both the Play Store and the App Store, so if someone is interested let me know.
by Eggpants | 2025-12-25 13:22:04+00:00
I agree that’s Zed is very nice but a ticking enshitiation time bomb.
However, you do see how this autocomplete “feature” and its whole copilot everywhere strategy, is about M$’s roi of its ai investment right?

So if you have a problem with VC money you should stop using VSCode as well.

Of course they will just invent more accounting terms, like they do with azure, to hide how much money they are losing on it.

https://windowsreport.com/steve-ballmer-calls-bullshit-micro...
by redeeman | 2025-12-25 13:22:36+00:00
> Windows in the early 2000s installed just fine without a floppy directly from CD or PXE booting.

when was it sata became the norm? im thinking circa 2001-ish, and what windows was latest here? im thinking windows xp. lets try remember, did windows xp include sata drivers on the installation medium?? oh wait, it didnt. There wasnt even ahci at the time, and windows xp didnt include a single sata driver for any of the chipsets at the time

> A Window Manager and Window Server don't come by default with Linux... It's always an install-time option on the major distros.

desktop distributions generally come with a desktop environment default selected, or prompt you to choose between a few. one feature that has been there since more or less forever is alt + left/rightclick mouse to move/resize windows, which is significantly better than finding the title bar or corners like. for an operating system called "windows" its pretty hilarious it has the worst window management of them all, dont you think?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-25 13:22:49+00:00
I don't think this was understood charitably. The point of the parent is that in practice, when it comes time to update one part, you'll also want to update all or most of the others. So, in practice, you will not see any of these savings.

The potential savings may be significant, but for most people, it may be the case that the actual savings are unlikely. A modular, upgradable laptop may be a niche product for people who want to upgrade each part more frequently, not less.
by azuanrb | 2025-12-25 13:23:41+00:00
Part of it is because Ruby imo, have a very nice syntax. With type annotation, it's becoming "ugly", a lot more verbose. It's no longer English-like. I do agree type have some advantages, but we need to get the DX right.

I've been using Ruby for more than 10 years now, and I only started using LSP recently. To me it's a nice addition but I can live without it. Type is just one of the tools, not the only one imo. Not trying to sound negative but type is becoming more like a hammer analogy nowadays.

And it's not limited to Ruby. Javascript, Python, all similar languages. Not everyone is a fan of type. We won't reach consensus imo and that's ok.
by chucke | 2025-12-25 13:27:02+00:00
Happy bday ruby!

For the usual doomsdaysayers saying "ruby can't X so I left it for Y", when X is typing, RBS is becoming the accepted standard (now that sorbet supports it),and RBS inline notation next to signature/code too (for peeps complaining about separate files); when X is LSP, ruby-lsp is the standard and already supports "go to definition" (its major hole for a long time), and its plugin architecture allows other other features to reuse the same code AST/index (So that each linter/formatter/type checker doesn't have to parse their own); when X is parallelism, ractors are have actually become performant in a lot of common cases, and it's only missing some GC improvements to be truly non-experimental.

There are new shiny things like ZJIT or Box, but even the core team recommends against using them in production for now. But they'll get better, as its been happening with the things listed above.

No wildly new syntax changes is also a good thing. Should help alternative implementations catch up.
by Rochus | 2025-12-25 13:27:47+00:00
> I hate this language with the intensity of a thousand suns

Interesting. What's the main reason? Do you already have representative experience with Typst? Does it really solve the issues you perceived with Latex? Are you satisfied with the typographic quality of Typst? (why I'm interested: https://github.com/rochus-keller/typos/)
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-25 13:28:30+00:00
> “Overall, 76% of female murders and 56% of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim.”

> https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offende...

Lets say M is "being murdered" and A is "stranger in the house", "not A" is "person known to the victim in the house".

The numbers you're quoting say that P(not A | M) is large, implying that P(A | M) is small.

However, to make a decision on whether to let someone in, I care about P(M | A).

You need to exercise that critical thinking more. You just heard someone say "the murders are known to the victim" and you instantly dropped your common sense.
by Strilanc | 2025-12-25 13:28:59+00:00
Author here: yes that's all correct.

This is perhaps not clear enough, but the title refers to a pattern. For classical bits on a quantum computer this pattern is already playing out (as shown in the cited experiments), and for quantum bits I think it's about to play out.

Classical storage of classical bits is still far more reliable, of course. Hell, a rock chucked into one bucket or another is still more reliable. We'll never beat the classical computer at storing classical bits... but the rock in a bucket has some harsh competition coming.

I should maybe also mention that arbitrarily good qubits are a step on the road, not the end. I've seen a few twitter takes making that incorrect extrapolation. We'll still need hundreds of these logical qubits. It's conceivable that quantity also jumps suddenly... but that'd require even more complex block codes to start working (not just surface codes). I'm way less sure if that will happen in the next five years.
by redeeman | 2025-12-25 13:29:06+00:00
they were not, they purchased what was in the stores, which was only windows. all the way from first windows to windows xp it was the biggest pile of shit imaginable. the average user wouldnt even have half a chance of installing it, and certainly couldnt use it with any kind of reasonableness, it was a giant mess, it was just the mess people were used to. Most people would throw out their computer and buy a new when windows became slow, because, of course it gradually becomes slower, makes perfect sense, no?

KDE from 15 years back was HUGELY better than windows at the time, and frankly, also windows now
by ben_w | 2025-12-25 13:29:07+00:00
Truth vs. perception.

As I said, politicians have the same range of beliefs as the rest of us, are not magically blessed with true knowledge. They can be believers in fusion just as e.g. Trump has weird beliefs about Chinese domestic installation of renewables.

(Me, I don't know if fusion is or isn't realistic, but I can see ways it can cause proliferation issues just by being easier to configure as a cheap neutron source than as aneutronic, so I hope it's not realistic, but hope isn't a prediction).
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-25 13:29:09+00:00
Thank you!! I just commented the same thing, but people will eat any meme you throw at them, it's quite shocking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46384274

One thing that spending time talking to people online has taught me is how often what people say is just mindlessly repeating something they heard somewhere.

It's also fantastic how I find your response more persuasive than mine, while using fewer words. Well done.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-25 13:29:35+00:00
Merry Christmas, dear HN Community!

Being super-lonely this year, I hope all of you are much better off than me - this year contained some catastrophic external events in my life, which led to permanent change on some "layers" of my live (not only material, but also in psy etc.)

I hope the next year will bring the luck to re-align some things and bring them backs on the track, otherwise next year I will write the same post and add that Im in huge (final) trouble...

Enjoy the time with your family if they are near to you!
by xpe | 2025-12-25 13:29:54+00:00
I'm thinking about various security models. When it comes to browser integration, I'm particularly interested in defense-in-depth rather than trusting the shIP activities to the captAIn.

Bad puns aside, this is an important area! Many of us want to know what people are building (or should be built) to put security front and center -- or at least integrated --rather than an afterthought. Components might include: sandboxing, access rules, logging, honey-pot mode, perhaps even read-only access for a "protector" agent. (Another common approach here is wishful thinking such as "this ship is unsinkable", but that ship has sailed for me.)

Putting on my dark humor hat, if all else fails, there could be a "time to panic" mode triggered by certain criteria (e.g. a regex matching "your bank account balance is $0").

P.S. Please don't interpret my style as a lack of seriousness. If used carelessly, this technology opens up some impressive botnet potential. Luckily, with the benefit of wishful thinking or just flat-out ignorance, we can trust humans and AIs to be adequately trustworthy. [1] [2]

[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/the_psycholog...

[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
by ta_le | 2025-12-25 13:30:01+00:00
I'm a chronic lurker for most of the year but this is a good time to say this. I'm so thankful for this community that provides so much without succumbing to enshitification as some other parts of the Internet. Whether I'm passing time on a train or escaping an annoying group discussion, this is by far my favorite algorithmic feed to do so.
Merry Christmas everyone!
by sallveburrpi | 2025-12-25 13:33:39+00:00
So so weird that we live in a timeline where Anduril and Palantir are military contractors of the US and other governments.

I know it’s somewhat of a tired observation by now but I still wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to name your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance artefacts.

I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai.

The names are really dope though I have to give them that…
by motbus3 | 2025-12-25 13:34:36+00:00
Once a person where I was tech lead asked to leave because he told me his salary wasn't enough.

I didn't know numbers, but I came to know that he was earning X and as I asked the company for him to stay he got at least 1.7X

Then I learned how much X was and I got said with my own salary

After a while, I've got a new job and they offered 1.7X for me even after I received a 1.5X increase.

First I was happy that they were at least trying to hold me, but then I realized that my base salary was probably just too low LOL
by cassepipe | 2025-12-25 13:36:31+00:00
Contra the author, the extra vertical space you gain with the 3:2 ratio on the 13' version makes up for the small form factor, especially it makes you realize that what you are often missing on a laptop is extra vertical space.

Exactly, this is why he should have got the 13' version. Sometimes you feel you want something "just slightly larger" (sic) than 14' but if you are not ready to pay the price for it, what's
I am pretty the issue comes from people wanting to work on two windows side-by-side but for that to be comfortable you really need at least 16' if not 17'

The way I go around this issue is that instead of having a subpar side-by-side windows experience I just optimized for fast window switching:
I just have mod + j/k mapped in my windows manager (can't do that in Gnome ofc) and I can just put the two window in their own workspace so that it's only cycling through those two if needed

My main gripe with the framework 13' is that it doesn't feel sturdy for some reason. Don't get me wrong, it is not flimsy either but if you get your hands or a macbook or even some other laptop in the same price range of the fw, it will feel better.
I thing it has to do with the partly recycled aluminum, it's a material that's just not as hard as it seems.

On the other hand not having to throw out your laptop because you stupidly broke the screen is a great feeling.