MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Mini tool helped me to get a dream dev job (can help you too)
by ilyasseisov | 2025-12-29 17:39:05+00:00
Hi HN!

I'm Ilyas - a web dev.

In this short post I would like to share my mini tool on getting prepared for any dev interview:

- HR
- Tech
- Behavioral
- Live coding
- Algo
- etc.

In the last five years through all kinds of interviews and summarized preparation in a bite size checklists to quickly go thru before the interview.

This definitely adds at least extra 5% to confidence.

Checklist is free to use.

In general, "checklist" is proven tool that is used by pilots and doctors. This method helps you to make sure that all necessary steps are checked by you. Unloads your memory.

If interested, check it out here:
https://www.99cards.dev/checklists

p.s. again, it's free.

Enjoy!
Ilyas
by rendall | 2025-12-29 17:39:07+00:00
That reminds me in turn of a joke we used to have, that the afterlife is being on a subway car with constant, unclear, but important announcements. Maybe this stop is heaven, maybe hell, maybe nirvana, maybe oblivion. There's no way to tell. Getting off at the wrong stop would be catastrophic. So, you remain, forever, riding in this afterlife subway car.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-29 17:40:05+00:00
London is one of the places that least needed to be devolved (because the UK is run like a city state). It is in England the last time I checked. Bits of Northern England have been offered it and refused it.

There has been some popular demand for Cornish devolution, but Whitehall is only prepared to entertain it within some greater south west region.

There is also some devo to councils.
by Fiveplus | 2025-12-29 17:40:31+00:00
> Can I still download offline installers? Yes.

This is the only line I was looking for. I stopped buying on Steam sometime ago because I realized I was just renting licenses. GOG is the only major storefront where I feel like I actually own the product. As long as offline installers remain a core tenet, I don't care who owns the company. That said, it helps that it's someone returning to their roots rather than a private equity firm looking to strip-mine the assets.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-29 17:40:45+00:00
When I lost my phone with a physical sim, I had to go to the operator' office and answer a quiz about which three different numbers I've called and received and when exactly did that happened. Apparently I've failed and they demanded that I would bring a phone box with IMEI sticker on it (yes, the one which all "influencers" tell us we don't need to keep) and then they restored me my sim card. I imagine the same process would be required for the lost esim.
by paxys | 2025-12-29 17:41:15+00:00
Yup, Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more copies in the same time frame than Witcher 3, which is routinely highlighted as one of the best and most successful games of all time.

You have to give kudos to CD PROJEKT for not just abandoning the game after a bad launch (which is what every other major studio would have done in its place) but patiently fixing problems and constantly adding content over 5 years to get to the state it is in today. And the game has no online requirement, no multiplayer, no microtransactions. Just one paid expansion which added a ton of new content. Rare to see this behavior in the industry today.
by comfysocks | 2025-12-29 17:41:44+00:00
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Larger than Saudi Arabia and the US, yet produces very little of it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/business/energy-environme...

Squeeze Ukraine for rare earths and Venezuela for oil. Neither has nukes, easy targets. Give lucrative contracts to mining and extraction buddies, give pardons to financial criminals, get protection from powerful new allies after you leave office.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-29 17:41:53+00:00
I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline

You seem so sure that you'll always be able to tell what you're looking at, and whether it's the result of prompting or some unspecified but doubtlessly-noble act of "creativity."

LOL. Not much else can be said, but... LOL.
by arunkumars91 | 2025-12-29 17:42:01+00:00
Author here. I ran an experiment comparing retrieval rankings for 'abstract' SaaS (Basecamp) vs 'visual' SaaS (Monday) on Gemini.

It seems the vector distance between 'Visual Nouns' (Gantt, Board) and generic 'Best PM Tool' prompts is shorter than for abstract concepts (Calm, Simple).

Minimalist tools are effectively invisible unless you explicitly prompt for 'text-based' or 'non-visual' workflows.

Has anyone else noticed this penalty for non-feature-heavy tools?
by the_other | 2025-12-29 17:42:10+00:00
I’m not convinced.

Academia should be for exploration, research, or preservation/archival. It’s about knowledge, not profit.

Academic attainment should be about the subject.

It’s business that should deal with the application, the short cuts, the “ends” rather than the means.

I’m sure there’s a formulation of this which also allows for AI in acedemia. I’m not srguing for that kind of purity. But I am saying that acedemia shouldn’t be treated as the training ground for employment.
by zuminator | 2025-12-29 17:42:14+00:00
I think any explanation along those lines would have a "just-so" aspect to it. How would we go about verifying such a thing? Perhaps if we compared and contrasted the eyes of savanna apes to forest apes, and saw a difference, which to my knowledge We do not. Anyway, sunlight at the ground level peaks around 555nm, so it's believed that we're optimizing to that by being more sensitive to green.
by Etheryte | 2025-12-29 17:42:38+00:00
Things do not work well in general. DB is internationally infamous for its garbage service because everyone who has ever taken DB has a horror story. I lived in Germany some years ago and not once did I manage to catch a train that was on time for both arrival and departure. And this doesn't even touch on the topic of being stranded in the middle of nowhere as a regular occurrence.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-29 17:42:49+00:00
This is a full static archive of HN (~22GB) served from Cloudflare Pages. It runs entirely in the browser using SQLite WASM; no backend.

Two caveats:

- We don’t yet have the canonical daily front page ordering (that would require scraping /front?date=; I haven’t coordinated with the mods).

- Some ASCII art (e.g., Christmas trees) is mangled because the public BigQuery dataset flattens <pre><code> into a single line, so the newlines are gone. I’m reflowing heuristically, but it’s imperfect.

You can jump to any day from Oct 9, 2006 to a day or so ago via the calendar at the bottom. Threads/comments are fully there.

Would love feedback on load time + the "Time Warp" UX.
by dale-cooper | 2025-12-29 17:43:02+00:00
Maybe I'm missing something, but two thoughts:

1. Doesn't the overcommit feature lessen the benefits of this? Your initial allocation works but you can still run out of memory at runtime.

2. For a KV store, you'd still be at risk of application level use-after-free bugs since you need to keep track of what of your statically allocated memory is in use or not?
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-29 17:43:02+00:00
You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?

They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.

The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.
by Ekaros | 2025-12-29 17:43:04+00:00
If I read their income statement from Q3 correctly it is comparatively not doing great.

01.01.2025 to 30.09.2025 net profit 910 thousand PLN I think.

01.01.2024 to 30.09.2024 net profit 32 thousand PLN.

With "from 1 January to 30 September 2025: 4.2365 PLN/EUR and from 1 January to 30 September 2024:4.3022 PLN/EUR."

It is not that much. So splitting it off probably make sense for the CD Projekt.
by motoboi | 2025-12-29 17:43:43+00:00
In that case, zoom is transcoding video, which is a pretty damn heavy operation (note that this is why previous MacBooks didnt have 1080p webcams: they wouldn’t stand more than 5minutes on zoom without throttling).

My point here is that it’s not that the CPU (or the SOC to be exact) cannot handle such loads. It just that it cannot handle it when you have the device connected via USB-C and charging via USB-C too. Also, if using cheap usb-c to display port or adapters.

The corollary of this is that if that would even be possible, were your display wireless, or if you were generating frames by saving them on the disk, the CPU would not throttle.

Of-course that is of little utility here because the end result is the same: CPU gets slow, be it because of CPU, GPU or whatever.
Show HN: Neko.js, a recreation of the first virtual pet
by Labo333 | 2025-12-29 17:44:22+00:00
Hi HN,

Here is a late Christmas present: I rebuilt Neko [1], the classic desktop cat that chases your mouse, as a tiny, dependency-free JavaScript library that runs directly on web pages.

Live demo: https://louisabraham.github.io/nekojs/

GitHub: https://github.com/louisabraham/nekojs

Drop-in usage is a single script tag:

<script src="https://louisabraham.github.io/nekojs/neko.js" data-autostart></script>

This is a fairly faithful recreation of Neko98: same state machine, same behaviors, same original 32×32 pixel sprites. It follows your cursor, falls asleep when idle, claws walls, and you can click it to cycle behavior modes.

What made this project interesting to me is how I built it. I started by feeding the original C++ source (from the Wayback Machine) to Claude and let it "vibe code" a first JS implementation. That worked surprisingly well as a starting point, but getting it truly accurate required a lot of manual fixes: rewriting movement logic, fixing animation timing, handling edge cases the AI missed, etc.

My takeaway: coding agents are very useful at resurrecting old codebases, and this is probably the best non-soulless use of AI for coding. It gets you 60–70% of the way there very fast, especially for legacy code that would otherwise rot unread. The last 30% still needs a human who cares about details.

The final result is ~38KB uncompressed (~14KB brotli), zero dependencies, and can be dropped into a page with a single <script> tag.

Happy to hear thoughts from desktop pets nostalgics!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
by kevincox | 2025-12-29 17:45:37+00:00
> It's certainly better than calling everything a div.

It's not. For semantic purposes <my-element> is the same as <div class=my-element>. So on the surface they are equivalent.

But if you are in the habit of using custom elements then you will likely continue to use them even when a more useful element is available so <my-aside> rather than <aside class=my-aside> so in practice it is probably worse even if theoretically identical.

Basically divs with classes provide no semantic information but create a good pattern for using semantic elements when they fit. Using custom elements provides no semantic information and makes using semantic elements look different and unusual.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-29 17:45:52+00:00
The term "lingua franca" comes out of the Holy Roman Empire and Norman expansion, and later French imperialism, which gave it high status.

But I have long wondered whether many European languages will end up in the same state as Welsh or Basque or Sorbian. Icelandic is already much of the way there. Will Dutch and even German go the same way?

It is chauvinistic and colonial-minded to expect everyone to speak your language in their country. Not to mention arrogant.
by tetha | 2025-12-29 17:45:53+00:00
> A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.

This varies wildly in Germany. In Hamburg, at 7 - 9 in the morning near schools or kindergartens with kids around, many people are following good traffic behavior. At 9 on a university campus, or at 9 at night no one really cares.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-29 17:45:53+00:00
Some newer synths do this where it makes sense. e.g. in Phase Plant the wavetable frame is a number, since wavetable positions are discrete values from 1 to 256.

Ultimately I see two problems though,

1. sometimes the number doesn't matter or make sense at all. A good example is a macro knob. The value is somewhere between "0" or "1", and synths do let you set it manually (since this is how recorded automation works), but a macro slider doesn't make too much sense IMO.

2. lots of controls deal with logarithmic values. Anything that corresponds to a frequency is going to need finer control when you're tweaking values below 500Hz vs changing a value between 10000Hz and 10500Hz. Knobs mask this pretty well. I'm sure you could build a slider that dealt with this, but a number box would be very weird since you'd want the scroll step to be much smaller at lower values.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-29 17:46:07+00:00
You're missing the point. Some people are quick to claim that the other person is being unreasonable in a way that's socially agreed upon to be bad as a justification for whatever their thing is, whether that's being a lazy worker at a min-wage job or anything else. And of course sometimes these people don't even wait for unreasonable behavior. They will characterize "hey can you please do your job" that way because it suits them.

This is a figment of living in a culture where being right but distasteful in a variety of poorly defined but broadly similar ways effectively makes you wrong. Toward the other end of the spectrum is stuff like "I don't care if he's a card carrying nazi he builds good rockets" and other stuff like that.
Ask HN: In the real world we pay for everything so why not software?
by asim | 2025-12-29 17:46:10+00:00
It seems like I and many others have develop a bad habit of giving software away for free. Whereas in the real world we charge for anything of value. I met a carpenter today. You could not imagine giving away hand crafted furniture for free. It's his trade. So why is it in software we give so much away for free? Like open source and even hosted services?

I have written a lot of open source but feel like now I need to really use my skill to sell something, to sell the things I build. Does anyone get that feeling?
by Noumenon72 | 2025-12-29 17:46:16+00:00
I've spent hundreds of hours on the GOG version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Every community recommends the GOG version over the Steam HD one. I didn't think how important GOG was to me, but now I'm going to find that patron program they're talking about. It would be great if in 30 years I can still play Master of Magic and that won't happen by itself.
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-29 17:46:41+00:00
Sure, ok.

But there are many, many people who can find financial success with a little knowledge and discipline. The FIRE community is full of people on all points on the journey.

On the other hand, giving up and spending what you make assures you won’t become wealthy.

For many people, it’s a choice. For a few, circumstances and bad luck drive the end result. I think it’s wise to prepare as if you’re in the capable majority, not the unfortunate minority.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-29 17:46:55+00:00
How else would you address the incessant ramblings of people who figuratively curse the sunset daily? After AI art has been integrated into the already existing suite of digital art applications (which themselves were once not considered art), whatever shall you complain about next?

Now if you wanted to define art to require 100% bodily fluids and solids 100% handcrafted to be the only real art, now that I'd understand.
by _rpxpx | 2025-12-29 17:47:11+00:00
Brilliantly put. Also, the very fact that there are millions of underfed people in the richest country in the world, is itself evidence of the economic failure of markets. As Richard Wolff put it: in a milk shortage, markets allocate milk to the people with the most money - i.e. the least need for milk. That's not efficient.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-12-29 17:47:46+00:00
What a barren viewpoint.

The logical implication of your view is that if someone or something has a halo, they can shit in your mouth and it's "good." The medium is the message, after all.

This is the same pretentious art bullshit that regular people fucking hate, just repackaged to take advantage of public rage at tech bro billionaires.
by graemep | 2025-12-29 17:48:02+00:00
I agree with you this is greatly exaggerated by the US right wing - along with much else about the UK.

However, there are serious issues with hate speech laws. They go a long way beyond preventing abuse - threatening behaviour and similar were illegal before hate speech laws were passed. What hate speech laws made illegal were things that were not illegal, bit views that were judged unpleasant. We also now have criminalisation of behaviour such as silent prayer, or offering help in the wrong place.

On top of that we have "non-crime hate incidents" where the police investigate and record people for doing things that are legal.

IMO it actually helps racist groups such as the BNP as they can hint to the worst of their supporters that they would like to say things that are more racist by the law prevents them, while at the same time not frightening off more moderate supporters by using extreme language.

Racists and xenophobes have a lot of gain from ambiguity. Not only not frightening off supporters from the ethnic majority by being too extreme, but also using bigotry between minorities. There are European immigrants who hate non-whites, there are Islamphobic Jews (a group the EDL works with), antisemitic Muslims and more.
by belter | 2025-12-29 17:48:14+00:00
It is an old objective:

[1] - "...According to the Associated Press, within the framework of the crisis in Venezuela, unnamed administration officials stated that an intervention was raised in 2017 to Donald Trump's advisors, including US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security advisor H. R. McMaster (who left the Trump administration from that moment on) and later to several presidents of Latin American countries including Juan Manuel Santos.[1] Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, declared in May 2023 that Trump had made a proposal to then-president Iván Duque to invade Venezuela through Colombia, but that his advisors had stopped him..."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_invasio...
by rainsford | 2025-12-29 17:48:20+00:00
Maybe, but there is also the potential for survivorship bias being a factor here too. The chance that a specific person with no football skills can throw a football 50 yards into a trash can is pretty low. But if you gather a stadium full of unskilled random people, chances are good that one of them will be able to do so, even multiple times. But you'd be wasting your time trying to discern what special football skill that person has.

I'm not saying this means successful CEOs don't have any relevant skills contributing to their success, but it's worth considering that for the most part we're only seeing the successful ones. It's hard to say how many would-be billionaire CEOs are out there with similar skills to someone like Elon Musk who just happened to get unlucky.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-29 17:48:43+00:00
The younger generations already struggle with technology because the guts have been hidden away their whole lives. They never had to understand a directory structure or a configuration file just to get a game running.

Having an LLM would turn that up to 11. Wishing you had AI in college is like wishing you had a car to train for a marathon. It’ll help a lot, if you ignore the actual goal of the work.
by 6510 | 2025-12-29 17:49:20+00:00
I understand it, just wondering if it is good taste.

On a different note, trying to use an accordion this simplistic is quite terrible.

https://jsfiddle.net/8m0t5af6/

Or this?

https://jsfiddle.net/8m0t5af6/1/

Not very nice.
by nickmonad | 2025-12-29 17:49:39+00:00
Author here! Overcommit is definitely a thing to watch out for. I believe TigerBeetle calls this out in their documentation. I think you'd have to explicitly disable it on Linux.

For the second question, yes, we have to keep track of what's in use. The keys and values are allocated via a memory pool that uses a free-list to keep track of what's available. When a request to add a key/value pair comes in, we first check if we have space (i.e. available buffers) in both the key pool and value pool. Once those are marked as "reserved", the free-list kind of forgets about them until the buffer is released back into the pool. Hopefully that helps!
by lucasgw | 2025-12-29 17:50:07+00:00
While I appreciate anyone rebuilding from the studs, there is so much left out that I think is essential to even a basic discussion.

1. Not all sensors are CMOS/Bayer. Fuji's APS C series uses X-Trans filters, which are similar to Bayer, but a very different overlay. And there's RYYB, Nonacell, EXR, Quad Bayer, and others.
2. Building your own crude demosaicing and LUT (look up table) process is ok, but important to mention that every sensor is different and requires its own demosaicing and debayering algorithms that are fine-tuned to that particular sensor.
3. Pro photogs and color graders have been doing this work for a long time, and there are much more well-defined processes for getting to a good image. Most color grading software (Resolve, SCRATCH, Baselight) have a wide variety of LUT stacking options to build proper color chains.
4. etc.

Having a discussion about RAW processing that talks about human perception w/o talking about CIE, color spaces, input and output LUTs, ACES, and several other acronyms feels unintentionally misleading to someone who really wants to dig into the core of digital capture and post-processing.

(side note - I've always found it one of the industry's great ironies that Kodak IP - Bruce Bayer's original 1976 patent - is the single biggest thing that killed Kodak in the industry.)
by oblio | 2025-12-29 17:50:08+00:00
Do you assume that the average HN commenter hasn't heard of the Luddites?

Go read what happened to them and their story. They were basically right.

Also, why do you think I mentioned those exact deindustrialization examples?

Your comment is the exact type of comment that I was aiming at.

Champagne/caviar socialist. Or I guess champagne capitalist in this case.
by graemep | 2025-12-29 17:51:15+00:00
> Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity"

How is standing by the road side saying and doing nothing harassing someone? The law is clearly not intended to prevent harassment (which was already illegal). Its purpose is to prevent women from being offered alternatives to abortion (e.g. accommodation, financial help, awareness of avaiable help and benefits)

> The Linehan case was debatable, and the approach taken probably wrong in some forms by the police (as admitted) but they were not arrested for simply voicing an opinion

They? Lineham definitely identifies as "he" so you are deliberately misgendering him
by lukan | 2025-12-29 17:51:25+00:00
Can you define a clear line between free speech and call for murder?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

I am very much pro free speech, but I do draw the line with implicit or explicit threats of violence. And this line is debatable, sure, but saying any words are just free speech? To escalate the example, Hitler giving the order to exterminate the jews was just free speech?