MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 13:04:50+00:00
You'll get a vastly different experience the more you use these tools and learn their limitations and how you can structure things effectively to let them do their job better. But lots of people, understandably, don't take the time to actually sit down and learn it. They spend 30 seconds on some prompt not even a human would understand, and expect the tooling to automatically spend 5 hours trying its hardest at implementing it, then they look at the results and conclude "How could anyone ever be productive with this?!".

People say a lot of things, and there is a lot of context behind what they're saying that is missing, so then we end up with conversations that basically boil down to one person arguing "I don't understand how anyone cannot see the value in this" with another person thinking "I don't understand how anyone can get any sort of value out of this", both missing the other's perspective.
by patresh | 2025-12-30 13:05:24+00:00
Does anyone have experience with longer DeepResearch tasks with Mammouth? How does it compare to using Gemini's / ChatGPT's DeepResearch or GPTResearcher + API-based alternatives?

For standard questions I feel like it doesn't matter too much what you use. When it comes to multi-step searching + reasoning flows like look for alternatives, fetch pricing, feature lists, compare etc, the differences are larger because of the engineering glue and prompting around the pure LLM inference which makes the tools more or less powerful.
by api | 2025-12-30 13:05:39+00:00
Tangent but... I kinda like the Python language. What I don't like about Python is the way environments are managed.

This is something I generally believe, but I think it's particularly important for things like languages and runtimes: the idea of installing things "on" the OS or the system needs to die.

Per-workspace or per-package environment the way Go, Rust, etc. does it is correct. Installing packages globally is wrong.

There should not be such a thing as "globally." Ideally the global OS should be immutable or nearly so, with the only exception being maybe hardware driver stuff.

(Yes I know there's stuff like conda, but that's yet another thing to fix a fundamentally broken paradigm.)
by sails | 2025-12-30 13:05:48+00:00
I've tried these in the past but always found the software/firmware side of it too fiddly for the reward (against the grain for a lot of people, I know), which is a pity as the hardware side is really rewarding (for me).

Recently, doing it with Claude Code was a breeze. If you are more interested in the outcome than the process, then I'd say it's a great time to buy a few old Kindles and see what you can create with them.
by kvemkon | 2025-12-30 13:06:30+00:00
> If an LLM can outperform an offshore team at a fraction of the cost,..

And "a few moments later" happens the same as with those "cost effective" clouds.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/IDC-Many-companies-want-partly-...

[2] https://www.idc.com/resource-center/blog/storm-clouds-ahead-... (original)
by leosanchez | 2025-12-30 13:06:43+00:00
Why are you bringing in Manusmriti when the topic in question is Bhagwad Gita?

Filling in your comment with Manusmriti doesn't make your point valid.

Now about your comments about Gita.

Bhagwad Gita 18:47 isn't about caste.

Neither 4:13 nor 18:41-43 support your claim of

"that it is actually a sin to perform the duties (dharma) of a caste that you aren't born into"

Bhagwad Gita 4:13[0] and 18:41[1] if anything can be interpreted as varna based on qualities rather than being fixed at birth.

Even bad faith interpretation of these verses does not support your claim.

You come across as bad faith.

[0]: https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/4/verse/13/
[1]: https://vivekavani.com/b18v41/
by firesteelrain | 2025-12-30 13:06:46+00:00
I had to dig this up because this was from August. Not sure why it is coming up now.

[1] https://www.state.gov/releases/2025/08/imposing-further-sanc...

I don’t think the ICC was plotting to undermine US or Israel sovereignty. The dispute is about jurisdiction. The ICC has a pretty expansive theory that says it can go after nationals of non-member states if the alleged conduct happened on the territory of a member state. That theory has been around for years and mostly lived in briefs and conferences. What changed in 2025 is that the ICC started acting on it and advancing real cases that implicated non-members. At that point it stopped being academic and started looking like a real-world precedent with consequences for allies and potentially US personnel. That’s the slippery slope. The administration had already tried protests and non-recognition and concluded it was not changing behavior. The August sanctions were framed as a last-resort escalation to draw a hard line against what they saw as ongoing overreach, not as a response to some new hostile intent.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-30 13:07:20+00:00
You can find entertaining stuff there. My interests can be really niche. I remember once finding an amazing book in our college library from the sixties or seventies about the use of LSD in treating psychiatric disorders. While I didn't agree with all the suggestions in there, it was a fascinating time capsule (with colour illustrations, many of them by patients). With the microdosing debate, it's probably relevant again.

Yet when I took the book off the shelf it looked like no one had touched it in many years.
by piva00 | 2025-12-30 13:07:52+00:00
So explain why the US used the same mechanisms against a Brazilian judge responsible for Bolsonaro's coup attempt case.

Was Brazil's justice trying to impose its legal authority outside of its jurisdictions? Nope. Was it hurting humans rights? Nope.

It's simply to bully, and meddle with entities that go against the interests of the current administration.

I don't buy your justification why this case is not the same, at all.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-12-30 13:07:55+00:00
I loath Musk and will never buy a Tesla, but your criticisms are strange. I don't want a HUD. I don't want new features. I want as basic a car as possible that goes forward when I press the gas and stops when I press the brakes. I had a 2007 Honda Fit which I still regret getting rid of. I have a new Honda and every single new feature (except for displaying the speed limit, which has it's own problems) is useless at best and dangerous and distracting at worse.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 13:08:15+00:00
> They're busy building small inconsequential side projects

Unironically, sending a program to build those for me have send me almost endless amount of time. I'm a pretty distracted individual, and pretty anal about my workflow/environment, so lots of times I've spent hours going into rabbit-holes to make something better, when I could have just sucked it up and do it the manual way instead, even if it takes mental energy.

Now, I can still do those things, but not spend hours, just a couple of minutes, and come back after 20-30 minutes to something that lets me avoid that stuff wholesale. Once you start stacking these things, it tends to save a lot of time and more importantly, mental energy.

So the programs by themselves are basically "small inconsequential side projects" because they're not "production worthy and web scale SaaS ready to earn money", but they help me and others who are building those things in a big way.
Show HN: Spraff – Voice and text AI chat, self-hostable, no data retention
by pllu | 2025-12-30 13:08:17+00:00
Hi HN! I built a simple, self-hostable AI chat app that focuses on voice input and privacy.

Why I made this: I want to talk to AI (voice or text) without my conversations being logged, used for training etc.

Requires an OpenRouter account. No subscription: pay-as-you-go with most conversations costing a fraction of a cent (a couple of cents for requests with search enabled)

Privacy:

- Uses OpenRouter to route to Gemini 3 Flash on Google Vertex with Zero Data Retention (ZDR).

- Prompts and responses aren't stored or logged at any layer.

- OpenRouter keeps only metadata like timestamps and token counts.

How it works:

- Single HTML file – download and self-host, or use the hosted version https://martinpllu.github.io/spraff

- Log in to OpenRouter via OAuth (API key kept in browser local storage until logout)

- Audio recorded in browser, sent directly to Gemini for processing (no separate transcription step)

- Text-to-speech via your device's local voices

Technical notes:

- Gemini 3 Flash is currently the only model that supports both audio input and ZDR

- Provider is pinned to Google Vertex with zdr: true in the API request

- No build step, no dependencies – just one HTML file

- Current status: beta, tested on MacOS, Android and iOS. Should work but issues/feedback welcome.

Code: https://github.com/martinpllu/spraff
by tetris11 | 2025-12-30 13:09:05+00:00
Serial might have been a bit unnecesary here, since there are USB hacks you can exploit to achieve the same over at mobileread.

You also might want to turn off some background scripts in /etc/init.rc/ such as the screensaver, unload the audio/mic, stop the window manager if you're not using it, and stop the webreader.

https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash/blob/main/src/dash.sh
by gibsonsmog | 2025-12-30 13:09:15+00:00
It's actually a regression overall compared to physical media like DVDs and Blurays. No director commentaries, no behind the scenes, no silly menu games, etc. Streaming would theoretically allow for tons of this type of content to be made and connected to a film at any time but instead we have this stagnant recreation of cable TV. C'est la vie
by rvz | 2025-12-30 13:09:41+00:00
The most important skills post-AGI is a "proof of a track record":

* Showing open-source contributions to respected projects shows you know how to code, reasoning your patches in code-reviews and the ability to understand how to solve the problem which is a very strong signal.

* Building something that makes a significant amount of money, makes getting hired optional and shows you are aware of market demand, identifying a problem and being able to monetize it.

* Publishing research papers proves your ability to go beyond academia and to build on top of other's research areas to advance the field or come up with something original to show in conference meet-ups (NeurIPS, SIGGRAPH, CVPR)

Unless it is a research career, the degree and where it came from matters far less.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 13:10:19+00:00
> Besides one point: junior developers can learn from their egregious mistakes, llms can't no matter how strongly worded you are in their system prompt.

I think if you set off an LLM to do something, and it does a "egregious mistake" in the implementation, and then you adjust the system prompt to explicitly guard against that or go towards a different implementation and you restart from scratch again yet it does the exact same "egregious mistake", then you need to try a different model/tool than the one you've tried that with.

It's common with smaller models, or bigger models that are heavily quanitized that they aren't great at following system/developer prompts, but that really shouldn't happen with the available SOTA models, I haven't had something ignored like that in years by now.
by Arch-TK | 2025-12-30 13:10:31+00:00
> Neither have keybindings that make any sense.

I can agree on Windows, but there is no such thing as "keybindings that don't make sense" on a proper Linux WM given that you can literally make up any keybindings you want. I mean this strictly from a window management perspective, yes applications running in those windows have often got their own idea of what good UX is, and this clashes. That's just a trade-off of Linux and to a lesser extent Windows not being complete walled gardens.

> that have never used Mac OSX

I have _used_ Mac OSX. It was and continues to be a confusing experience every time. I'm not saying that this would be the case if I bothered to learn it, but in all the times I have used it, I have failed to see any feature which would make me want to switch to it over i3 or which I feel like is missing in i3. Really it doesn't seem like there is any way of making it act remotely close to i3. Tiling as an option on top of whatever Mac OSX has is just as appealing to me as tiling on top of what Windows has.

> Unless you want to copy and paste, or have consistent key bindings cross applications, or take screenshots. Sure

I've never had copy and paste fail on Linux. The only issues I've had is with more modern applications not implementing the selection properly which is a feature you don't have on windows in the first place. No idea about Macs.

Screenshots have always and will continue to work (the way I want them to) because I can, as mentioned, bind any key to any action.
by wrxd | 2025-12-30 13:10:33+00:00
Sarah Wynn-Williams - Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

I'm not a Facebook fan but the more I read the book the more I dislike them.
The author seems well-intentioned but I the overall feeling is that she was part of the system. I know it's difficult but she followed along enabling what the Facebook leadership wanted to do.
by fireflash38 | 2025-12-30 13:10:56+00:00
Gtk makes that simple python program way more complex since it'll need more than pure-python dependencies.

It's really a huge pain point in python. Pure python dependencies are amazingly easy to use, but there's a lot of packages that depend on either c extensions that need to be built or have OS dependencies. It's gotten better with wheels and manylinux builds, but you can still shoot your foot off pretty easily.
by cue_the_strings | 2025-12-30 13:10:59+00:00
This has certainly happened to someone if not the OP.

I did wait in a single spot for almost 10h, my 5-6h journey became a 15h one, in Serbia in the late 2000s. IIRC, a large part of the railway was down that day, couple hundred km, electricity issue or something. Some people walked off the train, which was in between cities but near the road. I was a student, didn't have an alternative, so I didn't. They didn't organize a replacement bus.

This kind of thing was (maybe not to that extent) common, like once every year or two. They rarely reported on it in media if the cause wasn't notable.
by superjan | 2025-12-30 13:11:35+00:00
This is a story about a unique 1947 Chinese typewriter prototype that never got built. It could type thousands of characters by combining keystrokes. The prototype was presumed lost, found this year and it is now at Stanford.

This is not news, but I read about it here today in a Dutch newspaper article (paywalled, untranslated): https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/12/27/lang-verloren-gewaande-...
by kypro | 2025-12-30 13:11:48+00:00
As a Brit I find Germans so strange sometimes.

I visited the Dachau concentration camp several years ago on one of the hottest days of the year. Me and my GF packed water, but on that day is just wasn't enough and we ran out towards the end of the day.

We got around the camp and just before leaving we went into the cafe and asked for a drink, but they said sorry the cafe was closed.

Okay, fair enough. In that case we'll just fill our bottles with some tap water then.

"No, you can't do that".

Huh? We really need a drink... We've been on coaches and walking around all day and we've ran out of water.

"Sorry, I can't help".

We have our empty bottles here, could you please just pour us some water?

"No, sorry I can't".

I get she probably wasn't suppose to serve customers after close, but we just wanted her to fill our water bottles with tap water. I may be misremembering now but I'm like 80% sure I asked if I could fill the bottle in the toilet, but she also refused to open to toilets because they were closed.

This whole situation would have been absolutely absurd in the UK.

Germans really seem to like doing everything as per the rules regardless of how inconvenient and ridiculous it is. Even things like crossing roads where generally most Brits will wait for a green light, but if in a hurry many will look for a gap in traffic and just cross. Germans seem to rarely ever do this and you get the sense you are being judged if you do it.

I had lots of weird little experiences like this in Germany but almost passing out from dehydration at a German concentration camp had a certain level of irony to it.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-30 13:12:18+00:00
It's a vacuous argument. Even in the complete absence of piracy web apps would still have won out over desktop software due to turning a one time sale into a recurring subscription. That's what drove their adoption.

MMOs show the same thing. There are plenty of multiplayer games with centralized servers that are effectively impossible to pirate. But subscription based MMOs score a clear win in terms of revenue.

(It turns out free to play gacha is even more lucrative than subscription, but I digress.)
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-30 13:12:37+00:00
> You can't see the ball in American football, either.

Tell me you're not from the US without telling me. This is apples and oranges.

Unless it's a trick play, you 100% know where the ball is.

How many times in football does the ball go from one end to the other and back? Never. In hockey that happens regularly, and in seconds. That's why comparing them in this context isn't correct.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-30 13:12:39+00:00
An anti-AI movement is coming --- but it will be lead by lawyers, not politicians.

LLMs are inherently unreliable and untrustworthy and most people already know this from experience. In other words, for most businesses, they are a liability issue waiting to happen.

There's not too much that AI slop can be reasonably and safely applied toward without *human* review, oversight and verification.

The need for verification voids a lot of the financial incentive for applying AI. Skipping this (highly tempting) creates liability issues (aka negligence or slander) when (not if) things go wrong. Lawyers are probably giddy with anticipation over the prospects of bad AI.
by alessiopel | 2025-12-30 13:12:51+00:00
I’ve been working on a project called imesde (In-MEmory Streaming Data Engine). It’s a Rust-based vector engine designed specifically for data that doesn't need to live forever—like logs, financial tickers, or live chat context.

Most vector DBs are built for persistence and massive indexing (HNSW/Disk). I’m exploring a different trade-off: zero-disk dependency and circular buffers.

> What I’m trying to solve:

Latency Tax: By staying CPU-first (optimized for Apple Silicon/NEON) and using in-process ONNX, I’m seeing sub-300μs P99 latency for small, high-frequency streams.

Instant Anomalies: I implemented a moving centroid update, so you can detect "semantic outliers" during ingestion without extra passes.

It’s still in the early validation phase and very much an experiment. I’d love to know if you think this "ephemeral" approach makes sense for real-time RAG or if I’m over-optimizing a niche.

Repo: https://github.com/imesde/imesde

Feedback (even the "this is a bad idea" kind) is very welcome.
by larusso | 2025-12-30 13:13:03+00:00
I tried taking the train to Prague this year for my birthday. I’m from Berlin so taking the train made sense on paper. I could have taken the car but I thought that it might be more relaxing to just sit for the 4h or so it takes.

In Dresden we were told that they had issues with the power lines on the Czechia side and had to leave the train. It was still an hour to the border but seemed to be the best place to dump all the people and let them go the merry way the rest of the journey.
The basic service was a printed paper directly out of the connection lookup system. No info if this connection is actually the best or makes sense since other travelers will be also on route.
We had to switch trains 2 more times and arrived in Prague at around Midnight. Let’s say I really don’t want to take the train anywhere at the moment.
Sidestory. Check the current state of the S-Bahn Service (run by DB) in Berlin. One wonder why they bother to announce issues with the system day in and out. They could just switch over and announce when stuff is running smoothly instead.
by illiac786 | 2025-12-30 13:13:07+00:00
yes, so I can search my emails solely on my laptop if I install proton bridge and synchronize 50GB of emails. And in case you have ever tried to search 50GB of data with thunderbird, it’s slow.

I tried synchronising the data directly in the browser, without any email client and the search is mediocre and slow.

This is not a great experience for search.

But again, it’s not a critique of Proton, it’s just how it is with E2EE. At least it demonstrate they are really doing E2EE.

I still hope some time in the future homomorphic encryption will help, but I think we are at least a decade away from that.
by jug | 2025-12-30 13:13:09+00:00
Since people will at large not do this because they don't read Screenrant and how this needs to cut though the massive social media noise and we're looking at millions of viewers, what is the consequences with this particular episode? Viewing issues, or is it meant to be dark but won't be?

Last time I heard this reasoning about bad TV settings was during the infamous GoT episode that was very dark.

Producers generally don't warn about TV settings preemptively as if to warn, so it makes me a bit concerned.

Stranger Things already face complaints about S5 lately, having viewing issues on the finale would be the cherry on top.
by badsectoracula | 2025-12-30 13:13:12+00:00
> AFAIK game development is also more and more about avoiding dynamic allocation.

That might have been the case ~30 years ago on platforms like the Gameboy (PC games were already starting to use C++ and higher level frameworks) but certainly not today. Pretty much all modern game engines allocate and deallocate stuff all the time. UE5's core design with its UObject system relies on allocations pretty much everywhere (and even in cases where you do not have to use it, the existing APIs still force allocations anyway) and of course Unity using C# as a gameplay language means you get allocations all over the place too.
by xg15 | 2025-12-30 13:13:15+00:00
So the entire reason why this is not a "real" shebang and instead takes the roundtrip through the shell is because the Go runtime would trip over the # character?

I think this points to some shortcomings of the shebang mechanism itself: That it expects the shebang line to be present and adhering a specific structure - but then passes the entire file with the line to the interpreter where the interpreter has to process (and hopefully ignore) the line again.

I know that situations where one piece of text is parsed by multiple different systems are intellectually interesting and give lots of opportunities for cleverness - but I think the straightforward solution would be to avoid such situations.

So maybe the linux devs should consider adding a new form for the shebang where the first line is just stripped before passing the file contents to the interpreter.
by StrangeSound | 2025-12-30 13:13:16+00:00
Unfortunately we took the simple option and reverted back to Google. I was lucky that my wife even went along with my plan to migrate everything in the first place!

I'm considering self-hosting Immich to replace photos, but not sure when I'll tackle that and don't fancy having to use Tailscale all the time. No idea about a Drive replacement as yet!
by submeta | 2025-12-30 13:14:36+00:00
The US is now literally sanctioning UN experts and ICC people if they push too hard on accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes, e.g. Francesca Albanese over her Gaza reports and support for ICC cases. In Germany (and elsewhere) it often doesn’t need formal sanctions: people get disinvited, smeared, or quietly pushed out of jobs if they’re too vocal on Palestine – think Ai Weiwei, Greta Thunberg, Masha Gessen, Ilan Pappé, Ghassan Hage and others running into cancellations, funding cuts, and public delegitimisation instead of explicit legal punishment.