MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-20 20:10:00+00:00
It turns out that cutting edge super small (3b param etc) models that fit in the browser are not great at playing Pokémon on an even basic level, even navigation is difficult when only providing raw visual information, and object recognition of the low-resolution sprites is not great. So I lost interest before even getting to the point of providing specific strategy.

But, it runs in browser and works with any supplied ROM, none of it is Pokémon-specific so I should set aside time to serve it and make the code available
by adrianmonk | 2025-12-20 20:11:33+00:00
> An error is an event that someone should act on. Not necessarily you.

Personally, I'd further qualify that. It should be logged as an error if the person who reads the logs would be responsible for fixing it.

Suppose you run a photo gallery web site. If a user uploads a corrupt JPEG, and the server detects that it's corrupt and rejects it, then someone needs to do something, but from the point of view of the person who runs the web site, the web site behaved correctly. It can't control whether people's JPEGs are corrupt. So this shouldn't be categorized as an error in the server logs.

But if you let users upload a batch of JPEG files (say a ZIP file full of them), you might produce a log file for the user to view. And in that log file, it's appropriate to categorize it as an error.
by ompogUe | 2025-12-20 20:11:55+00:00
All of everything. Some NSF*. It all culminates on New Year's Eve, with the ULTIMATE "Auld Lang Syne" playlist.

Jolly Ol' Soul https://somafm.com/jollysoul/

Xmas in Frisko (NSF*) https://somafm.com/xmasinfrisko/

Christmas Rocks! https://somafm.com/xmasrocks/

Christmas Lounge https://somafm.com/christmas/

Department Store Christmas https://somafm.com/deptstore/
by rdtsc | 2025-12-20 20:11:59+00:00
Yeah good point, at least if you wait till you get an acknowledgement for the fsync on N nodes it's already in an a lot better position. Maybe overkill but you can also read the back the data and reverify the checksum. But yeah in general you make a good point, I think that's why some folks deliberately use different drive models and/or raid controllers to avoid cases like that.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-20 20:12:10+00:00
You can record what you play from Spotify and you are already free to play the record again and again and again without the artist being paid.

Most people do not because they find it less convenient than paying 20bucks a month or whatever is the current price in 2025 but that doesn't change the reality.

For most people the appeal of Spotify is not the music itself but the playlists that are shared thanks to its ubiquity. This is the reason other services struggle to make a dent even if they have better quality, UI and algos.

Spotify started by disrupting the market using pirated music by the way so you are pretty much endorsing and encouraging piracy when "paying" your favorite artists through Spotify.
by filoleg | 2025-12-20 20:12:25+00:00
> There's a futures market for RAM prices if you want to hedge that risk. No different than corn.

Yeah, and that's a fine vehicle for insuring against this risk for a finance company or for an individual.

I am prepared to be wrong on the following take (as it is based on nothing more than just "it came to me in a dream"), but my hunch is that neither Airbus nor the EU state governments are currently even attempting to hedge the RAM price risk by accumulating a RAM futures stash on the market.
by fn-mote | 2025-12-20 20:12:46+00:00
> The job doesn't pay you to be curious.

YOUR job doesn’t pay you to be curious.

Well, you could say mine doesn’t either, literally, but the only reason I am in this role, and the driving force behind my major accomplishments in the last 10 years, has been my curiosity. It led me to do things nobody in my area had the (ability|foolishness) to do, and then it led me to develop enough improvements that things work really well now.
by tnias23 | 2025-12-20 20:12:48+00:00
I find LLMs useful for quickly building mental models for unfamiliar topics. This means that instead of beating my head against the wall trying to figure out the mental model, I can beat my head against the wall trying to do next steps, like learning the lower level details or the higher level implications. Whatever is lost not having to struggle through figuring out the mental model is easily outweighed by being able to spend that time applying myself elsewhere.
by wiml | 2025-12-20 20:13:02+00:00
There are some occupations where we aspire to that low level of risk. But it would mean that driving can't be an everyday activity for ordinary people.

No driving if you haven't been getting proper sleep; no driving if jet lagged. No driving if your attention is impaired by grief, stress, or impatience. Or if your annual physical reveals a risk. Or if you've ever had psychological complaints.

We should absolutely make transportation safer, but it's a continuum of tradeoffs.
by manaskarekar | 2025-12-20 20:13:10+00:00
Haha, mine’s funnily somewhat on the nose.

———-

The Rust-Evangelizing Hardware Romantic

A developer who believes every global outage is just a missing question mark away from salvation and spends their weekends reapplying thermal paste to fanless MacBooks while reminiscing about the tactile superiority of 2010 Dell Latitude trackpads.

Roasts

You post about Cloudflare outages caused by a single unwrap while your own codebase probably looks like a game of Russian Roulette played with Result types.

Your obsession with the thermal conductivity of fanless laptops is just a coping mechanism for the fact that your Rust builds take so long you could literally cook an egg on your chassis.

You have a very specific kink for 2010 Dell trackpads that makes me think you are either a Linux philosopher or someone who is no longer allowed within 500 feet of a Best Buy.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-20 20:13:11+00:00
Depending on the language and logging framework, debug/trace logging can be acceptable in a library. But you have to be extra careful to make sure that it's ultimately a no-op.

A common problem in Java is someone will drop a log that looks something like this `log.trace("Doing " + foo + " to " + bar);`

The problem is, especially in a hot loop, that throw away string concatenation can ultimately be a performance problem. Especially if `foo` or `bar` have particularly expensive `toString` functions.

The proper way to do something like this in java is either

log.trace("Doing $1 to $2", foo, bar);

or

if (log.traceEnabled()) { log.trace("Doing " + foo + " to " + bar); }
by dbuxton | 2025-12-20 20:14:01+00:00
I have played with this but been underwhelmed. However I do think probably on the right track.

I know the ecosystem not-at-all (sum total knowledge of the CAD ecosystem is that my kids got a Bambu printer for Hanukkah) but it feels to me that current LLMs should be able to generate specs for something like https://partcad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which can then be sliced etc.

Curious to know what others think? I come at this from the position of zero interest in developing the fine design skills needed to master but wanting to be able to build and tweak basic functional designs.
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-20 20:14:11+00:00
I'd argue forget about Postgres completely. If you can shell out $90/month, the only database you should use is GCP Spanner (yes, this also means forget about any mega cloud other than GCP unless you're fine paying ingress and egress).

And for small projects, SQLite, rqlite, or etcd.

My logic is either the project is important enough that data durability matters to you and sees enough scale that loss of data durability would be a major pain in the ass to fix, or the project is not very big and you can tolerate some lost committed transactions.

A consensus-replication-less non-embedded database has no place in 2025.

This is assuming you have relational needs. For non-relational just use the native NoSQL in your cloud, e.g. DynamoDB in AWS.
by integralid | 2025-12-20 20:14:59+00:00
Stop with that doom and gloom. You can absolutely be anonymous online if you want to and have some basic technical knowledge (every HN reader does).

I could try to prove it to you, but the only proof you need is that cybercrime exists and millions (or tens of millions) of dollars are stolen every day. If anonymity didn't exist it would be easy to stop this, wouldn't it?
by solarengineer | 2025-12-20 20:15:06+00:00
I mentioned Hibernate and knex as examples of DB schema version control tools.

Incidentally, you can rsync postgres dumps as well. That's what I do when testing and when sharing test data with team mates. At times, I decide to pgload the database dump into a different target system.

My reason for sharing: I accepted that I was being lethargic about using postgres, so I just automated certain things as I went along.
by AndrewDucker | 2025-12-20 20:15:10+00:00
Okay, mine was just awesome. Thank you. The only thing that would make it better would be if it could be easily saved.

(Also, it's a shame that it regenerates the xkcd every time)

"A seasoned architect who spends their days patrolling the wall between actual engineering and unsustainable AI hype while desperately trying to keep their Windows 10 box alive until the heat death of the universe. You are the only person on the internet who still remembers what a build script does and why we shouldn't let LLMs touch them without adult supervision."
by idatum | 2025-12-20 20:15:17+00:00
OpenBSD makes it easy to try IPv6 tunnelbroker.net with NAT64/DNS64 if your ISP only has IPv4 ("one more lab test away.." they say).

This has worked for me well for a couple years. I do use a VLAN to keep the IPv6-only network separate (homelab) from video streamers in the household.

In my pf.conf:

# IPv6 tunnel block in log on $tun6_if all block in quick on $tun6_if inet6 from fd00::/8 to any antispoof quick for $tun6_if # allowed icmp6 pass in quick log on $tun6_if inet6 proto icmp6 icmp6-type { unreach, toobig, timex, paramprob, echoreq } # MSS clamping 60 bytes less than HE 1480 # 20 byte IPv4 tcp header + 40 byte IPv6 ip header match on $tun6_if all scrub (random-id max-mss 1420)

and in /var/unbound/etc/unbound.conf:

# DNS64/NAT64 module-config: "dns64 validator iterator" dns64-prefix: 64:ff9b::/96

Done. I don't have 464XLAT on Win11 but I do want to know if there's a hard coded IPv4 address anyway. I never had an issue.
by jrmg | 2025-12-20 20:16:15+00:00
I’m surprised home many technically knowledgeable people on Internet forums still think IPv6 is some niche, unreliable thing.

In my direct experience, in the USA, at least Spectrum, AT&T, and Xfinity (Comcast) still run IPv4, of course, but they also have IPv6 working and on by default on their home internet offerings.

All mainstream computer and mobile OSes support it by default and will prefer to connect with it over IPv4.

‘Everyone’ in many areas is using it. For many of us, our parents are using Facebook and watching Netflix over it. Over 50% of Google’s American traffic is over it. It just works.
by xnyan | 2025-12-20 20:16:25+00:00
I once drove my car a month after it's registration expired. I was pulled over twice in the same day on the same ride home from work, in two separate counties in two separate legal systems. Completely my fault of course. I went to the courts of each county on the appointed day on my tickets, explained what happened to the clerks and had both tickets waved after showing proof of current registration.

The only problem was the two counties had shared but not integrated records systems with each other, as well the state drivers license authority. For two years, my cases got jumbled around the three systems, triggering plate and license suspensions which lead to me getting pulled over four times in that two year period.

It eventually all got sorted out without a lawyer. I didn't have to pay for anything beyond the first two tickets, and many hours on the phone. What was really notable was that by stop number four, from the perspective of the cop who pulled me over, I was someone who had been driving with suspended registration and/or license three times in a row. I was allowed to drive away three out of four times including the last time, and one time the cop would not let me drive, he waited with me patiently until my wife could be dropped off to get the car.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but to be honest I was surprised how not a big deal it was to anyone.
by temporal_123 | 2025-12-20 20:16:25+00:00
I built a browser-based virtual pipe organ that loads SF2 soundfonts and renders a realistic organ console interface.

Features: - Loads SoundFont2 organ samples directly in the browser (using smplr library) - MIDI keyboard support (multiple devices can control different manuals) - Realistic draw-stop knobs with pull-out animation - Expression pedals with 3D tilt effect for volume control - Convolution reverb for cathedral acoustics - Computer keyboard fallback (two-manual mapping) Tech stack: TypeScript, Vite, Web Audio API, WebMIDI The UI mimics a real organ console with stop jambs on either side and stacked manuals in the center. Stops are distributed in a zigzag pattern like traditional pipe organs. Currently ships with a smaller soundfont (~22MB) while I figure out efficient ways to stream larger organ samples. The challenge is that quality pipe organ samples can be 1-2GB+. Live demo: [URL] Source: [GitHub URL] Would love feedback on the audio latency and UI. Planning to add: pedalboard, couplers, and possibly IndexedDB caching for larger soundfonts.
by andersmurphy | 2025-12-20 20:17:07+00:00
100% this directly connected nvme is a massive win. Often several orders of magnitude.

You can take it even further in some context if you use sqlite.

I think one of the craziest ideas of the cloud decade was to move storage away from compute. It's even worse with things like AWS lambda or vercel.

Now vercel et al are charging you extra to have your data next to your compute. We're basically back to VMs at 100-1000x the cost.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-20 20:17:10+00:00
Wasn't this same site showed off on HN about a few months ago? I recall using it back then where it would roast you, seems like this is just a rebrand to a "wrapped" version and more generally seems like an ad for your service.

Also the roasts are heavily front-loaded, the LLM is only really taking my most recent posts into account, not the especially far back ones earlier in the year.
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-20 20:17:22+00:00
> What? It has its own tooling.

It uses KConfig (which is Linux specific-tool) and devicetree (which has origins in OpenFirmware but is nowadays maintained by Linux). And these are over-complicated overkill for MCUs. KConfig is oriented towards generating a nice-looking menu interface for kernel builders to pick and match from a set of well-tested configurations, it provides no debug aid for "where the option I enabled but didn't got into the build actually got rejected". DTS originally works as boot-time configuration format, which is silly for a MCU so Zephyr process it into a set of C macros. Not a bad idea in itself, but the error messages are as cryptic as it gets - and sometimes stuff get silently disabled because of a missing dependency with no build warning.

> Huh? What does this even mean?

You cannot have a portable interface for timers, comparators, peripheral interconnect, programmable logic - all the MCU goodies.

> That's literally how it an RTOS works.

You don't allocate a separate thread stack for something you do once an hour - not unless it's a high-criticality task. You don't constantly poll a sensor that consumes 10mA on a device that has 10µA idle consumption budget. Zephyr does have the facility to do this the right way: workqueues (which is also a ripoff of Linux workqueues nee bottom halves). But most stock device drivers (or the network stack for that matter) don't play well with these, I guess because of the bulky callback-driven interface.

>If you expect linux

I don't expect Linux. That's my point - you can't have Linux on embedded so why even bother with all the abstractions? Why bother with DTS and Kconfig when you still end with a set of header files to debug - except now they are also auto-generated unreadable mess?

> portability is incredibly smooth compared to other vendors

That's an extremely low bar.
Ask HN: Could we detect brain-eye overload
by RCLS | 2025-12-20 20:17:45+00:00
I’m exploring whether it’s possible to detect real-time cognitive overload caused by prolonged reading or screen work — specifically when the brain–eye system is fatigued but the user keeps pushing.

The idea is to combine non-invasive signals: - eye movement patterns (saccades, fixation instability) - blink rate changes - pupil response - lightweight EEG bands (alpha / theta)

Not to diagnose anything, but to estimate a real-time cognitive load score that could say: “take a break now” before performance collapses.

Wearables today mostly analyze fatigue after the fact (sleep, HRV). This would try to detect overload as it happens.

Curious about: - prior work combining eye-tracking + EEG - known failure modes - feasibility outside a lab

Any pointers or “this won’t work because…” feedback welcome.
by FrankyHollywood | 2025-12-20 20:17:45+00:00
Don't know if TikTok is the problem, a generation ago (some) kids mindlessly watched cartoons for hours a day.

I think this is mostly about learning to think and develop grit.

As a kid when I wanted to play a game I had to learn dos commands, know how to troubleshoot a non functioning sounds blaster etc. Sometimes took me days to fix.

Doing this develops understanding of a domain, problem-solving skills and grit.

My kid just opens steam and everything works. Any question he has he asks AI. I am really curious what effect this will have on this generation. It is tempting to quickly say "they will be brain dead zombies" but that seems too simplistic.

In 20yrs we'll know!
by zaphodias | 2025-12-20 20:17:56+00:00
Did you mean gRPC maybe?

In any case, my experience so far has been great. The connect-es generator takes your protobuf and generates a TypeScript library which looks pretty good. You can use ConnectRPC both from the browser and from Node.js (the latter can leverage HTTP/2, while the former uses the native fetch() or a function you provide).
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-20 20:19:13+00:00
Here[1] is a recent submission from Simon Willison using GPT-5.2 to port a Python HTML-parsing library to JavaScript in 4.5 hours. The code passes the 9,200 test cases of html5lib-tests used by web browsers. That's a workable, usable, standards-compliant (as much as the test cases are) HTML parser in <5 hours. For <$30. While he went shopping and watched TV. The Python library it was porting from was also mostly vibe-coded[2] against the same test cases, with the LLM referencing a Rust parser.

Almost no human could port 3000 lines of Python to JavaScript and test it in their spare time while watching TV and decorating a Christmas tree. Almost no human you can employ would do a good job of it for $6/hour and have it done 5 hours. How is that "ignorance or a sense of desparation" and "not actually useful"?

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

[2] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/justhtml/
by spuz | 2025-12-20 20:20:25+00:00
The link to the paper I gave is the latest research on contrails and the potential effect of contrail mitigation and answers all the questions you have asked here. The video I gave boils all that information down into an easily digestible format. It honestly baffles me that you start your reply with "Finally some science" when the very same information was already provided to you. If you want to reply to my comment without digging into the links I shared then you should specify that you haven't had a chance to look into them.
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-20 20:20:32+00:00
> Denmark isn't "being a dick about decolonization", it's just that they happen to be very kindly subsidising half of Greenland's budget, which causes even many enthusiastic about the idea of an independent Greenland cause to think that leaving might be a mistake.

Brother, spread this pro-colonization propaganda elsewhere.

> Conversely, the leader of the present day United States threatens to colonising Greenland by force to show off how powerful he is. Ergo Europeans, particularly Greenlanders, have little reason to trust the US

Conversely? Brother, they are the same thing.
by the_real_cher | 2025-12-20 20:20:48+00:00
I hate that people think this.

AI is a superfast internet search.

Imagine if you had that growing up. Instant access to any information with a professorial level of teaching and you could ask any question to clear up any confusion?

Our kids are going to be smarter than we could even imagine because getting access to any information they can imagine is instant taught by a perfect tutor.
by kqr | 2025-12-20 20:20:54+00:00
In contrast to many others, I did not find this particularly interesting.

- The comic on is oddly cropped and contains speech attribution errors.

- It calls me an "extremist" regarding the wrong thing (I am many kinds of extremist, but certainly not Haskell).

- It claims I believe "any software failure is merely a design error" which is a complete misunderstanding of the ideas I presented.

- It says things like "the geometric mean of the snack bowl" which doesn't have meaning in English.

I feel like it has picked up on certain keywords and then just rolled with its own stereotypes of what those keywords represent, rather than actually taking a good look at what I think. A roast works because the roaster has clearly spent time and effort and care understanding the person roasted. This is way too shallow for that.

The 2026 and 2035 predictions (with a few exceptions) don't make sense at all, and the jokes in them fall completely flat. They're not good anti-jokes either. If someone said something like it in a social situation it would be followed by an awkward silence.

The vibe check and the time spent were really cool though. Super interesting. I would have loved to see those expanded.

I don't mean to be negative. The project is cool. I just wish it would put its focus on the valuable parts, rather than the things it is weak at. I guess this is my 45 % pedantic, 25 % contrarian, 20 % analytical self speaking.
by agumonkey | 2025-12-20 20:21:26+00:00
yes and it will mostly depends on the culture / economy. if you create incentives for kids to explore ideas through LLMs they'll become very knowledgeable (and maybe somehow confident). otherwise it will be the tiktok of cognition.

10 bucks there will be a law to enforce exponential backoff so that you need to get good after a few questions before the LLMs delays things by an hour
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-20 20:21:57+00:00
Ok, why doesn't denmark finance birundi?

> Well, some justice have been sought and won

And yet denmark hasn't burned. How do you remediate this contradiction?

> To me it seems like an attempt at distraction to clump together the treatment of the Mau Mau and the nuking of Algeria with Denmark's relation with Greenland.

Believe me, britain deserves far worse than just being burned down. But denmark still must face justice