MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jll29 | 2026-01-04 10:51:10+00:00
[Hunspell has been very successful as the OP correctly points out, and my comments are intended to improve over the state of the art rather than badmouthing the fantastic work of its authors, two of who are friends of mine.]

Hunspell uses an ad-hoc file format and an ad-hoc method. When the original code was developed in Ocaml at the time, it evolved to where we are today (one of the developers, VT, was sharing offices with me for a few years, so I am a past "ear witness" of sorts).

There is an opportunity now to rebuild something more systematic based on the XFST formalism originally devised at Xerox Research Center Europe in Grenoble under Prof. Lauri Karttunen, Kenneth Beesley and team [1]. Especially since Mans Hulden has re-created their toolset as FOMA, a C re-implementation that has been open sourced.

The beauty of XFST and friends is that it's a formalization of regular relations, the language generated and accepted by extended finite state transducers - a form of two-way automata. The XFST formalism leads to more readable/maintainable lexicons and rules, and it can also be used to generate, not just to analyze.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Finite-State-Morphology-Kenneth-Beesl...

[2] https://dsacl3-2018.github.io/xfst-demo/ and others
(simplay search for e.g. "xfst|foma fst")

[3] Hulden, Mans (2008) https://aclanthology.org/E09-2008/
(A Python interface already exists, too: Hulden, M. et al. (2024) https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-demos.24/ .)

There are many training resources for the XFST family of formalisms, and it is taught in computational linguistics courses around the world [2]. There is also tool support in the form of e.g. syntax coloring support for vim
https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3441
etc. - all this would make the set of potential contributors for a future version of the spell checker vastly larger (compared to requiring interested parties to analyze an obscure ad-hoc format). It would also open up future possibilities for new functionality in Open Office - e.g. the generation capability could be used to offer a button "pluralize word".
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-04 10:51:56+00:00
Cleaner, more straightforward, more compact code, and considered complete in its scope (i.e. implement backpropagation with a PyTorch-y API and train a neural network with it). MyTorch appears to be an author's self-experiment without concrete vision/plan. This is better for author but worse for outsiders/readers.
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-04 10:52:29+00:00
IMHO the downsides of tagged unions (e.g. what Rust confusingly calls "enums") are big enough that they should only be used rarely if at all in a systems programming language since they're shoehoerning a dynamic type system concept back into an otherwise statically typed language.

A tagged union always needs as at least as much memory as the biggest type, but even worse, they nudge the programmer towards 'any-types', which basically moves the type checking from compile-time to run-time, but then why use a statically typed language at all?

And even if they are useful in some rare situations, are the advantages big enough to justify wasting 'syntax surface' instead of rolling your own tagged unions when needed?
by watwut | 2026-01-04 10:52:59+00:00
Veeeery selective choices, arent there? The cancelled Romanian elections he talks about were cancelled and rerun for a good reasons. This was literally defending democracy against meddling.

The churches were not closed by some hostile state forces. People stopped being christians out of their own choices.

> We must do more than talk about democratic values.

This is dishonest to the maximum. Vance does not believe in democracy. Not in the USA and not in the Europe. He is trying to dismantle it and replace it with authoritarian fascism. He does not care about laws either, he cares about making his own thugs unreachable by law.
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-01-04 10:53:48+00:00
The fact that we need the entire xdg-desktop-portal stack for screen sharing on browsers is a major annoyance. We now have a standardised extension for screencasting and screencopy (formerly it was not standard, but had been around for years), but browsers only support the Flatpak stack, which has a lot of moving parts and IPC. Doing out-of-band IPC for this is kind of pointless when the client and the server already have a Wayland connection to begin with.

Outside of the domain of Firefox/Chromium, screencasting is much seamless. But 90% of the screen-sharing happens in browsers.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-04 10:54:06+00:00
>nVidia refused to support the API that Wayland was using, insisting that their EGLStreams approach was superior

This is a common gross mischaracterizarion of what happened. This API, GBM, was a proprietary API that was a part of Mesa. Nvidia couldn't add GBM to their own driver as it is a Mesa concept. So instead Nvidia tried to make a vendor neutral solution that any graphics drivers could use which is where you see EGLStreams come into the picture. Such an EGL API was also useful for other nonwayland embedded usecases. In regards to Nvidia's proprietary driver's GBM support, Nvidia themselves had to add support to the Mesa project to support dynamically loading new bbackends. Then they were able to make their own backend.

For some reason when this comes up people always phrase it in terms of Nvidia not supporting something instead of the freedesktop people not offering a way for the Nvidia driver to work, which is a prerequisite of Nvidia following such guidance.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-04 10:55:23+00:00
In my mind when I was 13 I played Carmageddon and GTA1

In reality I was 15 when they came out. The graphics in GTA weren't much different to Frogger. Doom and Quake involved blasting monsters, not people. Duke Nukem 3D, Halflife had very unrealistic looking people.

Todays games are very different in terms of visual quality, but even then, GTA is relatively mild compared to many games. You can hit a prostitute with a bat and kill her, but you can't drag a random person off the street and plunge their arm into a deep fat fryer.
by watwut | 2026-01-04 10:56:17+00:00
At this point, I don't think it is naivety or lack of insight. It is propaganda at its best. They like what is going on and support it. They cant just say "it makes us feel manly so we should do it and extract some resources", because they are educated and want to be seen as intellectuals.

So, they create these BS rationalizations.
Show HN: I built an HTTP/2 server in C++ to learn the protocol and language
by kiyouta | 2026-01-04 10:56:20+00:00
I wanted to learn more about the HTTP/2 protocol but also deep dive into modern C++ development. I'm currently using it to host my personal web site - https://www.roberthargreaves.com.

I've also blogged a bit about the development process, hosting options and steps I took to harden the application against attack - https://blog.roberthargreaves.com/2026/01/03/building-hostin...

It's by no means a complete implementation of HTTP/2, but I think I've achieved the main aims I was hoping to achieve with it!

I would love some feedback though from more experienced folks if there's some egregious failings which I should address.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2026-01-04 10:57:12+00:00
> If you’d like empirical data of your own to back this up, here’s an experiment you can run: find an immigration lawyer and talk them through the process of getting Signal working on their phone.

> Long term keys are almost never what you want. If you keep using a key, it eventually gets exposed.

Have a sentence praising Signal followed by a sentence explaining the main critique of Signal (requiring mobile number) makes me question the whole post for credibility
by Tech_News_Daily | 2026-01-04 10:58:30+00:00
I like to mix a few different types so I get a good balance of news, tech, and analysis. For mainstream news I follow BBC, Reuters, and The Guardian. For tech and AI updates, I check TechCrunch, The Verge, and Perplexity AI research updates.

It really depends on whether you want quick daily updates or deeper weekly reads!
by petrocrat | 2026-01-04 10:58:45+00:00
Also that the "spiritual world" (i.e. religion) in America has been colonized by money, consumption and commodities as well, which has drained all the spirituality from it. Religion in America is as desolate of meaning and sustenance as the American Western Frontier. You have to be a heretic to find spirituality that's worth anything here.
by koito17 | 2026-01-04 10:59:32+00:00
There are two major roadblocks I see for Japan phone number support.

1. Carriers are required by law to support mobile number porting (MNP). Yes, this includes voice plans offered by travel SIM operators (emphasis on voice plan). Thanks to this, I was able to have a Japanese phone number on the first day of arriving to Japan and later keep the number when I had the necessary documents to switch to a "proper" carrier.

2. Japanese phone numbers by law require a specific form of identity verification (本人確認). For instance, carriers generally don't allow representatives to pick up a SIM card. It has to be the same person who is contracting and paying for the line. This means Voklit will need to have some sort of eKYC implementation that normally isn't needed for e.g. the US and Canada (the currently supported countries).

With that said, spam calls in Japan are bad enough as-is. I sort of hope it remains difficult to obtain even a 050 number. Most VoIP numbers are just scam calls nowadays, though I did run into an edge case of a real estate broker attempting to call from a 050 number (which I configure my phone to block).

If you want your phone number to be "authentic", then it can't really be a 050 number. There are additional KYC requirements in Japan if you want a "proper" mobile number (070, 080, etc.). Likewise, the regional numbers (市外局番) like 042 typically have geographical requirements, so I doubt those can be easily offered by a SaaS platform.
by t0mk | 2026-01-04 10:59:38+00:00
I would prefer to run the build locally/myself, and to specify either a bounding box with lon and lat, or a country. The output would be data files and/or docker images with data. But as sibling comment said, if you plan to sell it, I understand it makes less sense to offer building logic.

I get why you created the monaco pack, it's a nice demo and fast to download and run. I would rather choose a big city where potential users live (london, nyc, the bay,?), but maybe there are technicalities that make that more complex.

Drawing box on a map in browser and generating the tiles, routing and geocoding db sounds quite heavy for backend compute. There was a project wiht a website that could generate a tileset (pmtiles file?) from box drawn on a map, but I can't find it now. There was a limit to the box size and if it was over some threshold, you had to have premium, or contact sales, or sth, I thought it was protomaps, but no tool like that there now.

Anyway really nice idea, I will follow your progress for sure!
by franga2000 | 2026-01-04 11:00:06+00:00
Wayland is not a compositor. Being more maintaned than Xorg doesn't mean anything because wayland doesn't do a tenth of the things Xorg did.

What used to be maintained in one codebase by Xorg devs is now duplicated in at least three major compositors, each with their own portal implementation and who knows what else. And those are primarily maintaned by desktop environment devs who also have the whole rest of the DE to worry about.
by stackbutterflow | 2026-01-04 11:00:41+00:00
There's nothing substantive to the comment I'm replying to.

It's explaining in too many words that might makes right. We all know that.

On the other hand I believe, but I could be wrong, that the many comments of the sort in this thread are a way for some people to cheer these sort of actions without being too obvious about it because they know it's not a good look in some circles, hn being one. So rather than chanting usa usa usa like their gut tells them too, they resort to such emotionally distanced statements, obvious to everyone, pretending to simply constate the gap in military capabilities of the US versus other powers.

And indeed, I find that appalling.
by inejge | 2026-01-04 11:01:22+00:00
> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc.

That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the docs, I asked Google's Gemini (whatever's the current free version) to write a bare bones script for an SMTP conversation.

It flatly refused.

The explanation was along the lines "it could be used for spamming, so I can't do that, Dave." I understand the motivation, and can even sympathize a bit, but what are the options for someone who has a legitimate need for an answer? I know how to get one by other means; what's the end game when it's LLMs all the way down? I certainly don't wish to live in such a world.
by meindnoch | 2026-01-04 11:01:59+00:00
>But it does allow engineers, trained on one platform, to work on the other.

The programming language is the most surface level detail when learning a platform.

The libraries, the frameworks, the OS services, the app lifecycle, the UI idioms are the hard part, and those cannot be abstracted away (of course you can try, but you'll end up with an inconsistent mess that doesn't feel native in any of the supported platforms, at which point you should just create a website).
by latexr | 2026-01-04 11:02:21+00:00
It’s disconnected from reality to believe anyone can get investor money to buy this amount of lottery tickets. Most people, even if they realise the odds, wouldn’t even know where to start.

But you’ve already locked yourself into an incorrect preconceived notion of the original point (which is simply: “not everyone has an equal chance on the lottery, though on the surface that may look like the case”) and are for some reason getting angrier with each response, so I don’t think we’ll get anywhere here.
by geremiiah | 2026-01-04 11:04:13+00:00
Ironically the reason Karpathy's is better is because he livecoded it and I can be sure it's not some LLM vomit.
Unfortunately, we are now indundated with newbies posting their projects/tutorials/guides in the hopes that doing so will catch the eye of a recuiter and land them a high paying AI job. That's not so bad in itself except for the fact that most of these people are completely clueless and posting AI slop.
by mns | 2026-01-04 11:04:40+00:00
I started reading it because I saw it recommended here 2-3 years ago on one of the end of year book threads. I’m still somewhere at around 40% according to my Kindle. I like the style and the way Mann paints the world so to say, like the world it creates in your imagination, but I find it so dragged and boring, I just can’t get myself to read it for long.
by Bender | 2026-01-04 11:05:57+00:00
They are crying tears of joy.

That pretty much sums it up. I think Zack covered it well too. [1] I do not understand what benefit there was to a dictator remaining in place and why so many on HN support him. Over a third of Venezuelans fled that country and lost everything to escape tyranny.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_x9aWccFCE [video][52m]
by j45 | 2026-01-04 11:07:33+00:00
AI is generally setup to return the "best" answer as defined as the most common answer, not the rightest, or most efficient or effective answer, unless the underlying data leans that way.

It's why AI based web search isn't behaving like google based search. People clicking on the best results really was a signal for google on what solution was being sought. Generally, I don't know that LLMs are covering this type of feedback loop.
by specproc | 2026-01-04 11:07:48+00:00
What I'm appreciating here is the quality of the _best_ human responses on SO.

There are always a number of ways to solve a problem. A good SO response gives both a path forward, and an explanation why, in the context of other possible options, this is the way to do things.

LLMs do not automatically think of performance, maintainability, edge cases etc when providing a response, in no small part because they do not think.

An LLM will write you a regex HTML parser.[0]

The stats look bleak for SO. Perhaps there's a better "experience" with LLMs, but my point is that this is to our detriment as a community.

[^0]: He comes, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-04 11:08:24+00:00
Right now the US have not invaded Venezuela but in effect attempted to precipitate a "coup". We shall see what happens now. Note, too that Maduro is not widely recognised as President by Western countries because of accusation of election rigging.

This is classic US action South of the border since the 19th century so I think the outrage is excessive. Perhaps people think, wrongly, that this is new becaude of Trump. What is new is that this seems actually aimed against China.

Regarding international law, it seems that it's been invoked so much in recent years that people have "drunk the Kool Aid" and actually believe that this is something carved in stone that must be obeyed, or even just actual "law"...
by nirui | 2026-01-04 11:09:41+00:00
What kind of visa Mr. Maduro was using when he entered the US?

I'm guessing it must be very good since, let's just say he kinda fits the profile which President Trump might describe as "worst of the worst", and yet the US Customs still just letting that guy walk right in.

But anyhow I hope Mr. Maduro don't illegally overstay because if ICE found out about it, there's a chance they'll deport Mr. Maduro to Venezuela.
by noduerme | 2026-01-04 11:11:08+00:00
That's pretty nice ;)

I once wrote this humdinger, that's still on my mostly dead personal website from 2010... one of my proudest bits of code besides my poker hand evaluator ;)

The question was, how do you generate a unique number for any two positive integers, where x!=y, such that f(x,y) = f(y,x) but the resulting combined id would not be generated by any other pair of integers. What I came up with was a way to generate a unique key from any set of positive integers which is valid no matter the order, but which doesn't key to any other set.

My idea was to take the radius of a circle that intersected the integer pair in cartesian space. That alone doesn't guarantee the circle won't intersect any other integer pairs... so I had to add to it the phase multiple of sine and cosine which is the same at those two points on the arc. That works out to:

(x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))

And means that it doesn't matter which order you feed x and y in, it will generate a unique float for the pair. It reduces to:

x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )

To add another dimension, just add it to the process and key it to one of the first...

x^2+y^2+z^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )+( (x/z) / (x^2+z^2) )
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 11:11:11+00:00
> I've been using ydotool but the daemon service is janky (fails to startup/shutdown frequently,

I'd be investigating that issue instead, should have errors in systemd/journalctl or whatever you use for managing daemons. I'm using ydotool on Arch, pretty much all defaults, together with a homegrown voice dictation thing, and it's working 100% of the times.
by idoubtit | 2026-01-04 11:11:35+00:00
I've read thousands of books. There are good novels everywhere, and no country has the exclusivity of any theme.

> One is the depiction of desolation and human loneliness before the American continent was developed into a prosperous land.

Of course, classical European literature didn't focus on the American wilderness.
Though the most famous book on this theme is probably Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. And I enjoyed T.E. Lawrence' Seven Pillars of Wisdom which most people know through the film; the Arabian desert was a good place for loneliness in the wilderness.

> Another is the pursuit of the American Dream, where people achieve success through relentless struggle.

Like wise, the American Dream is an American myth, which is rarely the focus outside of the USA. But searching success through relentless struggle is a frequent theme. For instance, Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir or Maupassant's Bel-ami. These are from two of the most famous classical French authors, but there are many novels about hard-working people that reach success.

> The third is what this novel expresses: what happens after success? Money and career cannot solve all problems; people need more to fill an entire life.

As you like Russian literature, I suppose you've read Goncharov's Oblomov and Chekov's theater, especially Uncle Vania. That theme is central in one of the most famous French novel, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The excellent Italian writer Alberto Moravia also has many novels about this, the most famous being Il disprezzo and my favourite being Gli indifferenti. I also like D'Annunzio's Il piacere much more than The Great Gatsby. I would argue that variations of this theme are universal, with old writings like the Bibles's Qohelet and even more Sumer's Gilgamesh.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-04 11:12:35+00:00
This is a big point thats often missed.

A lot of american buisness communication is packing, fluff or filler to either disguise a lack of knowledge or not make firm statements.

Unless you are very careful, a standard LLM output will wrap a bunch of obvious points in lots of filler language. This works in business because the most toxic phrase you can utter is "I don't know". So we are used to verbal noise, and pick through the filler to glean clues to what the writer actually knows or wants to assert (or not assert)

If you look at modern tech journalism, its either thinly re-worded PR pieces, or re-iteration of other not relevant opinions (see meta's AR glasses) You skim them to read to pull out interesting points (full colour, speakers, battery life, etc). The rest is just packing.

But for "pleasure" reading, ie stuff thats not directly related to your chain of command, there is no use in reading that shit.

Either its a story, where you need to impart emotion, or a. novel viewpoint. Or its an argument, where you also have a story, with some "facts" that also support an emotion.

That requires some level of understanding of the subject matter, to make a coherent narrative, that doesn't feel empty.

TLDR:

LLMs generally produce Buisness passive, which is almost useless as a form of communication. Just send bullet points.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-04 11:13:23+00:00
I've maybe used Wayland on Gnome for 1-2 years at this point, always with nvidia hardware. Works OK now, but didn't 2 years ago, and before that, used to be very janky, today is smoother than Xorg. But at this point, I don't think there is a single blocker left for me. Took some time to rewrite some programs that I have to control their own window position and wants to see what other applications are running, but was easy to work around with a Gnome Shell Extension in the end, as the design of Wayland doesn't really "allow" those sort of things.

I'm having more issues with games/websites/programs that didn't take high display refresh rate into account, than Wayland, at this point.
by andy99 | 2026-01-04 11:13:32+00:00
I’m convinced that some people are overly susceptible to the “preference optimized” nature of AI output and end up completely blind to its quality and usefulness.

Not to say it’s useless garbage, there is some value for sure, but it’s nowhere near as good as some people represent it to be. It’s not an original observation, but people end up in a “folie a deux” with a chatbot and churn out a bunch of mediocre stuff while imagining they’re breaking new ground and doing some amazing thing.