MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MegaDeKay | 2026-01-01 23:38:23+00:00
I'd say there are two remaining roadblocks. First and biggest is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks as you point out. But there's also no open source HDMI 2.1 implementation allowed by the HDMI cartel so people like me with an AMD card max out at 4K60 even for open source games like Visual Pinball (unless you count an adapter with hacked firmware between the card and the display). NVidia and Intel get away with it because they implement the functionality in their closed source blobs.
by trinix912 | 2026-01-01 23:39:10+00:00
Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.

Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
by rasz | 2026-01-01 23:39:26+00:00
>I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:

This one is imo better comparison https://www.dongchedi.com/video/7530078571931435566 https://carnewschina.com/2025/07/24/chinas-massive-adas-test... Tesla won every category despite this being a test performed in China by Chinese outfit.
by DeusExMachina | 2026-01-01 23:39:32+00:00
Where did you pull those numbers out from?

But ok, if we want to play with made up numbers, pop-ups working with the 0.01% of viewers that are willing to spend money are worth alienating even 10% of people that will never spend a dime.

You are assuming every visitor is the same, when most are just a waste of resources.
by physicles | 2026-01-01 23:40:09+00:00
There’s something about cold plunges. My group started when some of us started meeting for drinks and a swim after work during the summer, and we just kept doing it every week through the winter. Some joined the group during the winter. Those people became my closest friends:

- We see each other every week, almost without fail

- I suspect the invitation to a cold plunge pre-selects for people with very high openness, and those people aren’t afraid of deep friendships

- Doing something hard and a little bit scary together strengthens the bond
by bbor | 2026-01-01 23:40:12+00:00
Reminds me of on interaction a few months ago where I mentioned the left-right spectrum in passing and someone accused me of making HN a worse place, only to call me a "snowflake" in their very next response! As usual, "things shouldn't be so political" is often uttered from a highly-political sense of discomfort. The quintessential example for me was its usage in US anti-desegregation rhetoric in the 1960s, alongside its resurgence in the anti-DEI movement today -- demanding that no one discuss our shared institutions is too often an endorsement of them, rather than an honest effort to focus on something else.

"toward the left" aside, it's always a little frustrating to read the ubiquitous "this place sucks" comments on here and Reddit. I have tons of problems with HN--both petty (markdown when??) and fundamental (SV/PE has metastasized in a discomforting way...)--but I'm still here because I love it, and think it's one of the best communities the internet has to offer.

Specific critiques of specific people or ideas are always welcome, but comments like "everyone here is curmudgeonly" just makes me wonder why they bother to log on in the first place...
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-01 23:40:27+00:00
For anyone actually interested in Game Boy music, I would recommend the LSDJ software, which is a music production tool that runs on an actual Game Boy (or emulator). You can get much nicer results than this vibe-coded slop that feels insulting to the craft. It's not even that hard to do, if you just want to remix existing songs and have the sheet music/MIDI on hand (which this requires anyways) a song can be transcribed in just a couple of hours.
by ralph84 | 2026-01-01 23:40:45+00:00
Auto manufacturing is low margin and capital intensive. BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.

Even all of that aside, the idea that foreign investors will be allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies is questionable. Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners. What are they gonna do, sue in Chinese court?
by scaramanga | 2026-01-01 23:41:12+00:00
Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops.

Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions").

Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
by _ache_ | 2026-01-01 23:41:22+00:00
I'm talking about adoption around me. I didn't check the data.
Glad it works for them outside of people around me, didn't know that.

Is it relative adoption or absolute ? I mean, the people using Gemini are they new or coming from another provider, like OpenAI ? (said differently: Is Google eating OpenAI lunch or just reaching new customers ?)
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-01 23:42:21+00:00
As I understand it separate isolates in a single process are inherently less secure than separate processes (e.g. Chrome's site isolation) which is again less secure than virtualization based solutions.

As a TinyKVM / KVM Server contributor I'm obviously hopeful our approach will work out, but we still have some way to go to get to a level of polish that makes it easy to get going with and have the confidence of production level experience.

TinyKVM has the advantage of a much smaller surface area to secure as a KVM based solution and the ability to offer fast per-request isolation as we can reset the VM state a couple of orders of magnitude faster than v8 can create a new isolate from a snapshot.

https://github.com/libriscv/kvmserver
by motohagiography | 2026-01-01 23:42:38+00:00
I think the author is talking about "exoteric" meaning, which is for public consumption, and "esoteric" meaning, which is for the initiated. Even though they say they aren't dogwhistles or shibboleths, these Straussian memes are closely related, as the accusation asserts that there is an "esoteric" meaning to something beneath its "exoteric" face value.

They may be a converse of the Scissor Statement, which has a dual meaning that is irreconcilable between the separate interpreters. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190508)
by iamwil | 2026-01-01 23:42:49+00:00
> For instance, I know Project A -- these are the concerns of Project A. I know Project B -- these are the concerns of Project B. I have the insight to design these projects so they compose, so I don't have to keep track of a hundred parallel issues in a mono Project C. On each of those projects, run a single agent -- with review gates for 2-3 independent agents (fresh context, different models! Codex and Gemini). Use a loop, let the agents go back and forth.

Can you talk more about the structure of your workflow and how you evolved it to be that?
by hotsalad | 2026-01-01 23:42:59+00:00
If I'm reading the requirements around being a "browser engine steward" correctly, does this mean essentially only Google and Mozilla can ever qualify for the "Embedded Browser Engine Entitlement"? Even Microsoft seems to be ruled out, give that Edge's engine is based on Blink. Any other smaller browser engines would be ruled out by the baseline web functionality requirements.

This hardly seems to allow anything.
by ekipan | 2026-01-01 23:43:24+00:00
Shoutouts to SimpleFlips: https://www.wario.style/s/BRwFnLDe

TTYD File Select: https://www.wario.style/s/paznaBKf

Chemical Plant Zone: https://www.wario.style/s/L7kD5jJP

Robo's Theme: https://www.wario.style/s/MzeU9PVc

Everyone's beloved Rick: https://www.wario.style/s/byMyoc3Z

Better MIDI search: <https://bitmidi.com/> I guess you could copypaste the 12345.mid id number into the Wario Synth URL, but it's a bit tedious.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-01 23:43:25+00:00
Someone says "let's write a prototype in Python" and someone else says "are you sure we shouldn't use a a better language that is just as productive but isn't going to lock us into abysmal performance down the line?" but everyone else says "nah we don't need to worry about performance yet, and anyway it's just a prototype - we'll write a proper version when we need to"...

10 years later "ok it's too slow; our options are a) spend $10m more on servers, b) spend $5m writing a faster Python runtime before giving up later because nobody uses it, c) spend 2 years rewriting it and probably failing, during which time we can make no new features. a) it is then."
by immibis | 2026-01-01 23:43:27+00:00
Almost like there were at least three other features more important.

The most important letters in English are E, T and A. I'm sure you won't notice if we remove H from all keyboards, right? After all, the survey says it's not in the top three. And given a choice between a keyboard without E and one without H, nobody buys the one without H, proving they really don't need the H.
by zerocool86 | 2026-01-01 23:43:44+00:00
I wrote this over the holidays because I couldn't shake the feeling that we have a narrow window before Apple/Google ship "local" AI that's local in marketing only.

The manifesto covers the philosophical case (cypherpunk roots, enshittification, architectural immunity), but the real urgency is in the companion piece: https://www.localghost.ai/inflection

The TL;DR: personal AI is the final extraction layer — not just what you search for, but how you think. If that data flows to central servers by default, the capture is complete.

Hardware is commoditizing (sub-$200 NPU boards by mid-2026), but the software defaults are being set now.

Full honesty: LocalGhost is a vision, not a product. No working software yet, just architecture and this site. The Freehold Directory is real though — a /.well-known/freehold.json standard for local-first projects to declare their principles and get discovered.

If someone builds this faster and better, great. The goal is that the alternative exists.
Show HN: I worked on a sci-fi book for the 2025
by a1371 | 2026-01-01 23:43:51+00:00
Just about a year ago, the concept for a sci-fi book popped into my head. I instantly knew I have to see it through despite not having any writing experience (and a pretty demanding job). Over 2025, I attended writer circles, improved my writing, and structured the story. Here is the first chapter. I hope you enjoy it :)
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-01 23:44:22+00:00
For quite some time, Warren Buffett was a BYD investor via Berkshire Hathaway. If you tried to get into EV stocks after the Tesla exuberance started, you were already mostly too late.

> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.

> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.

> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.

Warren Buffett’s fund exits BYD after a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value - https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/investing/warren-buffet-berks... - September 22nd, 2025
by benoau | 2026-01-01 23:44:39+00:00
It's not just that, Apple also gets $20+ billion per year in AdSense revenue from Google for being the default search engine in Safari. A change of even 10% marketshare would cost them billions, and this money is pure profit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/google-pays-apple-36percent-...
by maccard | 2026-01-01 23:44:54+00:00
> GHA with the `setup-ruby` action will cache gems.

Caching is a great word - it only means what we want it to mean. My experience with GHA default caches is that it’s absolutely dog slow.

> Buildkite can be used in tons of different ways, but it's common to use it with docker and build a docker image with a layer dedicated to the gems (e.g. COPY Gemfile Gemfile.lock; RUN bundle install), effectively caching dependencies.

The only way docker caching works is if you have a persistent host. That’s certainly not most setups. It can be done, but if you have that running in docker doesn’t gain you much at all you’d see the same caching speed up if you just ran it on the host machine directly.
by steve-atx-7600 | 2026-01-01 23:45:14+00:00
Hahaha. Try sharing a couple old printers and scanners connected to a Linux box on your home network. At best, when it’s working you get lowest common denominator functionality. Want to run some vms ? Works great until you update your distro and the vm hosts kernel modules aren’t compatible anymore. Oh, want to use a later version of some package like docker? Did I use apt or snap or flatpack???

Yes, you can get this stuff working, but if you enjoy doing other things in life, have a job and don’t life alone, it is SSSOOOOO much easier to get a Mac mini. Or even windows 11 if that’s your thing.
by jjcc | 2026-01-01 23:45:18+00:00
As you mentioned EUV machine, I happened to read an article from a former Executive of ZhongXin, a domestic competitor of the famouse Huawei and also sanctioned by US. He said that China had no insentive to develop lithography technology including EUV until Trump blocked the sales of EUV machine in his first term. [1]

There are tons of other cases, like EDA software, etc. It used to be a bilateral business. Now China become more and more independent of the rest of the world due to external pressure.

BTW, I've been working and living in the West (more specifically , in Canada) for almost 30 years but also have access to Chinese language media. I've been watching a lot of misunderstanding or misinformation. It's less in recentl years. I have to stay way from some of the topics to avoid being downvote because misinformation believers strongly believe I'm wrong for those topics.

[1]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/VCEbmtljCS6jRCLaGxCa1A
by westurner | 2026-01-01 23:45:25+00:00
From
"Passive direct air capture via evaporative carbonate crystallization" (2025)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44286-025-00308-5 :

> Abstract: [...] This passive, single-chemical-loop approach has the potential to reduce capital and levelized costs by approximately 42% and 32%, respectively, compared with conventional liquid-based direct air capture systems.

What is their projected cost per ton?

From 2025-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282882 :

> A techno-economic analysis estimates a levelized cost of capture of ~$70/tonneCO2 [with this membraneless electrochemical approach], compared to $137/tonneCO2 for conventional EMAR

> [ $50 ]

From 2025-11 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46010414 :

> I just saw $26/ton for (non-CO2) carbon capture in 2025. Gravel is like $10-$50/ton.

From 2025-: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01696-5 :

> Using uncertainty-aware cost modelling, including membrane cost, electricity prices, contingency factors and learning curves, we show that capture costs can reach US $50–100 per ton CO2 for natural gas power plants and as low as US $25–50 per ton CO2 for coal and cement plants, positioning this technology favourably against state-of-the-art capture processes.

But then the usability of the captured carbon;

What is more reusable than CO2-derived graphene filters caked in CO2?

Given sequestered carbon in a useful form, what products can be made?
by prescriptivist | 2026-01-01 23:45:26+00:00
I think fibers (or, rather, the Async library) in Ruby tends to be fetishized by junior Rails engineers who don't realize higher level thread coordination issues (connection pools, etc) equally apply to fibers. That said this could be a pretty good use case for fibers -- the code base I use every day has ~230 gems and if you can peel off the actual IO bound installation of all those into non-blocking calls, you would see a meaningful performance difference vs spinning up threads and context switching between them.
by KPGv2 | 2026-01-01 23:45:50+00:00
> Or is there a way to archive sites like this?

A couple days ago, someone published their archive of HN that works in any browser.

Archiving sites is easy anyway. I wrote a Scrapy app that archives everything within the a specific fandom on Ao3. TH hardest part is remembering how beautiful soup queries work.
Show HN: Ducklang: Achieving 100x more requests per second than NextJS
by Apfelfrosch | 2026-01-01 23:46:00+00:00
Duck (https://duck-lang.dev) is a statically typed, compiled programming language that combines the best of Rust, TypeScript and Go, aiming to provide an alternative for full-stack-development while being as familiar as possible

Improvements over Rust:
- garbage collection simplifies developing network applications
- no lifetimes
- built-in concurrency runtime and apis for web development

Improvements over bun/node/typescript:
- massive performance gains due to Go's support for parallel execution and native code generation
- easier deployment since Duck compiles to a statically linked native executable that doesn't need dependencies
- reduced complexity and costs since a single duck deployment massively outscales anything that runs javascript
- streamlined toolchain management using duckup (compiler version manager) and dargo (build tool)

Improvements over Go:
- a more expresive type system supporting Union types, Duck typing and tighter control over mutability
- Server Side Rendering with a jsx-like syntax as well as preact components for frontend development
- better error handling based on union types
- a rust based reimplementation of tailwind that is directly integrated with the language (but optional to use)
- type-safe json apis
by mr_toad | 2026-01-01 23:46:42+00:00
Most people are capable of long-term learning. Some people are capable of discovering and inventing new things. I think the two are related, and current NN architecture doesn’t allow this. An AI that can cobble together a CRUD application to spec is one thing. An AI that can come up with a new idea for a successful app on its own is a completely different ball game.
by lifeisstillgood | 2026-01-01 23:46:45+00:00
Absolutely

But hidden in this is the failing of every sql-bridge ever - it’s definitely easier for a programmer to read customers(3).balance but the trade off now is I have to provide class based semantics for all operations - and that tends to hide (oh you know, impedance mismatch).

I would far prefer “store the records as plain as we can” and add on functions to operate over it (think pandas stores basically just ints floats and strings as it is numpy underneath)

(Yes you can store pyobjects somehow but the performance drops off a cliff.)

Anyway - keep the storage and data structure as raw and simple as possible and write functions to run over it. And move to pandas or SQLite pretty quickly :-)
by sho_hn | 2026-01-01 23:46:58+00:00
I do understand the contention is that an LLM would be less thoughtful in editorializing which bits to make interactive, reasoning about the progression in understanding and delight by the user.

I'm not so sure it's that far out of reach, though. From what I've seen the reasoning models do, they're not too far away from being able to run a strategy of figuring out interesting increments of a problem, parameterizing them, making an interactive scene for those parameters, ... it feels within reach.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-01 23:47:22+00:00
> (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL)

Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to talk about intellectual one-upmanship xD

Also another thing but holy shit, LLM's are sycophantic man, it tries uses big words itself to show how the person has intellectual one-upmanship while cozying you up by saying practical design aphorism.

Like I agree with both of you guys and there's nuance but I am pretty sure that nobody's tryna sound intellectual hopefully.

Sorry for turning this into a rant about LLM's being sycophantic but man I tried today watching big bang and asked it if sheldon and raj were better duo in more common about physics (theorist and astrophysicist) since I was watching a episode where they both have dark matter in common and chatgpt agreed

Then I just felt the sycophancy in my heart so I opened up a new thread and I think I used the same prompt and changed it to sheldon and leonard and it ended up saying yes again.

The problem felt so annoying to me that I ended up looking at a sycophancy index being frustrated of sorts and wrote a lengthy ddg prompt lol to find this https://www.glazebench.com/

We really don't need more yes man's in our lives and honestly I will take up a less intelligent model than a sycophantic one. So I am curious what your guys opinion are on it too as sometimes I use LLM's as a search engines to familiarize myself with things I don't know and I am lately feeling it will just say yes to anything even silly ideas so I would never know what's the truth matter of the reality ykwim?
by dekhn | 2026-01-01 23:47:28+00:00
More details required.

Like the other comment says, this can be done with a beam-expanding telescope (which can be as simple as two lenses whose focal length ratios determine the magnification). https://www.newport.com/n/how-to-build-a-beam-expander and https://www.thorlabs.com/an-example-of-a-diy-keplerian-beam-... are a good place to start.

But it can be a bit more complicated than that , and it's often easier to use an LED.