skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Never buy something you’re not allowed to repair.
Happy New Year and a Reflection on Mastery Through Simplicity
Hi everyone, and Happy New Year!

I’m new to Hacker News. Although I’ve read a few articles here before, this is my first real contribution. I’ve taken the time to read the guidelines and understand the principles of this community, and I’ll do my best to contribute meaningfully and respectfully.

Now, I’d like to share a personal reflection:

I’m 27 years old and from Brazil, a country where, unfortunately, foundational concepts like algorithms and logical thinking are often undervalued. For those familiar with Brazilian expressions, this is what we call a "tiro no pé"—which translates to "a shot in the foot." In English, this might compare to the saying "shooting oneself in the foot." It means making a decision that ultimately harms you, even if unintentionally.

For the past ten years, I’ve struggled to learn programming. Watching others succeed while I struggled often left me wondering what I was missing. Over time, I came to realize something important: the professionals who truly stand out are often those who master the areas that others dismiss as "too easy"—like algorithms, logic, and foundational concepts.

The power of simplicity became clear to me. Mastering the basics isn’t just a starting point—it’s the cornerstone of problem-solving. Programming isn’t just about writing code; it’s about abstract thinking, identifying patterns, and breaking problems into smaller, manageable parts. Everything connects when you have a strong foundation.

This realization motivated me to pursue a degree in Information Systems. I want to formalize my learning and ensure I develop that crucial foundation. More importantly, I’ve learned that embracing curiosity, persistence, and the humility to start simple is essential for growth. It’s not about rushing into advanced topics but about building step by step.

I hope this reflection resonates with others in the community. My goal isn’t just to improve my own skills but to become the kind of problem solver who contributes meaningfully, even philanthropically, to the tech world.

I want to clarify that I’m not trying to promote myself with this post. I simply want to understand the mindset of people who are truly great at solving problems. This will help me feel less like a fraud as I continue my own journey.
If thresholding of P-values is the issue, E-values -- a recent, much more elegant, easier to work with, and more robust alternative to P-values -- solve this.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08040 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.00901
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01948 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23614
>Last week I added #from_json method to String and have already used it a lot

Why? What do you get from globally modifying a very important class, instead of just creating a regular method?
Preventing Back button from working is evil (maybe because of iframes, but still).
In fact, one year they were forced to put it on twice, as it was shown as part of a variety show, and was moved earlier than billed, causing an uproar when people realized they'd missed it.
It was not implied it's a "property of far right", at all. All it's saying is "no lives matter" coordinate not in public networks.
hence why every recent programming languages are type after name (go included).
I disagree. Mercedes used to be well known for reliable and easy to repair cars among the general public, or at least that was true among the people I know. E.g. there are stories about old mercedes with millions of kilometers, some of them in remote places and owned by workers (e.g. taxi drivers). Of course, this is no longer the case and newer models are very disappointing in this regard.

Also the right of repair is orthogonal to the concept of luxury. What is relevant here is whether mercedes is leveraging their market power during the car's design phase to hinder competition in after-sales services and profit from that. Those decisions could have negative externalities for consumers and the environment.
Still way slower than what particle physics throws at you

(Wolphram Alpha gives me 743 m/s @ 250 bar and 1000C - could be wrong but probably the same OoM)
I sometimes wonder if feeling good about "ancient culture" and "proud history" creates an attitude that there's no need (or no point) to add to any of that in the present. For how long can a people use the achievements of those who died a thousand years previously as a crutch to not to live up to those achievements.
yes, read it from left to right, don't use spiral.
That's an epic thread. Thank you very much for sharing it :)

And now, looking back 17 years later, I'd say he succeeded. It's the tarsnap founder.
Understand what i want from life :)
I like the idea of "concept" .. you can represent a concept with language, visual etc. but it isn't any of those. Those are symbols used to communicate a concept or give representation to it but concepts are just connections between other concepts at the core. The closest things i feel to this is categories in category theory.
I can believe that it works. But there's a risk of actually starting to believe that the astral plane and other stuff is real, particularly if someone has predispositions for schizophrenia.

There's also a degree of danger, believing your dreams tell you the future is one thing but if you immerse yourself in occult, text about daemons, start believing they might have their own agendas - and I mean really believe - you can see how dangerous it can get.
Stefanik would rather have her husband, the gun lobbyist, push to let kids have more guns.

https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Stefanik-s-husband-K...
"several people"? I engaged with two people and moved on.
I guess it was one of the new self driving vehicles. It is not as if someone drove that vehicle into the crowd.
No regrets :D
Damages for breach of copyright. In some places you would get costs too.It should not cost millions either
That's what I meant by different sense. Yes.

But I suspect it applies to citizen facing things. It doesn't likely hold up research or pressures them into returning POC Viking images.

I could be wrong of course.
I didn’t read it that way at all.
Characterizing the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 ADC
> Good communication with LLMs is the least keywords used to make it deducible for LLM what you exactly want.

I am not sure that is the case, at least with a large number of LLMs. CO-STAR and TIDD-EC are much about structure and explanation than brevity.
"Dense" is a curious choice of words, but I agree, it often applies!
I see your point. I've had my fair share of trouble as well. Talking about this stuff on HN after the storm has passed, from a financially stable place, is a luxury on its own.

Nevertheless, I don't see any value on acknowledging the delta between me and peers that happened to be luckier. It'd be useful were I on the other side: for instance, if I hadn't seen my father sink into dementia, if he was still with me, I'd better keep reminding myself of the importance and blessing of growing alongside a functional, healthy dad.

But now... Thoughts like "I have struggled more than these guys" seem dangerous to me. Whenever I've taken them seriously I've ended up using them as justification for the next tiny act of self-destruction.
Any personal recommendations for a starter or favorites (perhaps top three or five or something like that)?
I don't understand the metaphor and how it would apply to this.

(But also, this feels like a Mythbusters episode challenge, and they managed to get a lead balloon flying).
People should stick to the specifications...

That said, that makes me think of perl5. I though the perl5 coders were doing some kind of sick competition: who is going to use the most implicit code, namely to read the code you would need a complete/perfect/permanent understanding of the full perl5 syntax parser to understand what some code is actually doing. I hate perl5 for that, but ultra complex syntax computer language like c++ and similar (java, rust, etc), are worse. In advanced OOP, you have no idea of what's going on if you don't embrace the full OOP model of a complex program, not to mention it does exponentially increase the syntax complexity, which is a liability in order to get a sane spectrum of alternative "real-life" compilers since those become insane to implement correctly.

If implicit there is in a computer language, it must be very little and very simple, but should be avoided as much as possible. Does it mean more verbose code, well, most of the time yes, and this is usually much better on the long run. For instance in C, I try to avoid complex expression (often I fail, because I am too used to some operators like '++' '--'), many operators should not be around, not pertinent enough (like a ? b : c) only increasing compiler complexity.
VGA was already on the market for 9 months by the time Windows 2 released.
Thanks for the explanation, it was very clear. Especially the bit about never being able to see your own private key. Ok I get it, it's to prevent malware from doing the same, but it still vaguely distasteful.
Hi,

In many ways, AI models today function as tools, much like Nmap—they're only as effective as the way you use them. Crafting good prompts is a key skill, and there's helpful guidance available. You might find this documentation on prompt best practices useful: Link: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-engineering.

After that, you could explore these examples for inspiration:https://platform.openai.com/docs/examples. They illustrate how much impact thoughtful input can have.

Hope this helps!
I had the flu at the beginning of December, with high fever, the whole nine yards. Keeping a running log with Claude in which I shared temperature readings, medications etc. has been so useful. If nothing else it's the world's most sophisticated rubber duck / secretary, but that's quite useful in many daily life situations on its own. Caveats apply etc.
Happy New Year to one of the most informative and interesting communities on the interwebs!
Wouldn't this be a easy way to get out of doing whatever current work you don't want to be doing?
Used ThinkPads used to be my way to go without even thinking about it but nowadays i don't think it's worth it anymore.

Many laptops i'm interested in come with soldered ram, meaning i can only buy something that's old and will stay old.

A lot of X280 and X13 come with 8gb or 16ram, which is truly a shame. I had 16gb ram in my X220 in 2014, ten/eleven years ago.

A lot of interesting ThinkPad models now come with a fixed keyboard i cannot change. Being somebody that likes us-ansi keyboard but that does not live in the US this means most eBay offers are not appealing to me.

Last ThinkPad i bought (X270) i just replaced the keyboard and ram (8->16gb). I cannot do that anymore with most models.

My X270 (for private use) it's getting old and I'm considering going for a brand-new laptop this time.

I have doubts between a new ThinkPad or a Framework. If Framework had an option to get trackpoint/ultranav that would be a no brainer.

I'm seriously torn on this. I'll probably go with a Framework 13 though.

I keep my laptop for many years each time so the idea of having the possibility to bump a laptop to up to 96gb ram (2 x 48gb ddr5) in some years is truly appealing.
Now we're talking. Some kind of requirement for government-issued ID too.
I'm bearish on 'ai war' but this sounds like a huge positive if it comes to fruition because war would become more about two sides trying to kill each each sides leaders, instead of these leaders sending masses of doe eyed young people off to die for them.

If politicians had real skin in the game there'd be far less war.
Thank you! I don't have any experience with PLATO itself.
I want a RP chip with the ARM block which was permanently disabled in hardware on which raspberry did not pay the ARM ISA royalties.

How can I get my hands of one of those boards? If they do exist?
Only 3 predictions?
Do you think Al Qaeda has membership badges or is it mostly just a bunch of people buying into the same set of memes?

What about vegans?

No one is mistaking this for a “membership badge.” They’re taking it as a signal for what a person believes, and acknowledging that extreme belief formation (even if cynical and “just a joke bro lmao”) is very often part and parcel with group identity.
I bought a used one, the battery life is quite sorry. It can live for maybe 2h using their linux with powertop improvements. Maybe linux is part of the problem and windows would perform better (heard an argument that linux driver writers are not privy to the hw details and so cannot write energy-efficient drivers).

I hate to say it as a linux fan, but if battery life was any important I would buy a mac. I have mac pro 2017 which is probably of the same age, if not older, and the battery life is just so much better.
Thanks so much for the write-up!
> the shopping list is plagued by blank items/rows

Hmm, interesting that he goes as far as to add a map based on an address provided (which is actually quite nice) but can't (or rather, didn't) get rid of blank items/rows.
There's a few projects that do rendering and 3D geometry construction from OSM Data, e.g.

- https://streets.gl (data outdated, sadly)

- https://demo.f4map.com/ (commercial, no textures)

- OSM2World (sadly not interactively on the web, good textures, lots of rendered details, e.g. street signs)

- osmbuildings.org (no live data, no roof shapes)

None are really photo-realistic, and there's are a bunch of problems in the map data where it's hard to infer good 3D geometry, e.g. stairs.
I like the way Dlang does it. It keeps the types on the left like C, but are actually readable.
C++ logging library – something I've been working on
Hello everyone,

I want to share with you something that I've been working on in the last couple of years - yet another logging library, how boring, I know. Still, this project represents a long journey of learning, growth, and dedication, and I’d be honored if you could take a moment to check it out, since it is something that I'm proud of.

I believe that it has become a very well-rounded tool that could serve you well. It is very performant and very configurable. It provides a nice CMake so it can be easily integrated into any project, and a well-made CI pipeline ensures that it runs on everything. All of this is packed in a very well-written and clean code base, at least in my opinion.

I would really appreciate it if you drop a critique, an opinion, an idea, or want to contribute to the project.

Thank you for your time,
Chris
> Realistically you might get the same mileage with a Dell, but to fans, it feels different.

Not quite, and I tried.

Dell laptops with bother you if your power supply is not a genuine dell one.

Dell refused to repair a second-hand dell laptop (xps 15) under warranty because I did not have the receipt of original purchased.

Lenovo repaired my second-hand ThinkPad no question asked, because it was still under warranty. And the laptop i bought had the pick&return warranty package, so they sent a courier to pick the laptop from my home and they delivered it back within the same week.

Dell has been just unreliable in my experience. I fixed that laptop myself and sold it as soon as I could (and bought another used ThinkPad).
They still have to guarantee best execution.
I guess that means that every number is equivalent to a formula? Is there some sort of metric of how many formula produce the same number?
I think a proper type system that doesn't special-cases arrays are better, e.g. Array<String>. Pointers may also be part of this uniform structure, e.g. Array<Ref<String>>, and there is zero question on how to parse it even if you are not familiar.
It's evident that shopping apps have captured most of the market share among different industries. Online customer-centric and appealing e-commerce solutions are the most compelling and future-driven trends.

Transform your business into a renowned online store and use examples to develop apps like Temu. Here’s an article as a master guide that includes business models, features, and more.
Grandma has a reason to care about you.

At the opposite, my trust of Russian / Chinese / USian platforms is low enough that I consider it my duty to publicly shame people that still use them in 2025.

(With some caveats of course, for instance HN is not a yet negative to the world. Yet.)

There's also the question of stickiness of habits : your grandmas are for life, human professionals you might have a shallow enough relationship with that switching them might be relatively easy, while it might be very hard to stop smoking or to stop using Github once you started smoking / create an account.
His movies from the 80s are worth watching, especially "Non-Stop Trouble with My Double", because they have this comedic bitter tragedy I haven't encountered anywhere else.
Dunno, it has to be some energy beam because kinetic ammo needs replenishing. In space. So laser, microwaves, EMP etc. Maybe it could ignite the ICBMs fuel somehow, as most of the missile's payload is the fuel.
Where’s the spam?

I scrolled dozens of posts without seeing a single mention of this—the biggest (certainly the most interesting) LLM news recently. When something big happens with Claude or ChatGPT there are more posts, but nobody calls that “spam”.

Anyways, if you were actually following locallama (a subreddit about running LLMs locally, where this is by far the biggest and most relevant news topic currently) you’d have seen this post https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/Yay5njt963 where a guy is working on running deepseek on llamacpp and demonstrates ~8tk/s using a cpu.
There are books on hieroglyphs as well, but there is a good reason we don't use them as types in programming languages.
> Those were dark days for the company.

Were they? Apple's earnings grew a lot during those time.

The harsh truth is that Apple's userbase will complain but in the end will keep buying anyway.
stop the press
Termux, usbredir, QEMU: "Use an Android smartphone as a 'serial modem' with DOS"
While I stand corrected on the year being the same, there is the question of the price, which offered a 16 bit VGA, not 8 bit colour palette as you mentioned, at more affordable price point.
> What's cheaper

If you don’t have the second how can you trust the first? Without the dataset to test on your human experts will deliver you slop and be confident about it. And you will only realise the many ways their hand finessed algorithms fail once you are trying to field the algorithm.

> With something like a lawnmower, you don't want it to kill people or run over flowerbeds.

Best to not mix concerns though. Not killing people with an automatic lawnmover is about the right mechanical design, appropriately selected slow speed, and bumper sensors. None of this is an AI problem. We don’t have to throw out good engineering practices just because the product uses AI somewhere. It is not an all or nothing thing.

The flowerbed avoidance question might or might not be an AI problem depending on design decisions.

> Hiring cheap contractors to build out a massive dataset of photos of grass (millions of dollars)

I think that you are over estimating the effort here. The database doesn’t have to be so huge. Transfer learning and similar techniques reduced the data requirements by a lot. If all you want is a grass height detector you can place stationary cameras in your garden, collect a bunch of data and automatically label them based on when you moved the grass. That will obviously only generalise to your garden, but if this is only a hobby project maybe that is all you want? If this is a product you intend to sell for the general public then of course you need access to a lot of different gardens to test it on. But that is just the nature of product testing anyway.
I suppose humans need high level concepts because we can only hold 7[] things in working memory. Computers don’t have that limitation.

Also, humans cannot iterate over thousands of possibilities in a second, like computers do.

And finally, animal brains are severely limited by heat dissipation and energy input flow.

Based on that, artificial intelligence may arise from unexpected simple strategies, given the fundamental differences in scale and structure from animal brains.

- where 7 is whatever number is the correct number nowadays.
Try asking about the Tiananmen Square massacre or why people compare Xi to Paddington Bear or even the failings of Xi... but it will happily criticise Trump.
After implementing (parts of) a recursive descent parser for C, I had a sudden enlightenment about how easy it is to understand C declarations once you get the basic principle. There's already a comment on this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565459), but I'll try to go into a little more detail.

A lot of people start with the idea that the syntax of C declarations is '<type> <variable_name>'. This works fine for simple cases, but it's completely wrong. What a declaration like 'int x' actually means is the following:

declare a variable x of a type such that the expression x is of type int

In such a simple case this seems unnecessarily long-winded, but now let's look at a more complex case:

int (*p[4]) (int x, int y);

declare a variable p of a type such that (*p[i])(x,y) is of type int

If dereferencing the ith element of p and then calling the result with two arguments gives us an int, then p must be an array of pointers to functions that take two arguments and return int. If you saw the expression '(*p[i])(x,y)' in some code, you'd have no difficulty figuring out that p must be an array of function pointers. So you needn't have any difficulty when reading the declaration either.

One slightly confusing thing here is that the nesting of the expression syntax is the opposite of the nesting of the type. The expression is

funcall(deref(array_index(p, i)), [x, y])

whereas the type is

array_of(pointer_to(function(args: [int, int], returning: int)))

This makes sense once you understand that the expression is to be interpreted just as a normal expression. The first thing you do with an array of something is index into it. So indexation is going to be the most deeply nested part of the expression, even though the outermost layer of the type is 'array of ___'.

One additional source of confusion is the '*' operator and the need for additional parentheses in function pointer declarations. In C, function pointers dereference to themselves, so 'p()' and '(*p)()' are equivalent if p is a function pointer. However, in a type declaration you need something to distinguish a function pointer from a function, so the '*' has to be present. Why can't we just write 'int *p[4](int x, int y)' in the example above? Because of how the operator precedence rules work. That expression is equivalent to '*(p[4](x,y))', so it would declare an array of functions returning pointers to integers. (You can't declare an array of functions in C, so that's invalid.)

Ad-hoc rules for interpreting C declarations miss the genius of their underlying concept. You already know all the syntax you need to understand a C type declaration! It's just C expression syntax.
It's worth to remember that C "happened" to stick around because of UNIX, but it's been just another iteration of what started as BCPL; with Go coming from the same people who made Plan 9 (the spiritual successor to Research UNIX) and Alef/Limbo. These guys are equally interested in pushing both PL/OS research and practice.

(I also have no doubt that just like Go fixed C's type declarations, in another 20-30 years, Go's successor will finally fix error handling.)
I've been able to do a lot for free with the regular version of Cesium, how is this different?
My Friend Chooses How and When to Die
> courts that routinely violate rights

You should do a deeper reading of the Constitution and the role the courts play. I think you’re quite confused.