MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agentultra | 2025-05-28 15:57:34+00:00
As I like to say, I do most of my programming before I touch a keyboard.

The single most powerful thing I do is ask questions and write down the answers. When I want to understand a system this is the fundamental step that cannot be skipped. How crucial it is that I understand the system will tell me how formal I need to be in my thinking. If it's a basic web application or a report I need to generate it's a simple, informal note. If we're talking about a critical system that's distributed and requires high-availability with hard limits on processing time and the consequence of getting things wrong is that businesses and people lose money/property? Then I'll bust out the mathematics and model things formally.

I've experimented as well with writing code on paper first. This doesn't work so well with procedural languages without some form of shorthand/formalism. It works much better with statically-typed functional programming languages. When using such languages I mostly need to reason about the types: the implementation is a matter of filling in the holes which can be done when I'm at the keyboard. The more I learn to "think in types," the better this works but I'm not super great at it yet.

Notebooks are where it all begins.

I also use notebooks to journal my work. I use the bullet journal system to keep track of my work. Keeping it on paper forces me to sit in front of it and physically remind myself of my tasks. It helps me stay focused on the day to day activities and not lose track of my longer-term goals. After using one long enough this way it becomes a chronicle of my work. Handy for performance review season. A great deal of programming work comes out of these journals.

Some folks prefer digital tools and that's fine and dandy. I'm just old school and prefer physicality. Paper and pen work on the level my brain works on and gives me a break from screen, keyboard, and constant stream of notifications. Room and freedom to think without interruptions is important and useful.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-05-28 15:57:45+00:00
> without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.

In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board.

It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
by bumby | 2025-05-28 15:58:44+00:00
>really? A parking garage takes six years?

I tend to agree with your overall point, but I’m not sure this supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like parking structures isn’t indifference but the opposite: we care too much.

We care about the environmental impact. We care about the safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents. We care about property values. All of those things create a layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care about those things enough to manage them.

(To be clear, I’m not saying any of those are bad, just pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and how it runs counter to the OPs point.)
by kbenson | 2025-05-28 15:58:58+00:00
If attackers only made ~$40 fora good amount of work, seems like it would have resolved itself if the scheme was left to run itself to conclusion before people started blocking coinhive in (what sounds like from your description) a knee-jerk reaction.

Then again, I'm sure there's quite a bit of tweaking that could be done to make clients submit far more hashes, but that would make it much more noticeable.
by sylens | 2025-05-28 15:59:00+00:00
After trying all sorts of note taking tools and apps over the years to try to get myself organized, part of my New Year's Resolution this year was to just buy a stack of To-Do list notepads that had a spot for the date and just let me write stuff down ad-hoc while in meetings or working on stuff. It's amazing how much more productive I've been since doing this.

The item in question for anyone curious: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BS1WJZNW
by kenjackson | 2025-05-28 15:59:05+00:00
Well yeah, the singularity isn't close by any measure.

But 3D printing and AI are on totally different trajectories.

I haven't heard of Mattel saying, "we're going to see in what places we can replace standard molding with 3d printing". It's never been considered a real replacement, but rather potentially a useful way to make PoCs, prototypes and mockups.
by BryantD | 2025-05-28 15:59:20+00:00
IHOP is good too!

If I were Waffle House, I would be thinking "hm. This is a one person project; what are the odds that it will break/go down eventually, and people will assume it was ours and get angry at us? Could write a clause about rights returning to us, get the code in escrow... but then we might wind up maintaining some random project using a stack that isn't part of our core competencies..."

And then I'd try to work something out anyhow, cause this is a cool project. But I sadly get the caution.
by offsky | 2025-05-28 15:59:42+00:00
The thing I don't understand is how unethical stuff like this comes to be built. Take the example where nurses with debt get lower wages because they are desperate. Some manager had to come up with this idea and then get various people to agree and then get a team of engineers to implement it. Thats a lot of people agreeing to do something so clearly evil (to me at least). Are there that many people who just don't care? Whenever I read stories similar to this I always wonder how many people went along without objecting.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-28 15:59:59+00:00
> Seriously, DOGE is sweating the small stuff, trying to get cuts where they can, and that does NOT happen from people who don't care.

DOGE is a propaganda exercise (in part to provide false justification for policies undertaken with other motives, and in part as a distraction), and the appearance of energy is important for that.

They care, but not about the thing that it is the public rationale.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-28 16:00:02+00:00
>In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes

I.e. exactly what those pesky naysayers decades ago said would happen eventually.
Launch HN: MindFort (YC X25) – AI agents for continuous pentesting
by bveiseh | 2025-05-28 16:00:44+00:00
Hey HN! We're Brandon, Sam, and Akul from MindFort (https://mindfort.ai). We're building autonomous AI agents that continuously find, validate, and patch security vulnerabilities in web applications—essentially creating an AI red team that runs 24/7.

Here's a demo: https://www.loom.com/share/e56faa07d90b417db09bb4454dce8d5a

Security testing today is increasingly challenging. Traditional scanners generate 30-50% false positives, drowning engineering teams in noise. Manual penetration testing happens quarterly at best, costs tens of thousands per assessment, and takes weeks to complete. Meanwhile, teams are shipping code faster than ever with AI assistance, but security reviews have become an even bigger bottleneck.

All three of us encountered this problem from different angles. Brandon worked at ProjectDiscovery building the Nuclei scanner, then at NetSPI (one of the largest pen testing firms) building AI tools for testers. Sam was a senior engineer at Salesforce leading security for Tableau. He dealt firsthand with juggling security findings and managing remediations. Akul did his master's on AI and security, co-authored papers on using LLMs for ecurity attacks, and participated in red-teams at OpenAI and Anthropic.

We all realized that AI agents were going to fundamentally change security testing, and that the wave of AI-generated code would need an equally powerful solution to keep it secure.

We've built AI agents that perform reconnaissance, exploit vulnerabilities, and suggest patches—similar to how a human penetration tester works. The key difference from traditional scanners is that our agents validate exploits in runtime environments before reporting them, reducing false positives.

We use multiple foundational models orchestrated together. The agents perform recon to understand the attack surface, then use that context to inform testing strategies. When they find potential vulnerabilities, they spin up isolated environments to validate exploitation. If successful, they analyze the codebase to generate contextual patches.

What makes this different from existing tools? Validation through exploitation: We don't just pattern-match—we exploit vulnerabilities to prove they're real; - Codebase integration: The agents understand your code structure to find complex logic bugs and suggest appropriate fixes; - Continuous operation: Instead of point-in-time assessments, we're constantly testing as your code evolves; - Attack chain discovery: The agents can find multi-step vulnerabilities that require chaining different issues together.

We're currently in early access, working with initial partners to refine the platform. Our agents are already finding vulnerabilities that other tools miss and scoring well on penetration testing benchmarks.

Looking forward to your thoughts and comments!
by mushufasa | 2025-05-28 16:00:45+00:00
FYI it is literally required by law that, to maintain a trademark, the company with the trademark must actively enforce it on an ongoing basis. Even if this side-project was benign, Waffle House must send cease-and-desist letters to maintain their trademark generally under US law.

That said, if the author had posted a tracker of Waffle House closures descriptively, without using their marks or branding, that would be fine, in the same way that google maps is fine to list which restaurants are open/closed. The key being that "google maps" is referencing the brand of google, their own trademark, and could not be confused for something authored by any of the restaurants featured on the map. Trademark is designed to avoid anyone being confused with who was the author, it's a "feels like" definition with a rubric, not a specific technical definition.

My suggestion would be to rename a site "disaster indices" and include the waffle index as one index. Even batter (yes) if you add other similar indices, like theme park closures or other.
by jgalt212 | 2025-05-28 16:00:56+00:00
> I feel sorry for people with budget phones who now have to battle with these PoW systems and think LLM scrapers will win this one, with everyone else suffering a worse browsing experience.

I dunno. How much work do you really need in PoW systems to make the scrapers go after easier targets? My guess is not so much that you impair a human's UX. And if you do, then you have not fine-tuned your PoW algo, or you have very determined adversaries / scrapers.
by hnthrowaway0315 | 2025-05-28 16:01:07+00:00
A notebook and a pen clear one's mind before touching the keyboard. I agree it is essential to clear one's mind before committing code to the computer. Sometimes I even write full pages of pseudo code before writing code in real programming languages.

However this is only for things that I care about. I'm OK to throw shits on the wall and see if it sticks for anything I don't care about.
Ask HN: Best way to do coding screens?
by danielandrews43 | 2025-05-28 16:01:10+00:00
Our interview process is fairly quick: 1. 15 minute phone call 2. 30 minute coding challenge on zoom 3. Paid onsite

What we’re struggling with is many people are passing the first phone call and then completely flipping the coding challenge. Many of the applicants don’t know how to code. These are people with 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.

It's a frontend role, and we're only interviewing people with React experience (at the moment!). Basically, the goal is to pull data from a server and display it. Correct solutions are 25-30 lines of JSX.

How do you structure your interview process to maximize the time you’re spending talking to qualified applicants?
by eduardoworrel | 2025-05-28 16:01:16+00:00
Hi everyone,

For the past 5 months I have been working on this personal project with great motivation, I have created incredible connections and gotten closer to the international WebAI community.

However, in the past 3 months I have ended up in a situation of overemployment. Foreseeing the burnout of dealing with multiple simultaneous demands, I started creating the open-source version with the intention of taking the focus off SaaS & sales and focusing on product, real utility & teamwork.

I am sharing it today on some networks and it would be a pleasure if you contributed in some way.

It could be by commenting here on something that could be improved, helping with the development or simply trying it out ;)

MAIN REPO: https://github.com/woolball-xyz/woolball-server
by atrettel | 2025-05-28 16:01:43+00:00
This is one of the reasons that I actually take notes in three different media: paper notebooks, an old-school digital voice recorder, and in text files. Different media have different advantages and disadvantages and represent different ideas for more readily.

I have used the voice recorder less over the years but I find it optimal when time is limited and I have to move onto something else. Part of using a voice recorder as a medium is listening closely afterwards and writing down what I said in a different manner (either in a more permanent paper notebook or digitally in a text file). And yes, each iteration transforms the idea at least somewhat. It gives you the chance to see the idea in a different way.
by fragmede | 2025-05-28 16:01:43+00:00
> People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met

Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really. You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you don't have to just because other people expect you to. I still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about other stuff.
by alexpetralia | 2025-05-28 16:01:43+00:00
The issue is moreso that they exclusively control their brand, and by letting someone else - who doesn't work for them and need not listen to them - control part of that, they are indirectly loosening control of their brand and narrative. They probably do not want the additional headache of buying this product, onboarding it, managing it, etc. The easiest but unfortunate solution here, to limit risk and liability, is to shut it down.
Show HN: Burner Bitcoin – a simple hardware wallet for gifting Bitcoin
by ccamrobertson | 2025-05-28 16:01:57+00:00
Hello HN! Late last year we launched Burner, a low cost Ethereum hardware wallet for gifting crypto. It's a card-sized wallet that generates and stores cryptocurrency keys with no need to manage seed phrases or private keys. It operates entirely through your smartphone browser and NFC. We've produced tens of thousands of Burners to date, primarily for gifting and partner collaborations (e.g. conference handouts). Today we're launching our most requested feature: a Bitcoin compatible Burner.

Burner Bitcoin features nearly identical hardware to the Ethereum variant -- a secure element chip with NFC capabilities in colorful/translucent plastic -- however, we made the decision to split the Bitcoin and Ethereum versions into two products rather than creating a single monolithic wallet. This is because we're seeing that both end users and business customers want to use Burner as a tool to give specific assets rather than gifting a universal hardware wallet.

In order to generate transactions on Bitcoin, Burner directly signs transactions using it's internal private key. You can add entropy that is hashed alongside entropy from Burner's RNG during the generation process of this key, but the private is never revealed in plaintext. We will also indicate through the interface whether or not a key has been used to sign a message or not, a helpful indicator so you can be confident funds have never been withdrawn from a gifted Burner.

Like the original Burner, we offer open libraries to interface with the wallet so you can sign transactions and messages fully offline if you want to use it for cold storage rather than as a “cash like” wallet. Our long term vision is to make buying small amounts of various cryptocurrencies for those who are crypto curious as easy as buying a restaurant or retailer gift card.
by AtomImpact | 2025-05-28 16:02:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm an independent builder and created AtomImpact, a free nuclear impact simulator that visualizes the effects of a nuclear strike on the Paris region — designed for civilians, not governments. It’s educational, data-backed, and completely independent.

This isn't about fear. It's about understanding consequences in a world where nuclear tension still exists. Think of it as a mix of science communication, civic awareness, and accessible modeling.

Right now, the simulator is in French and focuses on the Paris region, but the ambition is global.

I'd love feedback on everything: the simulation logic, the UX, the ethical implications, and ideas for expansion. No ads. No tracking. Just raw insight.

Built for impact. Shared with purpose. AMA or test it out: https://atomimpacts.neocities.org
by bell-cot | 2025-05-28 16:02:21+00:00
> Why is it so hard...

1) The article's portrayal of community living is rather idyllic.

2) To the Global Capitalist Profit Maximizer, community living is seriously sub-optimal. Ditto to aspiring members of the 0.01%, who can afford (or imagine) a "feudal lord" lifestyle - just themself and Mr./Mrs. Right, with a "community" of servants and servant-like outsourced labor services at their beck and call.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-05-28 16:02:48+00:00
One example that comes to my mind: I had my first job in 1974. The expectation back then was that if you wanted to leave your job, you always gave at least two weeks notice.

I'm slow so it took me a very long time to realize how ridiculous this was. If the company was going to lay you off, they never gave you any notice at all. You were just told not to come to work the next day.

So this is not just about current economic circumstances. It's about an imbalance of power that has been going on a long time.
by abtinf | 2025-05-28 16:02:57+00:00
Why do people write comments like this?

Pretty much the first thing the article does is define what it’s talking about. But you skip that, pull some other quote out of context, then attack that out of context quote.

And then you subtly change the topic, from “tools for scientific thought” to “[stuff that is] essential to scientific thought.” Are you hoping no one notices?

What do you get out of this?
by kees99 | 2025-05-28 16:03:05+00:00
Diskless (edit: with OS in initramfs) is indeed a golden standard against local persistence, but requires quite a bit of extra RAM - few GB for "latest Ubuntu LTS".

With regards to preventing accidental persistence, disk with only dm-verity partitions is as good, with extra advantage of only adding a little bit of extra RAM usage (/tmp, /var/run, ...)

For that matter, even something as sloppy as booting with rootfs wich can't be remounted rw (iso9660, squashfs, etc..) and is the only mounted fs, is also perfectly good against accidental persistence.
Show HN: ImgSeek.app
by virusyu | 2025-05-28 16:03:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm excited to share a project I've been deeply immersed in: ImgSeek.app, an AI-powered platform for generating images from text and other images.

The world of AI image generation is moving incredibly fast, and I wanted to build a tool that focuses on a streamlined workflow for iterative creation. While there are several powerful tools out there, I felt there was room for an approach that better handled nuanced prompts for specific styles.

ImgSeek.app currently offers two core functionalities:

- Text-to-Image Generation: You can describe the image you envision with a text prompt, and our AI will generate it for you. We've been working on improving prompt adherence. - Image-to-Image Generation: Upload your own image as a starting point, and you can then guide the AI with text prompts (or use other parameters) to transform or create variations of your original image. This is great for exploring different artistic styles for an existing concept.

We're also experimenting with a specific model fine-tuning.

This is still very much a work in progress, and the models and interface are continuously being refined. I'm eager to get feedback from the HN community, especially on:

- How intuitive do you find the text-to-image prompting? Were you able to generate images close to your vision? - For the image-to-image feature, what kind of transformations did you try? How was the experience of guiding the generation? - Are there particular styles or types of images you tried to create that worked well, or where it fell short? - What are your thoughts on the overall user experience and generation speed? - Are there any features or controls you feel are missing or would significantly improve your creative process?

Your insights and constructive criticism would be incredibly valuable as we continue to develop ImgSeek.app.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out!
by jessekv | 2025-05-28 16:03:23+00:00
These days I see Conda (and micromamba) used as a reliable cross-platform winget/apt/yum/brew. For example, to install GDAL.

uv replaces pip, conda and pip have been complementary for a long time. But I would be surprised if uv does not take on conda at some point, e.g. with a micromamba subcommand.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-05-28 16:04:27+00:00
Did you have an expectation of privacy using Telegram? I think that's the real issue here. If you were paying for Telegram, then I would say yes, those conversation should not be handed over to xAI. But, if you were ostensibly not paying for it, then I think it should be assumed that use of the service is considered consent to take that and use it as they please.

So yeah, it's almost certain that everything you ever put into Telegram is in Grok.
by chrisco255 | 2025-05-28 16:04:28+00:00
The decline of newspaper journalism has long been observed. Readership has declined and along with it, salaries and talent. AI looks to be the final nail in the coffin. Nobody cares about fake articles in Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer because nobody reads them at all. You've got a skeleton crew managing the decline of a barely profitable institution with shrinking staff and declining YOY revenues for going on two decades.

It used to be a staple of society to read the paper. Everyone read the paper. We read the feed now, and it's been that way for some time.
by mauvehaus | 2025-05-28 16:04:49+00:00
An upholster can also usually wash and reuse horsehair when reupholstering a piece of furniture upholstered with horsehair. It's very resilient stuff(ing). You can also get horsehair fabric for upholstery purposes; it apparently wears like cast iron.

Am not an upholsterer, but I work with one somewhat regularly when a client wants an upholstered piece.