MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gingerBill | 2025-05-13 14:40:54+00:00
Making it opt-in, means making the hierarchical approach the default. Whatever you make "opt-in" means you are by default discouraging its use. And what you are suggesting as the default is not what I wanted from Odin (I am the creator by the way).

I normally say "try to make the zero value useful" and not "ZII" (which was a mostly jokey term Casey Muratori came up with to reflect against RAII) because then it is clear that there are cases when it is not possible to do ZII. ZII is NOT a _maxim_ but what you should default to and then do something else where necessary. This is my point, and I can probably tell you even more examples of where "ZII is bad" than you could think of, but this is what is a problem describing the problem to people: they take it as a maxim not a default.

And regarding pointers, I'm in the camp that nil-pointers are the most trivial type of invalid pointer to catch empirically speaking. Yes they cause problems, but because how modern systems are structured with virtual memory, they are empirically trivial to catch and deal with. Yes you could design the type system of a language to make nil-pointers not be a thing unless you explicit opt into them, but then that has another trade-off which may or may not be a good thing depending on the application.

The Objective-C thing is just a poorly implemented system for handling `nil`. It should have been more consistent but wasn't. That's it.

I'd argue "correctness" is important in games too, but the conception of "correctness" is very different there. It's not about provability but testability, which are both valid forms of "correctness" but very different.

And in some non-game applications, crashing early is also a very bad thing, and for some games, crashing early is desired over corrupted saves or other things. It's all about which trade-offs you can afford, and I would not try to generalize too much.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-13 14:41:19+00:00
respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.

secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO
by kamranjon | 2025-05-13 14:41:39+00:00
Is the course creator being impressed the most important metric? Are there other more concrete metrics you are able to use to determine quality from the perspective of a student?

I am curious if you are using any methodologies from the digital learning space like knowledge tracing to help ensure that learners are actually retaining knowledge and improving over time or knowledge mapping to understand the gaps that might exist in your content?

Do you maintain your own skills taxonomy? Are you tagging your questions or assessment events with knowledge components or skills of any kind to understand what you are testing your students for?

All of this is really cool, I’m just curious at what level you’ve gotten to on some of this because there is a very fine line in online educational content between making the students life more difficult and actually helping them learn, especially when you get into auto-generating content, and especially if you aren’t following solid principles to verify your content. (I work for an online education company and particularly in the space of training LLMs and verifying their outputs for use in educational contexts)
by awaseem | 2025-05-13 14:42:07+00:00
I posted on HN about Foqos: https://www.foqos.app/ and got a few hundred downloads that same day which is awesome. I still continue to reach out to creators in Youtube and tiktok who have reviewed similar products to see if they would give any feedback. Usually since they have a larger online presence than I do, I noticed the publicly started recommending the app to others on Reddit, Threads, etc...

I've been also posting on threads after each update. I have over a 1000 downloads now, I don't have tracking but getting a consistent download rate of about 30 a day

Zero marketing and its been a ton of fun so far. Hope that helps!
by CyberDildonics | 2025-05-13 14:42:24+00:00
we could of course theoretically make everything even faster. It's nowhere near the most optimal use of the available hardware. All we'd have to give up is squishy hard-to-measure things like "feature sets" and "engineering velocity."

Says who? Who are these experienced people that know how to write fast software that think it is such a huge sacrifice?

The reality is that people who say things like this don't actually know much about writing fast software because it really isn't that difficult. You just can't grab electron and the lastest javascript react framework craze.

These kinds of myths get perpetuated by people who repeat it without having experienced the side of just writing native software. I think mostly it is people rationalizing not learning C++ and sticking to javascript or python because that's what they learned first.
by jane-b | 2025-05-13 14:42:33+00:00
So many of us have been wondering why something similar to this has never emerged for IDE’s.

“Piny doesn’t try to be all-in-one visual editor that would cover layout creation, styling, data, logic… That is no longer relevant in the age of AI coding agents.”

Looks like in Pinegrow where this came from you have a brilliant CSS Editor. We as developers and frontenders who use IDE's are still heavily revising through traditional methods even beyond the use of AI. So the described detached mindset concerning AI still seems pretty distant into the future. AI and the industry are not there yet to void the need for further edits. A visual CSS tool inside an IDE like that would be a powerful integrated solution for all developers and frontenders.

“IDE, where you already work”

Exactly, most of us want to be inside full fledged IDE's vs an apps like Pinegrow or similar. It’s odd you didn’t choose to first set the foundation with your core CSS Editor then build out from there regarding frameworks and libraries. Development is vast but the the core is common. Hope it’s not too late to go back and rectify this, maybe through various user modes or something. You would then literally match your statements of tools designed to compliment with easier iteration past AI.

“visual tools should be designed to complement AI assisted development.” + “it is often much easier to directly change a visual property than to go back and forth about it with your AI agent.”

You got the CSS editor and we have the IDE’s. Definitely a concept with big potential to keep an eye on. Especially if you are willing to consider the feedback as you move forward.
by VladCovaci | 2025-05-13 14:42:51+00:00
Predicteroo is a social football prediction app that lets you compete with friends by guessing football match results. Create private leagues, invite your friends, and earn points based on how accurate your predictions are. Track your scores, climb leaderboards, and enjoy friendly rivalry throughout the football season. It's fun, simple, and perfect for anyone who loves football and competition!
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-13 14:42:56+00:00
Really no notes on this. Carmack hit both sides of the coin:

- the way we do industry-scale computing right now tends to leave a lot of opportunity on the table because we decouple, interpret, and de-integrate where things would be faster and take less space if we coupled, compiled, and made monoliths

- we do things that way because it's easier to innovate, tweak, test, and pivot on decoupled systems that isolate the impact of change and give us ample signal about their internal state to debug and understand them
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-13 14:43:05+00:00
Weird. Maybe it just hates my last two ISPs (Google Fiber, Frontier).

The usual way I notice I'm not logged in is by getting blocked after interacting with ~3 different parts of the site within a minute. If I search, click a single repo, and stay in that repo without using search, it seems to go OK, but if I interact with search and then a couple repos, or search again, temp-banned.
by jaberjaber23 | 2025-05-13 14:43:46+00:00
We’re RightNow AI. We built a tool that automatically profiles, detects bottlenecks, and generates optimized CUDA kernels using AI.

If you’ve written CUDA before, you know how it goes. You spend hours tweaking memory access, digging through profiler dumps, swapping out intrinsics, and praying it’ll run faster. Most of the time, you're guessing.

We got tired of it. So we built something that just works.

What RightNow AI Actually Does Prompt-based CUDA Kernel Generation Describe what you want in plain English. Get fast, optimized CUDA code back. No need to know the difference between global and shared memory layouts.

Serverless GPU Profiling Run your code on real GPUs without having local hardware. Get detailed reports about where it's slow and why.

Performance Optimizations That Deliver Not vague advice like “try more threads.” We return rewritten code. Our users are seeing 2x to 4x improvements out of the box. Some hit 20x.

Why We Built It We needed it for our own work. Our ML stack was bottlenecked by GPU code we didn’t have time to optimize. Existing tools felt ancient. The workflow was slow, clunky, and filled with trial and error.

We thought: what if I could just say "optimize this kernel for A100" and get something useful?

So we built it.

RightNow AI is live. You can try it for freee: https://www.rightnowai.co/

If you use it and hit something rough, tell us. We’ll fix it.
by throwaway71271 | 2025-05-13 14:43:59+00:00
R. G. Loeliger Threaded Interpretive Languages Their Design And Implementation[1] is an amazing book, since it was out of print, I printed it on a good 160gsm a4 paper, and I randomly open it every few weeks just to read through it. I strongly recommend it, even if you are not interested in Forth.

I have been programming in all kinds of languages, from assembly to clojure, but in 25 years I never programmed stack languages, I was kind of scared of them, it wasn't until I read the book and made my own Forth I understood what I was missing. Since then I made few interpreters, with jit, or with types, etc, it was super fun, but most of all it allowed me to see a completely new paradigm of programming, kind of the first time you understand eval/apply from 13th page of the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. A language that writes itself and it is written in itself.

If you are making your own Forth, this Brad Rodriguez's article is also really good [2].

[1]: https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...

[2]: https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm
by gadders | 2025-05-13 14:44:32+00:00
"Register readers — especially those tasked with vulnerability management — will recall that the US government's funding for the CVE program was set to expire in April until the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, swooped in at the 11th hour and renewed the contract with MITRE to operate the initiative."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-13 14:44:47+00:00
> the best liars

Maybe, but I think there's a piece where you can be genuinely demonstrating in the interview context that you know how to reflect positively on an experience which obviously wasn't that all great or why would you have left it.

As an interviewer I'm not looking for IT WAS THE BEST WOO but rather "these were the elements I most appreciated, these were where I had opportunities to grow and push myself and here's what I ultimately got out of it." Yes, the "what went wrong" will be discussed too, but that's a different question, and as interviewee I look to pitch the downsides less in terms of "I had the worst boss/colleagues/projects/clients/whatever" and more of a circumspect kind of "elements A and B that had been really good early on were less of a priority later in my tenure, and I felt that management and I had differing priorities which was increasingly leading to unhelpful compromises in how things were done; although I stuck it out for some time to ensure as smooth a transition as possible, ultimately I came to feel that my seat would be better filled by some more aligned to the company goals."
Show HN: Basin MCP – Stops code gen hallucinations
by brainboi | 2025-05-13 14:45:04+00:00
tl;dr - try Basin AI with Cursor/Windsurf, instruction here (https://mcp.basin.ai), and use API key hackernews to gain access.

Hey HN — I’m Henry, co-founder of Basin, and I wanted to share something we’ve been working on called Basin MCP, a kind of QA infrastructure for AI coding copilots like Cursor, Windsurf, etc.

We built Basin because we kept noticing the same thing: agentic coding tools are great at generating code, but have no idea if the thing they built actually works — or even matches the original intent, and so they're prong to hallucinations. Basically, they have no feedback loop, and no accountability, leading to serious bugs when hallucinations happen.

So we asked: what if they could call in help — the way a real dev would call in QA?

That’s what Basin MCP does. It lets copilots trigger full QA workflows on the code they generate, using real-world testing patterns — HTTP requests, flows, even email notifications. You can say things like “and test this with Basin MCP,” and it’ll handle the rest: validating output, simulating inputs, catching regressions, etc.

It’s still early, but here’s what it can already do:

- It works with any copilot (as long as MCP hooks are enabled) - It can test inter-service flow checks, including email and webhooks - You can define what should and shouldn’t be tested with natural language, just use your chat prompt as the main interface

There’s no UI or plugin — you just talk to your copilot like normal, and add ...and test with Basin MCP

We’re not trying to build “AI QA for humans.” We’re building QA for AIs — so they can hold themselves to a higher standard. You can think of it as the copilot’s QA teammate.

We're in beta now. If you want to try it out, you can use the API key hackernews, instruction at https://mcp.basin.ai. Would love to hear your thoughts — especially if you're a serious vibe coder and you care alot about quality of the vibe coded software.

Happy to answer any questions and go deep on any of the above!
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-05-13 14:45:05+00:00
>When Trump lost it was a stolen election, when Clinton lost it was Russian hackers.

And an important distinction here: Those attributing Clinton's loss to Russian hackers are referring to Russian propaganda efforts to influence the decisions of voters, not that Russia actually tampered with the vote tallies. Those who believe the stolen 2020 election theory believe that the votes were actually tampered with. One of these has ample evidence, the other has none.
by duxup | 2025-05-13 14:45:13+00:00
Honestly your post sounds more like rhetroic than anything else.

Organized labor still seems supportive of left leaning candidates. If they had "abandoned" them you'd think it would show.

I don't buy into these ideas that <observes behavior that doesn't jive in some way> must be directly related to <pet peeve of mine>.

Voters behave in unexpected ways all the time.
by simpaticoder | 2025-05-13 14:45:35+00:00
This is very good news. Especially in light of recent attention given to the possibility of CPU shortages. Lots of programming tasks can be done comfortably on a smartphone. For example, no build front end programming. The description "desktop view" is unfortunate since it calls to mind a browser mode where the site is displayed as it would be on a desktop. And this is something completely different. I do hope this mode does not require an external display because it would be quite useful even with the phone's native display. Especially given their hypixel density and the availability of reading glasses.
Show HN: Toller – A Python library for robust async calls
by nibblingnokedli | 2025-05-13 14:45:56+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm excited to share Toller, a lightweight Python library I've been working on to make asynchronous calls more robust and easier to manage. I built this after a painful incident with one of my R2R (https://github.com/SciPhi-AI/R2R) clients where Azure OpenAI went down unexpectedly. While we were technically propagating errors correctly, we lacked clean, accessible error patterns that would allow the client to implement proper mitigation strategies. They were fully dependent on our infrastructure to handle the outage, with no way to gracefully degrade or implement custom fallbacks.

This highlighted a critical gap in the Python async ecosystem: while libraries exist for basic async operations, there's nothing that combines resilience patterns in a comprehensive, accessible way. More and more, applications today depend on many external async calls:

- How do you consistently retry transient errors (like 503s from Azure's API) with proper backoff and jitter? - How do you stop hammering a service that's clearly down (circuit breaking) while automatically testing recovery? - How do you manage API rate limits across concurrent tasks without complex manual logic? - And importantly, how do you provide standardized, actionable error information to both your server and any clients depending on your API?

Toller aims to solve this with a simple `@toller.task` decorator that wraps your `async` functions and adds: Rate Limiting:Async-safe token bucket-based limiter with adaptive throttling that responds to service feedback Retries: Customizable strategies (max attempts, delay, exponential backoff, jitter) on specific exceptions Circuit Breaker: Standard CLOSED/OPEN/HALF_OPEN states with configurable thresholds and recovery testing Transparent Error Handling: Rich context in exceptions that makes it clear what happened and what to do about it

Unlike alternatives like Tenacity (focused on retries but lacking circuit breaking) or raw asyncio primitives (which require significant boilerplate), Toller provides an integrated solution specifically designed for modern async workflows, particularly those involving LLMs and other AI services where reliability is critical.

A clear exception hierarchy (`TransientError`, `FatalError`, `MaxRetriesExceeded`, `OpenCircuitError`) aims to make error handling predictable. The goal is to take the "unruly" nature of distributed async calls and "lure" them into well-managed flows (hence the name, inspired by the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever!). It's async-native, lightweight, and I've tried to make it as straightforward as possible.

I'd love to get your feedback, suggestions, or hear about any use cases you might have for it! Thanks!
by JdeBP | 2025-05-13 14:46:04+00:00
Port something like this to OpenBSD and then say that this sort of thing is not hard work. (-:

It's very hard work, especially nowadays. The sweet spot was probably in the 1990s, when novices were still likely to know that prime sources of knowledge about this stuff were posts on Usenet, or shell archives of text files written by Daniel J. Bernstein.

https://jdebp.uk/FGA/bernstein-on-ttys/

I speak from experience of being someone who did my own tweaks to screen in the 1980s, and who has written other similar programs from scratch.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-13 14:46:13+00:00
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.

European universities would love to do so, the problem is that our model of funding is just as braindead as it is in the US (if not worse, like in Germany) and our politicians are too braindead or unwilling to fix the circumstances.
by jakevoytko | 2025-05-13 14:46:19+00:00
For my newsletter[0], I just reached 231 subscribers in 5 months. Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible (without wearing out my welcome in any of them)

My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network.

I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618

The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google.

I've gotten no traction from Reddit (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (seems like it's pay to play, which I won't do) or IndieHackers (I post milestones just for fun, but it hasn't amounted to anything).

I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.

[0] https://www.clientserver.dev/
by j_walter | 2025-05-13 14:46:25+00:00
>>>and quietly rolled out a limited-access beta version last month during a period of uncertainty surrounding the United States' Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program.

You mean the 24 hour period where people freaked out and assumed things that weren't true? The renewal came down to the wire just like most do during negotiations...MITRE tossed the news out there to stir up concerns but it was all just sensationalized. A "funding lapse" is not the same as "contract not renewed yet"...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-13 14:46:38+00:00
> too long to sway public opinion

Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure.

To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
by tecleandor | 2025-05-13 14:47:00+00:00
This is all guessing by me, but I think that, traditionally, there's been a certain quantity of users that synced folders out of the /Android/data or similar locations and/or needed some extra flexibility. When Android 11 arrived, it was difficult to break that workflow for all those users (and I guess there was also some re-architecture needed for the app, but I don't know how much would it be).

I went through the same with Syncthing, and now I install it from out of Google Play, where it doesn't need Google approval to do the All Files Permission API call.

I understand why the API changes and the hardening of the Android system, but it's also true you're locked out from certain folders even when on developer mode and it feels weird.
by jpeloquin | 2025-05-13 14:47:00+00:00
Multiple comparisons and sequential hypothesis testing / early stopping aren't the same problem. There might be a way to wrangle an F test into a sequential hypothesis testing approach, but it's not obvious (to me anyway) how one would do so. In multiple comparisons each additional comparison introduces a new group with independent data; in sequential hypothesis testing each successive test adds a small amount of additional data to each group so all results are conditional. Could you elaborate or provide a link?