MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bschwindHN | 2025-05-20 11:24:00+00:00
> Today, getting the correct order for translucent faces typically involves sorting the faces by their distance to the camera on the CPU, then sending the sorted faces to the GPU. This means every time the camera moves, you need to re-sort the translucent faces.

Don't most games and rendering engines these days use order-independent transparency if they care about these problems?

https://osor.io/OIT

How does the method in the OP article work if you're rendering meshes instead of planar objects? Sure, a mesh is just composed of planar triangles, but that's a _lot_ of triangles to sort, and with an O(n^2) algorithm, it's going to be painful.
by RileyJames | 2025-05-20 11:24:02+00:00
It’s an interesting idea.

I’ve definitely felt the pain of file formats in some unexpected ways recently.

Like airdropping a photo from iPhone only to discover a .HEIC file, which nothing will accept.

I’ve previously used “what ever turns up first on google”, but I now won’t for anything of significance (privacy)

I’ve recently discovered Automator (on Mac) and the quick actions menu. Which can achieve a lot of image and pdf related conversions, but takes some setup (not a mass market solution)

I like the idea of this product. But I think the challenge will be: - reaching the user at the moment they have this problem

- making your solution frictionless to solve their immediate problem, while also bootstrapping to solve it next time around (without them forgetting it exists)

If you can nail that experience for a single use case, I think this will be a winner.
by vidarh | 2025-05-20 11:25:15+00:00
A lot of those features are only "essential" for a subset of possible users.

My own editor exists because I realised it was possible to write an editor smaller than my Emacs configuration. While my editor lacks all kinds of features that are "essential" for lots of other people, it doesn't lack any features essential for me.

So in terms of producing a perfect all-round editor that will work for everyone, sure, editors like Kilo will always be flawed.

Their value is in providing a learning experience, something that works for the subset who don't need those features, or a basis for people to customise something just right for their needs in a compact way. E.g. my own editor has quirks that are custom-tailored to my workflow, and even to my environment.
by jappgar | 2025-05-20 11:25:22+00:00
You're overthinking it.

It's like this coupon booklets they used to sell. "Over $10,000 of savings!"

Yes but how much money do I have to spend in order to save $10,000?

There was this funny commercial in the 90s for some muffler repair chain that was having a promotion: "Save Fifty Dollars..."

The theme was "What will you do with the fifty dollars you saved?" And it was people going to Disneyland or afancy dinner date.

The people (actors) believed they were receiving $50. They acted as if it was free money. Meanwhile there was zero talk about whether their cars needed muffler repair at all.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-20 11:26:57+00:00
Dual gauge trains are technically much more complicated, making them more expensive to build, maintain, repair etc. Dual gauge do not work well (or at all depending) in the cold climate of Finland and if they did, the changeover takes time which adds up when you are trying to move thousands of cars worth of material. Dual gauge trains still need changeover stations, which are themselves expensive and complicated, as well as being targets for attack.

Unloading to new trains carry the same problems; expensive, time consuming, and make for excellent targets. Logistics are the least interesting part of war for most people, but are one of, if not the most, important part.
by user070223 | 2025-05-20 11:26:59+00:00
A great place to mention Karl Bushby whom is on his way from Punta Arenas, southern Chile to his home in the UK since Nov 1998 by mostly hiking. He crossed the Darien Gap, the Bering sea walking on ice / glaciers / swimming, as well as swimming the Caspian sea. In Mongolia he trained to work with camels Had a lot of issues of course with Russia due to crossing the Bering sea, and maybe the war, as well as covid lockdown in countries, limited days issued for visas etc. And he just left Turkey and entered Europe! so the only major challenge is swimming the channel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby
by netdevphoenix | 2025-05-20 11:27:50+00:00
This dev automation tech seems to be targeting the junior dev market and lead to ever fewer junior dev roles. Less junior dev roles means less senior devs. For all the code smart folks that live here, I find very little critical thinking regarding the consequences of this tech for the dev market and the industry in general. No, it's not take your job. And no, just because it doesn't affect you now does not mean that it won't be bad for you in the near future. Do you want to spend your career BUILDING cool stuff or FIXING and REVIEWING AI codebases?
by Caelus9 | 2025-05-20 11:28:24+00:00
I completely understand the concerns about AI potentially replacing human thinking, but what if we look at this from a different perspective? Maybe AI isn’t here to replace us, but to push humanity beyond its own limits.

If we look at the history of human progress, the emergence of tools has always made life more convenient, but it also brought new challenges. The printing press, the steam engine, and electricity have all greatly transformed society, but we adapted and thrived. Why can't AI be the same?

The real question isn’t whether AI will replace us, but whether we are ready to use it to do things we couldn’t do or even imagined. Imagine if we didn’t see AI as something that replaces us, but as a tool that allows us to focus on doing what truly matters, leaving the mundane tasks to machines. Isn’t that the ultimate form of progress?
by pabs3 | 2025-05-20 11:28:30+00:00
BTW, are you aware of the Bootstrappable Builds folks achievements? Starting with only an MBR worth of commented machine code, plus a ton of source code, they build up to a Linux distro.

https://bootstrappable.org/ https://lwn.net/Articles/983340/ https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... https://stagex.tools/
by LikelyLiar | 2025-05-20 11:28:34+00:00
I play video games that require an anti-cheat, so there's that. But honestly, it's fairly easy to deal with that. You can use the Windows IoT LTSC version and use one of those trusted debloaters. I haven't seen any AI features or bloat in a very long time.

I am not that proficient, I tried it three times, first hurdle is trying to find a distro, making all that research about which ones have more pre-configuration and which ones would be less buggy for your hardware can be a pain.

The thing that attracted me to Linux is the file system and customization. I just wanted to daily drive it, not really for any work. But bugs are just a reality using most DEs available.

In my case once, it even was related to performance, I had to stay the whole day trying to find out why Kubuntu was slower than Windows on my laptop, ended up just being one line in some config file that forced battery-saving performance, I failed to find the post online after encountering the same issue months later after reinstalling the system.

Believe it or not, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, I just realized I use Windows more and more in my dual boot system, so I gave up on using Linux after that.
by nobunaga | 2025-05-20 11:28:37+00:00
Hopefully one day you get impacted by similar tech and your business fails. What goes around, come around and Im sure it will come around to you too. Since you dont have any details on your website about who you are or where you are located (which says a lot about the type of company and people you are) I look forward to the day your servers and data are leaked to something like Distributed Denial of Secrets (love what happened to TMSignal today)
Show HN: Notte – Full-stack web-agent framework (open-source)
by giordanol | 2025-05-20 11:29:44+00:00
Hi HN,

This is Lucas, one of the creators of Notte.

Notte is an open-source full-stack framework for web agents, designed to be fast and reliable in production.

Our tech revolves around a perception layer that translates the DOM to natural language, allowing LLMs to reason and act upon it reliably. This allows observation of website states and execution of actions using intuitive natural language commands.

The goal with Notte is to ultimately be production-ready for a wide range of workflows.

Notte can be used via a unified API, and includes unified session management, secure vault (payment, creds, keys, cookies, OTPs), built-in stealth, async agent/browser execution, stateful sessions, agent personas (email, phone, identity vault), as well as built-in retry logic and session replay.

We also have captcha pause + HITL integration, as well as an MCP package, plus some cool features for scrapers (JSON schema-driven scraping helpers). All via Python SDK & API.

Apache-2.0 licensed: https://github.com/nottelabs/notte Docs: https://docs.notte.cc/

We’d love to get feedback on:

Is there anything missing before you’d try or trust it on certain workflows? Any edge cases we might have missed? ...or just any general feedback from the HN community.

Let us know what you think!

— Lucas/Andrea
Show HN: JavaFactory – IntelliJ plugin to generate Java code
by javafactory | 2025-05-20 11:29:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a code generator plugin for IntelliJ that uses LLMs to create repetitive Java code like implementations, tests, and fixtures — based on custom natural-language patterns and annotation-based references.

Most tools like Copilot or Cursor aim to be general, but fail to produce code that actually fits a project structure or passes tests.

So I made something more explicit: define patterns + reference scope, and generate code consistently.

In this demo, 400 lines of Java were generated in 20 seconds — and all tests passed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReBCXKOpW3M

GitHub: https://github.com/JavaFactoryPluginDev/javafactory-plugin
by conartist6 | 2025-05-20 11:30:07+00:00
"I recently told the Axios staff that we're done sugar-coating it, and see an urgent need for every employee to turn AI into a force multiplier for their specific work."

It's just more of the worst of the worst. I swear these people would sit there with a straight face and sell you the incredible potential of human achievement as if you've never heard of it before
by ChildishGirl | 2025-05-20 11:30:34+00:00
I recently wrote this article to share how I approach setting up MLOps on AWS using SageMaker. It’s based on my own experience and includes diagrams showing how I structure the process and components. My main goal in sharing this here is to get feedback — whether there are ways to improve it, blind spots I might have missed, or use cases where this approach wouldn’t work well. I’d also love to hear if others use a similar setup — that would help me know I’m on the right track. Happy to discuss or clarify anything.
by ysofunny | 2025-05-20 11:30:36+00:00
you seem to be missing this idea that mathematics must be doable alone, individually

this appears to be what sets mathematics appart from science? I mean, it's not like Euler, or Poincaré, and so on, are really there with you when "doing math"

point being, mathematics is not a team game. but everything else is??
by wolvesechoes | 2025-05-20 11:30:40+00:00
Tangent, but I encourage everyone to actually learn how to predict the weather. Every region has its own peculiarities, and even on a small scale geography may have quite significant impact, so it is natural to focus on where you live. Moreover, you quickly find out that this skill is not about looking at the sky in a single moment and taking a snapshot of it, but rather about recognizing some trends and changes, more prolonged and more subtle as your knowledge grows.

You will find out how urban areas behave differently than rural ones, how plains differ from hills and mountains, how forest differs from meadows, where the small cumulus clouds are being formed and where they disappear, how wind shifts before the storm, how animals change their behavior etc. Some of this stuff can be widely applicable, but some will be specific to your area. And you do not even need to live in some remote areas to enjoy it.
by stuaxo | 2025-05-20 11:31:00+00:00
We have a few lines with decent guages.

At almost every election before this version of Labour got in, the Tories would promise all sorts of rail projects then immediately cancel them after the election.

One project was a goods "spine" (all projects were "spines" at this point), that invovled improving the loading guage from Southampton upwards.

For routes where this happened I don't see why we couldn't upgrade the stations to a bigger loading guage and have double decker trains.

I've noticed all the bridges we get on stations these days are much higher.

I don't know if detailed guage maps exist - it would be interesting to know how many bridges and tunnels stand in the way of reguaging on various routes.
by erekp | 2025-05-20 11:31:12+00:00
I don't see why such animosity. Many legit companies (which is the only type of enterprise we deal with) have legit automation use-cases and require solutions to do that against walled gardens and information gatekeepers. We believe whatever a human can do with a computer, in public sites, should be automatable with a machine. There's no difference. A browser like that does not DDOs anyone.
by FeloniousHam | 2025-05-20 11:31:34+00:00
The obvious answer: you can't. I work in constrained environment with an IT department that provides the hardware and (most of) the software I develop on. I agree with all the WSL cheering here, it integrates almost seamlessly.

But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).
by dfox | 2025-05-20 11:31:39+00:00
The original POSIX subsystem was just there so MS could say that it exists (and pass DoD requirements).

It got actually somewhat usable with the 2k/XP version, slightly better in Vista (notably: the utilities installer had option to use bash a default shell) and IIRC with 7 MS even again mentioned existence of the thing in marketing (with some cool new name for the thing).
by codingbot3000 | 2025-05-20 11:32:23+00:00
Thanks for your factful reply :)

Regarding the nuclear risk - it is driven by incidents. If the plant had not incidents, there would be no risk.

E.g. the childhood leukemia risk is double inside a 5km radius, and there is no good explanation for this (except the occasional release of radioactive exhaust in case of incidents). (https://www.bfs.de/DE/bfs/wissenschaft-forschung/wirkung-ris..., link is in German, sorry)

Same is true for the nuclear plant workers. Their cancer risk grows linearly with their exposure - which I assume is also an effect of minor incidents, especially if you exclude lung cancer (smoking was quite popular in the 20th century...). See e.g. https://www.aerztezeitung.de/Medizin/Krebsrisiko-im-Kernkraf...
by endoblast | 2025-05-20 11:32:34+00:00
Thanks. Yes it is strange. I do accept there's some overlap between propaganda and memeing. Yet whatever the intentions (or paygrade, or artistic ability) of the author of a meme, the fact remains that once it is posted he has no control over its destiny. So ultimately it is the funniest/most beautiful/salutary/plausible memes that get refined and selected for, i.e. which supply the strongest signal, and which inspire new memes in turn.
by Saigonautica | 2025-05-20 11:32:58+00:00
Oh, it's quite OK! I haven't used it myself, but my wife has. We don't often head out the way it goes.

It's really great for tourists though, it does a good job of connecting one of the major tourist areas (Thao Dien) to the city center.

I'm hoping that later extensions will do more to alleviate traffic, e.g. head out towards Nha Be or something. Although I hope to move to a quieter city long before any of that.
by CafeRacer | 2025-05-20 11:33:11+00:00
act is a great helper tool for another tool that is an utter shit.

Ive given up on gh actions a while ago and transitioned to bash scripts in docker containers. I can reproduce stuff locally, can test it, can debug it, etc.

I dont get how GH Actions do not yet have a tool that looks and works like jupyter workbook. Then it would have been fantastic.
by adamcharnock | 2025-05-20 11:33:14+00:00
We’ve used Hetzner dedicated servers for many years now, but not cloud.

Our experience has been excellent, but we also design for the platform. Redundant dedicated networking, multi-AZ, networking failover, RAID, k8s, Mayastor, etc.

The worst issues we see are occasional scheduled outages of an upstream router. This will take out an AZ for external traffic for about 20 mins, but the internal dedicated network will ensure internal services all stay up and quorate.

It’s not cheap, but it’s still cheaper than AWS.

I think their dedicated offering is probably more stable as it has been around longer, and it is also much much simpler. They need to provide networking, power, and finance the hardware. All of which is very much solved problems.

(We’re https://lithus.eu, if anyone is interested. You can contact me at adam@…. I’m on holiday this week, but back next week)
Show HN: I Spent Years Building a FOSS Unified Zero Trust Secure Access Platform
by geoctl | 2025-05-20 11:33:56+00:00
Hello HN, I've been working solo on Octelium for the past 5+ years now, (yes, you just read that correctly :|) along with a couple more sub-projects that will hopefully be released soon and I'd love to get some honest opinions from you. Octelium is simply an open source, self-hosted, unified platform for zero trust resource access that is primarily meant to be a modern alternative to corporate VPNs and remote access tools. It is built to be generic enough to not only operate as a ZTNA/BeyondCorp platform (i.e. alternative to Cloudflare Zero Trust, Google BeyondCorp, Zscaler Private Access, Teleport, etc...), a zero-config remote access VPN (i.e. alternative to OpenVPN Access Server, Twingate, Tailscale, etc...), a scalable infrastructure for secure tunnels (i.e. alternative to ngrok), but also as an API gateway, an AI gateway, a secure infrastructure for MCP gateways and A2A architectures, a PaaS-like platform for secure as well as anonymous hosting and deployment for containerized applications, a Kubernetes gateway/ingress/load balancer and even as an infrastructure for your own homelab.

Octelium provides a scalable zero trust architecture (ZTA) for identity-based, application-layer (L7) aware secret-less secure access, via both private client-based access over WireGuard/QUIC tunnels as well as public clientless access (i.e. BeyondCorp), for users, both humans and workloads, to any private/internal resource behind NAT in any environment as well as to publicly protected resources such as SaaS APIs and databases via context-aware access control on a per-request basis through policy-as-code.

I'd like to point out that this is not an MVP, as I said earlier I've been working on this project solely for way too many years now. The status of the project is basically public beta or simply v1.0 with bugs (hopefully nothing too embarrassing). The APIs have been stabilized, the architecture and almost all features have been stabilized too. Basically the only thing that keeps it from being v1.0 is the lack of testing in production (for example, most of my own usage is on Linux machines and containers, as opposed to Windows or Mac) but hopefully that will improve soon. Secondly, Octelium is not a yet another crippled freemium product with an """open source""" label that's designed to force you to buy a separate fully functional SaaS version of it. Octelium has no SaaS offerings nor does it require some paid cloud-based control plane. In other words, Octelium is truly meant for self-hosting. Finally, I am not backed by VC and so far this has been simply a one-man show even though I'd like to believe that I did put enough effort to produce a better overall quality before daring to publicly release it than that of a typical one-man project considering the project's atypical size and nature.
by rainworld | 2025-05-20 11:35:09+00:00
Spooks in general like to project a veneer of competence, downright invincibility. Entertainment media, journalists, experts play a big role in this. And by and large it works.

It’s especially true for spooks of a certain entity. Also, it’s easy to confuse brazenness, being protected from consequences, and usually downplayed or secret Western complicity with competence.
by the_af | 2025-05-20 11:35:37+00:00
It's a legacy problem in the sense your system is a badly designed mess of functions that only return boolean. You could encode additional semantics in the types. Of course if you don't, the type system will be unhelpful.

This is a modeling problem at this point. Types can make your model better by encoding more things. It's often not easy or feasible to refactor the mess, so sometimes you're stuck with it.
by modo_mario | 2025-05-20 11:36:17+00:00
>You don't need a house to have kids.

Tell that to a good bunch of people I know who feel secure about their living situation well into their thirties and then of course that 3rd or 4th kid or even 2nd kid they might have felt comfortable having never happens.

What was the historical standard does not matter today in this context. One set of my great grandparents had 8 kids in an abode smaller than mine today. Yet I do not have a single one because where would I put it. A room where i have to strip the walls?

>before evolution starts kicking in and pushing us back towards overpopulation

societal evolution will work quicker than biological evolution ever will. Most of the families with lots of kids here in western europe are conservative muslims.
by pydry | 2025-05-20 11:36:23+00:00
>Your argument is the same as Iraq being a realistic threat against the US.

Your argument appears to be that your enemy's fear driven by losing 27 million people during an invasion/war of extermination is exactly equivalent to your country's fear of weapons that were imagined solely for the purposes of justifying an invasion.

My argument was that it is quite easy to get a domestic population to treat all of the enemy's legitimate fears as utterly irrelevant while treating bullshit domestic fears as existential.

In a way I think you helped make this point for me by forgetting about those 27 million deaths.
by high_na_euv | 2025-05-20 11:36:24+00:00
>Europeans don't just dislike capitalism. They've been indoctrinated into thinking that if a business makes money, it must be cheating. The entire continent has Stockholm Syndrome from decades of leftist academics preaching that profit = exploitation, as if every entrepreneur is some 19th-century robber baron twirling a mustache.

Who told you that?
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-20 11:37:46+00:00
MongoDB as the first DB paradigm you write an adapter for in 2025? Really?

Someone is getting paid an AI salary and picking Mongo as a backend in a public project that’s supposed to be run by many people and orgs? At least there’s an interface in place[0] so it can be changed at some point.

Is this isn’t payola I’m incredibly disappointed. Payola I would at least understand.

[0]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/blob/main/i...
by luma | 2025-05-20 11:37:50+00:00
Understood and SSH figures heavily into any admin's workflow, but PSRemote brings some advantages when you're using powershell. Much like you can execute remote commands in SSH, I can do that w/ psremote while keeping the full object pipeline intact, whereas ssh just squashes all output to a single text string like most unix-native tooling.

Posh remoting works well because it's posh and you get all the nice object-oriented things that come from that. You do miss features like tunneling so I have SSH to fall back on where needed (and also for non-windows workloads etc). Right tool for the job and all that, and if you're not a heavy posh user the ssh option makes a lot more sense.