MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grep_name | 2025-06-30 21:34:07+00:00
The stuff I'm working on never feels worth sharing, but I am doing a lot of computer stuff lately. It's kind of the year of moving towards declarative setups for me.

- Migrating to Niri on my laptop and re-evaluating my literate config approach, switching from xkb configs to kanata and a few other QOL changes to make my tooling more composable and expressive

- Shoring up my blog / media sharing infrastructure (migrated to a landing page on an s3 bucket, with different prefixes for several different hugo deployments for different purposes, still need to get better about actually posting content)

- Preparing to migrate a bunch of my self-hosted services to a k8s cluster which can can be fully deployed locally for testing and defined in code. All this is managed through argo and testable with localstack and crossplane for some non-local resources

- Attempting (somewhat unsuccessfully) to setup a nixos config for a bunch of services that just don't feel right to run in containerized stack that I want to live in ec2 and have as close to 100% uptime as possible (uptime kuma, soju/weechat relay/bitlbee, conduit, radicale, agate, whatever else I think of that is small and has a built-in nixOS service module. Thinking about some kind of RSS aggregating solution here as well)

- Experimenting with vibecoding by trying to get an LLM to do the legwork to build a TUI interface to ynab using rust (which I don't know how to write)

I'm hoping that by the end of this summer most of the tooling I use for most things will be way more concrete and seamless. I also want to get my workflows down and get on top of converting at least a few the ~100 draft blog posts I have laying around into something I can actually post. Ditto for my photography albums, which are not yet organized into coherent groupings or exported for web.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-30 21:34:10+00:00
I'm not sure I follow. Why would a network known to the device not be connected to the network? If you never connected your device to their wifi and only connected to your wifi connected via ethernet, why would it even know to make a request? If you're not actively connecting to the WiFi in your house, why not just "forget network"? Seems like a strange hypothetical, but aren't they all?
by Aurornis | 2025-06-30 21:34:19+00:00
> What is the resolution? Can I track my cat through the house? See when they go to the feeder? Count my own bathroom visits?

None of the above.

The setup process has you select 3 reference devices. You should pick the devices so that your normal motion areas are between the device and the router.

The router then watches the WiFi signals from those devices. If they fluctuate more than baseline, it's assumed that something is moving around in the area.

It's a threshold detection that can serve as a crude motion sensor for home/away purposes.
by imiric | 2025-06-30 21:34:22+00:00
LLMs don't "memorize" concepts like humans do. They generate output based on token patterns in their training data. So instead of having to be trained on every possible problem, they can still generate output that solves it by referencing the most probable combination of tokens for the specified input tokens. To humans this seems like they're truly solving novel problems, but it's merely a trick of statistics. These tools can reference and generate patterns that no human ever could. This is what makes them useful and powerful, but I would argue not intelligent.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-06-30 21:34:43+00:00
People with ADHD don't experience the task-completion-reward-loop like others; i.e., it's vastly diminished. This makes building habits more difficult because it looks more like a task that takes energy rather than continuing an establishes behavior.

> When you leave a building, do you exit through the door or the window? I assume the door.

This is a poor example; I think discussing workouts suffices. If a workout is mentally engaging (bouldering, arial silks, an active team sport) it's easier to engage in than a simple, unengaging, repeated task (weight lifting, running, cycling). Why? Because the mentally engaging exercise is appealing because it absorbs attention, which can help overcome the diminished reinforcement cycle.

If you don't already have a workout habit, framed to an ADHD person, it's a crap value proposition: spend time and energy to do something boring and you should feel better, but historically the things people say will make you feel better never have that effect, and you only ever end up with less time and energy to do the things you actually want to do.

In my personal experience, I loathe going to the gym on my own because it's boring and takes time and energy that I would rather spend interacting with friends or playing games: it's a "task" that I "should" do, but it never feels rewarding when I do it. However, if I go bouldering, I'm not bored because my brain focuses on the "problem" of positioning and coordination and I feel like I"m having fun because of the problem I can satisfy my brain with, which distracts me from the energy expenditure both in the logistics (going to gym, changing, showering, etc) and from the actual work my body is doing.
by tquinn | 2025-06-30 21:34:48+00:00
https://NameSampler.com

I’m working on a name generation tool that uses 83 structured naming methods. Examples: React (Verb-based), Vue (Obsolete English), Facebook (Compound), Netflix (Portmanteau), Lyft (Creative Misspelling), Alexa (Personal First Name), etc.

I wasn’t happy with the slop generated by the overly general name generators or my own prompting/brainstorming. I went on a tangent and read the top (5) books on naming from Amazon. From there I was able to create very specific and detailed prompts which started producing consistently good names, the odd great one, and a small amount of crud.

Eventually this escalated from a large spreadsheet of detailed prompts to a side project.

Please give it a try, I’d be happy for any feedback on this early version. (I recommend the options tabs for some granular tweaking)

(The name was inspired digital music samplers where there is a lot of rapid experimentation and tweaking similar to this app)
by WorldPeas | 2025-06-30 21:34:52+00:00
The Xbox currently runs AMD x86 processors, just like the Playstation. "running windows" is not out of the question, but the question is then "what does running windows look like?" and "how much freedom should we give users over a product sold at a loss?". My answer would be pivot to arm, only because that's where everything is going, and perhaps it would be a good push for windows-on-arm gaming, that has been languishing because most game vendors do not have the time or focus to deliver WOA games alongside the more popular x86
by jrockway | 2025-06-30 21:35:04+00:00
This is a neat feature when it's your own device that you control, but not so great when they "disclose information generated by WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you."

I wanted to talk about how responsible WiFi router software authors can make things local-only (and I've done that in the past; no way to get this information even if I wanted it). But this is always temporary when "they" can push an update to your router at any time. One day the software is trustworthy, they next day it's not, via intentional removal of privacy features or by virtue of a dumb bug that you probably should have written a unit test for. Comcast is getting attention for saying they're doing this, but anyone who pushes firmware updates to your WiFi router can do this tomorrow if they feel like it. A strong argument in favor of "maybe I'll just run NixOS on an Orange Pi as my router", because at least you get the final say in what code runs.
by thenaturalist | 2025-06-30 21:35:15+00:00
That's been the very normal way of the human world.

When the foundation layer at a given moment doesn't yield an ROI on intellectual exploration - say because you can overcompensate with VC funded raw compute and make more progess elsewhere -, few(er) will go there.

But inevitably, as other domains reach diminishing returns, bright minds will take a look around where significant gains for their effort can be found.

And so will the next generation of PyTorch or foundational technologies evolve.
by ghusto | 2025-06-30 21:35:53+00:00
To an extent, yes.

It's one thing to design and built an iKettle in such a way that every aspect from the water filter to the power cord is well thought out but propitiatory. It's another to refuse to plug in to another "inferior" socket because that cuts into your cut of propitiatory cable sales.

If their stuff is so superior, then people will see that and prefer it. They wouldn't need to make it impossible or deliberately painful to use competitors services.
by whimsicalism | 2025-06-30 21:35:56+00:00
i think context engineering as described is somewhat a subset of ‘environment engineering.’ the gold-standard is when an outcome reached with tools can be verified as correct and hillclimbed with RL. most of the engineering effort is from building the environment and verifier while the nuts and bolts of grpo/ppo training and open-weight tool-using models are commodities.
by alexjplant | 2025-06-30 21:35:59+00:00
> Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.

Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required.

People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.
by gertlex | 2025-06-30 21:36:19+00:00
Looks like it's a vulnerability in the installer.

From a small bit of skimming, sounds like it's a user escalation vector, where a low privileged user can run the installer in a contrived manner to achieve privilege escalation.

https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/secur...

So for my personal install, nothing to worry about here...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-30 21:36:27+00:00
> rural highway traffic

How big is the range on one of these?

> Every time a TPMS battery dies in these circumstances, the vehicle shouldn't pair with random TPMS sensors around it.

Random sensors around it that aren't already paired to their own car.

Also it could wait for you to complete an entire trip or two.

> Especially when we're talking about logic of a regulated safety system.

"Safety" in the sense that the little warning light usually gets you to do something about it eventually? Is this data going into anything where the correctness is a big deal?
by lurking_swe | 2025-06-30 21:36:41+00:00
i see you’ve never purchased a condo or lived within an HOA community.

Furthermore, in the US (and some other countries), you don’t _actually_ own a house or it’s land. you own the rights to that house (a deed) as long as you continue paying your property taxes. see what happens when you stop paying uncle sam… it’s kind of like a subscription lol.
by jeemusu | 2025-06-30 21:36:44+00:00
Looks great, hopefully you have plans to bring it to Android. I've been tracking every shot I pull in a coffee journal for the last 2-3 years. While I love writing it all down, it would be quite nice to have all the stats related to habits, trends, spending, etc. I think the biggest frustration I have with home espresso is when I pick up a bag of new beans that I've never tried before, or have no point of reference for, and end up wasting coffee getting it dialed in. It would be great if there was a way to see other peoples brew notes, especially people using similar coffee hardware.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-30 21:37:37+00:00
I recall this not being true at all for Dota and Starcraft. I recall AlphaStar performed much better than the top non-pro players, but it couldn't consistently beat the pro players with the budget that Google was willing to spend, and I believe the same was true of Dota II (and there they were even playing a limited form of the game, with fewer heroes and without the hero choice part, I believe).
Show HN: Timezone converter that tells you if your meeting time sucks
by skrid | 2025-06-30 21:37:49+00:00
I work with a team spread across Sydney, London, and SF. Last month I accidentally called my Aussie colleague at 3am their time during what I thought was a "quick sync". The silence before "mate... do you know what time it is here?" still haunts me.

Built this: https://timezig.com

It's a timezone converter but it tells you if your meeting time sucks for the other person: - Meeting quality ratings (excellent/good/fair/poor) - Visual indicators for day/night - Shows if it's a holiday in their country - Handles weird cases like Dubai's Sunday-Thursday workweek

Technical bit: pre-generated 18k+ static pages for every city combination. Loads instantly because there's no backend calculations. Next.js 15, no database.

Still figuring out monetization (ads? affiliate links for virtual meeting tools?) but keeping it free for now.

What else would make this useful? Currently tracking holidays for ~20 countries but could add more.
by cube00 | 2025-06-30 21:37:54+00:00
> Thus System

What other "restore point" functionality does Windows offer by default?

> The initial goalpost was lack of any protection / no alternatives to onedrive

The context was "uneducated users"; they're unlikely to know they could enable controlled access.

They're further unlikely to be able to handle the application problems it introduces such as games having problems saving their state which why it's disabled by default.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-30 21:37:55+00:00
when I'm at home, my device is just sitting on the desk. rarely is it in my actual hand being carried with me. also i'm old, so i don't have it in my hand while sitting on the couch or in bed either. that's why my laptop is for. something with a real keyboard and screen and not something that's going to give me scoliosis for hunching over to read all the damn time
by smeej | 2025-06-30 21:37:57+00:00
It also reminds me of when you could structure an internet search query and find exactly what you wanted. You just had to ask it in the machine's language.

I hope the generalized future of this doesn't look like the generalized future of that, though. Now it's darn near impossible to find very specific things on the internet because the search engines will ignore any "operators" you try to use if they generate "too few" results (by which they seem to mean "few enough that no one will pay for us to show you an ad for this search"). I'm moderately afraid the ability to get useful results out of AIs will be abstracted away to some lowest common denominator of spammy garbage people want to "consume" instead of use for something.
by scott_w | 2025-06-30 21:38:33+00:00
> Well with that mentality this whole conversation is useless.

Yes, it very well might be. Let’s look at the post I’m replying to:

>> If it's free, people are suspicious and judge the cost to be something implicit, generally with a higher expected cost than $1. On the other hand if you make the cost explicit, people are more comfortable.

That’s some deep psychological explanation for something when the simplest explanation could be “it was staged.” I hate to be cynical but it’s not exactly uncommon in show business!
by edwardbernays | 2025-06-30 21:38:54+00:00
The state of the art theoretical frameworks typically separates these into two distinct exploratory and discovery phases. The first phase, which is exploratory, is best conceptualized as utilizing an atmospheric dispersion device. An easily identifiable marker material, usually a variety of feces, is metaphorically introduced at high velocity. The discovery phase is then conceptualized as analyzing the dispersal patterns of the exploratory phase. These two phases are best summarized, respectively, as "Fuck Around" followed by "Find Out."
by tzs | 2025-06-30 21:39:11+00:00
And in some years it grows less, or even shrinks.

The whole point of an endowment is that it is supposed to support the things that it was funded to support indefinitely. Most endowments, including Harvard's, already spend each year about as much as is they reasonably can while not putting its long term viability at risk.

Also, endowments are not one big pool that can spend on whatever the university happens to want. They are comprised of thousands of separate pools created by donations that were donated on the condition they be used for specific things.

E.g., some rich person leaves a bunch of money to a school to create the Milburn Pennybags Professorship of Antitrust. That money goes into its own pool in the endowment and its earnings will legally be restricted to funding that one professorship.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-30 21:39:28+00:00
> If you read an article where the author says “that’s training bra thinking,” obviously the author is envisioning women reading the article. If you read an article where the author says “that’s smol pp way of thinking,” obviously the author is envisioning men reading the article.

Again... no?

If you read an article where the author says "that's training bra thinking", the author is female.

If you read one where the author says "that's smol pp thinking", the author is male.
by wtf242 | 2025-06-30 21:39:32+00:00
I think it's most useful for discovering new reads, especially with the advanced search and recommendations functionality. I do agree i could do a better job of non spoiler summaries. good idea

- Series have always been a problem. Some book lists will include the entire series, and then some will have individual books. If the series is sold as a single book I'll often just include that. Like Lord of the Rings. Sometimes I will include only the first book in the series on a list, to prevent always adding every single book in a series when a list mentions "harry potter series".

basically I don't have a perfect way of handling series'

for the last point, kind of. If you add a book to the default "My Favorite Books" user list, it gets aggregated and used for this book list which is included in the rankings. https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/463
by redactsure | 2025-06-30 21:39:34+00:00
Work with sensitive data without seeing it.

We're building Redactsure.com

A novel technology whose goal is to separate data from interactions entirely. We are building a custom OS whose first goal is to detect, hide, and then use sensitive data throughout any web interface.

Building a new browser rendering layer with real time transformer inferencing is hard but it's been an amazing tech to work on. Long term we think this technology will change the way all remote work is done at a fundamental level.
by linsomniac | 2025-06-30 21:39:56+00:00
In the range of 1984-1992 ISTR my family went through around 4 VCRs, ISTR a Sharp, a Toshiba, and a couple of Sonys. I was particularly annoyed with one of the Sony failures because it was a fairly high end unit and it died with a particularly hard to find extended cut of Dune in it.
by jaisio | 2025-06-30 21:39:57+00:00
The root cause of all this is that C programs are not much more than glorified assembly programs. Any effort to retrofit higher level reasoning will always be defeated somebody doing some dirty pointer tricks. This can only be solved by more abstract ways to express programs which necessarily restricts the bare metal dirty things one can do. But what you gain is that the compiler will easily be able to do lots of things which a C compiler can't do or only with a lot of headache. The kind of stuff this article is about is really trying to solve the wrong problem IMO.
by 9rx | 2025-06-30 21:41:02+00:00
Technically, the actual whole point of wrapping is to avoid leaking implementation details. If you let "FooLibraryException" bubble up, and then you stop using Foo Library, then all of the users of your code are going to end up broken waiting for "FooLibraryException" when now you throw "BarLibraryException". This diminishes any value exception handlers theoretically could provide since you end up having to wrap everything at each step anyway.

Checked exceptions were introduced to try to help with that problem, giving you at least a compiler error if an implementation changed from underneath you. But that comes with its own set of problems and at this point most consider it to be a bad idea.

Of course, many just throw caution to the wind and don't consider the future, believing they'll have moved on by then and it will be the next programmer's problem. Given the context of discussion, we have assumed that is the case.
by vladimirralev | 2025-06-30 21:41:21+00:00
It is still doing a great job for a few frames, you could keep it more anchored to the state of the game if you prompt it. Much like you can prompt coding agents to keep a log of all decisions previously made. Permanenece is excellent, it slips often but it mostly because it is not grounded to specific game state by the prompt or by the decision log.
by infecto | 2025-06-30 21:41:42+00:00
I am the original person already claiming that China plays games. Amazing how threads twist.

Fair enough—China’s not losing sleep over whether Ford picks Ohio or Pennsylvania. But that doesn’t change the fact that state-level tax breaks are still subsidies. Public money influencing private decisions is the definition, whether it’s across borders or state lines.

And just to be clear, I never said they were globally material—you did. I asked for evidence on your claim that they don’t exist in any meaningful sense and leave an equally unbacked claim as you did. Funny how that upsets you so much.
by brudgers | 2025-06-30 21:41:48+00:00
DAT entered the market at about the same time as CD, but was much less successful. For all its notional advantages, DAT never really caught on in the domestic market

Audio distribution dominates the consumer market and CD’s can be pressed much like a vinyl record. Basically, producing a full fledged CD takes about the same effort as manufacturing half the cassette case for DAT.

A CD is a mechanically stamped plastic widget. A DAT tape requires a BOM and assembly before loading it with data.
by jshorty | 2025-06-30 21:41:59+00:00
I have felt somewhat frustrated with what I perceive as a broad tendency to malign "prompt engineering" as an antiquated approach for whatever new the industry technique is with regards to building a request body for a model API. Whether that's RAG years ago, nuance in a model request's schema beyond simple text (tool calls, structured outputs, etc), or concepts of agentic knowledge and memory more recently.

While models were less powerful a couple of years ago, there was nothing stopping you at that time from taking a highly dynamic approach to what you asked of them as a "prompt engineer"; you were just more vulnerable to indeterminism in the contract with the models at each step.

Context windows have grown larger; you can fit more in now, push out the need for fine-tuning, and get more ambitious with what you dump in to help guide the LLM. But I'm not immediately sure what skill requirements fundamentally change here. You just have more resources at your disposal, and can care less about counting tokens.