MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-06-30 21:02:13+00:00
> It is amazing to me how many developers do not understand that having a stack trace at the exact instant of a bad thing is like having undetectable wall hacks in a competitive CS:GO match.

Who doesn't understand that? If you aren't using exceptions you are using wrapping instead, and said wrapping is merely an alternative representation of what is ultimately the very same thing. This idea isn't lost on anyone, even if they don't use the call stack explicitly.

The benefit of wrapping over exceptions[1] is that each layer of the stack gains additional metadata to provide context around the whole execution. The tradeoff is that you need code at each layer in the stack to assign the metadata instead of being able to prepare the data structure all in one place at the point of instantiation.

[1] Technically you could wrap exceptions in exceptions, of course. This binary statement isn't quite right, but as exceptions have proven to be useless if you find yourself ending up here, with two stacks offering the same information, we will assume for the sake of discussion that the division is binary.
by Veserv | 2025-06-30 21:02:17+00:00
Well the problem there is companies who are too stupid to invest in cheap tooling with massive ROI for their developers. A pretty constant problem in software development.

And I am not knocking JTAG over USB. It is certainly convenient and beneficial since you can enable it in production or deployed units. I was commenting on how the GP (and even article) was making it out to be missing capability. They just do not have the cheap tools that are the intended way to access that capability.

edit: The article even mentions how the "Qualcomm Landing Team at Linaro", which seems to be the team that works with pre-production hardware to get them working on launch day, has a development process where "debuggers have never been a staple of our work for all the typical reasons you'd expect (cost and complexity being the main ones)". That is literally the team that should have pre-production units in the lab which will have debug connectors and where JTAG probes should be par for the course, yet they are apparently hardly using them partly because of "cost".
by yaky | 2025-06-30 21:02:35+00:00
What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, *separate* app.

The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone).

And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.
by yoavm | 2025-06-30 21:02:56+00:00
> I can't speak for specific protestors you encountered, but the majority of people I know that are anti-Israel don't want "all Jews to die" or even any of them. They just want the genocide to stop, for people to stop dying. It's really that simple. Protestors are protesting violence.

I respect that very much, but I think that the problem is exactly that it _isn't_ that simple. If they don't want any of the Jews to die, they should be saying also, alongside "stop the war", how can it be assured that Jews won't die later.
by ModernMech | 2025-06-30 21:03:06+00:00
I'm a big fan of Rust and I also use Swift as part of my job. In terms of memory safety, Rust has a better story in that it will tell you of type problems pretty much upfront. The whole "Rust compile time takes forever" is only half true, because type checking happens pretty quickly. You're never left waiting for long to find out your types are wrong. The long compile happens at codegen phase, after type checking, so once it starts you know it'll finish successfully (unless there's a link error at the very end).

With Swift, that's not true. Sometimes you can wait for a while for the compiler to churn before it bails and tells you it can't fully infer types. As a Rust user, this is entirely unacceptable.

I would have to say, while I don't thoroughly dislike Swift, I do thoroughly dislike Xcode and the Apple ecosystem. The fact that Swift was tied so closely to iOS development for so long means it's not a language that people generally reach for. It feels more like ObjectiveC++ and a facet of the Apple ecosystem as a vehicle into iOS development.

People say that Rust's killer feature is the memory safety, but for me it's always been the ergonomics. Cargo and the painless dependency process is the real killer feature. Swift just doesn't have the same appeal, and that they are slowly getting there is a testament to Rust having already cracked the code; Swift only went fully cross platform (Windows+Linux+Mac) in 2020, so there's a lot of reputation as an Apple language to undo, as well as a lot of ground to catch up on. It's interesting to note that the ground they have to make up is pretty much the path that Rust blazed. So for a lot of the target audience of Swift, the question isn't "why Swift?", it's "why not Rust?". Really, they only good answer for Swift right now is "my target platform Apple."
by hbn | 2025-06-30 21:03:27+00:00
The most evil thing a tech company has done is make a proprietary messaging app?

Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all.

Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.
by _ncyj | 2025-06-30 21:03:44+00:00
I highly doubt that OpenAI is capable of releasing a full phone that isn't just a reskin of a generic Android with "AI". IOS design sucks (imo) and its app selection is much less than Android but that's not what makes people buy iPhone. It's simple familiarity and marketing. I'll definitely be switching off my iPhone when it breaks but that'll probably take at least a decade. Phones are pretty much feature complete at this point - for a normal person there's almost no reason to upgrade.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-30 21:04:13+00:00
Apparently (and I'm paraphrasing), the cost of the screen is not much. There's the cost of controls integration, at least, but also feature segmentation and warranty servicing. Apparently that's a lot of work to provide / cover and infotainment is one of the top warranty items. So it makes it a lot cheaper to just add a rack for your off the shelf bluetooth speaker.
by hinkley | 2025-06-30 21:04:19+00:00
> Unfortunately no C compiler can do this optimization automatically:

> The functions recip and recip⁺ and not equivalent.

This is one of those examples of how optimizing code can improve legibility, robustness, or both.

The first implementation allows for side effects to change the outcome of the function. But the problem is that the code is not written expecting someone to modify the values in the middle of the loop. It's incorrect behavior, and you're paying a performance penalty for it to boot.

Functional Core code tends not to have this problem, in that we pass in a snapshot of data and it either gets an answer or an error.

I've seen too much code that checks 3 times if a user is either still logged in or has permission to do a task, and not one of them was set up to deal with one answer for the first call and a different one for any of the subsequent ones. They just go into undefined behavior.
by bumby | 2025-06-30 21:04:39+00:00
You seem to imply that the legal and safety are independent. I am saying they are linked.

Ie there wouldn’t be a legal reason if it weren’t for the safety reason. So pointing to the safety is why it’s a circular argument.

It’s like disagreeing that smoke detectors are because they are legally required in homes because people want them anyway for safety reasons. Both can be true at the same time because they both are related to the same risk mitigation.

In any event, the OP was that some people don’t want those sensors, my point is they aren’t optional.
by tharkun__ | 2025-06-30 21:05:09+00:00
It's a two edged sword.

I love my camera but I've noticed that I tend to look around less, which is bad because a camera doesn't cover everything.

ABS is a no brainer. So is ASR.

TPMS is awesome coz face it, I have never and will never regularly check my tire pressure. Remember how they taught you to check the oil regularly? Who ever did that?

I want real knobs so I don't have to look away from the road and do climate controls and radio by feel on the side. Much safer.

But automatic braking is another one of those two edged swords. I almost had a car behind me crash into me recently because the car in front of me decided to abruptly slow down and turn left. I reacted and went slightly to the right to get around and the car in front of me was turning further away as well. But then the dang emergency breaking system hit the brakes and startled me. For a second I couldn't do anything then I hit the brakes too until a second later I realized it was BS and the car behind me was getting awfully close real fast and I instead hit the gas.

These systems are still quite bad in judging objects that go left-right or opposite. The cruise control slows down immensely for a car on front of me taking an exit for no reason. And on the other hand it reacts way too late if another car suddenly switches into your lane when you're about to overtake them. And that's for different cars from different manufacturers and different model years so I doubt it's a unique experience.
by msgodel | 2025-06-30 21:05:15+00:00
Lol.

It's legitimately easier to just buy a UMPC with an LTE card and use VOIP than do that. That's how bad the situation is at this point.

I say this as someone who gets paid to work on open source and used PostMarketOS on my primary cell phone for years. Even technical people really only have two options right now.
by bigonion | 2025-06-30 21:05:15+00:00
I spend a lot of time driving and on email so I built an app where I can manage email purely through voice.

Did this by building gmail mcp that exposes several useful tools to an AI assistant. Then just wired it up a frontend iOS app. No email data is stored. Passed the Google CASA 3rd party security audit. Pretty low latency.

Try it out and lmk what you think!
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-06-30 21:05:25+00:00
Let me put it another way.

Besides the FDA (and similar international counterparts), you're also using your phone for a bunch of other stuff that you probably don't want anyone having root access to. Wallets are one, banking apps, medical data and devices, password managers, and more.

If you have root access, that means that the apps can also get it, after all the app providing root access is itself an app.
by sillyfluke | 2025-06-30 21:05:27+00:00
Yeah, as another frequent flyer I find the parent's comment borderline delusional. Things have way shittier across the board post-covid. Just the other day, I noticed an airline turn their economy tickets fron three tiers to six, in an attempt to decouple baggage allowance and flight change options. Being able to change your flight now cost 3x as much than it did before.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-06-30 21:05:53+00:00
> Neurodivergence is an internet-nurtured buzzword

No, it's a well-defined term from an expert in the space and a member of the community [1], coined to describe an underserved group of people who didn't have existing terminology to describe themselves [2]. Reducing it to a "buzzword" to describe people who have "mental disorders" or "conditions" is a gross misunderstanding of both the term, the people it describes, and the space.

[1]: https://neuroqueer.com/neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/

[2]: https://neuroqueer.com/throw-away-the-masters-tools/
by chimeracoder | 2025-06-30 21:06:16+00:00
> That’s always a good idea, but they’ll still be able to tell when someone is home because the outbound internet traffic will increase.

Sure, but not necessarily who is home, since they won't have the MAC address of your device(s) connecting.

Also, traffic volumes are a lot noisier of signals than you might think, given how much automated and background stuff we have these days.
by msgodel | 2025-06-30 21:07:19+00:00
Don't tell me what I want.

Yes I have my bitcoin-qt wallet, Etrade, my ssh keys, and my password manager on a machine I also have root on. I don't run non-free code on it (and I'm very picky about the open source code I do run.) Also just because I have root access doesn't mean I'm running all my apps as root. That's in insane statement to make. I run administrative tools as root and that's it.

The same thing is happening on your phone, you're just not allowed access to those tools, instead various other companies are and when they do things you don't like your options are: throw out your device and data, or bend over and take it.

Again at the end of the day a computer is a computer regardless of you being administratively locked out of yours.
by hopelite | 2025-06-30 21:07:30+00:00
Yes, it will surely all end in calamity, whether anyone here experiences it themselves or not. Humans have a major (among many) flaw, in the nasty tendency to believe they not only have a sufficient understanding of sufficient enough things, but that they also know the effects their perceived perfect choices and actions will have on such a complex system. Many religions have stories capturing this folly, the most famous possibly being the Tower of Babel, which were are furiously building in spite of what many humans call God, while others believe they have no more need for a God greater than themselves.
by ffo | 2025-06-30 21:07:46+00:00
Welcome to the (B2B) auth space—it's encouraging to see more teams working on these challenges.

From our experience at Zitadel, we’ve found that mid-market and enterprise customers often also look for industry standards like SAML and OpenID Connect to integrate their services, so we’ve made those a core part of our offering—including providing fully compliant SAML and OpenID Connect endpoints. It looks like Tesseral is taking a more focused approach with SDK and API integrations for web apps, which makes a lot of sense for many teams starting out.

We also believe that, over time, the distinction between B2C and B2B use cases will blur, and both will be consolidated into a potent, unified identity infrastructure platform. That’s the direction we’re building toward with Zitadel.

Wishing you all the best as Tesseral grows. If you ever want to swap stories about auth, don't hesitate to reach out!
by o11c | 2025-06-30 21:08:34+00:00
My home ISP's cell router (because no other internet reaches our area anymore) has almost no configurable settings (just wifi name/password/hidden), and actively forbids you from disabling wifi even though I only use it through the wired connection.

(And what limited configurability it provides is only through the app, which requires you to agree to their "molest your privacy policy". I had been content with just not installing the app , but my threat model hadn't considered this new development ...)
by yesfitz | 2025-06-30 21:08:46+00:00
I believe that poster is using "preference" in the economic sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_(economics)

"In economics, and in other social sciences, preference refers to an order by which an agent, while in search of an 'optimal choice', ranks alternatives based on their respective utility." "Individual preferences are determined by taste, need, ..., as opposed to price, availability or personal income."
by Sinthrill | 2025-06-30 21:08:49+00:00
Working on my startup: ProtoMatter

https://www.protomatter.ai/

Automating Clean-room plant propagation using robots

There are about 2-3+ Billion plants cloned in laboratory conditions per year which are all done by hand. I am in the process of trying to develop a MVP to automate this task while also getting customer conversations to get early adopters.

What I am struggling with is that I don't know if I should focus on developing the MVP which will cost 20k-40k & 4-6 months to develop or put in place a pilot program to get customers willing to buy the machine / pay up front before I start developing. Hardware startups are rough usually because their MVP takes so long to develop.

I am currently bootstrapping while I am pushing for more conversations trying to do both at once. I could personally finance the venture, but it seems like a poor move to just take on all the risk personally? I have am setting up conversations with a few VCs, but that is a month out.

I'm working on this full time at the moment. I have a couple people who I have talked to who could be co-founders but nothing has materialized yet. So I am just all over the place at this stage in the process.

I spoke to 4-5 potential customers and 2-3 of which are 'interested' in what I have but seem only interested in the 'validation' stage which only comes up after the huge personal investment on my end.
by disambiguation | 2025-06-30 21:08:51+00:00
This feels like a spectator sport to me - elite classes fighting amongst themselves while ordinary people are caught in the crossfire.

Sure, I do feel bad for the well meaning professors, scientists, and researchers (some of whom are personal friends) that are losing their grant funding - techies of all people should be sympathetic to a sudden disruption in funding. But if the elites are asking us to take sides, they need to make a stronger case that they're really on _our side_ - that requires more than appealing to mutual self-interest. Academia must reconcile a litany of shortcomings and broken promises.

For the promise of education, we see a large and growing contingent of debt holders outweighing the number of available employment opportunities. Tuition is at an ATH, yet more and more students are walking away with worse outcomes. A grim forecast for the younger generation.

For the promise of research, we've seen a shift from truth-seeking to grant-seeking, a punitive culture of ideological conformity, and a pipeline to brain-drain the rest of the world, favoring foreign talent over local. Hardly the unbiased bastion of free-thought we've been taught is the foundation of good science.

As for ideology, I'm not sure the intelligentsia has ever been neutral, if that's even possible, or if neutrality itself isn't another ideology. As far as I can tell, this is just the pendulum swinging back. Academia is experiencing the consequences of its failure to live up to its promises to society and hold itself accountable for the negative externalities of its own agenda.
by josho | 2025-06-30 21:09:22+00:00
The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal.

If we rely on the technical path, Comcast can achieve the same by how many active IPv6 addresses are in use. Even if you aren't using your phone, the device is going to be constantly pinging services like email, and your ISP can use that to piece together how many people are at home.

If we rely on legal protection, then not only Comcast, but all ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers. Ideally the legislation would be more broad and stop other forms of commercial/government surveillance, but I can't imagine a world where Congress could actually achieve something that widely helpful for regular citizens.
by keerthiko | 2025-06-30 21:09:35+00:00
When LLM's come up with answers to questions that aren't directly exampled in the training data, that's not proof at all that it reasoned its way there — it can very much still be pattern matching without insight from the actual code execution of the answer generation.

If we were taking a walk and you asked me for an explanation for a mathematical concept I have not actually studied, I am fully capable of hazarding a casual guess based on the other topics I have studied within seconds. This is the default approach of an LLM, except with much greater breadth and recall of studied topics than I, as a human, have.

This would be very different than if we sat down at a library and I applied the various concepts and theorems I already knew to make inferences, built upon them, and then derived an understanding based on reasoning of the steps I took (often after backtracking from several reasoning dead ends) before providing the explanation.

If you ask an LLM to explain their reasoning, it's unclear whether it just guessed the explanation and reasoning too, or if that was actually the set of steps it took to get to the first answer they gave you. This is why LLMs are able to correct themselves after claiming strawberry has 2 rs, but when providing (guessing again) their explanations they make more "relevant" guesses.
by transpute | 2025-06-30 21:10:08+00:00
Sensing is (sadly) part of Wi-Fi 7. If you have a recent Intel, AMD or Qualcomm device from the past few years, it's likely physically capable of detecting human presence and/or activity (e.g. breathing rate). It can also be done with $20 ESP32 devices + OSS firmware and _possibly_ with compromised radio basebands.
by bitwize | 2025-06-30 21:10:15+00:00
Sounds like BASIC Computer Games by David Ahl.

Link to book's contents (Ahl released his works into the public domain): https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

Artwork example: https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=8...

(Was this your pontoon bot? I think those are supposed to be ice skates...)
Show HN: C.O.R.E – Opensource, user owned, shareable memory for Claude, Cursor
by Manik_agg | 2025-06-30 21:10:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I keep running in the same problem of each AI app “remembers” me in its own silo. ChatGPT knows my project details, Cursor forgets them, Claude starts from zero… so I end up re-explaining myself dozens of times a day across these apps.

The deeper problem

1. Not portable – context is vendor-locked; nothing travels across tools.

2. Not relational – most memory systems store only the latest fact (“sticky notes”) with no history or provenance.

3. Not yours – your AI memory is sensitive first-party data, yet you have no control over where it lives or how it’s queried.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/iANZ32dnK60

Repo: https://github.com/RedPlanetHQ/core

What we built

- CORE (Context Oriented Relational Engine): An open source, shareable knowledge graph (your memory vault) that lets any LLM (ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude, SOL, etc.) share and query the same persistent context.

- Temporal + relational: Every fact gets a full version history (who, when, why), and nothing is wiped out when you change it—just timestamped and retired.

- Local-first or hosted: Run it offline in Docker, or use our hosted instance. You choose which memories sync and which stay private.

Why this matters

- Ask “What’s our roadmap now?” and “What was it last quarter?” — timeline and authorship are always preserved.

- Change a preference (e.g. “I no longer use shadcn”) — assistants see both old and new memory, so no more stale facts or embarrassing hallucinations.

- Every answer is traceable: hover a fact to see who/when/why it got there.

Try it

- Hosted free tier (HN launch): https://core.heysol.ai

- Docs: https://docs.heysol.ai/core/overview
by Stratoscope | 2025-06-30 21:10:47+00:00
You must be thinking of The Forrest Mims Engineer's Notebook or his Engineer's Mini-Notebook or Getting Started in Electronics.

The Engineer's Notebook is still in print:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1878707035

If you download the free Kindle sample, it has some of the illustrations, but mostly just individual components.

This Reddit post has a couple of pages from Getting Started:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ECE/comments/ik1gw4/from_the_book_g...

The Internet Archive has the complete Mini-Notebook:

https://archive.org/details/Forrest_Mims-Engineers_Mini-Note...