MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by intalentive | 2025-06-16 19:17:01+00:00
The solution is to learn a world model amenable to A*. Then you can always get from point a to point b. You don't need to follow breadcrumbs generated by random walks, you can just plan your trajectory and go. Similarly if you can decompose the problem into linear control, then you can always find a control law that takes you to your destination.
by phillipcarter | 2025-06-16 19:17:35+00:00
This is correct. It's a seemingly simple desire -- "always capture whenever there's a request with an error!" -- but the overhead needed to set that up gets complex. And then you start heading down the path of "well THESE business conditions are more important than THOSE business conditions!" and before you know it, you've got a nice little tower of sampling cards assembled. It's still worth it, just a hefty tax at times, and often the right solution is to just pay for more compute and data so that your engineers are spending less time on these meta-level concerns.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-16 19:17:57+00:00
The 17th story about the country sliding into autocracy is not "evidence of some interesting phenomenon". It may have been interesting for the first story. Less so for the second. By now? Not interesting (in the HN sense).

And, it's not the moderators, or at least not mostly. It's the users who are flagging stories, because the users have seen them turn into flamefests too often.

In fact, the moderators (at least sometimes) rescue such stories from the user flags.
Git-style branching for AIchats(edit messages,merge threads,graph view)
by MaksimSiadura | 2025-06-16 19:18:35+00:00
We got tired of endless scrolls and messy threads in LLM chats, so we built a chat interface that works like Git.

Branch conversations to explore ideas

Edit any message or file inline

Merge back into a clean main thread (v1 → v2)

Visual graph replaces the classic chat list

multiple LLMs supported.

Still early — building during the T3 Chat Cloneathon. Would love feedback.
by khedoros1 | 2025-06-16 19:18:46+00:00
Yes. 35 years ago, the family PC-clone didn't have any dedicated audio hardware, just the built-in speaker, and that was pretty common. A couple years later, we got a "Sound Blaster" card (more likely, a clone). That provides a FM synthesis chip (typically used for music), and PCM audio output (for sound effects, voice, video playback) that doesn't require constant load on the CPU (it was possible to output scratchy digital audio on the PC Speaker, but CPU-intensive).

If you've heard music from the Sega Genesis, that's the same Yamaha FM Synthesis technology (details differ, of course).

So, games would often support different audio hardware. Here's a favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB-HAZsRs (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Adlib/OPL2/FM synthesis, common option for PC sound hardware)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20 (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Roland MT-32/Linear Arithmetic synthesis, premium hardware, likely what the music was originally composed for)
by czhu12 | 2025-06-16 19:18:54+00:00
Yeah, documentaiton is one area I've been meaning to spend more time in. The application runs outside of Kubernetes, it effectively manages a Kubernetes cluster and exposes a "heroku" like interface.

This way, it doesn't result in having to host a separate app within your cluster, saving resources. I was kind of imagining this to be deploying to fairly small, indie hacker type setups, so making sure that it was resource efficient was relatively important.

The docker compose set up is just for local development. I'll make that more clear, thanks for the feedback!
by jrflowers | 2025-06-16 19:18:56+00:00
This is a good point. They tested software that exists rather than software that you’ve imagined in your head, which is a curious decision.

The choice of test is interesting as well. Instead of doing CRM and confidentiality tests they could have done a “quickly generate a listicle of plausible-sounding ant facts” test, which an LLM would surely be more likely to pass.
Show HN: I made an open-source feedback tool that captures context, not noise
by satyamskillz | 2025-06-16 19:18:58+00:00
Hey HN!

I built Reactnest — an open-source visual feedback tool that helps teams collect rich, contextual feedback, including logs, screenshots, device info, user data, and sessions.

With Roastnest, users can: —Send feedback in 3 steps: click, point, send —Highlight UI elements directly on the page —Get instant confirmation on submission —Earn rewards for giving feedback

Everything’s shared via a simple link — no sign-up required.

Built for:

—Developers who want actionable bug reports —Designers who care about layout and UX details —PMs are tired of playing telephone between users and devs

It Includes:

—Live demo & docs: https://roastnest.com —React SDK (npm): https://github.com/satyamskillz/react-roast —Browser extension: (coming soon)

Would love your thoughts on:

—What’s missing for serious adoption? —Any blockers or red flags in the current flow? —Where do you see this fitting into your workflow?

Thanks for checking it out!
by btilly | 2025-06-16 19:19:19+00:00
The purpose of https://www.random.org/draws/ (which is unfortunately currently down), is to do exactly that.

Also it is possible for any group to agree that they will all sign messages at a given time about a given source, and stick them on a blockchain. This then becomes proof that this group all agreed on what was displayed, at that time. This becomes a kind of public verification of what was there.
by jasperry | 2025-06-16 19:19:31+00:00
Once a seed is fed to a PRNG, it can be deleted. But you still have a point, because the state of an OS PRNG can be saved and restored, for example when the machine sleeps, and a hacker could potentially access this to reproduce generated bits. But whenever the entropy pool is seeded with new entropy, any previous state values become useless.
by pbiggar | 2025-06-16 19:19:52+00:00
OK, interesting question. Long story short, companies are made of many shareholders with different needs and wants and financial expectations. We can split this into: "what are the needs of the investors of the Dark Inc" and "what are the needs of the founders of Darklang Inc".

Dark Inc investors signed up for a unicorn ($1B company) or better. They didn't get that, and they aren't interested in shares in a small business making programming languages. So they want to shut it down, they're not interested in funding it, and actually would much prefer to not have shares than to have shares in it. They are also interested in their reputations, so having a "soft exit" is better than a hard shutdown - usually that's an acquihire where they get a bit of cash back and get to say "we succeeded" but they also don't want to damage their reputation by shutting down products that are in use.

Meanwhile, the new founders of Darklang Inc are interested in building this cool language, and so want a (possibly small) business making programming tools while continuing to make a living. That company needs money to run until it gets revenue.

It is much simpler and cleaner to sell the assets than to sell the company (many acquisitions are structured this way). It's not just money in vs money out, it's what are the needs of the stakeholders. It's in the interest of both Dark Inc investors and Darklang Inc founders for Dark Inc to sell assets and shut down. Dark Inc investors are relieved of reputational liability and can close their books on the investment, and Darklang Inc gets a clean start.

In this case there's more money in than out - that money isn't just for buying assets though, it's for running the company for several years.

Hope that addresses the question!
by jiveturkey | 2025-06-16 19:21:13+00:00
> preferring instead to spend ~15+ hours a day on projects and open source contributions.

This makes it clear it's not just that the prison provides such opportunities, but that inmates are motivated to take advantage of such. Too many fully law abiding folks spend 15+ hours of screen time just doom scrolling.

There's a real lesson here for similar community services. For folks whose upbringing maybe doesn't afford such advantages, if services can be available where students can find reprieve from harsh daily life and be (very) modestly taken care of, I can see value. At a much lesser level, I benefited enormously from school, church, and community services where I could apply myself, things my family could never afford. So, like school lunches but for practical developer education.
by BeetleB | 2025-06-16 19:21:21+00:00
> They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers and we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.

People have already addressed the "aware" part, but "willing"? Really? Do you understand how addiction works?

I'd bet a lot of money that they saved some number of lives by catching him. He was engaging in an activity that had a high probability of resulting in some deaths. I can sell knives in a store, and I have a reasonable level of confidence that no one died because of those knives. Here, the probabilities are inverted.
by vdqtp3 | 2025-06-16 19:21:39+00:00
> prevent space sharing between the ~2-3 social groups where intermingling means friction and fear.

The issue is not space sharing between social groups. I'm happy to share space with people of any ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation, political leanings, dress code, economic status, educational level or "social cohorts". The issue is civil, polite people being forced to share space with rude, entitled, violent individuals.
by swdev281634 | 2025-06-16 19:21:55+00:00
> But this guy was selling carfentanil

Do you have a source? It seems that guy was selling MDMA and marijuana. Here's the relevant quote from https://pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/

I was caught with MDMA coming in the mail from Vancouver, and some marijuana coming from california (the latter of which is what I am currently serving my time for right now)
by pgte | 2025-06-16 19:21:59+00:00
Instead of building a complex API surface for your AI agent, make it interact with your app like a human user would. Use the Accessibility Object Model (AOM) to give your agent “eyes” to see the UI and “hands” to interact with it. This approach is simpler, more maintainable, and has the bonus of making your app more accessible for screen readers.
by jeffbee | 2025-06-16 19:22:09+00:00
I wouldn't. "Trace contains an error" is a hideously bad criterion for sampling. If you have some storage subsystem where you always hedge/race reads to two replicas then cancel the request of the losing replica, then all of your traces will contain an error. It is a genuinely terrible feature.

Local logging of error conditions is the way to go. And I mean local, not to a central, indexed log search engine; that's also way too expensive.
by Aloisius | 2025-06-16 19:22:25+00:00
We know what the world looks like without copyright and that world has far fewer works created and very few artists who can do it full-time absent patronage or independent wealth.

Banning the nonsense that is character copyright and shortening copyright back down to a reasonable length of time (say, 20 years) would still enable the creation of more culturally-relevant derivative works without pauperizing every artist.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-16 19:22:52+00:00
I'll be honest, I have not seen a single implemented legal system I would like to live under, although that's not to dismiss all systems as equally bad. I was imprisoned in the USA once because an officer claimed a dog alerted, resulted in being stripped naked and cavity searched -- but that doesn't mean the entirety of our justice system is bad. Which isn't implied to be as bad as, say, a rapist getting away with it via a forced marriage as might happen under Shariah or xeer law.
by chasil | 2025-06-16 19:23:19+00:00
"Recently, mosquitoes and mosquito-borne parasites have developed resistance to chemical treatments and antimalarial drugs."

This seems similar to phage therapy, in that the treatment continues to evolve along with the target.

The treatment in the above article is a fungus. "Despite being lethal to mosquitoes, the transgenic Metarhizium fungus is harmless in humans."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104592118
by doright | 2025-06-16 19:23:25+00:00
I remember when the Steam "login from a new computer" auth flow shoved a big "Hi there!" in user's faces the moment it blocked access to their entire online functionality until they left to get a code from their email and came back. Sometime later they removed it and now it's just "please look for the confirmation code sent to <address>".

I think in the push to make computing "friendlier" by dressing up error messages, past a certain point they began to come off as condescending. I wish modern UX could focus on working for me instead of trying to be my friend all the time.
by jobs_throwaway | 2025-06-16 19:24:50+00:00
> Have you ever ridden in a "super car" (Ferrari, etc.) that also has very fast accel/braking? Do you experience the same?

No. Plenty of luxury vehicles but nothing sporty like a Ferrari.

> If a Tesla driver just drove a bit less aggressively, would you not get car sick? Did you ever try "FSD" on a Tesla on regular streets? Is the accel/braking still strong enough to make you feel car sick?

Hard to say. If they focused on not hard braking I imagine it would not make me car sick. I have not tried FSD on regular streets. I think a major part of the problem is these are typically uber/lyft rides where the driver isn't focused on providing a smooth riding experience.

FWIW, I haven't experienced car sickness in Waymo rides that I've taken.
by Bender | 2025-06-16 19:26:24+00:00
Excellent. That shows debugging will not be enough and one should at least enable tracing [1] probably on both the ZuckMail and OpenSMTPD side. FB's security team should be able to replicate this on the Zuck side if someone has a current contact. I know that a few of them lurk here. I think it's the least they can do after trying to abuse my liver and luring away an amazing coworker with the beautiful blue-haired girl.

[1] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/OpenSMTPD#Subsystem_tracing
by smurpy | 2025-06-16 19:26:55+00:00
Haha! I used to do LOTS of work in PostScript. The biggest project was a system which was part Python for the management, but PS for the content of a database publishing engine, motivated by the the need to generate crazily complicated real estate books, back in the day. There was a whole huge template system for different kinds of commercial and residential property and all sorts of different sections, ranges and indices. It was responsible for generating hundreds of multi-hundred page documents per day for dozens of real estate boards across Western Canada. Each publication was about as complicated as a Yellow Pages and generated daily and automatically from ever-changing data. In fact, the underlying database schema could evolve automatically through the update mechanisms in RETS (the Real Estate Transaction System API), though that was on the Python side. The rendering happened using GhostScript out to PDF for printing and electronic distribution to realtors. A stupid amount of detail, but what else is a touch of the 'tsim for anyway?!?

My other PostScript stuff was mostly fun and experimental: some fractal hacks which made printers and typesetters groan and some collaborative knowledge visualization stuff. I got started with PostScript on my NextStation in 1991 and it served me well, being the basis of a whole career of programmatic visualization.
I vibe-coded a $0.15/week AI marketing automation for social media
by ditegashi | 2025-06-16 19:27:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a CTO-turned-solo-founder who got tired of seeing "vibe marketing" success stories (looking at you, Greg Isenberg) without the technical implementation details. So I spent 3 hours building and recording a complete marketing automation system.

*What it does:* - Claude AI analyzes your writing style and generates content - Runs through custom keyword optimization algo - Passes through humanizer algo for authentic voice - Node.js project pushes to Google Sheets for manual approval - Zapier picks up approved content → Buffer schedules it - One command: `npm run generate:weekly` → 2 daily X posts + 3 weekly long-form

*Tech stack:* - Anthropic Claude API for content generation - Custom Node.js algorithms for keyword optimization + humanization - Google Sheets as approval workflow - Zapier for automation workflows - Buffer API for scheduling - Cost: ~$0.15/week (just API calls)

*Architecture decisions:* The Google Sheets approval step was crucial. Pure automation felt too risky for brand voice. Now I can review/edit before publishing while keeping 90% of the workflow automated.

The humanizer algo was the trickiest part - had to fine-tune prompts to maintain my technical writing style while avoiding AI-generated "fluff."

*Why this approach:* Most marketing tools are either expensive ($100+/month) or completely generic. This learns YOUR voice but gives you control over what actually gets published.

*Current workflow:* 1. `npm run generate:weekly` 2. Review Google Sheet, flip approved posts to "confirmed" 3. Everything else happens automatically

*Demo:* I recorded the entire 3-hour build session here: https://x.com/GashiDite/status/1934686143196311841

Let me know what you think
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-16 19:27:36+00:00
I think many of us, as this linked article that kicked off this discussion included, are thinking of various ways of using more Vanilla approaches. I appreciate the above poster's complaints that we aren't in some promised land of being able to do things 100% Vanilla without some form of reactivity management. That's still all in progress, no matter where you are in the Observables versus Signals "debate", Browsers are back to showing interest in native specs for one or both. (I personally think Signals are just "worse, poorly encapsulated Observables", but either proposal is a good building block for whatever the next steps are and thinner libraries to build on top of them will be.) But Web Components are mostly some steps in the right direction, I think, while that other work remains ongoing.

I also like gradual typing too much to expect to be 100% Vanilla any time soon. Typescript is too handy a verification/testing tool and while I'm still watching the native type stripping proposal with TC-39 with a lot of interest, it's certainly not on a fast track.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-16 19:27:58+00:00
Not a democracy? Oh no!

But what does "democracy" even mean? And how does ranked-choice voting prevent a polity from being a "democracy"?

Does the author realize that the Athenians also voted against people? Every so often, obnoxious politicians were ostracized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

Ranked-choice voting can be, along similar lines, a way of voting against somebody.

For whatever it's worth, the Athenians would be absolutely aghast at "representative democracy" -- feeling, as they did, that every male citizen was inherently a representative of Athens. (Hence Athenian travelers, little more than peddlers, felt capable of speaking on behalf of Athens when they once found themselves in Sparta.) The modern wage-earner, and not only in New York, is already more a Helot than an Athenian.
by lelanthran | 2025-06-16 19:28:18+00:00
> Is there a particular reason you prefer this approach?

Compared to Lit? Firstly, I like Lit. My approach is better for me because there are far fewer things to know in order to create a reusable object and there are far fewer things to know in order to use an existing object.

IOW, my approach trades off functionality in favour of a lower cognitive burden for me. I just wanted something that had the minimum functionality I need - create an object and then reuse it. For me, anything outside of that goal is peripheral burden that I'd rather not get bogged down in.

I agree with many here that this is not an approach for them, maybe even for most, but I am certain that if I find something useful that increases my velocity of feature delivery, then maybe someone else will as well.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-16 19:29:48+00:00
Why would someone in corporate IT responsible for this not ask Claude to write a script that does this on a much more frequent basis? That person might get a nice attaboi for it, but much less likely an actual bonus for it. Although, I can't imagine they are losing too much money on each cruise from this hack unless the next DefCon is on a cruise ship. Then realizing that 0 passengers signed up for WiFi might seem strange
by JdeBP | 2025-06-16 19:30:21+00:00
And more evidence to add to the server-does-negotiated-SSL-but-client-is-doing-implicit-SSL pile is this:

* https://marc.info/?l=opensmtpd-misc&m=141543622103232&w=2

Coincidentally, I was just talking about the mess that SMTP got into with all this.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44285357
by rcarmo | 2025-06-16 19:32:11+00:00
I’m curious as to how storage and secrets are handled, since my recurring issue with Kubernetes is not deploying the containers or monitoring them but having a sane way to ensure a (re)deployed app or stack would use the same storage and/or multiple apps would put their data in consistent locations.

Also, having seen the demo video, it’s a happy path thing (public repo, has dockerfiles, etc. what about private code and images?)
by paulbjensen | 2025-06-16 19:32:23+00:00
Although WebSockets are simple to use, there are a bunch of issues that the spec doesn't cater for when using them:

1. Connectivity. The WebSocket connection is only as persistent as the underlying network connection between the client and the server. A person playing a web-based game on a mobile device on a train that then goes under a tunnel is a good example.

WebSockets do not reconnect if they close unexpectedly. In such cases, you have to throw the WebSocket instance away and create a new one, and so you end up having to implement your own reconnectivity logic.

2. Message Sending. Messages will only be sent if the connection is open. If it is closed, not only do the messages not get sent, but they don't get queued up either, so they end up disappearing into the ether.

If you want to guarantee message sending, then you end up having to implement a queuing mechanism that is linked to knowing the status of the WebSocket connection, and is able to send when the conditions are right.

3. If you don't use WSS (WebSocket Secure Server) for the WebSocket host and connection url, then the WebSocket connections can get interfered with if they are connecting over a mobile network - ISPs sometimes inject packets which ends up distorting WebSocket connections over http. But I think since the days of Ed Snowden's leaks everyone has their production WebSocket systems setup using WSS.

This comes from the experience many years ago of working on a WebSocket-powered web framework called SocketStream which ran into these issues, and then some years ago I managed to build a library that focussed on dealing with those WebSocket-related issues, called Sarus: https://github.com/anephenix/sarus

WebSockets is great though, and there is still much that can be done with it as this library in the HN post demonstrates.
by immibis | 2025-06-16 19:33:14+00:00
Entropy can be defined as the logarithm of the number of microstates in a macrostate. Since transition between microstates is reversible, and therefore one-to-one (can't converge on any particular microstate, can't go in cycles, have to be something like a random walk) we're more likely to end up in a macrostate that holds a larger number of microstates.

For example, there are many more ways your headphone cord can be tangled than untangled, so when you pull it out of your pocket, and it's in a random state, then it's very likely to be tangled.

If entropy causes gravity, that means there are more somehow more microstates with all the mass in the universe smooshed together than microstates with all the mass in the universe spread apart.