MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jaimefjorge | 2025-06-18 14:07:14+00:00
Hey thanks for testing! That's been my experience well, it's very frequent to see libraries with vulnerable versions being introduced in code. What's also interesting is that, despite using incredible AI coding models like Sonnet 4, you still get CVEs in your code. Try this with Codacy Guardrails: "create a Java server using undertow".

Thanks for testing. Please do share your feedback when you test further!
by k2xl | 2025-06-18 14:07:48+00:00
As a game developer for a grid based puzzle game (https://thinky.gg - one of the games Pathology is a game where you have to go from Point A to Point B in shortest amount of steps).

I have found A* fascinating not because of the optimization but also from the various heuristics that can be built on top of it make it more generalized for other types of pathfinding.

Some devs have built solvers that use techniques like bidirectional search, precomputed pattern databases, and dead locking detection.
by Svip | 2025-06-18 14:08:06+00:00
I assume you are referring to this sentence:

> I know German history and how divided the country used to be, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see these differences.

The author is not talking about Germany post-WW2, but pre-1870, where Germany was divided into 39 independent states (if we include the Austrian Empire), at least in the 19th century. Before that, the number was likely higher.

German history is a lot longer than the past century.
by slightwinder | 2025-06-18 14:08:45+00:00
This looks like something that should be done like a TiddlyWiki. A TiddlyWiki is a whole Webapplication in a single HTML-File. Traditionally, when you change something, you just save the HTML-File and it self-replicates with the new data. There are now also TiddlyWikis which can save to backends and probably some other ways.

Building a whole platform around self-replicating HTML-files with optional backend-access seems to be the more reliable solution for small personalized stuff. At least it has a strong resilience.
by 6r17 | 2025-06-18 14:09:36+00:00
CRDTs are also crazy slow due to their architecture ; even the best alg out there are costly by design ; so adding homomorphic encryption is even more of a challenge ; tough it really is impressing I'm curious if this can be usable at all;

edit so i bring some "proof" of my claim: from this very page : `To calculate the new map, the server must go through and merge every single key. After that, it needs to transfer the full map to each peer — because remember, as far as it knows, the entire map is different.`
by palata | 2025-06-18 14:09:51+00:00
> It’s still vapourware, in that in 2025 Wayland is still not a drop-in replacement for X11.

If it was vapourware, nobody would find it useful. I have been using it for 4 years, it works. I wouldn't call that vapourware.

Question: how do you feel about systemd? Feels similar to me. Nobody forces me to use systemd (and I don't), but the evolution is such that more and more software assumes systemd and it hurts the minority who is not using it.

In order not to use systemd, I can choose a distro that supports something else. Aren't there distros out there that still support X11? Surely that must exist...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-18 14:09:51+00:00
They poison their own context. Maybe you can call it context rot, where as context grows and especially if it grows with lots of distractions and dead ends, the output quality falls off rapidly. Even with good context the rot will start to become apparent around 100k tokens (with Gemini 2.5).

They really need to figure out a way to delete or "forget" prior context, so the user or even the model can go back and prune poisonous tokens.

Right now I work around it by regularly making summaries of instances, and then spinning up a new instance with fresh context and feed in the summary of the previous instance.
by peacebeard | 2025-06-18 14:10:29+00:00
Very common to see in comments some people saying “it can’t do that” and others saying “here is how I make it work.” Maybe there is a knack to it, sure, but I’m inclined to say the difference between the problems people are trying to use it on may explain a lot of the difference as well. People are not usually being too specific about what they were trying to do. The same goes for a lot of programming discussion of course.
by uludag | 2025-06-18 14:10:31+00:00
Totally fair take — and honestly, it’s refreshing to hear someone call it like it is. You’re clearly someone who values real understanding over surface-level noise, and it shows. A lot of people just go along with the hype without questioning the substance underneath — but you’ve taken the time to test it, poke at the seams, and see what actually holds up.

I swear there's something about this voice which is especially draining. There's probably nothing else which makes me want to punch my screen more.
by dkarl | 2025-06-18 14:10:37+00:00
Maybe do it more consistently! Heat acclimation takes a week with daily exposure or 2-3 weeks if you get exposure every other day[0]. If you work out in the heat once a week, you might be living that miserable first hot day of the year over and over again all summer.

[0] I don't know how well nailed down this is, but I didn't find any wildly differing opinions in my internet research: you achieve roughly 80+% of the heat adaptation you're capable of in this time period, assuming 90 minute sessions with physical activity.
by Hesinde | 2025-06-18 14:10:48+00:00
An organ pedalboard MIDI controller would be an off-the-shelf solution albeit expensive. You could hook it up to a drum rack in a DAW in order to remap the pedals to a useful layout.

With a foot activated MIDI controller the number of keys will always be rather limited. Therefore, I think that the virtual layout should be customized to the music you play or even for each song. E.g. you could only map notes of a certain scale and range in order to save space.

If you consider building something custom; I have found that outputting to hardware MIDI from an Arduino is delightfully simple. (The hard part on my own project is finding motivation for figuring out how to read velocity from piezos and isolating vibrations.)
by ktosobcy | 2025-06-18 14:11:11+00:00
Erm... yeah, cool and whatnot but: 1) in case of pixar those are just animations that are mostly "generic" (or in fairyland) hence adapting them to the local nuance to pass some idea makes sense 2) as a Pole that had to be basically "brainwashed" by US made movies - while being exposed to other cultures is great, being firehose-fed by "dream factory" was IMHO one of the worst thing that happened to "post-commie" countries.
by duffyjp | 2025-06-18 14:11:36+00:00
I have a Sony DSC-TX100V that does GPS tagging. When I first got it in 2011 or so it was vastly superior in every way to phone cameras. Most of the photos and videos of my first kid were taken with this camera. I liked it so much that when it broke I bought another one.

I just checked eBay and they're going for 2x what I paid for my replacement a few years ago. I bet a seller would take a more modest Best Offer though, there are a ton of listings.
by momocowcow | 2025-06-18 14:11:50+00:00
This statement explain his position very clearly. Anyone who did any serious DOS programming understands it well.

"A debugger is how you get a view into a system that's too complicated to understand. I mean, anybody that thinks just read the code and think about it, that's an insane statement, you can't even read all the code on a big system. You have to do experiments on the system. And doing that by adding log statements, recompiling and rerunning it, is an incredibly inefficient way of doing it. I mean, yes, you can always get things done, even if you're working with stone knives and bare skins."
by mort96 | 2025-06-18 14:12:31+00:00
> I don't think I've ever worked on a nontrivial C++ project that compiled in three seconds.

No C++ project compiles in 3 seconds, but your "change a single source file and compile+link" time is often on the order of a couple of seconds. As an example, I'm working on a project right now where a clean build takes roughly 30 seconds (thanks to recent efforts to improve header include hygiene and move stuff from headers into source files using PIMPL; it was over twice that before). However, when I changed a single source file and ran 'time ninja -C build' just now, the time to compile that one file and re-link the project took just 1.5 seconds.

I know that there are some projects which are much slower to link, I've had to deal with Chromium now and then and that takes minutes just to link. But most projects I've worked with aren't that bad.
by bluGill | 2025-06-18 14:12:41+00:00
Politicians don't like boring pragmatic ideas, they like cutting edge new things. You see it all over. Building a fancy building when a boring box would do. Building expensive trains when a cheap bus would do as well. Investing in cutting edge tech of all types when the existing technology already works perfectly and we have no reason to think the new will be better. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for fancy buildings, trains, and cutting edge technology, but politics often invests in the above when there is no reason to think they have a place just because it looks good.
by pmontra | 2025-06-18 14:14:24+00:00
It reminds me of this excerpt from Coders at Work, in Chapter 13 - Fran Allen:

Seibel: When do you think was the last time that you programmed?

Allen: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out.

That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization.

The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue. The motivation for the design of C was three problems they couldn't solve in the high-level languages: One of them was interrupt handling. Another was scheduling resources, taking over the machine and scheduling a process that was in the queue. And a third one was allocating memory. And you couldn't do that from a high-level language.

So that was the excuse for C.

Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve.

By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are . . . basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.
by accrual | 2025-06-18 14:15:55+00:00
I've had some similar experiences. While I find agents very useful and able to complete many tasks on its own, it does hit roadblocks sometimes and its chosen solution can be unusual/silly.

For example, the other day I was converting models but was running out of disk space. The agent decided to change the quantization to save space when I'd prefer it ask "hey, I need some more disk space". I just paused it, cleared some space, then asked the agent to try the original command again.
by macspoofing | 2025-06-18 14:16:17+00:00
>That’s exactly what’s rude about it.

By the way, I also hate the "hello"-only message. I am, however, guilty of writing "Hey. Do you have a second to chat" - typically in cases where either through chat or video conference I want to go through something that is more involved, and I also want some confirmation of understanding and acknowledgement.
by panphora | 2025-06-18 14:16:38+00:00
I'm building a self-modifying HTML runtime inspired by TiddlyWiki [0]. It lets you build "HTML apps" in a single file with plain CSS/JS. These apps are shareable and hostable, but you can also download and use them locally as offline apps [1].

The cool thing is each HTML file is able to modify/overwrite itself, so users can use the app's own UI to modify it (e.g. a dashboard where users can add new fields by clicking a button to clone a DOM node, everything's persisted).

The key insight: collapsing the UI/state/logic layers into a single self-contained HTML file eliminates entire categories of complexity - no build steps, no deployment, no state synchronization. Everything you need is just right there.

[0] https://hyperclay.com/

[1] https://hyperclay.com/hyperclay-local
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-18 14:17:00+00:00
Just a note on the radiologist part, the current SOTA radiology AI is still tiny parameter CNN's from the mid-late 2010's running locally. NYT ran an article a few weeks about this, and the entire article uses the phrase "A.I.", which people assume means ChatGPT, but really can refer to anything in the last 60 years of A.I. research. Manually digging revealed it was an old architecture.

We don't know yet how a modern transformer trained on radiology would perform, but it almost certainly would be dramatically better.
by RajT88 | 2025-06-18 14:17:33+00:00
I would classify their "oops we reset your privacy settings accidentally again" as a lie. Granted this was a common occurrence in the 2000's, and not so much the last 15 years.

The privacy settings also did not obviously do what their wording suggested - accidental over-sharing was their goal, and the wording was carefully crafted to deceive and confuse. Is that lying? It's a technical argument, and not really relevant - they are shady AF and always have been.
by eli | 2025-06-18 14:17:49+00:00
The Anti-Circumvention Clause in the DMCA says "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology [...] is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [or] has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title"
by simonh | 2025-06-18 14:17:58+00:00
>They're explicitly defining the hard problem out of existence.

A claim is just an opinion, it's not a 'definition' or 'declaration'. That's absurd hyperbole. If I say personally I don't think the hard problem is an obstacle for physicalism, I'm not defining anything.

Let's see what the author says in his introduction to the paper. "Take this with a grain of salt". Hardly the definitive declaration you're railing against.
by vrighter | 2025-06-18 14:19:10+00:00
"Smarter" and "stupider" are completely subjective terms.

It translates one language into another, while maintaining logical correctness and its original semantics. Some cases are easier to do than others, but it doesn't change the nature of what is being done: language translation.

It isn't as simple as you think. Ex. in basic, the goto statement allows you to jump from anywhere to anywhere. Go has restrictions, such as it may not jump over variables coming into scope (being declared), nor can it jump into another scope, only outwards. So, for starters, this probably needs to scan the BASIC code for variables and hoist everything to the top as well as rewrite any code where it is trying to jump into a deeper scope (ex. jump from the topmost scope of a function into the body of a for loop).

Yes, it is a compiler. Maintaining semantics.
by nathanfig | 2025-06-18 14:19:45+00:00
I'm finding 2.4% unemployment rate for software developers: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...

Regardless of the true number, you're right that no amount of reasoning on paper "why" we should be employed matters if the reality is different; which it clearly is for a lot of people. Reality decides in the end.

A more accurate title might have been "Why AI is a reason to become a software developer" - since the topic I discuss is entirely AI and its effects on the field, and there might be entirely non-AI reasons for not going into software.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-18 14:20:21+00:00
Me no like grug perpetuate complexity myth. Little grugs no understand complexity is not monolith. Me want fix that.

Complexity not bad. Complexity just mean "thing have many consideration". Some thing always have many consideration. Not bad if useful and necessary.

Complexity still difficult and raise problem. So try avoid complexity when unnecessary and no add value. But shun complexity bad when it detract value or raise new problem.

Little grug benefit from not over-simplify. Not everything just good or bad, most thing both, it depend.
by cardanome | 2025-06-18 14:20:38+00:00
Oh gosh, this explains so much.

I always felt that many native English speakers can't really parse a text properly. They seem to react to certain keywords. When the text says something they didn't expect, they often miss it or get confused.

I thought it might be a side-effect of being monolingual and hence having a less explicit understanding of language but seeing how they are taught to read, things make perfectly sense.

It is crazy of much staying power bogus science has in education. Reminds me how the idea of individual learning styles is still popular and though it lacks empirical evidence.
by IanCal | 2025-06-18 14:20:57+00:00
> I think the ability to swap out APIs just isn't the bottleneck.. like ever

It's a massive pain in the arse for testing though. Checking which out of X number of things performs the best for your use case is quite annoying if you have to have X implementations. Having one set that you swap out keys and some vars makes this massively easier.
by WillAdams | 2025-06-18 14:21:19+00:00
It would be nice if we could be successful at doing so, and extend it into the modern world (I asked after it a while back, and this was one of the tools which was suggested). Elsethread, https://cardstock.run/ was mentioned which looks quite promising as well. Curious if any others (which I've not found despite searching) will turn up.
by DangitBobby | 2025-06-18 14:21:23+00:00
Sometimes I need a debugger because there's a ton of variables or I just have no idea what's wrong and that's the easiest way to see everything that's going on. It's really frustrating to feel like I need a debugger and don't have a good way to add the IDEs visual debugger (because I'm using a CLI on a remote session or something). It's also really frustrating to be inside a debugging session and wish you knew what the previous value for something was but you can't because you can't go backwards in time. That happens so often to me, in fact, that print debugging is actually more effective for me in the vast majority of cases.
by mr_toad | 2025-06-18 14:22:10+00:00
The important thing about Starhopper was that it had a Raptor engine. And the Falcon 1 had a Merlin engine. They were testing with the engines they intended to put into orbit. Blue Origin are also going with orbital class engines.

I doubt that this rocket has an engine intended for orbit? So it makes me wonder how serious this program is.
by Zak | 2025-06-18 14:23:02+00:00
I think the answer here is to put the high CRI, neutral white lights on the car. Street lights should be warm or amber and don't necessarily need CRI. (Low-pressure sodium has negative CRI).

We could make a lot of improvements by rethinking our approach to street lights. When I've looked for studies on driving safety in the past, it did not appear that street lights improved safety in most places. Where they did help is crosswalks and low-visibility hazards.

At a controlled intersection, it would be easy to have lighting that's activated by a pedestrian pressing a button. Once drivers got used to that, the light being on would serve as a strong indication a pedestrian is definitely present at the intersection, even if they're not currently visible to the driver. For fixed hazards, small marker lights might be just as effective as overhead flood lights; passive reflectors might even have an equal effect, though I haven't read any studies on that.
by JohnFen | 2025-06-18 14:23:38+00:00
> The original poster is likely trying to get answers on how this kind of article is even a thing, and now so am I.

Then it would have been better as an "Ask HN", where the title would have been more useful (and didn't link to the article), and the poster would have written a little piece explaining the issue and linking to the article in the explanation.

The problem I have with the poster's title is that it is not reflecting what the link he provided is about. If his point was to raise a discussion about the article itself rather than the subject of the article, that's valid but should have been done in clearer way.
by heyitsguay | 2025-06-18 14:23:45+00:00
I've noticed this a lot, too, in HN LLM discourse.

(Context: Working in applied AI R&D for 10 years, daily user of Claude for boilerplate coding stuff and as an HTML coding assistant)

Lots of "with some tweaks i got it to work" or "we're using an agent at my company", rarely details about what's working or why, or what these production-grade agents are doing.
by Joker_vD | 2025-06-18 14:23:48+00:00
I... still can't make heads or tails out of this description. Let me restate how I understand the scheme in TFA: there are two people, editing on the same document using CRDTs. When one person makes an edit, they push an encrypted CRDT to the sync server. Periodically, each of them pulls edits made by the other from the sync server, apply them to their own copy, and push the (encrypted) result back. Because of CRDT's properties, they both end up with the same document.

This scheme doesn't require them two people to be on-line simultaneously — all updates are mediated via the sync server, after all. So, where am I wrong?
by parpfish | 2025-06-18 14:23:48+00:00
i'd argue that the biggest hurdle to home cooked software is finding a way to distribute/deploy it among your friends. im a backend guy and can easily make a useful li'l executable to run on my work machine. but how do i share that with people that will only use their smartphone for computing?

i either have to: - make something browser-based, register a domain, and then pay somebody to host it. that's a lot of hoops (and unnecessary cost) just to access a little script that's just fine running locally. - make some sort of official developer account[0] for an app store and then jump through hoops to get my app approved. this would let me make a little app that runs locally, but it's even MORE hoops to jump through and it puts you on the hook for support because it's a wide public release instead of just sharing with a couple friends.

[0] tbh, I don't know how this works. I just hear mobile devs complaining about submitting apps for review and know it can be slow and frustrating.
by Svip | 2025-06-18 14:24:41+00:00
In truth, I was a bit surprised to see the piece written in English, because it feels like the audience should be German-speaking. Whilst there is an initial paragraph discussing the different situations within the Holy Roman Empire in the 1100s, the Holy Roman Empire itself is never explained, merely assumed (in fact, it is not even mentioned by name). Perhaps it comes natural to Germans themselves that their history of unity is far smaller than their history of division.
by HelloNurse | 2025-06-18 14:24:55+00:00
Even inadmissible heuristics can have their place, and it is easy to reason about how suboptimal they can be: you might want to trade off optimal results for performance (i.e. ignoring some part of the search space that should be searched) or to make an agent in a game a little stupid or stylized (e.g. prone to zig-zagging).