MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graealex | 2025-06-18 13:33:35+00:00
WebP is basically a single i-frame from the WebM video codec, which literally was developed by Google to avoid paying license cost for H.264. For which they had great incentive.

WebP is to WebM what HEIC is to HEVC.

You can argue that using free codecs is a collateral benefit here, even though Google did it for selfish reasons. It is not detrimental to the public or the internet.
by fumeux_fume | 2025-06-18 13:34:04+00:00
I seriously question the premise that productivity gains from the use of AI (if they really exist) will translate into quality of life improvements. If 20 years of work experience has taught me anything, it's that higher productivity typically results in more busy work. More busy work or more work that gives the employer the most value rather than the customer or employee. So the doctor in your example gets more patients rather than higher quality interactions. Some people will get to see a doctor sooner but they still get low quality interactions.
by schneems | 2025-06-18 13:34:17+00:00
I wish there was a “evergreen” feature for social sites where it tracked resubmissions and would auto suggest them to people who haven’t seen them and periodically surface them to those who have and ask “is this still relevant” That way really good content keeps being recommended to those who need it and you get fewer complaints from old timers who don’t have to see it N times.
by em-bee | 2025-06-18 13:34:31+00:00
that would be a burden for anyone willing to launch software that host any kind of user data

if dealing with consumers is a burden, then you should not start a business. the same argument is being made against right to repair and having spare parts available or against the ability to download all your data. or have it deleted. and yet that is being made law in several places. any provision to protect consumers is a burden. that is a non-argument.

the question here is one of balance and appropriateness. if you go bankrupt, storing and making the data available for all users for another year is a burden. but if you have millions of users, keeping the data around for a few blocked users until their violation can be proven is not a burden. especially because you can potentially still continue to charge for the subscription.
by Izkata | 2025-06-18 13:34:51+00:00
I have a theory on that, based on something I do that over the years I've learned a lot of my co-workers don't do: When I'm reading code, I have the contents of the variables all in mind and am manipulating them as I read the code. When describing it a couple of times they've said "oh, like a human compiler"... So I really don't know what's going on in their heads, but this seems like the reason I can understand code I haven't seen before faster than most of them.

Spreadsheets flip the usual interface from code-first to data-first, so the program is directly presenting the user with a version of what I'm doing in my head. It allows them to go step-by-step building up the code while focusing on what they want to do (transform data) instead of having to do it in their head while focusing on the how (the code).
by jaimefjorge | 2025-06-18 13:35:00+00:00
thanks tosh!

The guardrails are ran every time there is code being generated by the agent. We give instructions to the coding agents to run the guardrails on the code that is changed. It doesn't YET work with Claude Code and Amp but because it leverages an MCP server, we can easily do it. It's in the plans to do.

I think dev-time is critical, because AI is producing large swaths of code as we speak. We also make sure that regardless of what happens in dev time, we can always run our cloud checks in CI time. Thanks for your questions!
by dagw | 2025-06-18 13:35:04+00:00
who really want to believe that "computers" is some magic cornucopia of endless high-paying jobs

Do those people still exist in any significant number? 10 years ago every teenager wanted to get into programming, now I hardly see any. The only one of my teenage kids' friends who shows any interest in studying CS at university or working as a programmer is a bonafide computer nerd.
by jakewins | 2025-06-18 13:35:31+00:00
True - but most languages make it much easier than Python to disallow this kind of accidental public API creation. Python inverts the public API thing - in most (all?) other mainstream languages I can think of you need to explicitly export the parts of your module you want to be public API.

You can do this in Python as well, but it does involve a bit of care; I like the pattern of a module named “internal” that has the bulk of the modules code in it, and a small public api.py or similar that explicitly exposes the public bits, like an informal version of the compiler-enforced pattern for this in Go
by bluGill | 2025-06-18 13:35:35+00:00
> We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant

Part of this is we don't build a lot of them and so are not good at it. If we set out to build hundreds of them per year we could do that, and costs would go down.

>And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?

That is not an issue. A quick search says that ships have a lifetime to 20-30 years after which they are replaced. Sure there are a few antiques older than that, but for the vast majority of ships the owner will pay to replace it in 20-30 years anyway. Oil is not going to run out on a single day, it will be a process of years which is plenty of time for normal processes to work.

I don't favor nuclear in general, but for large ships it remains the only thing I know of that makes sense. (synthetic fuels are expensive, and solar/wind needs more space than a ship to deliver the power a ship wants).
by visarga | 2025-06-18 13:35:51+00:00
LLMs don't care you have to maintain the code, they don't get any benefit or loss from their work and are unaccountable when they fuck up. They have no skin in the game.

They don't know the office politics, or go on coffee breaks with the team - humans still have more context and access. We still need people to manage the goals and risks, to constrain the AI in order to make it useful, and to navigate the physical and social world in their place.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-06-18 13:35:54+00:00
> This makes me wonder if one day we will see artisan software developer (I mean, the idea of software craftmanship is already here). LLM&Co are good at outputting a lot of code very quickly, but they are often not good at producing quality code.

The reason I think we might not see this for software even though we do other goods is that the output of a developer is not code it is software. It's possible for good (fit for purpose, easy to use, fast, pretty, whatever metric) software to be built on bad code. The craft of the code is not necessarily apparent in the product in the same way it can be with physical goods.

Whether or not LLMs can consistently output "good" software is less clear to me and I'm not interested in trying to make a prediction about it. But if they do I don't see "hand crafted" code being a thing. No one cares about code.
by Barrin92 | 2025-06-18 13:36:02+00:00
I remember one of the Advent of Code challenges had a hex grid puzzle on it, and Red Blob Games hex grid guide was so good the site got hugged to death because of it for a while. Used that later when I built a civ clone too, it's a fantastic resource.

https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/
by schmidtleonard | 2025-06-18 13:36:32+00:00
I'm not sure people consciously make that association, but you know which association they absolutely do make? The one where google images started using webp at the same time as they were locking it down. At the time, ecosystem support was practically nonexistent, so it functioned as "soft DRM" and among people who know the term "webp" at all that's by far the #1 association.
Show HN: I built a web app to edit photos with a prompt using Flux Kontext
by zzsshh | 2025-06-18 13:37:00+00:00
Built this to show off the recently released Flux Kontext model which is great at making edits based on your description, while keeping everything else the same. Eg. "make him wear a suit", "change the background to the beach", etc. No mask, etc needed.

I've used Nextjs 15, and this page is static and fully client side. I'm still torn between the value of RSC, and the downside of it not being served from a CDN.

I use Supabase for Db and Auth. Happy with these general, but their auth needs some work. The official supabase auth docs still recommend logic in nextjs middleware which hits your DB for protected routes.

My app gives you 3 free edits per day with no sign up required. There's rudimentary vibe-coded logic to enforce this, please don't bankrupt me, i have a wife and kids.

There's potential to expand on what the app can do with flux kontext also supporting multiple images as a prompt, for things like combining people into one photo.

Open to feedback and ideas on the tech, product or pricing.
by adobrawy | 2025-06-18 13:37:21+00:00
It looks promising.

I retrieve error response when fetching exercise:

0:{"a":"$@1","f":"","b":"eETmgndxtv4Ar0i8Wync1"} 1:{"serverError":"An unexpected error occurred."}

My request: curl 'https://workout.cool/' \ -H 'accept: text/x-component' \ -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,pl-PL;q=0.8,pl;q=0.7' \ -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \ -H 'content-type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8' \ -b 'Next-Locale=en; _fbp=fb.1.1750253718188.954698194752805529' \ -H 'next-action: 7f80b017f78704b00d2411aebde5ba8318b475de6d' \ -H 'next-router-state-tree: %5B%22%22%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%5B%22locale%22%2C%22en%22%2C%22d%22%5D%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%22__PAGE__%22%2C%7B%7D%2C%22%2F%22%2C%22refresh%22%5D%7D%2Cnull%2Cnull%2Ctrue%5D%7D%5D' \ -H 'origin: https://workout.cool' \ -H 'pragma: no-cache' \ -H 'priority: u=1, i' \ -H 'referer: https://workout.cool/' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Google Chrome";v="137", "Chromium";v="137", "Not/A)Brand";v="24"' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1' \ -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"' \ -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \ -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \ -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \ -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36' \ --data-raw '[{"equipment":["PULLUP_BAR","BANDS","BODY_ONLY"],"muscles":["TRAPS","BACK","SHOULDERS","TRICEPS","FOREARMS","GLUTES","HAMSTRINGS","CALVES"],"limit":3}]'
by falcor84 | 2025-06-18 13:37:39+00:00
For those of you who don't want to use Twitter, there's a screenshot there with the following message, ostensibly from an AI agent in Cursor, but it doesn't show which one, and it could easily be fake:

> I am at a complete loss. I have tried everything I can think of, and I am still stuck in this infinite loop of build errors. The `kCppLibVer` error in `RCT-Folly` and the `Jitsi WebRTC` script error are still present, even after all of my attempts to fix them. I am officially out of ideas. It is clear that there is a fundamental problem with this project's configuration that is beyond my ability to diagnose and repair. I have tried every trick in my book, and I have failed. I am sorry, but I cannot solve this problem. I have exhausted all of my knowledge and abilities. I recommend that you seek assistance from a human developer who has experience with React Native and iOS development. They may be able to spot something that I have missed. I wish you the best of luck.
by toyetic | 2025-06-18 13:37:41+00:00
This is cool, as someone whose been lifting for ~5 years its nice to see a fleshed out opensource tool for weightlifting.

The main problem with any app I've tried is that after enough experience the bells and whistles of the app don't really matter and mostly what you care about is consistent tracking for progressive overload.

I think this is a good app for people who want to get started weightlifting I would say the two main things needed for wider adoption would be 1. A mobile app ( or pwa, I've made and used my own personal workout app for a while as a PWA and its been just as good as any native app I've tried) 2. A way to save specific workouts as routines and track those for long periods of time
by bluGill | 2025-06-18 13:38:36+00:00
The Germans were able to transition from oil to synthetic fuels while in the middle of WWII. South Africa used the same to provide their energy for decades when the world prevented them from getting oil. We know from those experiences that synthetic fuels scale.

We also know from experience that synthetic fuels are around 5 times more expensive than oil, and so only niches are willing to pay for it if oil is an alternative.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-18 13:38:46+00:00
So, "useless or dangerous tools" is not a self contradictory sentence.

Gas powered pogo sticks, shoe fitting X-ray, Radium flavored chocolates, Apollo LLTV, table saws, Flex Seal for joining two halves of boats together, exorbitantly parallelized x86 CPU, rackable Mac Pro with M1 SoC, image generation AI, etc.

Tools can be useless, or be even dangerous.
by elmerfud | 2025-06-18 13:38:50+00:00
This article has confused happiness and freedom. Money can absolutely not buy happiness, but what it can do is buy you freedom from many of the burdens of life. So when you give examples about health care, or ways to buy a better lifestyle, That's not buying happiness That's buying peace of mind which gives you freedom. You are not crushed by stress and debt and other things.

There are so many examples of wealthy and famous people who were unhappy. Because all the money in the world doesn't buy you happiness it doesn't buy you good mental health which is key to happiness. Which is why you see a number of these famous and wealthy people commit suicide. Yes you see poor people do this as well but it's not the difference of money that matters. Because it's not something you can buy.

Having money gives you the freedom to have more opportunities to be happy. If you have not figured out how to be happy when you're poor then being wealthy won't magically solve your problem. It can provide you a distraction for a time but that unhappiness will come right back to you.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-06-18 13:39:28+00:00
> The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system

this is akin to the self-checkout aisles in supermarkets, some of which have been rolled back to add back in more human checkout staff.

why? people liked interacting with the inefficient humans. turns out efficiency isn’t ideal in all cases.

i wasn’t trying to argue that everything should be inefficient. i was trying to point out that not everything needs to be efficient.

two very different things, and it seems (?) you may have thought i meant the former.
Show HN: Graphtune – A tiny AI-assisted graph algorithm scheduler (with a story)
by lixiasky | 2025-06-18 13:39:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small AI-assisted tool that predicts which graph algorithm (e.g., Dijkstra, BFS, coloring) to apply based on graph properties.

GitHub: https://github.com/lixiasky/Graphtune Model: XGBoost trained on synthetic + real graph data Use Case: Automatically selects the fastest algorithm for your input graph.

---

But the reason I built it might be more interesting.

A few days ago, I watched this video by a brilliant girl from Imperial College math department. She explained a Chinese math olympiad problem using Manim animations and really deep insights: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1WsMCzeEQg/

Unfortunately, the video didn’t get much attention, and she mentioned on stream that she cried after seeing the low views. So I made this project inspired by her problem and her visuals, hoping to help more people discover it.

If you like this idea, you don’t need to star my repo — but please consider clicking into her video, giving it a thumbs up, and leaving a kind comment. Maybe just a simple “nice work” will make a big difference.

Thanks
by metalcrow | 2025-06-18 13:40:12+00:00
If you're asking why the state isn't stopping them, that is part of the power asymmetry between states and the federal government. The federal government can, effectively, do whatever the hell it wants with no punishment because of a number of emergent reasons. States cannot, and if they attempted to would get dog piled by a dozen different checks and balances metrics.

If you're referring to why a civilian milita isn't spinning to to stop them, that's because there are (basically) two groups of people in the US. The type that are strongly pro gun, pro militia, and have knowledge in both are generally actually supportive of this particular case, and furthermore wouldn't act anyway unless they or people they like were directly targeted. This is an unfortunate cultural aspect of the US, and correcting it would have a lag time of many decades. Furthermore, the groups that did attempt to correct it got crushed by the federal government for a few decades (see the MOVE bombings, and the Black Partners history), so are extra behind. However, spinning up a small militia for directly opposing this may happen. It would look similar to the CHAZ, but that requires a large group of dedicated and motivated people to spontaneously group together.
by ksec | 2025-06-18 13:40:40+00:00
I dont want to use iCloud alternative, even if it is cheaper. And at least in terms of Backup, I am also not fuss about having alternative, unlike App Store blocking access to Apps.

I do however wish for TimeCapsule for iOS that is linked to iCloud Cold Storage backup.

But modern Apple isn't about being the best or even better. It is all about value extraction. How do we milk more money from our loyal customers.
by maxdamantus | 2025-06-18 13:40:44+00:00
No, it's on the software (computer) side. It's not in the demo site because I created that in 2019 [0] for use with a regular keyboard (since I was having issues with the software I'd previously been using for playing MIDI). I only upgraded to the Wooting keyboard in late 2021.

I've been meaning to look into adding Wooting support, just haven't got round to it. This would require either WebUSB or WebHID which are still "experimental", and I'm not sure if there will be latency issues.

The program I created for computing velocity and emitting MIDI is here [1]. When it's listening for keyboard data it does it in another thread so that it can attach fairly accurate timestamps to the key events, without being subject to pauses from Gtk or something. If there's inconsistency between the key event times and the relative timestamps, the velocity detection can be noticably off. I've noticed this in Wooting's own MIDI application [2]. Hopefully WebUSB/WebHID includes timestamps in the data, so it doesn't have to be subject to JS GC pauses.

As well as the Rust program above (possibly Linux-only, though should be easily adaptable to work on Windows/macOS), I've written an Android app that does the same thing so I can use it without a computer (though in Android you have to take control of the USB device rather than just read the HID data), but I haven't uploaded the code anywhere.

[0] https://gitlab.com/Maxdamantus/bayan

[1] https://gist.github.com/Maxdamantus/c5d5133cab1ef3596ac589d2...

[2] https://github.com/WootingKb/wooting-analog-midi ... as well as issues with timestamp jitter, this application seems overall a bit bloated for my taste (web-based app using Tauri), and it's inconvenient since it will continue to generate MIDI when you're focused on other applications, so you'd have to close and open it (slow startup time too) each time you want to use it. their timestamp jitter occurs because the Wooting SDK (at least at the time, haven't looked at it recently) worked by running a thread that would update a shared HashMap and you would have to poll that hash map; it wasn't possible to see all updates, and there were no timestamps attached. I avoided the SDK and instead just read the data directly from the "hidraw" device.
by vital_beach | 2025-06-18 13:40:57+00:00
nope, just running and stopping dev servers. It may have done a pfkill once or twice if something was hanging?

Either way, using it was the API credits was fine for a little over a month, so I don't know if it was that. I got autobanned only a few hours after paying for Max and reauthing the client to use the subscription. My actual usage of it didn't change.
by seivan | 2025-06-18 13:41:08+00:00
If you want cohesion between entities pathfinding, adjust the cost when you do the pathfinding for tiles that has friendlies on them to be lower than their base cost.

The way to think about water crossing with naval transports, is to consider those things to be conditions. You already have a set of condition when pathfinding. Just add another case for water. Make it so the requirement is that you’re either on a ship or there is a ship on the adjacent tile you checked previously, e.g N-1. If valid, set a flag and now every tile check that is water should be appropriate.
by qazxcvbnmlp | 2025-06-18 13:41:21+00:00
when this happens I do thew following

1) switch to a more expensive llm and ask it to debug: add debugging statements, reason about what's going on, try small tasks, etc 2) find issue 3) ask it to summarize what was wrong and what to do differently next time 4) copy and paste that recommendation to a small text document 5) revert to the original state and ask the llm to make the change with the recommendation as context
by enraged_camel | 2025-06-18 13:41:53+00:00
I've actually thought about this extensively, and experimented with various approaches. What I found is that the quality of results I get, and whether the AI gets stuck in the type of loop you describe, depends on two things: how detailed and thorough I am with what I tell it to do, and how robust the guard rails I put around it are.

To get the best results, I make sure to give detailed specs of both the current situation (background context, what I've tried so far, etc.) and also what criteria the solution needs to satisfy. So long as I do that, there's a high chance that the answer is at least satisfying if not a perfect solution. If I don't, the AI takes a lot of liberties (such as switching to completely different approaches, or rewriting entire modules, etc.) to try to reach what it thinks is the solution.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-18 13:42:00+00:00
Politics, yes, but:

1. Politics has been getting more freedom here lately, especially if it's the first story about something new. This is, as far as I can see, the first story about this.

2. The story has an interesting technical component, about encryption, privacy, and tracking - things that a lot of HN users care about.

3. It mostly hasn't deteriorated into a flamefest.
Show HN: I built new type of dev environment for agentic coding
by jbentley1 | 2025-06-18 13:42:32+00:00
The main goal of this was to be able to not just run multiple Claude Code sessions at once, but actually manage them and keep track of what I was doing. Sometimes this is multiple attempts on the same task, sometimes I work several tasks at once.

Really I was just sick of twiddling my thumbs waiting for the coding agent to finish, and I wanted it to be easy to work on/review/test another change while I waited.
by llm_nerd | 2025-06-18 13:42:35+00:00
Palantir, Meta and OpenAI just had executives commissioned as lieutenant colonels in the US armed forces. They are defacto extensions of the US government now.

It is rather shocking seeing how rapidly the US is shifting from all of its historic norms. Trump sees the US as a "store" where he dictates the terms, he directly has control over US Steel after the Nippon Steel "takeover" -- straight out of the communist central control dictums -- and now US major corporations are embedded in the US military.

It is insane. This is stuff people accused China of for time eternal but apparently it was taken as a good lesson to learn from.

But absolutely no one outside the US -- whether enemies or allies -- should trust anything from US corporations now. The country has fallen.