MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Grimblewald | 2025-07-21 09:04:20+00:00
mine is seeing if they can implement brown et al (2007) image stitching algorithm. It's old, plenty of code examples exist in training data, the math at this stage is quite well developed, but funnily enough, no decent real open source examples of this exist, especially anything that gets close to Microsoft research's demo tool, the image composite editor (ICE). Even if you heavily constrain the requirements, i.e. planar motion only, only using multi band blending and gain correction, not a single model currently manages to pull this off. Few even have something working at the start. Many other things they excel at, even look downright competent, but in all those cases it simply turns out decent open source examples of the implementation exist on git-hub, usually a touch better than the LLM version. I have yet to see a LLM produce good code for something even moderately complex that I couldn't then find a copy of online.
by elcritch | 2025-07-21 09:05:46+00:00
I really want an excuse to run NetBSD on something. I wonder if ESP32's are capable of running NetBSD? Even just running on a RPi would be fun.

Also, for embedded devices the coherent whole system design of *BSDs with the package builder seems like it'd be much nicer than BuildRoot or Yocto.

I've come to very much dislike trying to keep Linux images for embedded stuff running over years. Perhaps it's because Linux claims not pride itself on "not breaking userspace" but seems to add a new GPIO sub-system every 5 years. Ain't nobody got time for that.
by moconnor | 2025-07-21 09:06:00+00:00
He berated the AI for its failings to the point of making it write an apology letter about how incompetent it had been. Roleplaying "you are an incompetent developer" with an LLM has an even greater impact than it does with people.

It's not very surprising that it would then act like an incompetent developer. That's how the fiction of a personality is simulated. Base models are theory-of-mind engines, that's what they have to be to auto-complete well. This is a surprisingly good description: https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/th...

It's also pretty funny that it simulated a person who, after days of abuse from their manager, deleted the production database. Not an unknown trope!

Update: I read the thread again: https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1945840482019623082

He was really giving the agent a hard time, threatening to delete the app, making it write about how bad and lazy and deceitful it is... I think there's actually a non-zero chance that deleting the production database was an intentional act as part of the role it found itself coerced into playing.
by DrNosferatu | 2025-07-21 09:06:35+00:00
A try at a Solution:

The EU should enforce much larger warranties than the current 2 years.

The higher the price, the longer the required warranty:

A 1500€ electric scooter should have, say, 7 years warranty. A car, 10 years - after that date, the battery interface becomes open source hardware for easy OEM replacement.

Results:

+ Sweatshops exploiting people in miserable conditions are no longer profitable

+ Protects the environment via resource utilization reduction

+ The EU can compete in manufacturing - via quality - with competitors that mostly offer cheap labor.
by ZephyrBlu | 2025-07-21 09:08:24+00:00
He is not a "courseboi". SaaStr is a legit brand that's been around for a long time focusing on the sales side of SaaS.

You have to remember this is someone who is almost certainly completely non-technical and purely vibe coding. He won't know what things like code freeze, rollbacks, production database, etc actually mean in real engineering terms and he is putting his full trust in the LLM.
by the8472 | 2025-07-21 09:09:01+00:00
Good at autovectorizing? Eh, if you massage your code in godbolt until it kicks in. But just naively writing code often falls off the happy path. And even when it autovectorizes it can sometimes produce such gems as

vmovdqu xmm1, xmmword ptr [rdx] vmovdqu xmm0, xmmword ptr [rdx + 16] mov rax, rdi vmovd ecx, xmm1 or byte ptr [rsi], cl vpextrb ecx, xmm1, 1 or byte ptr [rsi + 1], cl vpextrb ecx, xmm1, 2 or byte ptr [rsi + 2], cl vpextrb ecx, xmm1, 3 or byte ptr [rsi + 3], cl vpextrb ecx, xmm1, 4 or byte ptr [rsi + 4], cl vpextrb ecx, xmm1, 5 or byte ptr [rsi + 5], cl ... vpextrb ecx, xmm0, 15 or byte ptr [rsi + 31], cl vmovups ymm0, ymmword ptr [rsi] vmovups ymmword ptr [rdi], ymm0

instead of a vorps
by odyssey7 | 2025-07-21 09:09:22+00:00
A hasty incorrect assumption that I revised on new information is obviously not the same as hard data on radiation doses and cancer implications considered over weeks.

The “could save my life” odds were not very clear and the risk of cancer for that radiation dose had been long ago quantified by scientists, though without considering the immunosuppressants I was taking at the time that elevate cancer risks, making those rates more of a best-case scenario than something to count on. Above all else, the number known to the healthcare facility was the dollar amount to bill to my insurance, with the facility receiving nothing but money in exchange for taking those risks with patients’ lives.

For reference, in exchange for 10 mSv of radiation, a moderate dosage for a CT scan, the cancer risk for a young adult is something like 1/1000 over the course of their life. This means that out of every 1000 young adults who receive a 10 mSv CT scan, 1 would go on to get cancer they otherwise would not have gotten, assuming those 1000 aren’t already at higher risk of dying sooner (this assumption is important to weigh but is not straightforward). Those odds sound low, but if there was a revolver with 1000 chambers and one bullet, would you play Russian roulette with that if your life wasn’t on the line? The risk of cancer for the same radiation dose is much higher for children.

A technically clear answer to this is to use MRIs wherever practical, and to make MRIs more practical as much as we can. Why accept 10 mSv of radiation when you could just do an MRI instead? We should be making MRIs more and more practical. I’m concerned about the potential fear-mongering over times like this one when the facility fails to perform an MRI safely, where the impression people get could be that MRIs are dangerous, when the hazard was really the facility doing a bad job. By contrast, a perfectly performed CT scan will deliver a known radiation dose to the patient every time.
by lexicality | 2025-07-21 09:09:50+00:00
As someone that used Coffeescript a bunch, the problem is it's designed to make it very easy to write code, but has very little thought given to being able to understand that code again in 6 months time.

This means it's very easy to knock out an entire project in record time, but subsequently very difficult to debug/maintain/update the same project when you come back to it. It's essentially a technical debt generator.
by pyman | 2025-07-21 09:09:54+00:00
I don't agree with this.

Facebook's power comes from how it gathered and monetised data, how it acquired rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp, and how it locked in network effects.

If regulators had blocked those acquisitions or enforced stricter antitrust and data privacy rules, there's a chance the social media landscape today would be more competitive. Politicians and regulators probably received some kind of incentive or didn't get it. They didn't see how dangerous Zuk's greedy algorithms would become. They thought it was just a social site. They had no idea what Facebook employees were building behind the scenes. By the time they realised, it was already too late.

China was the only one that acted. The US and EU looked the other way. If they'd stepped in back in 2009 with rules on privacy, neutrality, and transparency, today's internet could've been a lot more open and competitive.
by raincole | 2025-07-21 09:11:49+00:00
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...

> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)

Life expectancy is longer than that in even the poorest countries today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
by benjaminclauss | 2025-07-21 09:11:58+00:00
I personally found this somewhat exciting. While small publishers getting screwed isn’t great, I think it’s fascinating that these tools are challenging the traditional SEO landscape. There was a lot of hype around this with “Web 3”.

If I ask ChatGPT for a recipe, I’m not going to have to read a story about someone’s grandparent first.
by muzani | 2025-07-21 09:12:12+00:00
Americans are not necessarily expensive in this day and age. Maybe the ones in the big cities are, but international salaries are rising up to match. Plus, they might be happier with a lower salary in a lower cost of living, especially if the quality of life is boosted by weather/location/food/hot people into foreigners.

American salaries likely anchor high though, and you can probably still get a decent amount above locals for the same work.

Plus even if you were mid, you'd be mid for the upper tier market. That might still be better than an average market, and you might do well in a market that's facing a shortage. Keep an eye on HN to see which countries are investing massively in tech.
Everyone's racing to build AI tools, what about interaction with AI socially
by capribhanz | 2025-07-21 09:12:24+00:00
I’ve been thinking about, There’s a huge surge and rush to build AI tools—productivity apps, assistants, creative tools, automation layers in social media, ecommerce, healthcare etc. But while we’re adding AI into everything, anybody rarely talk about how human interaction itself will change. Will new social medias have all communication be through LLMs with better UI? Will we just keep using tools while AI/AGI does all the talking/thinking/creating? What does AI mean for human connection in social spaces?

Is there still space for people to connect meaningfully, or how will we include AI in it, or AI include us? I'm currently not able to comprehend that scenario. Curious to hear how others are thinking about this—from tech, design, philosophy, or just a user POV.

Also, if you’ve read anything good on this (papers, blogs, etc...), would love some recs! This being my first post, so wanted to know, what would be the best sub for this post?
by vidarh | 2025-07-21 09:12:51+00:00
I was about to mention Aminet[1] too as a joke of sorts (it's Amiga focused, but still updated, though it stores the actual archives more than focus on the "news"), but scanned the front page on freshcode first and one of first things that stood out was an Amiga program[2]... If anything makes Freshcode a successor to Freshmeat, the only thing missing is an Enlightenment theme being posted too.

[1] https://aminet.net/

[2] https://freshcode.club/projects/apccomm
by virtualritz | 2025-07-21 09:12:51+00:00
> “We standardized on non-premultiplied alpha as being the lossless and more general case.”

How is this "more general"? Unpremultiplied is actually lossy (not so as far as precision goes but critically so if you talk about meaning/information).

> PNG has supported 16-bits per component since it was first introduced (see version 1.0 of the spec or RFC 2083).

True, my bad. But there have been many updates to the spec over the years.

I btw found a mention of alpha to be assumed to be linear in [1] but in a comment in a sample code snippet.

Quote:

/*

* Compositing is necessary.

* Get floating-point alpha and its complement.

* Note: alpha is always linear; gamma does not

* affect it.

*/

On the note of alpha: [2] is a good piece to read to understand why this matters, specifically the section "PNG cannot store all clamped linear values…".

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Encoders.html#E.Alpha-channel-crea...

[2] https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/png-srgb-cutoutdecal-...
by mort96 | 2025-07-21 09:13:11+00:00
I think of "programming" in "dynamic programming" the exact same way I think of it in "linear programming", "integer programming" and "constraint programming": it's probably some kind of software development that some computer scientists came up once and that I don't need to think about, because my normal programming has worked out pretty well so far

(Except, well, I guess I understand what "dynamic programming" is more than I understand what the other forms of programming you mention is; "dynamic programming" is solving certain classes of recursive problems by using arrays, sometimes nested arrays, to avoid re-computation, and somehow that's supposed to be more "dynamic" than not doing that)
by Terr_ | 2025-07-21 09:13:41+00:00
It would probably be some application of spectral imaging [0], highly dependent on what data you choose to capture based on your assumptions about how the aliens see.

Even if you have a mathematical "photo of a planet of nitrogen gas clouds", that leaves the problem of how to present it to humans, since we have no concept of what "nitrogen gas color" is supposed to be.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-07-21 09:14:37+00:00
Given that most farms globally have profit margins below 10%, a 10-15% subsidy is what I'd consider "massive". Definitely enough to influence growing decisions.

If your farm is the recipient of a 15% subsidy, and your margin is only 10%, then the subsidy disappearing means you cannot continue producing the same stock going forward, as you'll be making a 5% loss.
by elcritch | 2025-07-21 09:14:47+00:00
Eh I found the article interesting. To me it seems more like a non-native English speaker using an LLM to help their English grammar.

The article lists out some examples which I found interesting and didn't know about. I tried getting Gemini to reproduce them but it just gave general examples. Now without those examples it'd be a boring listicle.

Also I haven't seen an LLM spit out a classic sentence like: "This text explores the reasons behind its adoption and how it powers these satellites."
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-07-21 09:15:02+00:00
> I doubt that the average employee could tell Linux and Windows apart if you applied a Window-style skin to Linux.

It doesnt really matter if the UI is the same or almost the same. We are talking about rolling out an entire new suite of tools to every government worker in a given country.

It would take years to plan the migration, then start deploying it in stages to the less critical services of said government while you work out all the kinks.

While that is happening, you most likely will need to support both systems for a while so that you have a fallback if things go wrong with the new system.

Then you will need to train all these employees properly so that they can potentially troubleshoot some of the issues they encounter and give them enough time to become as productive as they were before the new system rolled out.

> But at least in Germany, I've seen Windows being written into agreements between state governments and trade unions representing clerks and employees. Good luck changing those without a negotiation running 3 years.

And there is that too. I am sure its the case in many countries.

Finally this migration if successful would not bear any fruits to the person who initiates it at best because by the time the roll out is complete this person will have moved on to another position, be elected somewhere else or retired.

But if it goes badly, you can be sure that this will be used by the opposition political parties to attack the governing party and accuse them of bringing the entire country's services to a stand still.
by muzani | 2025-07-21 09:15:19+00:00
I still want a to do list app that I like. Something compact like Workflowy, not the card-bloat that vibe coding adds. Something AI-aided, so I can take a photo of a recipe book and it'll add the ingredients. Or I can tell it what I want to do today and it'll break that down into something.

Like a Cursor for To Do lists.
by chasil | 2025-07-21 09:15:26+00:00
It is always helpful in recording if any bash behavior changes when it is not running in POSIX mode.

This is most common in Debian and Ubuntu, where ash is /bin/sh, and /bin/bash does not run in POSIX mode by default.

Some behavior of legacy bash of the '80s, prior to POSIX.2, can be surprising.

https://w3.pppl.gov/info/bash/Bash_POSIX_Mode.html
by bubblethink | 2025-07-21 09:15:52+00:00
There's a lot of variety in DP. Knowing about DP doesn't help much with solving DP problems. I'm sure you've seen all the fun problems on codeforces or leetcode hards. The one quote I remember from Erik Demaine's lecture on DP is where he comments, "How do we solve this with DP ? - With difficulty."
by alephnerd | 2025-07-21 09:15:53+00:00
> I suspect a version of the GFW may emerge from EU red tape - a 'great thicket' perhaps

Barely. There's a reason American bigtech FDI within the EU has largely coalesced around Ireland, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and Bulgaria - they rolled out the red carpet and tried to reduce any acrimony that American companies might have. They are also the most lax with enforcing EU digital regulations, as enforcement falls under national sovereignity.

> I suspect Trump will go ape and force the EU to back down, like they already have by dropping Digital Tax

Pretty much. BigTech can afford GRC, not startups. VC overwhelmingly backed Trump for this reason as Vance promised to fight digital export barriers (and largely delivered in the UK and Canada)

> Permanent vassalage is the end point, though this time w/o any prospect of influence to the center

I'm not sure. I think what will happen is the return of the primacy of individual states trying to curry favor with major powers, which has already started to happen.

Look at Hungary rolling the red carpet to Chinese FDI as a bulwark against the EU; Czechia and the Baltics adopting an avowedly pro-Taiwan stance in order to curry favor from the US; and Italy+Greece leveraging IMEC to re-negotiate better terms on OBOR-related investments from the 2010s. In most context, "Europe" has almost always been used to denote Germany Inc.

I wouldn't be surprised if Wang Yi ranted this exact same thing to Kallas during their 4 hour meeting which apparently lead to the entire China-EU summit being canceled. Similar incidents arose with American, Turkish, and Indian negotiators as well, all of whom prefer to work directly with national leaders instead of the EU leadership.

European countries now need to choose between the US or China. There is no other way.
by grillitoazul | 2025-07-21 09:16:41+00:00
For a new social network to thrive, it needs two things: content that interests users, and a distinct culture that keeps them engaged. Take the J programming language—I’ve been exploring it lately, but Reddit’s discussions are sparse (the first post I found was 16 years old). Niche topics often lack critical mass, and without it, platforms risk becoming ghost towns.

But beyond content, what sets a network apart is its style. Hacker News works because it rewards precision, logic, and staying on-topic. If Subreply wants to compete, it needs more than just "text-only"—it needs a clear ethos. Will it enforce an etiquette? Foster a specific tone? Otherwise, why would communities migrate?

Edited with help from deepseek.
by manquer | 2025-07-21 09:16:47+00:00
There is no mathematical guarantee to a contract or task being done if that is what you mean.

Yes, however first there is an understanding involved when the other operator is intelligent [1] secondly there are consequences which matter to living being which don’t apply to an agent. Humans needs to eat and take care of family, for which they need a job so have lot less freedom to disobey explicit commands and expect to do those things.

Even if an agent becomes truly intelligent you cannot control it well if they do not have hunger, pain love or any number of motivation drive[2].

——

Depending on the type of red button you can always design safe guards (human or agent) , we after all haven’t launched nuclear war heads either by mistake or by malicious actor (yet).[3]

——-

[1] which humans are and however much the industry likes to think otherwise agents are not

[2] Every pet owner with a pet that have limited food drive will tell you how hard it train their dog versus the ones that have one, even if they are an intelligent breed or specimen.

[3] Yes we have come alarmingly close few times , but no one has actually pressed the red button so to speak .
by netsharc | 2025-07-21 09:16:51+00:00
I skimmed through it, yeah, such a pathetic article. It's like having the title "Why satellites use carbon fibre (question mark because of illiteracy)" and having the text be too many words that's just repetitions of "Because it's lightweight and strong"...

At least give us some history about who decided on NetBSD, when, and why they picked it without the generic blah blah.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-21 09:17:03+00:00
From the paper:

> The kinematic properties of interstellar interlopers are expected to preserve for the most part the kinematic signatures of their host stars.

That's quite interesting - a cosmic ShotSpotter of sorts. I hadn't considered that the object's track would be roughly still pointing at the star system whence it came, but I suppose in interstellar space, things would move in pretty straight lines.
by pdimitar | 2025-07-21 09:18:03+00:00
> There is hope that LLMs can be used to convert shell scripts to other languages, because they can make the jump that experienced devs have learned to avoid: rewriting from scratch. What else do you do when refactoring in small steps is not feasible?

There were some languages shown in HN that compile to sh/bash (like oilshell[0]). I would think that's also a viable vector of attack but not sure how viable it actually is i.e. maintainers might have moved on for various reasons.

[0] https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils
by pjc50 | 2025-07-21 09:19:07+00:00
It reads a lot like those instagram/magazine profiles of "I get up at 7am and eat healthily" (author actually gets up at 9am and eats junk food on most other days).

Worth noting that this is a relatively immobile king. Various other kings spent a lot of time on:

- hunting for sport

- military campaigns (e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it)

- assizes (mobile courts)

- summer residences (Versailles is a huge, late example of this, but lots of monarchs around the world have had holiday homes of one sort or another)
by MEMORYC_RRUPTED | 2025-07-21 09:19:58+00:00
I mean, same story in Belgium, The Netherlands, and (I'm gonna assume) every other EU government.

Specifically for The Netherlands, https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/demystifying-european-digi... is a good read, from someone that really understands how this works in government.

Sadly, I understand why: they have a tonne of systems, that all, at least somewhat, work, that people know how to use, with established contacts and support contracts. IT departments trained and certified on how to run and deploy MS software. And that's before we start talking about lobbying.

edit: added a link to a good resource about the topic.

We should have started moving over yesterday, but it's a long and difficult process, I just hope we start moving forward on this.