MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rubymamis | 2025-07-31 09:49:31+00:00
> One missing feature that the ChatGPT desktop app has and I think is a good idea for these local LLM apps is a shortcut to open a new chat anytime (Alt + Space), with a reduced UI. It is great for quick questions.

This is exactly what I've implemented for my Qt C++ app: https://www.get-vox.com
by js8 | 2025-07-31 09:50:36+00:00
Israel never really accepted two state solution either (US has been vetoing against it, and together with Israel they still threaten any politician who seriously floats the idea of Palestinian state). There is other evidence as well, but I don't think blaming either party is constructive.

So if neither party accepts the partition, the only conclusion is they will have to learn to live together on the same territory. It's not rocket science, everywhere else in the world this is possible.
by lbriner | 2025-07-31 09:50:49+00:00
I think you are misusing the phrase "tech debt" like many people do.

Not everything that is not perfect is Tech Debt, some of it is just pragmatism. If you end up with two methods doing the same thing, who cares? As long as they are both correct, they cost nothing, might never need any maintenance attention and will never be paid down before the codebase is replaced in 10 years time.

Same with people writing code in a different style to others. If it is unreadable, that isn't tech debt either, it's just a lack of process or lack of someone following the process. Shouldn't be merged = no tech debt.

Adding some code to check edge cases that are already handled elsewhere. Again, who cares? If the code make it unreadable, delete it if you know it isn't needed, it only took 10 seconds to generate. If it stays in place and is understandable, it's not tech debt. Again, not going to pay it down, it doesn't cost anything and worse case is you change one validation and not the other and a test fails, shouldn't take long to find the problem.

Tech debt is specifically borrowing against the right way to do something in order to speed up delivery but knowing that either the code will need updating later to cope with future requirements or that it is definitely not done in a reliable/performant/safe way and almost certainly will need visiting again.
by eadmund | 2025-07-31 09:51:31+00:00
> However, you're abusing a text format for human reading and pretending it's a serialization format.

They should be the same, in order to facilitate human debugging. And we were discussing ASN.1, not its serialisations. Frankly, I thought that it was fairer to compare the S-expression to ASN.1, because both are human-readable, rather than to an opaque blob like:

MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDrEee0Ri4Juz+QfiWYui/9UGSXau/2P8LjnTD8V4Unn+2FAZVGE3kL23bzeoULYv4PeleB3gfm

Sure, that blob is far more space-efficient, but it’s also completely opaque without tooling. Think how many XPKI errors over the years have been due to folks being unable to know at a glance what certificates and keys actually say.
by stefan_ | 2025-07-31 09:51:32+00:00
> In sales it is uniquely easy to identify your contribution since it's literally measured in dollars coming in.

This logic about stops working as soon as you sell something that is not some immediately exchanged mass produced commoditized gadget. Sales people on commission have tons of incentive to saddle the company with demands and imaginary product features they can't actually deliver on and be long gone before the bill comes due.
Ask HN: Am I wasting my time applying for jobs in the US?
by martiuk | 2025-07-31 09:53:09+00:00
I'm sure you're well aware of the dire state of the UK, I've had enough of this country and the ever lowering standard of living.

I've been applying for roles at US companies, I'd consider myself a pretty strong SRE/Platform Engineer, but I realise that being located here is probably going to be a massive barrier, especially with H1Bs being under the spotlight recently.

So I am just wasting my time, or is there something I can do to stand out?
by lolive | 2025-07-31 09:53:10+00:00
Funnily I am interested in this semantic argument. Do LLM trainers actually feed their « beast » with prompts from the past? Especially ones that are human corrections upon false assumptions hallucinated by the LLM? As a non-specialist I would definitely see a lot of value in doing so, but I let you, experts, clarify that point.
Show HN: I built a structured directory to compare AI coding tools
by algo-artist07 | 2025-07-31 09:53:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I was getting frustrated with the flood of AI coding tools. Most lists are just noisy, unstructured link dumps that don't help you decide which tool to actually use.

So, I built the directory I wanted for myself. My goal is to provide signal, not more noise.

What makes it different:

- Structured Analysis: Instead of a feature list, I use a consistent schema to compare tools on developer-centric criteria (IDE integration, offline use, model transparency, etc.).

- Qualitative Scoring: A transparent methodology to give a quick read on a tool's strengths and weaknesses, moving beyond just feature-counting.

- Focus on "Job to Be Done": Helping you find the right tool for a specific task.

This is a v1 solo project. It's a static site generated with a custom Node.js script and hosted on Netlify. I know it’s not perfect and tools are missing. I'm posting here for your feedback to make it better.

I'd love to know:

- Is this approach actually useful to you?

- Is the analysis fair? What am I getting wrong?

- What essential tools should I add next?

Appreciate you taking a look. Thanks!
by lm28469 | 2025-07-31 09:54:38+00:00
You have to decide for yourself because you're the only one that cares in the end. The main problem is that we're easily getting tricked into spending time on things we don't even particularly enjoy or things we enjoy in the instant but know we will regret later. It doesn't matter if you spend your time saving children from starvation or collecting pokemon cards, as long as on your death bed you're not overcome by "did I just waste my life ?" thoughts.

But that's not new:

> Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius—set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words, that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-31 09:54:58+00:00
The other thing about documentation is that it inevitably goes stale.

So the question becomes: is no documentation better or documentation that can be - potentially - entirely out of date, misleading or subtly wrong, because eg they documented the desired behavior vs actual behavior (or vice versa).

I'm generally pro documentation, I'm just fully aware that internal documentation the devs need to write themselves and for themselves... Very rarely gets treated with enough respect to be trustworthy.

So what it comes down to is one person spearheading the efforts for docs while the rest of the team constantly "forgets" it, until they decide it's not worth the effort as soon as the driving force either changes teams or gave up themself.
by cnity | 2025-07-31 09:55:09+00:00
This highlights I think what is an ultimate pitfall of something like Lean. It is something like this: when an assumption is broken or violated in mathematics, the whole field of mathematics can _grow_. Non-euclidean geometry, imaginary numbers, etc are all examples of this. Trying to cram maths into a programming language sounds like it would constrain it, removing the creativity and reducing all maths to a search space.
Show HN: I built an extension that let AI controls my web browser
by djyde | 2025-07-31 09:57:08+00:00
Hey Hackers!

I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while: what if an AI could actually use my browser for me? I mean, not on some virtual machine in the cloud like ChatGPT agent, but right on my own browser.

I finally decided to just build it and see what would happen. I wrote a quick MVP, and honestly, I didn't expect much.

But then... it started doing things. On its own. It figured out how to use search engine to find what I needed, read a webpage to answer my questions, and even it can organize my chaotic mess of tabs into neat groups. It was a genuine "whoa" moment for me.

That's when I knew I was onto something potentially cool. I roped in a designer friend to help me make it usable (so it doesn't just look like my personal science project!), and now I think it's ready for some fresh eyes.

This is super, super early. It can be a bit wonky, and some tasks might fail. To be completely honest, I haven't even figured out the "killer" use case myself yet.

And that's the whole reason I'm posting it here. I'm just incredibly curious to see what happens when other people get their hands on it. What will you even use it for?

You can leave a feedback here or send a feedback on the extension.

Thanks!
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-31 09:57:30+00:00
Your argument rests on rational choice theory, which is occasionally, in limited circumstances, a useful analytical framework, but insofar as it can be operationalized into a trstable form is fairly thoroughly falsified.

If people aren't, as we fairly well know they aren't, perfectly rational utility maximizers, than the fact that people do not consistently take an action or set of actions which would be utility optimal if a given proposition were true is not xounterevidence to the proposition.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-31 09:57:37+00:00
>I love government subsidies through implicit and explicit loan guarantees

Like student loans?

>It’s the reason a 30 year mortgage exists.

Which is a large part of the reason houses cost what they do.

>the bottom 50% of American earners only pay 2.3% of total federal income tax collected,

"Well the poors aren't paying for it, you are" isn't the endorsement you think it is. And the poors still get kicked in the dick by spending driven inflation same as the rest of us anyway.
by darkwater | 2025-07-31 09:57:47+00:00
Well, I've asked ChatGPT with your prompt and came out with a very long comment. Asking to shorten it, we get:

"Figma is basically Google Docs for design — a fast, browser-based tool where multiple people can edit the same UI file in real time. No installs, no emailing files around.

Its magic as a business is the frictionless onboarding (just share a link), viral team adoption, and a freemium model that naturally expands into enterprise contracts. Works cross‑platform, so it spreads fast.

That combo — great product + viral growth + strong enterprise lock‑in — is why it became the design platform and why Adobe was ready to pay billions for it."

In the longer form it was also enthusiastic about the WASM part, but that didn't make the cut.
by lvturner | 2025-07-31 09:57:55+00:00
I want to care, but I also want money to eat, and the guy that isn't caring and doing a fifth as much work as me, is making more than me and getting promoted ahead of me.

Welcome to enterprise, it's not shit because people don't care. People don't care because they are incentivised not to, and those that do care, burn out.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-07-31 09:58:55+00:00
Whitelisting—and more user control in general—seems like such a valuable feature, that they could probably charge for it. Heck, I'd pay $10 a year if I could just customise certain aspects of YouTube and remove all the ads and suggested content.

Whether this is viable or not, I don't know. I'm not sure what the average take per person is from the current model.
by graemep | 2025-07-31 09:59:02+00:00
> anyone who runs an internet facing site and can view traffic knows what I'm talking about

Most of what I see is looking for very specific vulnerabilities - a very high proportion are looking for hidden files and directories being served (e.g. .git, .env) or specific software (e.g. Wordpress), or similar.

In over 20 years of dealing with many mostly smallish businesses the compromises have been:

1. A client who insisted on using Wordpress for one of their sites (against my advice) because they had people who knew it so it was the cheap option. It was easy to see what would happen because those people were not available long term. 2. A very carefully set up server with a hardened kernel etc. I did not set it up so cannot give all details and neither do I know how it was compromised. It was carefully set up because it was a target for political reasons so I would guess it was a targetted attack.

On the other hand I know there have been many vulnerabilities. There have been many vulnerabilities in the applications - the outstanding examples being creating queries by concatenating user input with SQL (no escaping at all) in multiple places across a small site (years ago), and (recently) finding code that called (python) exec on user input. Many other flaws that have been present for years. Not updating OSes, server software and frameworks for many years is usual.

In spite of all that, just those two compromises. You will probably get away with a high degree of bad code and bad practices in deployment and maintenance with a small site.
by Frieren | 2025-07-31 09:59:10+00:00
> There are a lot of idiots out there.

Tech experts things that everybody not as knowledgeable as them are "stupid". The reality is that everybody has blind spots and fall for a scam. Maybe, you will not fall for this one because you are an expert on technology but you may be victim of some other form of scam.

To call victims "idiots" is an attitude that solves nothing. We should make sure that people gets better on-line safety education with good trustful sources starting on school. This will be too late for some people that grow in a different time and may have problems identifying this type of on-line scams, but it is not for younger generations.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-31 09:59:31+00:00
> (also see all the different logics philosophers use to formalise different kinds of argument involving time/modality/probability - there are a lot, but they aren't very "modular" and can't easily be mixed unless someone has solved that since I last looked into it)

From a logic-as-types perspective, modalities turn out to be monads. So the problem of "mixing" modalities is quite similar to the problem of composing monads in programming languages.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-31 10:00:02+00:00
So, std::jthread is basically fixing std::thread. In C++ it's difficult to fix broken standard library features so they just make a new thing and discard the old busted one. Landfill programming.

The fact Rust actually has scoped threads is unrelated, in Rust they can do this because they have working lifetime checking and in C++ such a feature would be meaningless, you're always assumed to have manually ensured the correct lifetimes and they aren't checked.

Generously you could say they're gesturing at the fact C++ decided to bolt the stop flag mechanic to jthreads, so you can have the old broken threads or this newer non-broken threads which also has built-in stop flags. But that's less choice, it's not as though you can't have a stop flag in Rust.
by anyg | 2025-07-31 10:01:10+00:00
I have wanted a tool like this for a while exactly for the reasons you stated! But for me, being able to see score changes (with changelog) since previous release is key. For instance, I started with VS Code + Copilot but realised Cursor is way better. Now, I'm hearing that Copilot has caught up and would like to be on top of that.
by dataflow | 2025-07-31 10:01:51+00:00
> I don't know how to exactly describe it, but I'd suggest it has to do with more autonomy in non-farming businesses, where you are always trying to balance between trying to make the business work and not taking advantage of people. Or if you end up taking advantage of people...

What about all the non-organic farming, use of pesticides/antibiotics/etc., poor treatment of animals (sometimes), water waste in some cases (like almonds in CA), being beholden to & inevitably supporting the wonderful companies that are John Deere and Monsanto, having to use proprietary seeds and IP for such a basic human need, etc.? Some of our largest problems on the planet trace back to modern industrial farming.

To be clear, I love and respect farmers a ton, my comment isn't about them at all. They're amazing and hardworking and anybody in the the business would be dealing with the same problems. I'm just talking about the purity of the business itself that you're talking about. The idea that the job is somehow so morally pure compared to all the other jobs baffles me. Your average local job (waiter, cashier, postal delivery worker, janitor, etc.) would seem to have a much more direct positive and impact on people's happiness and much less of an opportunity to take advantage of other beings, as you put it.
by mprovost | 2025-07-31 10:03:47+00:00
Handling SIGINT (ctrl-c) with child processes is tricky, but a more pervasive problem for Rust CLI programs is handling SIGPIPE. For historical reasons the compiler adds a signal handler before calling main() which ignores SIGPIPE. It means when you pipe your Rust CLI program's output to something like head, instead of being killed by the signal sent when head closes the pipe, you get a write error and usually print an error message instead of silently dying. You can match on the type of write error and skip printing a message when it's from a broken pipe, but a more subtle problem is that the shell sets the exit status of a program killed by a signal to 128 + the signal number, so 141 in the case of a broken pipe. You can emulate this behaviour by checking for a broken pipe and explicitly exiting with a 141 status code, but it's not possible to fully reproduce being killed by a signal. There's been an issue to make this configurable (the latest proposal is via a compiler flag) for years.
by darkwater | 2025-07-31 10:04:01+00:00
> It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.

I know that I'm in a small/medium European company (~400 people total), generally very mindful of how we spend money but this is the exact billing model that would turn us away because too expensive for the features actually used.
by jongjong | 2025-07-31 10:04:14+00:00
I like vibe coding. I've always hated bloated code bases with too many files, too many unnecessary abstractions, too many unnecessary utility functions... The AI is now dishing out punishment; giving people a taste of their own medicine. Complex codebases lead to complex buggy LLM code completions.

If I come across a fugly code base, I don't bother reading it, I just ask Claude what it's doing and I ask Claude to fix it. To me this is a huge advantage because my OCD prevented me from producing fugly code by hand but now I wield Claude like an automatic complexity gun.

Producing that kind of complexity when you know there exists a simpler way is demoralizing, but it's not demoralizing when an LLM does it because it's so low effort.

I just hated thinking about all this mind-numbing nonsense.
by philipp-gayret | 2025-07-31 10:04:26+00:00
I recently switched to Claude Code, I much prefer it (I end up less in cycles of Cursor getting stuck on problems). Before I used Cursor for some months.

> My understanding is that a rule should essentially do the same as if it is put in the prompt directly. Is there a solution to that?

Yes from my understanding Cursor Rule files are essentially an invisible prefix to every prompt. I had some issues in the past with Cursor not picking up rule files until I restarted it (some glitch, probably gone by now.). So put something simple like a "version" or for your rules file and ask it what version of the rules are we following for this conversation just to validate that the process is working.

For Cursor with larger projects I use a set of larger rule files that always apply. Recently I worked with Spotify's Backstage for example and I had it index online documentation on architecture, build instructions, design, development of certain components, project layout. Easily 500+ lines worth of markdown. I tell Cursor where to look, i.e. online documentation of the libraries you use, reference implementations if you have any, good code examples and why they are good, and then it writes its own rule files - I don't write them manually anymore. That has been working really well for me. If you have a common technology stack you or way of working you can also try throwing in some examples from https://github.com/PatrickJS/awesome-cursorrules

For a codebase containing both good and bad code; maybe you can point it to a past change where code was refactored from bad to good, so it can write out what why you prefer which style and how to manage the migration from bad to good. That said; the tools are not perfect. Even with rules the bad output still can happen but larger rule files describing what you'd like to do and what to avoid makes the chance significantly smaller and the tool more pleasant to work with. I recently switched to Claude Code because Cursor tended to get "stuck" on the same problem which I don't really experience with Claude Code but YMMV.
by donjoe0 | 2025-07-31 10:04:41+00:00
Ah yes, the "independent" news outlet that was totally not set up by the European version of the National Endowment for Democracy, i.e. the CIA's public propaganda arm. Also totally not funded by the Canadian government, also totally not aggressively pushed right from its inception just a few months before the Ukraine war by Twitter's algorithms to people who never chose to subscribe to it. https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/people-overestimate-the-us...

Nope, just honest grassroots journalism funded by regular people and not pushing any government's agenda.
by qcnguy | 2025-07-31 10:06:18+00:00
Why do you need regulation for any of that? Devices with parental controls exist already. Special browsers with parental controls exist, just for kids. Do you think Jane Smith, L3 civil servant, will do a great job of taking over product management for the entire software industry despite having a BA in English Lit and having never heard of JIRA?

There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a power grab by governments and now the people who trusted the state are making surprised pikachu faces. "We didn't mean like this", they cry, whilst studiously ignoring all the people who predicted exactly this outcome.
by gorbypark | 2025-07-31 10:06:22+00:00
For sure, it was a bit of a simplified example, but you can imagine prompts that are asking the LLM to touch dozens of files at once. A lot of people will use fairly high level requests, "make a screen in my app that does this" and that ends up making screens, components, queries, local state changes, etc etc. It adds up quick having so much in the context at once (and if you /clear the context and ask it to do anything more than one off changes in a file, it's gonna grep and glob it's way through your code looking for the right files)
by encom | 2025-07-31 10:06:59+00:00
Here's an amusing thing to try on anything with SSH exposed. These log files go back a month.

# zcat -f /var/log/auth.log* | awk '/sshd/ && /Invalid user/ && $6 != "from" {print $6}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -bnr | head -n 30 5190 #redacted: my domain name 3063 admin 1891 #redacted: another domain name 931 user 724 ubuntu 287 test 268 solv 206 odoo15 200 solana 197 sol 184 ubnt 173 wialon 170 Antminer 169 guest 168 odoo17 159 oracle 157 postgres 151 git 150 support 142 ftp 135 ftpuser 120 debian 118 pi 91 nginx 85 baikal 82 docker 81 perl 74 operator 74 deploy 72 dev