MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-07-18 03:26:21+00:00
I'm more interested in ethics than I am in law. Sit down in a court room for a day if you want to see how the infallible law fucks person after person who committed a vitcimless crime of ignorance, or being too poor to get a good lawyer. Or don't, if you don't want to lose faith in "due process."

So, ethically, I don't think it's ok for companies to dangle a 30 year old videogame around saying "you can't play this because we might want to sell it to you again someday. And by the way the version we sell to you may not be the version you treasured from your childhood, we might fuck up the aspect ratio, or cut content, just because we don't give a shit. Neener neener."

Foolish nonsense. I want to play old videogames. If they sold it to me, I'd buy it off them. I'm not ok that I need to re buy the same game ten times. You used to be able to play old games on new systems by just sticking the disk in. Now you don't even get a disk.

The games industry is rotting. I don't care if companies lose money from emulation (they're not, because they aren't selling what we're buying). Enshittify away, I will continue to rip roms and play them on the device I please, and if that device is sold to me with a garbage SD card full of 10,000 bunk roms, so be it.
by mdavidn | 2025-07-18 03:27:25+00:00
Years ago, I bought a hub similar to that Satechi one. It worked great until I unplugged my laptop. Then my home network would die. After some sleuthing, I realized the RJ45 interface repeated any packets received, creating a network loop and confusing my Ethernet switch. I contacted Satechi about this obvious defect. Their support team insisted this was by design and told me to unplug USB-C power from the hub whenever I disconnected my laptop, which … kinda defeats the point?
by iambateman | 2025-07-18 03:28:27+00:00
I’m a TALL developer, so Laravel, Livewire, Tailwind, Alpine.

It’s nice because 3/4 of those are well-known but not “default” industry choices and it still handles them very well.

So there’s a Laravel CRM builder called Filament which is really fun to work in. Claude does a great job with that. It’s a tremendous amount of boilerplate with clear documentation, so it makes sense that Claude would do well.

The thing I appreciate though is that CC as an agent is able to do a lot in one go.

I’ve also hooked CC up to a read-only API for a client, and I need to consume all of the data on that API for the transition to a Filament app. Claude is currently determining the schema, replicating it in Laravel, and doing a full pull of API records into Laravel models, all on its own. It’s been running for 10 minutes with no interruption and I expect will perform flawlessly at that.

I invest a lot of energy in prompt preparation. My prompts are usually about 200 words for a feature, and I’ll go back and forth with an LLM to make sure it thinks it’s clear enough.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-07-18 03:28:30+00:00
For this script I have "implemented HTTP" using printf, an ash builtin.

The TCP networking is done with orginal netcat reading the HTTP from a pipe.

The TLS is handled by a TLS forward proxy listening on the loopback.

The orginal netcat and other TCP clients I use, like tcpclient from djb's ucspi or tcploop from haproxy, are not part of the NetBSD base system but are easily added when I compile the OS. For Linux I use a custom distribution I make myself, without LFS. Busybox has ash and nc together in the same binary.

These TCP client programs are stationary targets, they will work reliably year after year, and small enough that I can store and compile them quickly even on computers with modest resources. Python is constantly evolving, a moving target, and much larger.

I wrote a utility in C89 that "implements HTTP" called yy025. This is produced using GCC, specifically flex, which is intsalled on all systems I use. flex is part of the NetBSD toolchain. It's a requirement for compiling the OS. It's a requirement for building many GNU userland utilities. It's even a listed requirement when building the Linux kernel.

yy025 is what I normally use in shell scripts when I need to generate HTTP. It reads URLs on stdin and outputs customised HTTP to stdout. There is no "third party dependency" for HTTP. This is a "first party" program. I wrote it.

But this script to fetch YouTube metadata doesn't use yy025. It's just some printf statements.
Show HN: Cursor Autopilot – Control your Cursor chat via Telegram and more
by singularitygz | 2025-07-18 03:29:45+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Guojun, creator of Cursor Autopilot.

Most of my day using Cursor involves babysitting—I sit there reviewing the AI agent’s output, hitting "continue," and repeating. Honestly, it's tedious, especially since those 2-minute waits always tempt me into another round of doomscrolling.

So I thought: wouldn’t it be great if I could step away, grab coffee, or just relax while still managing Cursor from my phone?

I quickly hacked together Cursor Autopilot, a simple extension that's now available on the Cursor Extension marketplace. It sends your Cursor chat summaries directly to Telegram or Feishu, where you can reply with a quick "1" to continue or even type out new instructions—no need to stay glued to your desk.

Setup is super simple, and I've been dogfooding it happily over the past few days. It's open-source too, so you can easily add your favorite messaging platform like Slack or WhatsApp.

I'd love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to drop questions or feedback here, or open an issue directly on GitHub.
by Gigachad | 2025-07-18 03:29:53+00:00
It’s not really PD. It’s just they aren’t usb c spec compliant at all. USB-C has the power pins at 0v by default, and you have to signal there is a connected device to activate 5v. While usb-a has 5v hot all the time.

Since there aren’t any active chips in these cables, an A to C cable happens to have 5V hot on the usb c side, but this should not be relied on as it isn’t true for C to C
by 9rx | 2025-07-18 03:30:01+00:00
> Linus Torvalds given as an example of self-taught engineers yet he has a masters degree in CS.

The example was Torvalds building Linux. Linux was written before he attained a CS degree.

> Higher education isn’t just about what you learn, it’s about learning how to study and learn.

You'd have to have screwed up your life pretty bad to not have already learned to study and learn before reaching the point of going to a place of higher learning. But that wasn't a problem for Torvalds anyway. It is well known that he was writing software since he was around 11 years old. He is unquestionably self-taught, as the term is normally used.

Higher education is about gaining access to machinery that mere mortals can't afford on their own. Linus' university story is significant because that was where he was first able to use Unix. It is unlikely that Linux would have come to be without that experience.

But that is also the contention around a modern CS degree. What is the "Unix" of our time that you can't reasonably access without going to university?
by solid_fuel | 2025-07-18 03:30:55+00:00
That's true but you can get creative in a case where you don't need to page things back in from the disk. You could do something like powering off the entire system (assuming you have this kind of memory in the CPU too) while you're waiting for a disk read, if there's nothing else to do. So I could see big potential for power savings in things like phones and other battery powered devices.
by komali2 | 2025-07-18 03:31:59+00:00
I don't think they should, and just because I'm a filthy commie. I disagree that older works are competing in a meaningful way - the market has demonstrated it's happy to pay again and again for the same game on new platforms, especially if it comes with upgrades or QOL improvements. Nintendo could easily make money selling a new version of Mario 2 with new levels by og Nintendo level designers. I'd buy it and I have that game on like five different systems.

Not to mention, it's not like I'm not gonna buy tears of the kingdom even though I like to occasionally replay ocarina of time or whatever.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-18 03:32:02+00:00
This is wholesome. Now, I’m happy that there is a good reason for the way I name and structure files/folders, especially when working in a team.

I was part of a team that built a large web application with Pocket PC interaction capabilities for clinics and physicians in 2002-2003. I scaffolded the front-end, worked on it, while tinkering with the back-end (worked with a brilliant programmer), and built the entire Pocket PC App.

I met the team maintaining the application system after 10+ years around 2015-2016. The lead, who was once the junior we hired, talked about the naming convention and organization and how they followed it for a decade plus. I felt happy and proud of my work.
by lxgr | 2025-07-18 03:32:02+00:00
USB-C hosts and power adapters are only allowed to provide 5V if they can sense a downstream device (either via a network of resistors or via explicit PD negotiation).

Out-of-spec USB-C devices sometimes skip that, and out-of-spec USB-C chargers often (somewhat dangerously) always supply 5V, so the two mistakes sort of cancel out.
by geor9e | 2025-07-18 03:32:26+00:00
Because the USB Consortium made a terrible mistake. Instead of speccing USB-PD power supplies to default to 5V <3A when there are no resistors in the port of the other device, the default is do nothing. So in order to be in spec, you have to refuse to charge non-compliant ports. This means the compliant power supplies are worse, in a way. So you need to use a "dumb" USB-A power supply and USB-A to C cable, which does default to 5V <3A to matter what. As for why some devices choose to use non-compliant ports - I assume it's extreme cheapness. They save a penny on a resistor.
by skydhash | 2025-07-18 03:32:36+00:00
I like solving problem. But I also want the problem to stay solved. And if I happen to see a common pattern between problems, then I build a solution generator.

Maybe because I don’t think in terms of code. I just have this mental image that is abstract, but is consistent. Code is just a tool to materialize it, just like words are a tool to tell a story. By the time I’m typing anything, I’m already fully aware of my goals. Designing and writing are two different activities.

Reading LLMs code is jarring because it changes the pattern midway. Like an author smashing the modern world and middle earth together. It’s like writing an urban fantasy and someone keeps interrupting you with some hard science-fiction ideas.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-07-18 03:33:33+00:00
Given that you work in IT and not development, I should point out that IT is less intellectually demanding than software engineering. I am less skeptical of self-taught IT people because the nature of the work is almost entirely around familiarity with hardware that fits together like Legos, and proficiency with software tools that are designed for maintaining systems without much theoretical knowledge or mental reckoning required.

>In a general sense, I find the self taught to be simply more inventive problem solvers. What you are using as a critique— “Self-taught individuals don’t understand what they’re missing” —I would say that can be a strength.

It is true that an outside perspective can be useful sometimes. However, more knowledge tends to be a net benefit. If you don't have a certain amount of training, this ingorance-driven "inventiveness" overwhelmingly turns into reinventing wheels and spending major effort on naive approaches to problems that are known to be intractible.

I think it is easier for a trained individual to learn to be creative, than it is for a self-taught individual to learn to not mess things up.
by hirvi74 | 2025-07-18 03:34:25+00:00
I have a degree in computer science, and I have been a professional full-stack developer for almost 9 years. I could probably not solve the problem in your first link in 25 minutes. I know exactly how I would solve it, conceptually and what data structures I would use, but I am not sure I'd get the adjacent mines part correct on the first attempt.

Then again, this is nothing like the type of problems I work on a daily basis.
by programjames | 2025-07-18 03:36:53+00:00
Reply to your edit:

1. Keyword: "your". Your version of empathy is not scalable. It's literally, "my way or the highway," and a bunch of grandstanding on things pretty much everyone agrees on, but you must be evil and not if you don't agree with my more radical proposals.

2. I consider "I don't want to die, thus I shouldn't kill others," to have more of a Kantian/evolutionary genesis than an empathetic one. For the most part, all the people that failed to recognize this were killed off and weren't allowed to enter into the Kingdom of Ends. Unless you're talking about emotivism, I don't see how empathy has anything to do with morality/society, except as a quick symmetry trick to help you make smarter decisions (while you could logically deduce that the rational response to a member of your group being killed is to punish the killer to prevent more killings, if you just assume symmetry, then things that are bad for you are bad for others, and taking those actions will get you punished).

3. 5% as many people die from starvation or exposure as suicide in the United States (that's 1–2,000/year). If people want food, or want shelter, they can find it (99.8% of homeless people do), even if it's not the particular food or shelter they want. What do you actually want? "Food, shelter, and all the basic necessities of life" are available. Almost no one is arguing that we should let people just die. It really sounds like you're arguing for a flavor of ice cream, but you don't even know what flavor that is.
by whyenot | 2025-07-18 03:36:55+00:00
> My favorite use-case for AI is writing logs

You mean like this?

[2025-07-17 18:05] Pallet #3027 stacked: Coast‐live oak, 16" splits, 0.22 cord. [2025-07-17 18:18] Moisture check → 14 % (prime burning condition). [2025-07-17 18:34] Special request tagged: “Larina—aromatic madrone, please!” [2025-07-17 18:59] Squirrel incident logged: one (1) cheeky Sciurus griseus absconded with wedge.

...or something more like this?

Base-10 (log10) handy values -------------------------------- x log10(x) ------------------ 2 0.3010 e 0.4343 10 1.0000 42 1.6232 1000 3.0000 1e6 6.0000
by userbinator | 2025-07-18 03:37:46+00:00
It's results like this which put to rest the "myth" that "10x" programmers don't exist according to some people. In fact, it's been my experience that "100x" or even "1000x" programmers exist. (Fabrice Bellard is a prominent example of the latter.) For your given practice problem I'd probably spend more time reading it and writing the code than thinking, unless I'm asked to use something like an APL-family language in which case the majority of the time would be spent reading the problem description.

(Full-disclosure: mostly self-taught with several decades of experience.)
by acheron9383 | 2025-07-18 03:37:48+00:00
Man that is a lot of computer to put into that product for as little money as possible. I'm not intending to excuse the products with likely bad firmware causing most of these issues, especially Ethernet PHYs. Though, in my professional experience doing embedded device firmware, Ethernet PHYs are always the biggest pain, hands down. The firmware included with them has many many ways to configure it wrong, and the defaults are typically just random settings, not a reasonable configuration. Just getting the drivers even running sometimes involves just knowing a few tricks. Anyways, it doesn't surprise me many have trouble working right, especially when they indicate they are all running OEM firmware essentially.
by zach | 2025-07-18 03:40:06+00:00
The fact that it has no clearly discernible purpose is evidence for it being something to be enjoyed for aesthetics, spiritual purposes, or, most likely I think, entertainment. Attach some string and it is a durable, highly portable puzzle and even two-player game: https://tinkerings.org/2020/06/17/roman-dodecahedrons-part-i...
by rjh29 | 2025-07-18 03:40:13+00:00
Short for Not Invented Here syndrome... when developers ignore existing libraries or solutions and implement their own version. Usually this is meant negatively, i.e. developers thinking they -need- to implement their own version, at great expense, when they could have just used an off-the-shelf library. However this article is positing that writing your own code is a good thing in some cases.
by geor9e | 2025-07-18 03:40:40+00:00
USB-PD hubs are very annoying. Devices with no battery on a hub (Raspberry Pi etc) will just get hard rebooted if anything else gets plugged into the same hub. I looked at a lot of hubs and they all behaved this way. They all cut power to everything, then re-negotiate the power allowance each device gets from the shared wattage, every time anything new connects. I could not find a hub that honored existing power contracts and gave new devices the remainder. My guess is the average customer expect the newest plugged in device to get max power (at the expense of everything else) or they return it to the store thinking it's broken.
by kstenerud | 2025-07-18 03:41:23+00:00
I started programming at age 8, and finally went to college for it at age 22 (although not an actual computer science degree). That was almost 30 years ago.

Yes, there is something to learning in your own way, in the "play" explorative style that humans are so very well adapted to.

However, there is definitely something to be said for proper training by a professional. A big part of my early career involved unlearning bad habits, learning the compsci tools that my peers already had, and learning to think holistically.

It's a lot like learning guitar. You can learn it yourself, and some people can even really excel that way. But maaaaaan, when you've been trained by a professional, the effort required to play well goes WAY down thanks to the centuries of knowledge, skills, and techniques you're taught. All the bad habits you DON'T pick up are so worth it.

There will be talented, creative people coming from both paths; professional instruction isn't going to diminish that. All it does is amplify what you already have.
by donatj | 2025-07-18 03:42:30+00:00
I had my own decent into madness this spring.

I slowly replaced my home network piece by piece trying to find the bottleneck that was causing my gigabit internet to top out at ~300kbps in my office on the other side of the house from the modem.

After replacing the Ethernet cable run from the second floor to the basement with fiber optic... And the switches in between... And seeing no improvement... I tried a different computer with a built-in ethernet port on the same cable, and pulled 920kbps.

The problem... Was my Caldigit Thunderbolt Dock. I replaced it with an OWC one from Facebook marketplace for cheap and it solved the problem... Roughly $500 in. I'm still angry I didn't check that early earlier.

My network is 10 gigabit now though.
by reactordev | 2025-07-18 03:42:47+00:00
Lambda’s being pulled from storage or containers being pulled from ECR is negligible. The difference here is in the container layers. If you build a small container with alpine it’s not that bad.

Not to try to convince otherwise. Just that it isn’t as bad as it used to be. Our Golang lambdas have 2ms more startup time than our JavaScript lambdas.

Lambda is just a fancy CGI-BIN
by nsoonhui | 2025-07-18 03:42:52+00:00
But why is this surprising at all? Self-taught engineers most likely than not have the intrinsic motivation that CS graduates lack, who got into the field because of peer pressure or money.

And the raw talent too, that someone can master multiple disciplines is a sign of intellectual dexterity. Not too say CS graduates are not talented but self taught ones master more cognitive fields, which aid in their programming tasks because programming is a cognitively demanding job.
by loocao | 2025-07-18 03:43:25+00:00
I built PetPet-Generator in a weekend—now it cranks out 25 k “pet-pet” GIFs per hour. That’s either a love-letter to the modern web stack or a damning indictment of how little compute it takes to make the internet lose its mind over a floating hand.

Your turn: upload your CEO’s LinkedIn headshot, set the squish to 11, and watch Slack implode. Privacy? Zero server uploads—your browser does all the work, so even your browser history stays cleaner than your conscience.

Is this peak creative freedom or just weaponized dopamine? Let the HN jury decide.
by komali2 | 2025-07-18 03:44:11+00:00
One thing I'm slightly anxious about in this new LLM world is whether the prices I'm paying are sustainable. I crank the fuck out of cursor and I think we're paying like 40 bucks a month for the privilege. Is this early Uber where it was unbelievable how cheap the rides were? In 2030 am I going to have gotten dependent on ai assisted levels of productivity, be making client and customer promises based on that expectation, but suddenly find myself looking at 1k+ bills, now that all the ai companies need to actually make money?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-18 03:46:09+00:00
The issue is that there shouldn't be a case where it's impossible to override it, because then the problem is unfixable when the misconfiguration occurs in that case.

It's also overloading what HSTS is supposed to be for. Normally if you go to a site via HTTP, it loads without comment, which is less secure than loading a site via HTTPS that has an expired or self-signed certificate. HSTS it to say, don't do that.

Allowing the site to tell the user agent to do something according to the wishes of the site owner in a way that can't be overridden by the user is not something that user agents should ever do.
by throaway955 | 2025-07-18 03:46:45+00:00
Look guy, your initial post was about how people sat around watching Netflix during Covid and how that's terrible for you and unproductive.

First off, a heck of a lot of those things that you are calling productive, are really just physical activity. Going for a bike ride is good for you, literally. The sense of achievement is just a side effect. If you had a pill that could replicate the effects of a 30 min bike ride, people would sit around eating those pills. And they'd be extremely healthy and happy.

Secondly, Covid was a time when people were culturally and legally obligated to stay inside and keep away from other people.

UBI does not come with those constraints. So no, it's not the same. People will not sit around watching Netflix at the rate they did during Covid. Because they are not compelled to stay inside the house at the risk of being deemed a menace to society.

I did read what you said and I do understand. You said that you can't go do things other than go to the office because you chose an expensive lifestyle. Congratulations. UBI will not cover that and it shouldn't. It is a universal BASIC income.

Saying addiction requires treatment for many people does not imply it is a disease. Addiction treatment existed before the disease model and I don't think of it as a disease in the same way as cancer etc. So that's your own conflict that you're projecting onto me. Much of addiction treatment is treating emotions and rationales that addicts may not even be aware of anymore, sometimes purposefully, sometimes not.

>No. That is one of the excuses they use to justify their poor choices. I know because I used the same justification.

That's your experience with one drug (alcohol). Frankly, it comes across as naive. Many people can not quit by themselves, even if they want to. Not to mention hard drugs like heroin, crack, meth, benzos. You really are trying to say that years of use of those drugs can be stopped by just "deciding?" For every individual? Simply untrue.

>which I thought was better between the two with a rationale.

I get it, believe me. Im saying your rationale is simplistic and that both choices are subpar and neither should not be acceptable.