MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Fix your outdated GitHub docs on autopilot
by NeelDas | 2025-07-28 15:57:55+00:00
In my 15+ years as a developer, one of the most frustrating problems I've seen across teams is outdated documentation. I’ll be honest, I skip it myself. You ship a feature and move on. Then a month later, someone is onboarding or debugging and runs into stale docs that no longer reflect the code.

I tried fixing this with tools like Swagger and Sphinx-autodoc, but they only work for narrow use cases like OpenAPI or annotations. They don’t help with the high-level stuff like onboarding tutorials, SDK guides, or user-facing examples. You still have to keep things like docstrings in sync, and it’s a manual burden.

LLMs helped a bit. Tools like Cursor and Copilot let you prompt for doc updates, and they work to some extent. But you have to remember to prompt after every change, figure out the right context manually, and hope your teammates don’t overwrite things in their own AI sessions. And if you're not careful, the updated docs lose their original structure or style.

So I built DeepDocs — a GitHub-native AI app that keeps your documentation in sync with your codebase automatically. Once installed, it listens to your commits, detects doc drift, and opens a clean branch with suggested updates. No prompting. No context setup. No forgetting.

DeepDocs understands both your code and your docs in full context. It updates only what’s necessary and leaves your formatting intact. You can also trigger a full Deep Scan to fix outdated docs across your entire repo in one go. It works with monorepos, external docs repos, integrates easily with popular doc generators like Docusaurus or MkDocs, and fits naturally into your existing GitHub flow.

What I’m most proud of is that it works like CI for documentation. You don’t need to change your habits. Just commit your code and let DeepDocs handle the rest.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-28 15:58:35+00:00
Not a big deal at all. Maybe 30 seconds at a time.

Whenever I hear sirens, I always think "Someone is having a worse day than I am."

Around here, we are pretty solicitous of emergency vehicles. We pull over, or don't enter an intersection, if we hear sirens. Every now and then, some inflamed hemorrhoid cuts off the fire truck, but it's rare.
by draismaa | 2025-07-28 15:58:47+00:00
We open-sourced Scenario, a tiny framework to simulate and test AI agents by using another AI agent — much like how self-driving cars are tested in controlled environments before real-world deployment.

The idea: if you wouldn’t deploy an autonomous vehicle without simulation, why would you deploy an AI agent without pressure-testing it first?

Scenario lets you: Describe multi-turn user flows (e.g. “book a flight and cancel it”) Set success criteria ("user got confirmation + refund info") Have one agent simulate the user, testing how another agent performs the task Debug regressions, track failures, iterate on behavior

It’s like writing unit tests, but for conversations.

Why? Traditional evals fall short when testing multi-step flows, memory handling, tool use, or goal alignment. Inspired by simulation in autonomous vehicle testing, where cars are exposed to rare, edge-case situations at scale, Scenario allows similar validation loops for AI agents.

Instead of hoping your support bot or agent workflow handles complexity… you simulate it:

Works with any agent-framework you define

Minimal setup required. There are a few starter examples in the repo: https://github.com/langwatch/scenario

We’d love feedback from the HN community:

What test patterns do you (want to) use for agent workflows?

Thanks!
by resters | 2025-07-28 15:58:58+00:00
Suppose there is an LLM that has a very small context size but reasons extremely well within it. That LLM would be useful for a different set of tasks than an LLM with a massive context that reasons somewhat less effectively.

Any dimension of LLM training and inference can be thought of as a tradeoff that makes it better for some tasks, and worse for others. Maybe in some scenarios a heavily quantized model that returns a result in 10ms is more useful than one that returns a result in 200ms.
by jstrong | 2025-07-28 15:59:01+00:00
imagine some people started using hammers as weapons, leading to some gruesome murders vividly depicted by the news. as a result, construction companies started advertising that this house was built without the use of ANY hammers. that's how I feel about cookies.

cookies are not the problem. spyware is the problem. the way cookies work is, the server includes a "SET-COOKIE" header in its response. it is literally a request, which has no power, other than your computer deciding to store the data locally and include the cookie as a header in its subsequent requests.

somehow instead of us collectively relying on our own user agents to not comply with requests from remote servers that are not in our interest, we settled on deciding the cookie itself is a dangerous mechanism, which is stupid.
by shkkmo | 2025-07-28 15:59:05+00:00
> these are apps of commercial data-sharing/selling businesses, not some 'official' gov app for the benefit of the citizens.

While there are a few of commercial apps that can integrate now, The goal is to have every navigation/gps app have the ability to do this. This can also be done by privacy friendly apps.

> Why do these commercial entities get to influence public traffic lights?

The commercial entities don't influence anything, they provide a tool for their users to influence the lights.

> And due to the inherent red-queen arms race

What arms race is inherent here? Traffic isn't (or shouldn't be) a competition but a cooperation.

Your whole comment seems weird because the main point of the article us that most people seem unwilling to change navigation apps to take advantage of this feature so widespread adoption will wait till the apps people are already using (and which already get all that data) support the standard.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-07-28 15:59:09+00:00
> I'm getting pretty tired of the EU trying to shove internet-crippling regulations down my throat

And I'm getting tired of people pulling out pitchforks without reading anything. This is how democracies end up electing people like Trump. There are no regulations to require age verification here. The EU is simply giving guidelines for implementing harmonized age verification across the EU if any member states or companies that do business in the EU want to use it instead of making people scan ID cards like they currently do and making the receiver of said scans have to understand updates to the designs of the various ID cards used throughout the EU.
by eawgewag | 2025-07-28 15:59:24+00:00
tbh, claude code is the only product that feels like its made by people who have actually used AI tooling on legacy codebases

for pretty much every other tool i've used, you walk away from it with the overwhelming feeling that whoever made this has never actually worked at a company in a software engineering team before

i realize this isn't an answer with satisfactory evidence-based language. but I do believe that there's a core `product-focus` difference between claude with other tools
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-28 15:59:41+00:00
I've been working on polishing accessibility features for a hobby web app, mostly out of curiosity to see what a deep dive would look like.

Some of it is definitely UX polish, like if a button can be pressed to toggle a sidebar, then ESC should dismiss the sidebar and return focus to the button that toggled it. And when the sidebar opens, focus should be moved to the top of the sidebar.

Though you can also get trapped in a fractal of polish-chasing. When it comes to screen readers and live-content like a rich chat app or MUD client, I'm not sure how you would target anything more broad than, say, Safari + VoiceOver on macOS and then some other combo on Windows. You quickly realize the behavior you see is an idiosyncrasy in the screen reader itself.
by bennyg | 2025-07-28 15:59:51+00:00
I built https://www.stoodious.app for my wife while she was studying for her California Real Estate Broker's Exam. She was frustrated with the price gouging on text books, or being the "state-of-the-art" study platforms being video only, having no/poor mobile UX or just feeling outright dated.

So I built Stoodious as a study guide platform that intends to give you the material and get out of your way, as opposed to the engagement-driving gamification of others. One of the killer features is being able to drill practice questions related to the specific study section you're working on - e.g. 20-30 questions about water rights, encumbrances or calculating GRM. Frequently my wife found herself studying vocab for a section but having to skim through a 100-question practice test to find related questions.

I extended the material to all 50 states' basic real estate licensing exam and am looking to add even more "professional exam" material.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-28 16:00:17+00:00
> I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership

All culture depends on leadership maintaining it. They have the power to not only set culture, mostly, but even more so they have the power to break culture. You can't have a bottom-up culture that'll withstand leadership ignoring or breaking it.

If leadership doesn't inspire trust, that'll spread through the rest of the company very quickly.
Show HN: RipeKiwis – Self Inquiry for the serious meditator
by zenape | 2025-07-28 16:00:19+00:00
edit typo:

www.ripekiwis.com

Made a simple guided self inquiry tool.

Self inquiry is a technique to realize your true self from the delusion of thoughts made popular by the great teacher Maharshi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-enquiry_(Ramana_Maharshi)

If you're suffering or have the burning desire to find out who you are, give it a go.
by gus_massa | 2025-07-28 16:00:35+00:00
Someone had this idea, but from a static laser tower https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376376 (343 points | 4March 2021 | 250 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28793660 (317 points | October 2021 | 161 comments). I'd be very afraid of a missed shots or reflections impacting an eye, also the fire hazard.

Ans there is also a recent post where someone use a similar device to light the mosquito https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005200 (20 points | May 2025 | 5 comments) and you must give the final bow that sound safer. (Protip: Buy an Electric Fly Swatter)
by mattlondon | 2025-07-28 16:00:37+00:00
Yes but they are part of the lived experience of a large part of the country.

So these are not some dusty forgotten thing from history books that people might read about, it was stuff they saw on TV and is back in the news whenever a round-number anniversary comes up etc.

The point I was trying to make is that quite shocking bad things happened semi-recently, and more shocking bad things continue to happen. It appears in the news over and over and over about people being radicalised online.

I get why people think this is a good idea - you need to prove age to buy knives and cigarettes etc, so they think "why not" for porn and other "adult" things online.
by tetha | 2025-07-28 16:00:55+00:00
This area of security always feels a bit weird because ideally, you should think about your assumptions being subverted.

For example, our development teams are using modern, stable libraries in current versions, have systems like Sonar and Snyk around, blocking pipelines for many of them, images are scanned before deployment.

I can assume this layer to be well-secured to the best of their ability. It is most likely difficult to find an exploit here.

But once I step a layer downwards, I have to ask myself: Alright, what happens IF a container gets popped and an attacker can run code in there? Some data will be exfiltrated and accessible, sure, but this application server should not be able to access more than the data it needs to access to function. The data of a different application should stay inaccessible.

As a physical example - a guest in a hotel room should only have access to their own fuse box at most, not the fuse box of their neighbours. A normal person (aka not a youtuber with big eye brows) wouldn't mess with it anyway, but even if they start messing around, they should not be able to mess with their neighbour.

And this continues: What if the database is not configured correctly to isolate access? We have, for example, isolated certain critical application databases into separate database clusters - lateral movement within a database cluster requires some configuration errors, but lateral movement onto a different database cluster requires a lot more effort. And we could even further. Currently we have one production cluster, but we could isolate that into multiple production clusters which share zero trust between them. An even bigger hurdle putting up boundaries an attacker has to overcome.
by naikrovek | 2025-07-28 16:02:01+00:00
> Yeah but this is industry standard

we don't have to accept it. but people say "it's just how we do it" and suddenly people just accept it.

i really feel like our society is going to collapse soon, if it hasn't already begun to. the amount of total crap that people are put through just so that ads can be more targeted to users. we are creating a hellscape for privacy and freedom just so people click on ads. it is pure and complete insanity, and no one cares.
by k310 | 2025-07-28 16:02:20+00:00
I couldn't find the Windows reference in the article and various links.

I did find a reference [0] elsewhere.

Apologies if I missed something.

> According to other sources, the head of Aeroflot has not changed his password since 2022, and the company's infrastructure was running on outdated versions of Windows XP and 2003. "The cybersecurity of Russia's key infrastructure is basically at the high school level," the NEXTA agency noted . [1]

> People are commenting on the event on social media.

> “Jesus, a national airline with a three-year-old password? That’s negligence on a new level. No wonder the hackers got their way.” “It looks like they didn’t even pay for licenses. The domain controller in one of the published images didn’t even have Windows activated. So updates were out of the question.” “The password is said to be 1234.”

Nexta: [1]

> Aeroflot got hacked because of a three-year-old password — a state-level IT embarrassment

> The Belarusian hacktivist group Cyber Partisans BY, who breached Aeroflot, claim the airline’s CEO hadn’t changed his password since 2022. The company’s cybersecurity? A total joke: they’re still running Windows XP and Server 2003, and employees ignore even the most basic digital hygiene. The hack was only a matter of time.

> Here’s what we know: Hackers wiretapped employees for over a year and downloaded all internal communications The entire passenger flight history has been leaked Some of the stolen data will reportedly be published soon

> The cybersecurity of Russia’s key infrastructure is basically running at middle school level.

[0] https://www-forum24-cz.translate.goog/hackeri-pronikli-do-sy...

[1] https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1949839009586298962
by StillBored | 2025-07-28 16:02:53+00:00
Checksumming doesn't prevent 'bit rot', it can only detect it, which if your detecting it with modern hardware, its likely because your not using ECC ram somewhere.

Every modern harddrive, and most if not all nvme/sata SSDs have built in error correction as part of the encode/decode of your data to the media/flash, Combined with link layer data integrity protection/etc the most likely place for data corruption is low end intel machines without ECC ram, or really old arm designs that don't have cache/interconnect protections, which don't have ECC ram either.

So, the drive usually has far better error correction and detection than your getting with these software algorithms and running the mdadm, scrubbing is more than sufficient to detect basically 100% of 'bitrot'.

There is a ton of false information all over the internet about RAID1 vs RAID5/6, and this article is in the same boat WRT why one would prefer RAID1 vs one of those. (Clue, it has absolutely nothing to do with data integrity).

Pretty much everyone running a home NAS is going to be better off with just a RAID5 + regular scrubbing, vs all this other nonsense. For people who want something a bit better RAID6+scrubbing and then a DIX/DIF enabled path. I think your more likely to hit a critical ZFS bug, than have a problem with a well maintained raid5 setup running on reliable hardware. Think ECC + working AER/MCE/etc RAS reporting. Nevermind that pretty much none of these applications close the loop on their own data manipulation and that fancy new database your running overwriting the wrong record won't be saved by anything other than a good snapshot/backup mechanism.
by dietr1ch | 2025-07-28 16:04:13+00:00
I think it just abuses on how reading a few contiguous cache lines at random isn't a whole lot more expensive than reading a single random byte.

I found myself never wanting to use binary heaps, and instead use a wider one with an arity that can use at least a whole cache line, if not multiple ones after I started experimenting with my priority queues. Wider nodes meant fewer jumps, and jumping between nodes was more expensive (time, cache misses) than the work done at each node.
by mrkeen | 2025-07-28 16:04:29+00:00
> parse with the lalr generated parser, then if that rejects your string because the program was ill formed, call the hand rolled one for guesswork/diagnostics

This feels like a recipe for disaster. If the hand-rolled parser won't match a formal grammar, why would it match the generated parser?

The poor programmer will be debugging the wrong thing.

It reminds me of my short stint writing C++ where I'd read undefined memory in release mode, but when I ran it under debug mode it just worked.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-28 16:04:51+00:00
Organisational sociopaths: Rarely challenged, often promoted. Why? [pdf] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242338489_Organisat...

Deconstructing the corporate psychopath: an examination of deceptive behavior https://www.emerald.com/rbf/article-abstract/10/2/163/368313...
by ksec | 2025-07-28 16:05:16+00:00
Yes. N4 or 5nm Class compared to Apple's N3E or 2nd Gen 3nm. But the gap in IPC remains the same regardless of node. AMD could scale higher or has lower energy usage, it still wouldn't change the performance.

Not only is the Zen 5 slower, it also uses more energy to achieve the its results. Thinking about that the gap is staggering.
by tombert | 2025-07-28 16:05:33+00:00
I was doing the University of York online PhD in computer science (formal methods), and it was actually pretty great, but it was costing me like $17,000 per year, and it was a huge time sink when I was already working full time.

That said, if you feel like you're organized enough to pull it off, I do recommend looking into University of York. It's a very good school.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-07-28 16:05:55+00:00
There are already age check requirements to do things like buy liquor online. Today, that requires uploading your ID, so the service provider gets a lot more information than just that you're above a certain age. The existence of this new way to prove your age without giving away a bunch of other information does not "[help] governments censor information" in any reasonable way.
by emmabotbot | 2025-07-28 16:06:02+00:00
Most tools store plans in plain markdown that agents forget about. We built Tasklist to fix this by making each step a first-class object with strict state transitions (todo → in_progress → finished).

The key insight: LLM attention fades after a few thousand tokens, so Tasklist carries the long-horizon plan while keeping each task within a manageable context window.

Real-time visibility means you can watch agents work, stop them mid-execution, or redirect when things go sideways. Each task emits structured events that enable analytics and future automation.
by MisterTea | 2025-07-28 16:06:37+00:00
No, that's R9: https://github.com/r9os/r9 (edit: proper r9 project link)

Harvey is Plan 9 built with a GCC/Clang tool chain instead of the Plan 9 tools. AFAIK both projects are abandoned (edit: R9 might still be alive) and most devs have moved on to 9front which is a modern fork of Plan 9.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-28 16:06:40+00:00
That's a good callout. My understanding is there are 3 options:

- You can download the eval ISO from Windows and add in the ~couple MB of additional XML files to be able to change the eval ISO to a version of the installer with the full SKU. The specific files will change per version. There were also some variations for doing this post-install for Windows 10 LTSC but I'm not sure if anyone has bothered for Windows 11 LTSC.

- You can download the full ISO from somewhere else (so you don't have to add anything). E.g. the massgrave links.

- Of course, if you have access to the VLSC for other reasons you can just download through the portal.

Practically, I see the first option as a waste tbh because Microsoft publishes the SHA256 hashes of the ISOs anyways. massgrave most likely rehosts the full ISOs because it is both easier to work with and easier to validate. #3 is nice, but not applicable to most folks. If sourcing the ISO from Microsoft sounds like too much work I don't think you lose much (if anything) by sourcing it elsewhere instead.
by tracker1 | 2025-07-28 16:07:09+00:00
I have to disagree... while most "corporations" are chartered in such a way that shareholder value is maximized, you can put other provisions and leadership goals into a corporate charter, and privately owned businesses can have much more leeway in terms of structure and goals.

Many NPOs are corporations/companies legally, but their founding structure isn't to maximize shareholder profits/value. Beyond this, most businesses have two operating models, one is for maximum stock price, which increases the value, but that remains static without trade and/or to provide dividends from profits, which tends to keep stock values more level. With the latter, a business might not be chasing a 20% growth every year, but a healthy margin and predictable dividends to shareholders.

IANAL, this is not legal advice... but if you start a company, and want to emphasize values beyond pure growth/value, then what I would do is definitely talk to a good corporate attorney and tune the founding charter documents to that effect.
by toast0 | 2025-07-28 16:07:29+00:00
It's useful to have signed intervals, but most integer type systems return a signed number when subtracting a signed int from a signed int.

You kind of have to pick your poison; do you want a) reasonable signed behavior for small differences but inability to represent large differences, b) only able to represent non-negative differences, but with the full width of the type, c) like a, but also convincing your programming system to do a mixed signed subtraction ... like for ptrdiff_t.
by horse2 | 2025-07-28 16:08:02+00:00
I would rather recommend ignoring people who automatically follow every latest fad without much thought, especially to those who dare call themselves “engineers”. Learn both and make an informed decision. The new shiny thing is not better just because it is new and shiny, especially when it's just an abstraction over the old thing.

Not too long ago people who refused to be dragged into the blockchain circus were called luddites by some. Now no-one even remembers that, the industry has moved on to another buzzword du jour. Not every change for the sake of change is “progress”, there are more dead-ends that lead nowhere than things that stick with us for a long time.

Also: old men make the world go brrr, it's not an insult as you seem to think it is. I wonder what the Linux kernel folk would say to your insinuations, if they had time to waste here. Or the OpenBSD guys who are much more conservative still.