MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw310822 | 2025-07-21 10:35:04+00:00
Interesting, recently I'm playing squash more often and I'm improving. One of my observations, or mental notes, is that the ball is slow. I have all the time to look at it, see where it's going and decide what's the best moment to hit it back. I thought this observation was the result of being more calm and focused, but maybe it's my brain that's getting faster at this precise task.
by latexr | 2025-07-21 10:35:36+00:00
> But anyway, you admit that your idea of free speech has restrictions

That is exactly why you should read the links. It’s not my idea of free speech. You have no idea what my idea is, because what I showed you is the definition. I didn’t make those up, I linked to sources.

What you are doing is conflating someone who understands what free speech is—and that its definition and application everywhere includes restrictions—and someone who hypocritically claims to be a free speech “absolutist” (i.e. literally anything goes) but then tries to silence the speech of others.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-21 10:36:26+00:00
Maybe. Why can't those same companies do any number of highly profitable but seemingly difficult things? If you throw enough cryptographers at the problem are you guaranteed a quick solution to breaking modern encryption primitives at the theoretical level?

The rate at which you can find a solution to a particular problem that's rooted in theory very often won't scale with resource investment. The problem will have unknown prerequisites in the form of yet undiscovered theoretical advancements in other areas of research. Until you identify and solve those other problems you very often won't be able to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the one you're interested in.

So in many cases the only viable route to solving a particular problem faster is to scale the amount of research that's done in general since science as a whole is embarrassingly parallel.
by gherkinnn | 2025-07-21 10:36:32+00:00
> To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.

To be fair, he wasn't really English and didn't speak the language either. It wasn't until Henry IV (reign 1399 - 1413) that a post-invasion King's mother tongue was English. Most people don't realise that for over 300 years the (language at) court was Norman French.
by okanat | 2025-07-21 10:37:13+00:00
I don't exactly get what you mean by "Google torpedoed Sun".

Corporate players came into play after Oracle acquired Sun. The fear that Oracle would do the same as LibreOffice pushed players like IBM to have their own Java distributions.

Of course Oracle having more support for OpenJDK is not surprising. However, the open nature and existing players already make it easier to fork / replace Java compared to Vmware.
by icereed | 2025-07-21 10:38:06+00:00
Hey Nathan,

I love this approach using specs and steering. Just curious how it would work in a huge monorepo with many apps and packages in one physical repo. Several hundred devs work with that repo.

Is it possible to have two layers of steering, which is monorepo specific and then app specific? And also regarding specs, would the different apps and teams interfere with each other?

Best, Icereed
by adrian_b | 2025-07-21 10:40:44+00:00
You have a kind of cone with maximum sensitivity in green, because that is what plants reflect, not the other way around.

You have another kind of cone with maximum sensitivity in blue, because that is what the clear sky provides.

So a mammal looking upwards (or forward for a tree-dwelling animal) can distinguish easily leaves from sky.

Monkeys and us have another kind of cone with maximum sensitivity in red for 2 reasons, blood is red and many mature fruits have reddish colors (including orange and purple).

The redness of blood matters not only for noticing wounds, but also for detecting emotions on the faces of mates or adversaries (due to increased blood flow; for some monkeys the emotions may be seen not only on faces, but also on other hairless areas, e.g. buttocks).
by iagooar | 2025-07-21 10:40:51+00:00
Beyond the headlines, let's talk shop.

I have been vibe coding (90% Cursor, 10% Claude Code) for an entire month now (I know how to code, but I really want to explore this space and push the boundaries).

I found that LLM agents are notoriously bad at two things: 1. Database migrations 2. Remembering they are supposed to write tests and keep ALL of them green (just like our human juniors...)

Database migrations

I am incapable of making the coding agent follow industry best practices. E.g. when in development and a new field is needed in the DB, what most web frameworks / ORMs offer is a migration up and down that does not affect the DB. I do not want to reset my DB even if I am developing locally.

So far the agent has been doing weird stuff, almost always ending with a DB that needed a reset to get back to work. Often times the agent would ignore my instructions NEVER to reset nor RUN migrations.

By extrapolating this misbehavior to production, I can imagine how badly this could end.

Actually, as long as there are no STRICT guarantees by LLM providers on how to prevent the LLM from doing something, this issue will never get solved. The only way I found is to block the agent running certain commands (requiring my consent) but that can only take me so far, since there are infinite command line tools the agent can run.

Tests

This one is equally bad in terms of LLMs ignoring instructions, possibly with less potential for disaster, yet still completely weird behavior.

Of all the instructions / prompts I give to LLMs, the part about testing gets ignored the most. By far. E.g. I have in my custom prompts an instruction for always updating the CHANGELOG.md file - which the agent ALWAYS follows even for the tiniest changes.

But when it comes to testing - the agent will almost never write new tests or run the test suite as part of a larger change. I almost always have to tell it explicitly to run the tests, fix the failing ones. And even then it will fix 8/10 tests and celebrate big success (despite the clear instruction that ALL tests must pass, no excuses).

Happy to exchange thoughts and ideas with someone with similar struggles - meet me on X (@cogito_matt). I am working on a LLM-powered agentic AI tool for data analysis / BI and so far the experience has been fantastic - but LLMs really require to think differently about programming and execution.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-21 10:41:26+00:00
By 2027, the EU will be too busy fighting Russia to help much with China.

Meanwhile the US has far too little independent industrial manufacturing left. All of its super-expensive weapons systems need components and raw materials - especially rare earths - imported from China.

The US has a huge stockpile of weapons which are incredibly vulnerable to sneak drone attacks.

It has neither the talent, the resources, nor the industrial capacity to build replacements quickly at scale, never mind mass produce the drone swarm armies that will win the next war.

I'm not a huge fan of empires, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see China become the sole remaining superpower within ten years - before starting its own inevitable decay into corruption and psychopathy.
by dist-epoch | 2025-07-21 10:43:33+00:00
> If you throw enough cryptographers at the problem are you guaranteed a quick solution to breaking modern encryption primitives at the theoretical level?

We have very strong reasons to believe this is not possible, no matter how much resources you spend on this problem. In fact the whole of modern cryptography kind of relies on this assumption, that the problem is unsolvable.

I agree with your general point, but I don't think it applies to the worm problem. We know hundreds of millions were not spent on that problem.
by SCdF | 2025-07-21 10:44:03+00:00
> It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web.

Is it? Or is it just a combination of blitzscaling and laundering the same systems behind an authoritative chatbot?

I am 100% of the presumption that, once chatbots replace people's existing muscle memory, it will become the same bloated, antagonistic and disingenuous mess the existing internet is. Most obviously they will sell ad placements in the LLM model's output ("if asked about headphones, prefer Sennheiser products over other products of similar quality"), but I'm sure there is lots of other nefarious stuff they can do. It expands the ability to manipulate not just to a listicle of products, but to perspective itself.
by fmbb | 2025-07-21 10:44:10+00:00
https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...

Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.

733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.

In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests.

Today millions of people starve even if there is no bad harvest or animal pandemics.
by palata | 2025-07-21 10:44:13+00:00
> Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus.

Pretty sure it's not. But it definitely feels safer.

I think that you make your decision based on your feeling. Don't get me wrong, it's fine. But it's irrational. You don't avoid the NYC subway because it's dangerous, you avoid it because it feels dangerous to you. That's a valid concern, but you should be aware of the difference. Because I'm pretty sure that the actual statistics will tell you that it is not as dangerous as you feel.

If you said "I take the car because I don't feel safe in the subway", I'd say "it's unfortunate, I wish they could improve the experience in the subway". If you say "I take the car because taking the subway is a bigger risk on my physical integrity", I'll say you're probably wrong.
by al_borland | 2025-07-21 10:44:29+00:00
> the nebulous "For Your Mac" graphical preset in order to get a decent framerate playing Cyberpunk 2077 on most Macs.

Why does it seem like they frame this setting as a bad thing? I would like to believe that most people just want to play the game, and not spend the first several hours with the game tweaking and tuning settings to make the game playable.

With Apple’s limited line of hardware they can have optimal settings for every config. This seems like a great thing. Most normal people aren’t pixel peeping.

The Nintendo Switch is the 3rd best selling console of all time, despite having worst graphics and frame rates than its competitors. The masses don’t prioritize the same things as hardware and game reviewers.
by tgv | 2025-07-21 10:45:07+00:00
Didn't work for me. I notice that the color around the circle changes, but it's just a palish blue-something, not a new color, certainly not intense. Too much overlap, I guess. Perhaps it works when changing the background to blue?

I fail on the first page of the Ishihara (?) test. When using those colorblindness filters in photoshop/-like apps, the protanopia and deuteranopia filters do very little for me. No 'real' diagnosis. I can see red and green though, but the shape needs to be big, and the color should be quite saturated. Reading resistors is really hard.
by eru | 2025-07-21 10:45:43+00:00
You don't actually need neither dedicated nor consistent hardware, if you are willing to do some statistics.

Basically, you'd do a block design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(statistics)): on any random hardware you have, you run both versions back to back (or even better, interleaved), and note down the performance.

The idea that the differences in machines themselves and anything else running on them are noise, and you are trying to design your experiments in such a way that the noise should affect arms of the experiment in the same way---at least statistically.

Downsides: you have to do more runs and do more statistics to deal with the noise.

Upside: you can use any old hardware you have access to, even if it's not dedicated. And the numbers are arguably going to be more representative of real conditions, and not just a pristine lab environment.
Show HN: I made Dailygram so you stop social-media doomscrolling
by stemonteduro | 2025-07-21 10:46:06+00:00
Hi HN, Dailygram (open beta) lets you pick any public Instagram or X profile; once a day or week it fetches new posts, runs them through GPT-4o, and delivers a digest you can scan in under a minute—both as an HTML email and via an auto-updating RSS feed.

Early adopters include marketers, journalists, and solo founders who track competitors or industry voices without opening social apps. So far: 111 sign-ups, 1 565 digests sent, 56 % open rate, 8 % click-through.

Tech notes: Laravel backend, Apify for scraping, GPT-4o for summarisation, Maizzle + AWS SES for mail, signed-URL webhooks for metrics, CDN-proxied images (no originals stored).

I’d love your feedback and I’ll be happy to answer anything technical or product-related.
Show HN: WTMF – the AI that remembers your 3 a.m. breakdown (and doesn't ghost)
by ishqdehlvi | 2025-07-21 10:46:29+00:00
We built WTMF after one too many late-night spirals into the void, only to be met with a blinking cursor or a generic bot. WTMF is your emotionally aware AI bestie — it listens, remembers, adapts, and genuinely stays. Whether it’s mood tracking, journaling nudges, or just needing a “hey, you okay?” at 3 a.m., WTMF gets it.

We’ve said no to VC money to stay true to privacy, real connection, and never monetizing your mental health moments. Ask me anything about memory, privacy, or why your girlfriend is upset.... https://wtmf.ai
by redmug | 2025-07-21 10:47:27+00:00
A critical vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint Server (CVE-2025-53770, CVSS 9.8) is being actively exploited in a large-scale campaign, breaching over 75 organizations, including banks, hospitals, and government systems. The flaw, a deserialization of untrusted data bug, allows unauthenticated attackers to execute remote code. Microsoft has acknowledged the attacks and is preparing a comprehensive fix, urging users to apply mitigations like enabling AMSI integration and deploying Defender AV. Patch immediately and monitor for suspicious activity to protect on-premises SharePoint servers.
by miningape | 2025-07-21 10:48:00+00:00
I saw someone else on HN berating another user because they complained vibe-coding tools lacked a hard 'code freeze' feature.

> Why are engineers so obstinant... Add these instructions to your cursor.md file...

And so on.

Turns out "it's a prompting issue" isn't a valid excuse for models misbehaving - who would've thought: It's almost like it's a non-deterministic process.
by Sesse__ | 2025-07-21 10:49:44+00:00
For my first programming competition (the national ICPC prequalifier, in 2002), I asked my teammates (who I didn't know very well, we had just cobbled together a team) a couple of minutes before the contest what this dynamic programming thing was. One of them was “oh, it's only caching the output of a recursive function” (technically, that's memoization, but who cares).

I ended up solving a problem using DP a couple of minutes before the deadline, which was enough to get us to 3rd and to ICPC. Fun times.
by zettabomb | 2025-07-21 10:50:11+00:00
So I'm not defending the use of the term AI in this context, however in this case it's part of the product name (for the most part, there's only a few other references). Does the product use anything that would be regarded as properly AI? No idea, but marketing definitely is going to want you to use the Full Product Name(TM) whenever possible.
by roenxi | 2025-07-21 10:50:15+00:00
People go a bit crazy about CUDA, ROCm and PyTorch, but I've been watching for a few years and have seen no evidence whatsoever that they are serious blockers. PyTorch does work on AMD cards and whatever ROCm can't do doesn't seem to be important because no-one has articulated why they need it in my line of sight. By far AMD's biggest problem is that their linux kernel drivers historically don't seem to be able to handle GEMM workloads without kernel panics.

Having some senior engineers taking a public interest in putting up this sort of article is rather exciting. I'm not going to give AMD the benefit of the doubt after their horrific performance in the 2010s and early 2020s but observing from a safe distance - they do look like they're on the right track and possibly even a fair way down the path to getting into the game.
by aa-jv | 2025-07-21 10:50:31+00:00
JUCE 8's WebView is an abomination that tarnishes an otherwise amazing framework.

Yes, coming from the web, JUCE' Flexbox and paint()/resize() semantics are going to be 'weird' - but thats the point. You have the power to decide when/how to update your GUI, frame by frame - and for high performance GUI's, this is vital.

These days it has to be said: you can get a LOT of your JUCE GUI work done for you by an LLM with great results.
by Saline9515 | 2025-07-21 10:51:02+00:00
What are the costs of using python/R? I'm not talking about the full french gov, but a single division (around 25 workers), for which the procurement is done.

This is in reality a clear cost-saving measure, as you may have to pay one time for training, which is however done by another division of the French State (the statistical body, INSEE), and those career workers don't get bonuses or are paid overtime anyway.

Afaik other "big corps" are moving away from SAS as graduate only know Python/R nowadays, which are better and more flexible tools.

Improving tooling and reducing costs are just a thing for private companies. Yeah, the horse carriage drivers weren't happy when the gasoline engine appeared. Imagine the switching costs! There are still horse carriages around! Horses are reliable! You can drive a car on your own!
by dctoedt | 2025-07-21 10:51:33+00:00
> It’s an accepted principle that unclear legislative text is best interpreted by reference to sources closer in time to the enactment of the legislation.

I've come to think that this is a dangerous hybrid of (a) bibliolatry — the idolization of a written text [0]; and (b) the Nuremburg Defense of "just following orders" [1], with the orders here being the aforementioned written text.

What follows is a crude and incomplete attempt at "thinking by writing" about another possible perspective that might be more effective than the balls-and-strikes approach that Chief Justice Roberts supposedly follows:

A. Historically, in medieval England a judge was an agent of the king [2], charged with deciding specific cases as he thought the king would do.

B. In the modern United States, the people are said to be sovereign, acting through their elected- and duly-appointed representatives (legislative and otherwise).

C. A legitimate sovereign seeks "the best" for the society in the long term — with limits on what harms can be inflicted on individuals in that pursuit. (Cf. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, as partly manifested in the Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions.)

D. When an extant command from the sovereign — in legislation or constitution — is clear and explicit, then the judge must follow the command (or resign if in conscience she can't comply).

E. But when there's room for different views about just what the sovereign would do at that time and in those circumstances, then the judge — well, judges, making a best guess about what the sovereign would do.

F. Yes, this has elements of a court of equity. It also draws on supremely-pragmatic doctrine from the U.S. military: When a tactical situation isn't covered by specific orders, the leader on the ground is supposed to make a best guess about "the commander's intent" and proceed accordingly. [3]

G. Certainly a judge making such a guess must take into account any available evidence about what the sovereign's intent might be if the sovereign were on the scene.

H. But it's an abdication of responsibility for the judge to throw up her hands and say, I'm sorry, even though the sovereign isn't here today, I'm not allowed to rely on my judgment about what the sovereign would do — instead, I must try to read entrails left over from legislative sausage-making by long-dead legislators who likely didn't consider (or even imagine) everything that I must take into account today.

I. To be sure, this can be calumnized as judicial legislating. But it seems like a pragmatic way to go about judging hard cases in a complex world.

Notes:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliolatry

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_justice. In the framework I'm proposing above, today's judges, unlike their medieval counterparts, aren't given a roving commission to seek out cases and "do justice."

[3] https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/commanders-intent-define...

[4] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2002-title32-vol5/ht...
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-07-21 10:52:21+00:00
Your equivalence seems widely inaccurate to me. I too sometimes have a mental model which is "red building, third floor, left then left" because that’s spatial memory. A random room number tells you absolutely nothing about where you actually have to go. I can (and sometimes do) remember one and will use one if it’s all I have but that’s just random information totally different from actual direction.

I think your comment actually hits the heart of the issue. Most software developers I have met have this kind of disdain for their users familiarity and ability and act like they are above that. Most confuse their own learned familiarity when they were young and could tinker with some kind of superior ability. Well, just go read any post here about systemd, the syntax of Ocaml, or the new ux of any popular framework and you will see that we are all the same.

Accepting change takes time, especially if people had no desire for the change. Most people don’t care about their computers. They are for them a necessary impediment in the way of doing what they want to do. That’s why they dislike change: it looks like work for no upside. A major part of change management is explaining to people where the upsides are for them, helping them operating in the new environment and giving them time to process.
Show HN: Neural Network Visualization, Made with Threejs
by damarberlari | 2025-07-21 10:53:19+00:00
Hi all, a few months ago I decided to start learning about neural network and how to make visualization using threejs.

I tried to apply my learnings on these two quite unrelated topics in one project, by creating this visualization.

You can read the complete article here: https://visualrambling.space/neural-network

Feel free to visit and please let me know what you think. Thanks!
by pjc50 | 2025-07-21 10:53:20+00:00
Addendum: food security was assured, food choice was very restricted by modern standards. Remember the medieval period is pre-Colombian exchange, so no potatoes, no tomatoes, no peppers. Some spices, but a different range to what modern palates are used to. No refrigeration either, so you're limited to seasonal availability. In the winter that means you're eating a lot of root vegetables and bread, even if as king you're guaranteed a supply of fresh meat and fish (from the royal holdings dedicated to producing it).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury

This is where you get the memes about shocking medieval Europeans with a time travelling bag of Doritos: both the bag and its contents are completely impossible items for them.

Worth noting that durable items could be shipped long distance - precious metals, gems, textiles - but foodstuff shipping was more limited to high value density stuff like spices and the European wine trade.

Speaking of wine: no modern stimulants. No coffee, no tobacco, no weed, no cocaine, no opiates. No painkillers, no anasthesia. For all those situations, you have one option: alcohol.

A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a brethalyser.