MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by torginus | 2025-07-16 08:12:31+00:00
The weird thing about Theranos is that every single expert who knew about the technical details of blood testing basically called out the BS from the get go.

Blood testing for a single condition can involve blood separation via centrifuges, application of various chemical solutions, a multi-step process using varios test strips (each with different specificities/sensitivities). Not to mention some of the offending markers might be so rare in blood that you'd have to draw multiple vials just to get a statistically significant amount of markers.

Reducing just a single one of these tests to an instant test that works with a drop of blood would be a major breakthrough, subject to various medical awards (and lengthy medical trials).
by mnaimd | 2025-07-16 08:13:01+00:00
> “The difference is not one of profit, it is one of philosophy. You believe software can be managed by a committee. I believe software requires an owner, otherwise it is dead.”

This justification is even worse than the domain squatting itself.

Some of the most influential software in history (Linux, Git, GCC, and yes, PuTTY) thrived under community-driven development. The idea that software "dies" without a single corporate owner is not just false, it’s insulting to the open-source ecosystem.

If Bitvise truly believes in their philosophy, they wouldn’t need to borrow PuTTY’s reputation by holding putty.org. Maybe they should spend less time on branding and more time studying how successful open-source projects actually work.
by shawa_a_a | 2025-07-16 08:13:14+00:00
Since going down this rabbit hole, I gave Anki another fair shot and actually RTFM :) the blog post warrants an update

https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#learning-steps Details what _actually happens_ when you pick again/hard/good etc. I much prefer understanding this to the vibes-based approach of “did you pause before answering”.

Secondly turns out you can indeed very easily set up type-to-answer in a deck by editing the front template and adding

{type:Field}

where field is the answer part of the card’s data.

So… I’m actually using Anki again. I’m still very happy I did this, it was a fun little journey!
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-16 08:13:30+00:00
I recently built a project called PIT (Phono In Terminal) — a terminal image viewer written in C that renders .png/.jpg images using actual RGB colors in your terminal (with optional 256-color fallback). What makes it different?

Zero dependencies (just stb_image.h)

Works even on very old or embedded systems

Fully cross-platform (Linux, macOS, WSL, Windows Terminal, Termux, etc.)

Compiles down to ~250 KB

CLI options for zoom, flip, resize, offset, background fill, and more

Doesn’t require X11, SDL, or curses

Here's a screenshot from Termux showing Tux inside a text-mode terminal (demoed using ANSI blocks and real RGB shading): (HN doesn't support images, but you can try it yourself from the repo)

Comparison with tiv: tiv is an excellent and mature tool (C++ + ImageMagick), optimized for Unicode and quality. PIT, on the other hand, is hyper-minimal — no dependencies, fully embeddable, and runs even in initramfs or micro distros.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/phono-in-terminal-image... Would love to hear your feedback or ideas!

I don't want to be greedy, but please, if you can, support me by putting a star on the repository, you will help me develop the project. :)
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-16 08:13:46+00:00
Oh, they know it.

Saturn V was less powerful than SLS - but it could send an entire mission in a single launch. Capsule, lander and all.

A lot of what NASA has been doing with SLS is just trying to... rationalize its existence. This is what gave us NRHO, Gateway and others.

Reportedly, some of the people at NASA just believe that having an inefficient, wasteful and corrupt space program is better than not having it.
by zhangjunphy | 2025-07-16 08:14:26+00:00
I also hope we have something like this. But sadly, this is not going to work. The reason is this line from the article, which is so much harder that it looks:

> and a critic model filters the results for genuinely valuable ideas.

In fact, people have tryied this idea. And if you use a LLM or anything similar as the critic, the performance of the model actually degrades in this process. As the LLM tries too hard to satisfy the critic, and the critic itself is far from a good reasoner.

So the reason that we don't hear too much about this idea is not that nobody tried it. But that they tried, and it didn't work, and people are reluctant to publish about something which does not work.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-07-16 08:14:42+00:00
>It makes sense at a high level though

This is the way I've always done TDD.

I don't think it makes sense to do it any other way. If a test case doesn't map on to a real scenario you're trying to implement the code for it doesn't make any sense to write it.

I find that people who write the test after tend to miss edge cases or (when they're trying to be thorough) write too many scenarios - covering the same code more than once.

Writing the test first and the code that makes it pass next helps to inextricably tie the test to the actual code change.

>but it is not always possible

I don't think I've written any production code in years where I gave up because it was intrinsically not possible.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-16 08:14:52+00:00
I don't think we need to agree to disagree just yet. I want to remark on:

> That depends on what you are measuring to determine market efficiency. Social, political, knowledge, and natural capital are excluded from consideration, so of course we optimize towards financial efficiency at the expense of everything else.

I'm taking a loose but classical definition of it, so obviously in financial terms. But there isn't really much choice to be made here: the market, as a system borne of aggregate human behavior at scale, is optimizing along a specific dimension for structural reasons. "Social, political, knowledge and natural capital" aren't excluded at all - on the contrary, they're converted into dollars and become part of the optimization, competing with other things that are also converted into monetary units.

It's just that, it turns out, those other forms of capital you mention tend to not have that much value, so they get optimized away, especially under strong competitive pressure.
by tiernano | 2025-07-16 08:15:10+00:00
In my last job, we used a key that was stored on a user machine to sign documents... always wondered if something like PassKeys could replicate that... given documents could potentially need to be signed by multiple users on behalf of an entity, having the cert on a user's drive seemed like a security issue... It was password protected, but still.... Replacing that with PassKeys, and having that stored on a phone or even in something like 1Password would potentially solve some of those issues...Does anyone know if that is possible?
by jajko | 2025-07-16 08:15:33+00:00
Sorry to hear that, no parent is unmoved deeply with such stories which just shouldn't be happening, but life is... life.

Its a mistake in general in life to get swayed and stunned by the negative aspects of it and be blocked to experience the positive aspects, even if some risk of harm is involved. Although some healing and reconciliation is required, no doubt there. You did allright based on your description. Trying to play the game of life as safe as possible ultimately means losing the game.

Life doesn't have to be always a positive experience, rather an intense one compared to keeping it always safe and ending up with meh story (and usually tons of regrets before dying). My philosophy only, but I really think it should be pretty much universal.

Also yes miscarriages are very common, we had one, and so did basically all couples in our circle in various phases. I take it as a defense mechanism of woman's body, figuring out it wouldn't work out later so aborting the mission (at least under normal circumstances). One was very brutal (in 37th week, basically a stillbirth and woman still had to go through whole birth process), a proper traumatic experience that leaves permanent scars on souls of parents. But still, after mourning one has to get up and keep moving even if feeling empty and powerless, thats life.
by bigiain | 2025-07-16 08:16:08+00:00
That's not correct.

LetEncrypt are trialling ip address https/TLS certificates right now:

https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-addr...

They say:

"In principle, there’s no reason that a certificate couldn’t be issued for an IP address rather than a domain name, and in fact the technical and policy standards for certificates have always allowed this, with a handful of certificate authorities offering this service on a small scale."
by wrp | 2025-07-16 08:19:03+00:00
> smartphone addiction and constant connectivity become normalized

Cyberpunk predicted this, but I don't think anyone predicted how we now see people relinquishing their thinking to LLMs.

> Babies flick paper magazines to scroll

I know a young couple who are rigorously keeping screen devices away from their toddler, yet the kid has picked up the habit of holding up random objects to his ear and talking to it, or just swiping across the object's surface.
by bmn__ | 2025-07-16 08:19:18+00:00
The five properties used as headings in the article are able to be expressed in good type systems. This way a huge part of the specification becomes code, and the compiler guarantees to uphold the expressed properties in many or all cases. We should strive to have a programming future where this idea is normal and commonplace.

OpenAPI and GraphQL have exceedingly poor types, and will not bring us there unless they make a fifty year leap forward.
by vindarel | 2025-07-16 08:19:58+00:00
the image-based REPL, including the interactive debugger, is still unique (matched maybe by Smalltalk), CLOS and the condition system too… pair them with stability, fast implementations, instantaneous compile-time errors and warnings a keystroke away, a Haskell-like type system on top of the language (Coalton), macros… and the whole is still pretty unique.
by HenryBemis | 2025-07-16 08:20:23+00:00
I was reading a couple of days ago the Frank Miller's Robocop comic series. I laughed so hard at the comment/response of "Dr. Love" when asked "have you sold out?" and the response was "I'm reposisioned Lilac to where I can more efficaciously relate values of cooperation and participation to our children. Where I can infuse a spirit of caring and sharing to marketing and media."

Then she (Dr. Love) continues to say... "I welcome this change to dialogue. To relate to you OCP's commitment...."

So when I read the FF's post, Dr. Love and the beginning of a big spin came to mind!
by spwa4 | 2025-07-16 08:21:28+00:00
> I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with.

Not me. Knowledge and patience do it for me. Computers do pretty well on the patience front, but are a bit more "DIY" than I'd like on the knowledge front. I'm hoping AI can fix that. But I have met humans who did well on both, and boy did I advance in skill studying under them. They are far superior to anything I think AI could ever become. But they are few and far between, at any level of education (even at uni, they're exceptional).

Most teachers I was far smarter than the teacher and they were a waste of time. Plus I've been burned extremely hard by teachers I felt a personal human connection with (and then social workers) "trying to help". Never again. Hell, I literally fought my way out that situation, physically, many individual fights with actual people getting hurt, and not by choice (did you know, for their own ease and budget savings, social workers put kids who get bullied into the same group bedroom as kids who pulled a knife at school (and don't make sure they don't have a knife). That's how much they ACTUALLY care). Never again.

I also would like to point out the priority. A patient teacher with knowledge and zero human connection: anyone who wants to learns A LOT. People who really don't want to learn, learn a little. A teacher with knowledge but no patience: everyone learns a lot, but there's a lot of shouting. It becomes painfully clear who is best. A teacher with lots of human connection without knowledge: everyone learns very little. A teacher with lots of human connection and no knowledge or patience: worst of all possible worlds. Bullies run the classroom. Nobody learns anything.

This last kind of teachers, lots of human connection (at least in their mind) and very little knowledge, rules the schools of our country.

In other words, you want to do well for students: for teachers, knowledge comes first, by 100 miles. Human connection is somewhere between nice to have and destructive. Patience: same. Makes things look nicer from the outside, but is actually kind of destructive.
by rwmj | 2025-07-16 08:21:35+00:00
They're the most basic form of version control possible (little more than undo/redo). The Google one has a really awful interface as well. I haven't used any MS products in a long time, but Word's version control circa late 2000s was bad as well. Actual version control allows branching, merge strategies, offline editing, and all the other crazy stuff you can do with git.

Expressing all of that in a way that makes sense to end users is the real challenge, and I guess why this hasn't been solved yet.
by messe | 2025-07-16 08:23:03+00:00
> the Python interpreter is natively integrated in all Unix distros

It's included in the default install of most desktop/server Linux distros (with plenty of exceptions), but I don't believe any of the BSDs ship it in their base system.

IIRC macOS used to have python 2 in its default install, but I vaguely recall that being deprecated and removed at some point. My only Mac is on the other side of the country at the moment, so I can't check myself.
by noduerme | 2025-07-16 08:23:22+00:00
Funny. I was configuring a new domain today, and for about 20 minutes I could only reach it through Firefox on one laptop. Google's DNS tools showed it active. SSH to an Amazon server that could resolve it. My local network had no idea of it. Flush cache and all. Turns out I had that one FF browser set up to use Cloudflare's DoH.
by perlgeek | 2025-07-16 08:24:27+00:00
An outage of roughly 1 hour is 0.13% of a month or 0.0114% of a year.

It would be interesting to see the service level objective (SLO) that cloudflare internally has for this service.

I've found https://www.cloudflare.com/r2-service-level-agreement/ but this seems to be for payed services, so this outage would put July in the "< 99.9% but >= 99.0%" bucket, so you'd get a 10% refund for the month if you payed for it.
by ares623 | 2025-07-16 08:25:43+00:00
I don't like talking to other people. I'm pretty sure I have social anxiety. It takes a lot of energy from me when I talk. But I will 100% choose to talk to a person than the alternative, a world where that person's worth is taken away by AI.

Fuck this AI shit. I will not smile and hype up something that promises to take away the liberties of my children when they grow up. Because that is what they promise, a future where my children, and other children that grow up with them, will have no jobs. At the very least, I can look my kids in the eye when they ask me what the fuck happened, and tell them I did not smile and welcome it.

"Yes, we're starving and homeless now. But for a beautiful moment in time, I was able to open 20 PRs in one day."
Software Freedom and Cyberpunk: Why Freedom Still Matters
by ricecat | 2025-07-16 08:25:58+00:00
We often talk about cyberpunk as if it’s a future that hasn’t arrived yet — dystopian cities drenched in neon, rogue hackers, mega-corporations, and synthetic realities. But if you look closely, we’re already living in it. The surveillance is real. The monopolies are real. The technological dependency is total. And in this environment, software freedom is not just an ideal — it’s one of the few lines of defense left for individuals.

https://www.gizvault.com/archives/software-freedom-and-cyberpunk
by asimops | 2025-07-16 08:26:16+00:00
I don't get it. The putty website has always been https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

This has never changed.

Just because someone likes to use short circuit routing in their head doesn't make putty.org the official site for putty.

That is the same attitude as telling the Keepass folks that https://keepass.info/ is wrong...

edit:

Maybe also have a look at the putty FAQ, especially 9.3

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#...
by saurik | 2025-07-16 08:26:22+00:00
I think that's why they explicitly added the story about the color TV being an instant improvement.

FWIW, I've felt over the years that if you have to get used to it, it probably wasn't that good to begin with: so so many things that are totally different I've upgraded to and thought "omg this is amazing! how did I ever live before?" and, if I have to go back, it takes a long time to get used to the bad thing again.

The one example I have off the top of my head: higher resolution monitors. I was totally happy with my lower resolution monitors; but, the second I tried a higher resolution monitor, it ruined me for lower resolution monitors. I can totally get used to it again, but it takes a long time, and I really don't want to; upgrading, though, is instantaneously better.
by edanm | 2025-07-16 08:27:16+00:00
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.

Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?

VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?

The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?

Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
by palata | 2025-07-16 08:28:30+00:00
On the other hand, English is a Germanic language and got influenced by French. A nice recent article talked about why English doesn't use accents (because... of French) [1].

Just to say it's not uncommon at all to have languages influence each other.

[1]: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-english-doesnt-use...
by lazzlazzlazz | 2025-07-16 08:28:30+00:00
The honest truth is that you (like many; I say this blamelessly) have been swept left, whereas Marc has not. He has remained utterly loyal to technological progress, which is under assault right now politically.

Ask yourself honestly if you are still as optimistic about technology and the intellectual freedom (and chaos, "unfettered conversations") as you may have been in the past. I have asked many friends this and the answer is "no".
by OldfieldFund | 2025-07-16 08:28:35+00:00
I felt that it was really easy to get consumed by money/power when I started making serious income. To feel that I'm better than other people.

And I mean that in the context of running my own company, which meant I could make very unethical decisions if I wanted to. (financial services -- the easiest niche to bend the rules just a little bit)

The temptation was strong, at least in my case.

It took me some time to turn around, understand when enough is enough, and what is actually important in life. Therapy helped.

I think that the old saying, albeit banal, rings true: "all power corrupts. and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
by s-macke | 2025-07-16 08:28:38+00:00
Most of the sites I’ve seen are indeed just demos. I especially like Compute Toys [0], a Shadertoy clone for WebGPU. [1] is probably the best place to find demos. I have a site myself in which I experiment mainly with WebGPU Compute Shaders [2].

[0] https://compute.toys/

[1] https://github.com/mikbry/awesome-webgpu

[2] https://github.com/s-macke/WebGPU-Lab
by maxloh | 2025-07-16 08:29:12+00:00
Yeah, your operating system will first need to resolve cloudflare-dns.com. This initial resolution will likely occur unencrypted via the network's default DNS. Only then will your system query the resolved address for its DoH requests.

Note that this introduces one query overhead per DNS request if the previous cache has expired. For this reason, I've been using https://1.1.1.1/dns-query instead.

In theory, this should eliminate that overhead. Your operating system can validate the IP address of the DNS response by using the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) field within the CA certificate presented by the DoH server: https://g.co/gemini/share/40af4514cb6e
by dm270 | 2025-07-16 08:29:54+00:00
Im very interested in that topic and haven’t made up my mind about what really counts in parenting. You have sources for the claim about well-being (asking explicitly about mental well-being and not just material well-being) being more influenced by socioeconomic status and not so much by parental absence?

About the guy: I think if it’s just a one time thing it’s ok but the way he presents himself gives reason for doubt
by reedf1 | 2025-07-16 08:30:07+00:00
> Python has done a good job of hiding its legacy ugliness (such as __init__, __new__, and similar aberrations), swettening its syntax to accomodate developers with good taste.

What exactly is the problem with __init__ or __new__? @dataclass is very nice syntactic sugar, but are we arguing here that having access to initializer/allocator/constructor dunder methods is "legacy ugliness"? This is the core of pythonic built-in aware python. Bizarre.
by bigiain | 2025-07-16 08:30:54+00:00
There are kinds big step/jumps as the size of a company goes up.

Step 1: You start out with the founders being on call 27x7x365 or people in the first 10 or 20 hires "carry the pager" on weekends and evenings and your entire company is doing unpaid rostered on call.

Step 2: You steal all the underwear.

Step 3: You have follow-the-sun office-hours support staff teams distributed around the globe with sufficient coverage for vacations and unexpected illness or resignations.
by jimmcslim | 2025-07-16 08:31:00+00:00
Kiro, the latest agentic IDE hotness, indicates that it you should "Define user stories and acceptance criteria in structured EARS notation". But didn't link to what EARS actually is [1]. Any mention of EARS also appeared to be missing from the HN post discussing Kiro [2]. If you have previous experience with EARS, it looks like you might be soon "hearing" all about it...

From the link...

The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) is a mechanism to gently constrain textual requirements. The EARS patterns provide structured guidance that enable authors to write high quality textual requirements.

Structured English that should be simpler for an LLM to parse and reason about.

[1]: https://kiro.dev/docs/specs/concepts/#workflow

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44560662