MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wredcoll | 2025-07-31 05:22:36+00:00
> Thanks, thinking about this - I think there are several ways to serve this concern: one could be having an agent as a server, where "prompting" is just a command `prompt ...` sent to the agent as a server. Then you never leave your terminal. Presumably, you'd want this, but with some sort of interface _like_ these TUI systems?

The whole advantage to a shell, and why people get so obsessed with it, is that they provide a standard interface to every program. Tuis break that by substituting their own ui.

They also provide a standard output... limitation, really, which means you can suddenly do pipes.

The future should look to capture both of those benefits.

Everyone will get super mad, but html is honest to god a great way to do this. Imagine a `ls` that output html to make a prettt display of your local files, but if you wanted to send the list to another program you pass some kind of css selector `ls | .main-list.file-names.name` or something. It's not exactly beautiful but you get the idea.
by quotemstr | 2025-07-31 05:22:45+00:00
> Even in the best case though, things won’t be as great as they are on Linux or Windows.

Worst case, you just swap out the NS p pselect hack and use a w32-like separate thread. Let Emacs be Emacs and let Cocoa be Cocoa.

NS would be just as good as Windows then. Isn't that bood enough? Maybe this thread splitting is the "deep event loop surgery" the author meant? I haven't been following.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-31 05:23:28+00:00
>> This is not a problem that needs LLMs to be solved.

Yes, better customer service is not bounded by physics but it might be bounded by competence or maybe even malice if companies simply want to make the experience horrible so no one ever calls back (suggest starting with Hanlon's razor first however). Regardless, having an agent on our side, fighting against these two forces would be great.
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-31 05:23:37+00:00
> "Medical research and consent doesn't work like this."

Yes, I agree that person's comparison to non-consensual medical research is stupid.

> "Your opt-out telemetry is akin to your insurance sending you powered and Bluetooth enabled toothbrushes out of the blue to track you and threaten to cancel your insurance if you don't use that toothbrush and send data to them."

More akin to your insurance company making a public RFC where you can discuss the coming telemetry, then you choosing to ask your insurance for an optional toothbrush, being able to opt out of telemetry if you want to, the insurance company documenting how to opt out[1], you being able to edit the toothbrush source code to remove the telemetry entirely with the insurance company's approval because it's MIT licensed, and absolutely nothing happening to you if you opt out.
by preommr | 2025-07-31 05:24:37+00:00
Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop. Only a step away from using something like blender or after efffects tbh. It was also mac only. And desktop only. It turns out design is one of those things that people like to see, and is not insrcrutable like code. So stakeholders asked to see your ui and you would send them... this file. They would then have to download the application, and deal with all the joys that come with different platforms, asking how to install the thing, security complians, licenses, etc.

Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.

Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
by verisimi | 2025-07-31 05:24:57+00:00
> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will.

This isn't the right way to characterise what happened. Governments are going this is unison, it is a coordinated campaign that has been obviously coming for a couple of years. Remember that governments wanted to act against misinformation? Well, this is it. Deanonymised internet. Aus, UK, US, etc - its on the way.

What you are seeing with certain comments etc is probably a lot of genuine comments primed by stories of cases where id would have apparently prevented something-or-other, along with comments from agents and bots. This is how modern governance actually works.

There is a goal (here, its deanonymised internet) then the excuse (children, porn, terrorists), then the apparent groundswell of support (supportive comments on hn, etc) then actual comments that validly complain this is dystopian but go nowhere (auto-downvoted or memory-holed by mods) which gives the appearance to most that no one really cares and this should be simply accepted. So, a difficult idea managed correctly can get past everyone with the minimum of fuss.
by EnnEmmEss | 2025-07-31 05:25:14+00:00
The report is definitely worth reading although I don't think the data is strong enough to draw significant conclusions from. I personally think that this should be studied more in depth over a longer time period since the current study had a 50 hour threshold (not exactly but close enough). One thing which is mentioned in the research paper[1] is:

> However, we see positive speedup for the one developer who has more than 50 hours of Cursor experience, so it’s plausible that there is a high skill ceiling for using Cursor, such that developers with significant experience see positive speedup.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089
by benrutter | 2025-07-31 05:25:19+00:00
> it's obvious to anyone that writes code that we're very far from the standards that we're used to

This is true, but I also think there's a backlash now and therefore some really nice mostly dev-focused software that is reeaaaaly fast. Just to name a few:

- Helix editor - Ripgrep - Astral python tools (ruff, uv, ty)

That's a tiny subsection of the mostly bloated software that exists. But it makes me happy when I come across something like that!

Also, browsers seems to be really responsive despite being one of the most feature bloated products on earth thanks to expanding web standards. I'm not really counting this though because Firefox and Chrone might rarely lag, the websites I view with them often do, so it's not really a fast experience.
by lmm | 2025-07-31 05:25:58+00:00
> I've yet to see a convincing argument that trains are cheaper than busses (especially when you consider that most of a bus's route (in the USA) would be on "free" roads).

For a given capacity requirement, in a dense city, they're cheaper. The biggest costs of an urban train line are 1) building stations on expensive land 2) driver salaries, and buses are worse on both aspects; you need much more station space to load/unload the same number of people from buses than from trains, and buses carry far fewer passengers per driver.

> If they weren't why would BRT exist at all?

As far as I can tell BRT is a spook, a way for the road lobby to stop cities building rail. Has it ever actually worked out well for passengers?
by pbrum | 2025-07-31 05:26:12+00:00
What if superintelligence isn't even a thing? I was watching an interview with a Chinese-American specialist the other day (I'm sure it's been shared here on HN at some point) and she explained in the Chinese AI community they don't operate under the assumption that something such as AGI or superintelligence exists, and therefore don't work toward that goal. I'm sure people in this community can comment to a much more informed extent on this than I though
by sn9 | 2025-07-31 05:26:33+00:00
> I have lived alternating violently between bulimia and anorexia my entire life precisely because someone emphatically, and also utterly and destructively incorrectly, believed that to be true.

Having a mental disorder does not change how physiology works and does not depend on how it works, but it does explain a lot of what you're writing and why.

> I am absolutely certain that I know more about what calories actually are, and how badly fitted they are to actually managing our body mass — the best way to manipulate your weight is to change gravity wells — than you do.

I have a degree in biology and have been reading and researching enough about fitness and health for well over a decade to know how to take someone from the couch to at least 80% of their genetic potential in terms of strength and size while being as shredded as they'd like in a deterministic process.

> We are not bomb calorimeters. We do not consume calories, nor do we engage, in even the most ludicrously “basic” sense, in anything resembling the simple combustion of our food supply. There are calories in coal and, for that matter, plutonium… try to metabolize either.

Yes but if you'd ever opened a biochemistry textbook, you'd see what we actually do and you'd understand why what works in bodybuilding works at all, and how it's all downstream of that.

I hope you get help but you are simply not an authority on this topic. I'll go with all the people with proven track records teaching people how to successfully manipulate their body composition with methods rooted in understanding basic physiology over a random person on the internet.
by Frieren | 2025-07-31 05:27:25+00:00
> Let's say it was coded extremely well, but nevertheless a more advanced exploiter wreaked similar havoc.

A doctor kills a patient because malpractice. Could that patient have died anyway if the patient had a more critical condition?

That is a non sequitur argument.

> Would they still be liable in your perfect world?

Yes. The doctor would be liable because did not meet the minimum quality criteria. In the same way that the developer is liable for not taking into account any risks and providing a deeply flawed product.

It is impossible in practice to protect software from all possible attacks as there are attackers with very deep pockets. That does not mean that all security should be scrapped.
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-31 05:29:10+00:00
That's true but it's not just monopolies per se. Another big part of it is information flow. The kind of idealized free markets that "work" involve relatively transparent interactions between buyers and sellers. Sort of like, well, a market --- an old-fashioned bazaar-type market with sellers offering their wares. You can walk down the line and see 10 people are selling apples or saddles or whatever and you can compare the prices and the products and make your decision.

Even in that setup, people can try to game the market. They can make something that looks like a good saddle and sell it to you and then it falls apart not too long afterward. They can get you to agree to a price but then tell you the stirrups aren't included even though they're attached to the demo model. They can ask for half payment up front while they custom make your item, then skip town.

And mechanisms sprung up to prevent this: regulation. Some are market-internal (reputation) and some are enforced (people can report you to the authorities for selling fraudulent goods, and you can be jailed or whatever).

The problem is mainly that nowadays companies have turned the majority of their innovation energy towards this kind of market-gaming meta-activity. It's no longer about goods, services, buyers, sellers, or any of those things. It's just about finding new ways to manipulate the market itself.

This is what the article seems to be saying, and I agree. I'm not sure I'd call it "hype", though. It's not that "the hype is the product", it's that the market activity is not oriented towards products at all. Products have become like abstract proxy tokens that are moved around to simulate what we think of as market activity, but all the real activity is happening in the meta-market.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-31 05:33:35+00:00
This kind of issue is absurdly common. I’ve seen basically the same thing with Microsoft, Amazon and Google—personally and with others.

With Google, it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification… which may not be possible. This hit me once while overseas, I think I managed to get in by tunnelling through my VPS in Australia. And if you can’t do this, you’re stuck, because Google simply doesn’t have support.

With Amazon, I was finally able to find one way of contacting them that didn’t require signing in, and when I finally got to a human, the problem was immediately fixed.
by benrutter | 2025-07-31 05:37:02+00:00
Molasses can be fast if you leave it in the packet and hurl it!

Seriously though, you're so right- I often wonder why this is. If it's that people genuinely don't care, or that it's more that say ecommerce websites compete on so many things already (or in some cases maintain monopolies) that fast doesn't come into the picture.
by LeFantome | 2025-07-31 05:37:23+00:00
In some ways, things may be about to get better for these old environments.

Xwayland is likely to be a completely static environment. The Wayback compositor will evolve with Wayland of course, but Xwayland itself probably will not. That means that desktop environments that run on Xwayland will probably continue to run for a long, long time.

X11 evolution is about to stop. Perhaps that means that nothing will break.
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-31 05:37:25+00:00
To what extent can this generalize from flies to humans? I've been very interested in dreams and read a decent amount of research on sleep and its functions, but most of that was years ago so my knowledge may be outdated. But my impression was that there are non-negligible differences in how sleep works (e.g., in terms of brain activity) between say, birds and mammals, or even one mammal to another. Certainly there could be some basal functions that are shared in flies but it seems a stretch to say "it all comes down to" that. As someone said in another comment, it's unclear what makes this about sleep rather than rest.
by 9rx | 2025-07-31 05:37:47+00:00
> You could cut that one without any real harm

The risk is going back to the time where we left corn in piles to rot. That's not harmful in any kind of immediate sense, but losing that energy to waste heat instead of converting it back into usable energy is less than ideal.

> and you could definitely cut back on corn

It's not that you try to grow too much corn, but its yield can be pretty unpredictable. Last year, with favourable weather, yields around here were nearly 100 bushels per acre higher than pre-harvest estimates! That is a hell of a lot of extra product that nobody ever expected before the combines started rolling.

And if you plan for those freak years every year, you're going to end up short more often than not. There is a lot of guesswork involved. That is what ethanol was originally intended to be: A way to buffer that guesswork.

> in general and promote some other stuff

Like what?

1. The consumer dictates what you grow. The consumer loves corn (mostly because it turns into meat). You'd have to compel the consumer to eat something else, and that is going to be one hell of an uphill battle. Many organizations have been trying to get people away from meat for decades and meat consumption is only going up. Meat doesn't necessarily have to come from corn, granted, but other options are more expensive. The consumer isn't going to pay more for meat either.

2. Corn equipment is compatible with other human foods (beans, wheat, etc.) that are also being grown in the crop rotation. If you expect a corn/bean/wheat farmer to start growing carrots in place of corn, good luck. They'd never be able to afford the capital expenditure to add carrot equipment to their lineup.
by kristianp | 2025-07-31 05:38:04+00:00
I've encountered something similar with Apple. I tried to create an Apple id on a reconditioned Mac. It said the machine had been used too many times to create an Appleid. In the process it seemed to flag my phone number so I was unable to create an account on another device. The two support chats just told me to try again with no change. The first chat took about 40 minutes, there was a 5 minute pause on every response from them. At least on the 2nd chat I was able to ask for a 2nd level support call who fixed the problem.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-07-31 05:39:09+00:00
Within a city it really doesn’t matter because it averages out.

I’m an avid cyclist in a US city. There’s a pretty large radius around me in which driving is <= 5 minutes quicker, not counting time to park. Plus cycling often leaves me directly by my destination. I can’t imagine how much more convenient it would be in a dense European city.

Anyways, what the hell is everyone in such a hurry for? Leave five minutes earlier. Cars are absolutely magical. Drivers sitting on mobile couches while expending minimal effort? Magical. So, ya know, adding a few minutes should really be no big deal. Which I doubt it does.

Big, open highways are different. Or at least I’d imagine them to be.
by subarctic | 2025-07-31 05:39:12+00:00
Setting up a linter, formatter and having a lot of strict type checking are really helpful when using an llm to generate code, just like they are when you start receiving contributions from people who don't know or don't agree with the style rules that you implicitly follow. As are tests. Basically anything automated that helps ensure the right style and behaviour of your code becomes very useful with coding agents as they can just run whatever command you tell them to check for issues and/or fix them if possible.
by crocowhile | 2025-07-31 05:39:37+00:00
The conclusions are pushed and hyperbolic exactly to get this type of reaction from the public, at best conflating control with function (we solved sleep) while the sleep phenotype itself is basically non-existing.

Proper rebuttals will come up in due time on the appropriate channels. all the colleagues I talked to are as pissed off as I am about this way of doing science.
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-31 05:39:59+00:00
> "slows down economic growth"

Is this a problem? Can I eat economic growth? I'd be pretty happy to have fewer cars in city and town centers, which would reduce things like death, injury, lung cancer, sleep disruption, and make foot journeys shorter and more pleasant, make biking easier. It would involve making and selling fewer cars and less executive compensation for the CEO of Ford, but that's about the worst reason to argue against it.
by boudin | 2025-07-31 05:41:03+00:00
There are multiple studies showing the negative impact of social media on teen's health. It's not about censorship but about forcing companies that don't care at all to be held accountable.

I'm not sure the approach taken by Australia will be effective (i'm not sure how it can be implemented), but i don't see the problem with doing something against harmful companies like meta, tiktok, x/twitter

One of the study https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476631/
by esseph | 2025-07-31 05:41:26+00:00
Oxide is selling a technical solution to technical customers with ownership needs or desires for security, regulatory, or other reasons. Access to the complete stack source code is another. I know a bajillion of these customers and they all have very, very deep pocket books.

They are specifically going after features in a way that no other vendor is, with an extreme care of execution of their crafts at the highest level.

The problems oxide is solving for these customers is something Amazon has shown no interest in. Could they? Sure, they could do anything they put their pocket books to doing, but they haven't.
by intermerda | 2025-07-31 05:42:33+00:00
> In Executive Order 14193 of February 1, 2025 (Imposing Duties To Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our Northern Border), I declared a national emergency regarding the unusual and extraordinary threat to the safety and security of Americans, including the public health crisis caused by fentanyl and other illicit drugs and the failure of Canada to do more to arrest, seize, detain, or otherwise intercept drug trafficking organizations, other drug and human traffickers, criminals at large, and illicit drugs

Yes, totally normal and not radical at all.

I really don't get why HN posters feel the need to polish a turd.
by rramadass | 2025-07-31 05:43:06+00:00
This argument has been made before and that is why i said it depends and put "proving" within quotes. It is a very narrow and wrong way of looking at Formal Methods (both Specification and Verification) and one of the main reasons the "ordinary" software engineer gets intimidated and overawed by formal methods and afraid to even approach the subject (as my comments to user cubefox shows).

A Formal Method defined broadly is the application of Mathematical Concepts/Models and Logic to the specification/implementation/verification of Computer Programs.

DbC is based on Hoare Logic where you try to "prove" the program intellectually and not necessarily tool driven. This was somewhat mechanized (though still a intellectual pursuit) by Dijkstra's technique of deriving weakest-preconditions. Because the whole process can be quite tedious, laborious and rather complex, automatic theorem prover tools were invented to do the job for you. This has resulted in the unfortunate status quo where Formal Specification/Verification have become identified with the use of tools and not the Mathematics behind them. Proving Correctness need not be fine-grained and absolute but can be good enough done partially at a gross level at specific stages in a program as needed and done either by hand and/or using tools.

DbC can be considered a lightweight Formal Method with aspects of both Specification and Verification included. The Programmer plays the role of "theorem prover" when using DbC. However tools exist to map "Design-by-Contract" constructs to "Verified Design-by-Contract" constructs. See for example https://www.eschertech.com/products/verified_dbc.php. Also Eiffel (quintessential DbC language) can be converted using AutoProof to a form which can be proven by Boogie verifier.

Finally; here is a case study Design by contract formal verification for automotive embedded software robustness (abstract & pdf) - https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/ERTS2024/hal-05028176v1
by superfish | 2025-07-31 05:43:12+00:00
> The term references an Internet meme depicting the fallacy using Goombas, which was first posted to Twitter by @supersylvie_ on January 29, 2024.

The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this.

Maybe “population fallacy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy ?
by doughnutstracks | 2025-07-31 05:43:45+00:00
I've also been experiencing issues with the Authenticator app and Outlook, and it seems many others online are facing similar problems [0][1].

It's genuinely disappointing that using the Microsoft Authenticator app is a mandatory requirement for work, especially since they introduced the tap the correct number thing.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Outlook/comments/1m4wp7h/microsoft_...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4376965/...
Show HN: Truman Street - Create your own market funds from stocks
by ishaanmishra | 2025-07-31 05:44:35+00:00
I built Truman Street, a tool that lets you create your own custom market funds. You can select stocks, bundle them into a fund, and then track its performance. It's designed to be simple and accessible, with no account setup required. I'm looking for feedback on the concept and user experience. Let me know what you think.