MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nunez | 2025-07-27 22:07:22+00:00
You don't like software engineering; fine.

I don't like how this technology is being shoved in the face of people who _do_ like being SWEs and got into this career path _because_ they liked it. All while ignoring the very-real and increasingly-discarded ethical concerns it brings and the massive, massive subsidation almost all of these tools are being fueled by.

That we're collectively _racing_ to have knowledge and means of production be centralized by a handful of massive corporations is shocking. And scary.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-07-27 22:07:25+00:00
I have a couple smaller projects pending that may become a part of something bigger, but the most amusing one so far a priorities app. At its core its basically a todo list. The difference is that I let it go through local llm to reconcile against declared ( and occasionally derived ) priorities and check for alignment to the todo list with the idea being that the most aligned items should be the ones to act on.

Overall, it is ending up being the most amusing thing I was working on.

edit: Very much for personal use. I currently have no intention of sharing it anywhere.
by pseufaux | 2025-07-27 22:07:39+00:00
This is about the only thing I like about PowerShell. In Unix-y shells I can use a combination of `jc` and `jq` to get a similar effect. Not quite as convenient as PowerShell though. That said, even after using it daily for years, I never was able to get used to all the weird inconsistencies and footguns.
by Nasrudith | 2025-07-27 22:07:50+00:00
I have concluded that math is something downright eldritch. It not only can describe the universe, but entire endless sets of possible universes that obey internal consistency and all of its hypothetical states, no matter how implausible it would be to exist (ice cubes inside the sun, briefly).

Better than that, math can exist entirely independently of the universe and can describe that which cannot exist. The universe may go to one stable end state or another eventually, one which renders time meaningless but math will still exist, even without anything able to embody it, much less conceive of it. Math is thus arguably more real than reality despite containing vast amounts of fiction.
by MITSardine | 2025-07-27 22:08:19+00:00
By contact simulation, do you mean solid dynamics? (mechanics is not my field)

I'm intrigued by the use of level set domains here. I've only encountered those in other type of numerical simulation where the intent is in avoiding surface meshing.

I suppose moving an object in this context is as simple as composing its level set function with a translation and rotation. However, deforming is non trivial, especially local deformations, right?

How do you efficiently resolve collisions? At the scale of an element, it seems to be a simple check of nowhere should both level set functions be negative. But how do you select the elements to check? Do you somehow keep track of only the elements traversed by the objects in a time step, or some other method? I would guess your method should be more efficient than intersecting meshes, is that what you've found?

I'm particularly interested by your mention of high-order boundary parameterizations, what do you mean by that exactly?

Sorry to bombard you with questions, I was intrigued by a combination of things I'd never seen together before!
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-27 22:08:25+00:00
It's open source, can't people fork it?

Circa 2017 I was in charge of figuring out build problems at a startup that was using Python for machine learning. By the time I left I had a complete checklist of what the problems were but I was out of time.

I had notes for something that would have been equivalent to "uv" in many ways, in particular it would have a correct resolving algorithm. I had spike prototyped many interesting things, such as a system which could use http range request to download just the metadata for a wheel so it could rapidly scan a bunch of different versioned wheels to work out what would be compatible with what.

One problem I was worried about was, written in Python, it would be dependent on having a working Python environment to stand on -- my experience was that Python devs, particularly data scientists, could screw up their Pythons worse than I could imagine. uv's answer to be not written in Python was genius, not least because it contributes to speed (caching matters a lot, a pure-Python system could dot that) but because a static linked binary completely eliminates the dangers of corrupted environments. (poetry gets fubared if you use it long enough)

I didn't got forward with it because when I asked around I found Pythoners just didn't give a damn that the pip resolver didn't really work -- it works for them, if their project is simple. If your project is a little more complex it still works sometimes, works enough that you can whack it on the side the few times or start fresh occasionally. Only if you had the super-complex projects we were working on was it war all the time. I didn't think I could sell anyone else on using it so I gave up.
by pengaru | 2025-07-27 22:08:44+00:00
> I say this often, and it's quite an unpopular idea, and I'm not sure why. > > Security researchers, white-hat hackers, and even grey-hat hackers should have > strong legal protections so long as they report any security vulnerabilities > that they find. > > The bad guys are allowed to constantly scan and probe for security > vulnerabilities, and there is no system to stop them, but if some good guys > try to do the same they are charged with serious felony crimes.

So let me get this straight, you want to give unsuccessful bad actors an escape hatch by claiming white-hat intentions when they get caught probing systems?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-27 22:09:24+00:00
> Definitely not. Damage is done to customers

What is the evidence for this?

The cost of identity fraud clocks in around $20bn a year [1]. A good fraction of that cost gets picked up (and thus managed) by financial institutions and merchants.

I’m sceptical we could harden our nation’s systems for a few billion a year.

[1] https://javelinstrategy.com/research/2024-identity-fraud-stu...
by LinguaBrowse | 2025-07-27 22:09:43+00:00
I'm not familiar with the term "context tracking", and management of the event loop is a bit lower level than I normally go, but I do know several runtimes use libuv (https://libuv.org) to handle asynchronous I/O, the same as Node.js (which it was created for).

I'm sure there will be JavaScript runtimes out there using some of Rust's asynchronous schedulers like tokio (https://docs.rs/tokio/latest/tokio/), too, but I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of them just do things bespoke.
by piker | 2025-07-27 22:09:58+00:00
Working on Tritium, the legal IDE in Rust (https://tritium.legal/)

This month I'm improving CI/CD for e2e testing across Windows, macOS, Linux and Android. Also adding support for unlocking password-protected PDFs and Word docs and improving OCR. OCR runs in the background and leverages native OS OCR where available and a pure LSTM Rust implementation elsewhere. Generally improving the word processor and looking for speedups. Adding a cross-platform spellchecker leveraging native where possible, too.

Play with it online: https://tritium.legal/preview

Download for free: https://tritium.legal/download
by gavinray | 2025-07-27 22:10:56+00:00
I'm probably in the minority here, but I also produce House music as a hobby and I love the idea of generative AI as a production tool.

I paid $10 to try the latest Suno 4.5 model and one of the songs it produced was incredible (to me) and sounded so much like the music from my Pandora station I'd never have known it was AI.

https://suno.com/s/EjiWqoG3iR6OYXQA

I'm excited for the future of "Infinite Personal Jukebox" where you can hear an endless stream of music tailored exactly to your taste, and never hear the same song twice.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-27 22:11:42+00:00
Bari Weiss and Paul Krugman wouldn't agree on almost anything but they agree it's a better life to be writing for Substack than for the NYT.

I enjoy reading Krugman so much now because he seems to be having so much fun now that he doesn't have the weight of the New York Times editors on him.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-27 22:11:42+00:00
> that changed with agriculture some 480 generations ago; enrichment is merely the solution

Whoops, typo—I meant nutritionally deficient.

Hunter-gatherers had a varied but volatile diet. Agriculture solved the volatility at the expense of variety. Most agricultural humans across history were nutritionally deficient.

Enrichment (a/k/a fortification) started to solve for the lack of variety, though it’s been historically stymied by our lack of understanding what e.g. vitamins are; modern farming, biology and logistics enable us to actually solve for the problems agriculture introduced to society for the first time.
by manquer | 2025-07-27 22:12:10+00:00
We are tied to ASML and TSMC and to an extent to the likes of NVIDIA .

As cost of innovation in the industry soars, you are bound to end up with a monopoly or at best an oligopoly who will collude.

Competitors get acquired or fully fail when their research is not successful .

It is just as true in pharma and healthcare.

Like it or not in tech we are stuck with no real choice.
by resters | 2025-07-27 22:12:27+00:00
It’s a method of storing information that makes it far more useful than previous methods.

Sure we can idealize feats of the human brain such as memorizing digits of pi. LLMs put more human behavior into the same category as memorizing digits of pi, and make the previously scarce “idea clay” available to the masses.

It’s not the same as a human brain or human knowledge but it is still a very useful tool just like the tools that let us do maths without memorizing hundreds of digits of pi.
by 9dev | 2025-07-27 22:12:28+00:00
That sounds like a perspective from deep in the trenches. A software system has SO many parts, spanning your code, other people’s code, open source software, hardware appliances, SaaS tools, office software, email servers, and also humans reachable via social engineering. If someone makes a project manager click a link leading to a fake Jira login, and the attacker uses the credentials to issue a Jira access token, and uses that to impersonate the manager to create an innocuous ticket, and a low-tier developer introduces a subtle change in functionality that opens up a hole… then you have an insecure system.

This story spans a lot of different concerns, only few of which are related to coding skills. Building secure software means defending in breadth, always, not fucking up once, against an armada of bots and creative hackers that only need to get lucky once.
by cozzyd | 2025-07-27 22:13:06+00:00
Should have stuck with 1080p.

On a more serious note, the administration's NASA budget is just completely nonsensical. I'm biased as a grantee, but the budget request called out our balloon experiment as should happen this year but refunded the balloon program (?!?). The congressional markups keep it so that's hopeful but there's still substantial uncertainty if we're actually going to Antarctica in ~3 months to fly our $20M experiment.

Even if all funding is ultimately secured will so many good people leave from the NASA balloon contractor that it will be difficult to have an Antarctic balloon campaign?
by radicalbyte | 2025-07-27 22:14:19+00:00
Coding as the fun stuff need you to be able to focus and due to responsibilities (which include a whole lot of system architecture, people management I do enjoy and can do well).

Basically you get to a point in your life and career where you have to decide whether you want to be the absolute best engineer, or whether you want to be building the best environment for building and retaining the best engineers. I kicked the can down the line but it was eventually having three kids which made me realise that the latter was my path. That and it was becoming increasingly harder to actually do #1 when you seem to be surrounded by incompetents taking the second path who, as they often never became competent engineers but seem to have a large influence on decisions as a group.

It's not that I like writing code exactly it's that the domain of the code I can write to a professional level doesn't overlap with the code I find interesting to write. Or in the case of web frameworks, worth spending two days understanding the new dialect of whatever the latest fad framework is so that I know what I'm doing and not copy/pasting or otherwise working from example.

What might make it hard to understand is that the vast majority of people who call themselves engineers don't do so to the level I consider professional; especially in the app / web development / start-up world.
by LinguaBrowse | 2025-07-27 22:14:26+00:00
Oh right, thanks for the insight. Wondering how to rephrase it. Did AWS at least create it, or fund it?

rquickjs looks like a good one to include in the article. I've just edited it into the polyglot engines section (I think I've got a mix of engines and runtimes in there at this point anyway).
by Beijinger | 2025-07-27 22:15:02+00:00
This is true but how much will your body absorb via a mouthwash?

Erythritol is commonly found in sugar-free or keto-friendly products like beverages, desserts, and snacks. A single serving of an erythritol-sweetened product (e.g., a sugar-free soda, keto ice cream, or protein bar) often contains 10–30 g of erythritol.

Studies, such as the 2023 Nature Medicine study, used a 30 g dose in intervention experiments to simulate typical consumption (e.g., one sweetened beverage or dessert). This dose raised plasma erythritol to 5–7 mM within 30 minutes, a level linked to increased platelet reactivity and clotting risk.
by willahmad | 2025-07-27 22:15:43+00:00
I have built bunch of MCP servers so far, and here is my take (and why I love it)

There are 2 types of actions, (1) read-only and (2) MCP servers/tools with side effects

1. Read-only types. As you know, LLMs are static models, they don't learn things between your sessions, hence you need RAG or better prompting to enrich the context to get the best results for your use case. MCP helps you with enriching that context. For example, you want to categorize your recent emails, you can obviously copy paste all of them as a context, then ask LLM to categorize. Or you use MCP server to pull emails and add it to the context. This is very similar to RAG, but heavily personalized for your use case (e.g. by pulling data from Jira, Github only when you ask it)

2. MCPs with side effects (write/delete) - Here you can leverage NLP capabilities of MCP to take actions. For example, send email or create an event in your calendar, or enrich the contents of Jira ticket. Same as (1), you can ask LLM to come up with contents and then manually copy/paste it to your calendar to create an event or leverage the convenience of MCP tools to do it automatically.

Here are some demos from my MCP servers:

* Integration with Google Calendar to create events based on information of another MCP server (memory) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgEy6Y1kfn4

* Here you can see how easily you can integrate your OpenAPI based spec and use human language to query it - https://x.com/getaikoapp/status/1945278307496235482
by DiggyJohnson | 2025-07-27 22:17:40+00:00
I’m usually the last person to take this side of a discussion but I don’t see how feasible since:

- the existence species regeneration does not imply the incentivize to regenerate and manage the vast majority of extinct species - lack of gene samples for vast majority of species - we don’t and are not very close to having a viable model for environment and species fitness so we can’t accurately model what specifies to regenerate - new species populations have to be managed before and after initial release - land and labor capital investment
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-07-27 22:17:43+00:00
"I wonder why it's not standard that you can simply connect two PC's to each other with a USB cable and them communicate/transfer files."

After TCP/IP became standard on personal computers, I used Ethernet crossover cable to transfer large files between compuers. I always have some non-networked computers. USB sticks were not yet available.

Today the Ethernet port is removed from many personal computers perhaps in hopes computer owners will send ("sync") their files to third party computers on the internet (renamed "the cloud") as a means of transferring files between the owner's computers.

Much has changed over the years. Expect replies about those changes. There are many, many different ways to transfer files today. Expect comments advocating those other methods. But the crossover cable method still works. With a USB-to-Ethernet adapter it can work even on computers with no Ethernet port. No special software is needed. No router is needed. No internet is needed. Certainly no third party is needed. Just TCP/IP which is still a standard.
by hdjdi | 2025-07-27 22:17:54+00:00
The definition of “100%” varies.

In U.S. even though a full-time job is “40 hours”, many in non-government jobs put in more. The “120%” spoken of would be 48, so let’s say roughly 2 extra hours a day, so 7:30-18:30 with an hour lunch. Tech startups in my experience are usually 44-46 hours for low-mid IC dev or more if higher or any lead/manager responsibilities. Some dev/IT managers may be on-call most of the week. But some people literally are working 40 hours/week.

Other countries “100%” hours/week are roughly: Europe 35-40, Eastern Europe ~40, India 45-55, China 45-50, Africa 40-50.

And similar applies for dev/IT startups and management.

Some work > 100 hours week on average, but I think that’s difficult to do in dev/IT for more than a month at a time without burnout, even if you just keep hitting a button over and over.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-07-27 22:18:27+00:00
I mostly agree but for the needless swipe at Einaudi. He writes popular classical, but I don't feel its trite, and has led more than a few people to classical in a wider sense.

I personally find some of his compositions quite moving, and have seen him live before (and will see him again at the Royal Albert Hall next Spring), and I'll also be at the late night prom in celebration of Pärt this week, also at the Royal Albert Hall.

But then, I can listen to Tallis and Metallica, I've got a wide taste. Perhaps I just have a broader palate than most, but I don't see any reason to be a snob about one genre, musician or composer over another...
by leptons | 2025-07-27 22:18:32+00:00
Did you consider things like JScript.NET? jsc.exe still comes with every Windows installation, and JScript still runs on IIS server (I have built a few things with it).

And what about things like Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and Illustrator which can run Javascript using either Extendscript in older versions or V8 in modern versions.

https://developer.adobe.com/xd/uxp/uxp/versions/

https://developer.adobe.com/photoshop/uxp/2022/ps_reference/
by DaveZale | 2025-07-27 22:19:14+00:00
A few years ago, some talk briefly circulated about local internet efforts, possibly run by public libraries.

Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans?

That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?
by chazapp | 2025-07-27 22:20:18+00:00
I've been building for some time a local production like environment running in Minikube, deployed in a single `terraform apply` command. The plan is to deploy in one command a couple of home made services, frontend, backend, some websockets in between, and have everything accessible over HTTPS via Ingress resources. That, and all the open source observability tools you can imagine (Grafana/Prometheus/Loki/Tempo), configured and running at once.

See https://github.com/chazapp/o11y.

These last few days I have decided to try getting Kubernetes Gateway API to work, using the implementation of Istio. I have written an `auth` microservices which provides JWTs and published a public JWKS endpoint, and intend to have the API gateway validate tokens and claims to allow access to other services. The plan being to write API services without any knowledge of the authentication systems that happen upstream. If a request reaches them, it's that it had been validated before !
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-27 22:20:56+00:00
It’s the standard response anytime someone claims they get productivity boosts from ai. Either you are inexperienced or bad at your job.

On a board that would deride any other no true Scotsman take, this one happens on every ai discussion.

It’s no longer worth engaging with. I’m now just posting basic statements like “I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years and I find ai to be extremely helpful”. That way there is at least someone claiming the opposite. But you aren’t going to convince anyone as they already shut that door with their statements.
by XorNot | 2025-07-27 22:22:27+00:00
And then you didn't post your prompt, the links you looked at or really anything that would mean anyone could establish a common basis of reality or determine if actual nefarious action was happening.

For example, "infiltrating an organization" is also just joining it, which is quite dissimilar to say, stalking if all they did was not actually believe in the organization, rather the say, menacingly post men and machines outside of someone's residence for the purpose of intimidation via threat of violence.

Did you find any of that? Specifically in the UK, by private investigation organizations, specifically providing stalking for hire? Confirmed by more evidence then "well someone totally said it happened but we won't say who or by who?"
by abigger87 | 2025-07-27 22:22:31+00:00
Claude's sub-agents are powerful but hard to share across users. Over the past 24 hours (and 60M+ tokens put through Claude), I built CARP: a minimal open-source registry to upload, browse, and integrate agent definitions effortlessly.

Open-sourced at https://github.com/refcell/carp.

Future plans include voting/downloads metrics and a Rust CLI for push/pull (cargo-style). Experimental, so expect bugs.
by sarchertech | 2025-07-27 22:23:40+00:00
Reducing cyclomatic complexity says very little about what we care about when we talk about simple code. It’s very possible, even likely to produce code with fewer branches that is much harder to reason about.

Cyclomatic complexity says almost nothing about architectural complexity. There’s a reason talking about cyclomatic complexity fell out of favor 20-30 years ago. We tried using it as a software quality metric and it failed.

There are no good, widely agreed upon metrics for software quality.

An optimizer that tries to reduce lines of code per function or file is going to overfit to the specific version of the system at the expense of readability and maintainability.

Both of these metrics will likely ensure you do the exact opposite of what you’d really want when you say you want to simplify the code.

>coworker/junior/intern

I would never in a million years allow anyone to go off by themselves and spend hours and hours unsupervised changing tens of thousands of lines of code with no goal but to simplify the code.
by wrboyce | 2025-07-27 22:24:03+00:00
Interesting goals, and quite different from the norm. I assume you must have somewhat strong feelings about privacy and/or children having access to technology/internet/etc that has driven you to build this platform? As a happily childless late 30s married man, this is quite foreign to me; but I definitely recognise that there is passion driving this project… Could you talk some more about your inspiration and long term goals? I find both the concept and the end goal quite fascinating!