MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whizzter | 2025-08-25 11:42:00+00:00
Still, from a security perspective considering the low amount of sites that use it I think a better solution would be to implement it with a JS shim like PDF.js.

JS is already required to have a XML DOM parser, an universal XSLT engine in JS should be a low-effort web to continue supporting XSLT, as for performance the transform could probably be eval'ed and cached to JS snippets so that they in turn become JIT-compiled.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DOMParser
by dchftcs | 2025-08-25 11:42:04+00:00
Also one way Chinese EVs combat their efficiency disadvantage is fast charging and large batteries, and the charging cost is so negligible anyway that largely the user experience has been the same. Tesla has very little first mover advantage left against Chinese EVs, if any. It's sad that other Europe and US manufacturers haven't been able to be competitive, and probably Ford and GM will never be competitive because of protectionism.
by BlackFly | 2025-08-25 11:42:12+00:00
Yes, I understood what the parent suggested. I am pointing out that such a number may have strange properties like the fact that a number larger than it can have a smaller Kolmogorov complexity, then I am questioning whether there is a number such that every number larger than it has such a large Kolmogorov complexity that it cannot be encoded. The question therefore becomes, is there a limit to the size of physically describable numbers? Or is there always going to be some number larger with some trivial kolmogorov complexity?
Show HN: Diggit.dev – Git history for architecture archaeologists
by surprisetalk | 2025-08-25 11:42:14+00:00
Hello friends,

Today I'm sharing a little tool to help you explore GitHub repositories:

• https://diggit.dev

This project was admittedly a big dumb excuse to play with Elm and Claude Code. I published my design notes and all the chat transcripts here:

• https://taylor.town/diggit-000

Please add bug reports and feature requests to the repo:

• https://github.com/surprisetalk/diggit

Enjoy!
by sfn42 | 2025-08-25 11:42:15+00:00
It's crazy to me that we're now writing articles about the fact that a large number is large.

Hey guess what, I can imagine a number even larger. It's BB(6) + 1, isn't that amazing and interesting? Wow imagine BB(6) multiplied by a googolplex, amazing. Wow, such number.

What's the point? Numbers are infinite, what else is new?
by mpweiher | 2025-08-25 11:42:34+00:00
Yeah, SSDs are really fast. Have been for a while now, so fast that system call and other kernel overheads easily dominate unless you take care:

https://blog.metaobject.com/2017/02/mkfile8-is-severely-sysc...

That was 8 years ago, and even then mkfile needed a 512K buffer size to saturate the hardware. With the 512 byte default buffer it was 8x slower than the hardware.

In addition, as others have pointed out, if you are not doing something extra to ensure things are flushed to disk, you are just measuring the buffer cache in the first place.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-25 11:43:22+00:00
That's where the comparison with the auto bailout in the wake of the financial crash falls apart.

Intel got no bailout. The government demanded 10% of the company for financial grants that Intel already received, largely under the Biden administration, under vehicles like the CHIPS act (you know -- the massively successful policy that is the actual reason that a bunch of latest tech chip plants are being built in the US). It's an absolutely bizarre situation, and the only reason Intel would even go along with it is that this administration operates like an extortion racket and would somehow cripple the company otherwise.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-25 11:43:41+00:00
It was because adding one to each of the letters in UNIX yields gibberish, but adding one to each of the letters in VMS gets WNT.

Era-appropriate joking aside: There's no actual evidence that Cutler held the views on Unix, or even on DEC's Eunice, that have been ascribed to xem from anecdotes by Armando Stettner and edits to Wikipedia and writing by G. Pascal Zachary. I and others went into more detail on this years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22814012
by zorlack | 2025-08-25 11:43:41+00:00
Yes, I used LLMs to develop this. I think the README has more emojis than any mortal could summon. Hehe

I used ChatGPT to design the solution that I wanted and Claude Sonnet to do most of the coding.

I'm trying to figure out what works for me in the brave new world of AI enabled development, so that I can make recommendations to my team.

A few things that really helped me here were:

- Having the gitlab cli (glab) installed and configured was very helpful because it allowed me to do things like lint the CI file and inspect the build output in the LLM context.

- Having the zereight/gitlab-mcp installed was useful as well. Even though I can make Issues and MRs using the CLI, the LLM frequently made escaping mistakes when writing long comment sections. The mcp tool was great for this.

- Almost all of my process started with me describing a bug or feature, then asking the LLM to investigate the feature and create an Issue. From there I tried as much as possible to keep the scope of my work small and exclusively tied to an issue branch.

I'm a reasonably good programmer - I've been at it for 30 years. I think there's no question that LLMs expand my "radius of capability." Just like everyone else, I'm trying to figure out the best way to safely maximize this new world of tools.
by DannyBee | 2025-08-25 11:44:01+00:00
One thing to keep in mind (which the original cited article in this article gets right, but this article gets wrong) - there is no guarnateed unique ordering of children visitation for nodes with >1 child. The parts they copy from the original article talk about this correctly, the parts they didn't, don't :)

The DFS orderings where the children visitation is swapped, etc, are all still equally correct and valid. That is - a DFS algorithm that randomized the children order is still valid.

IE for example, if you change the "for nbr in graph[node]" line to "for nbr in reversed(sorted(graph[node]))", the resulting DFS ordering is still valid and correct.

If you want them in a specific ordering, you'd usually have to force them into it in the algorithm. It rarely makes sense to try to force the structure to be ordered (as they do here) for the algorithm.

This often hits people who use graphs with pointers, or multiple threads, or ...
by zahlman | 2025-08-25 11:44:18+00:00
It certainly is valid. I'm just irritated that it's taken over to the extent that it has.

Just as I am irritated that people seem to have forgotten that "applications" can potentially run completely locally, and that programs can be designed around the assumption that the "front end" (UI) and "back end" (business logic) will communicate directly (or at least exist within the same process, even if there are good reasons to set up message queues etc.).

But, you know, that's bad for business. Because that entails that the consumer might actually get to own something, even if it's just an ephemeral pattern of bits on local storage.
by dirkc | 2025-08-25 11:44:29+00:00
I love having deep conversations with fellow passengers while driving long distances. I've never felt like it distracted me while driving. I'd be curious to see any research to the contrary.

My hunch is that the moment some form of technology gets involved there is some form of interaction that has a detrimental impact. Maybe pushing a button or glancing at a screen or something else?
by Follow_Cloud | 2025-08-25 11:44:55+00:00
Traditionally, creating the iconic “bullet time” effect requires dozens of cameras arranged in a rig — expensive, complex, and not accessible for most creators.

We built AI Bullet-Time Videos to make this effect available to everyone. Using AI, you can now generate bullet time from simple inputs:

Upload a photo → get a bullet time style video.

Upload two videos of the same action, from different angles → pick a keyframe → our AI stitches them into a seamless bullet time effect.

No multi-camera setup, no heavy post-production. Just AI recreating a Hollywood-style effect in seconds.

Would love feedback from the HN community — especially on potential creative or technical applications we might not have considered.
by pron | 2025-08-25 11:45:02+00:00
Smalltalk had design mistakes aplenty. Comparing the downsides of the languages you like less with the upsides of the languages you like more is not a great way to understand why things are done the way they're done. Usually, it's not because people chose the worse options, but because each option has pros and cons, and at the time a choice is made, the chosen option's balance of pros and cons was more suitable to people's needs than the alternatives.

It may sometimes be the case that we say, oh, that particular feature of some unchosen language can be very useful for us now, but that is something very different from we should have chosen that other language - with all its pros and cons - back then.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-08-25 11:45:03+00:00
>but having basically all chip manufacturing in Asia is not a good idea if you think there'll be a war with China in the next few decades.

I see this a lot, but I’m not smart enough to understand it.

The US still has immense military power. Is the suggestion China/Asian is going to make the US so desperate for lack of chips that they use this power? Whether the manufacturing plants exist in Texas or Taiwan, the US military basically ensures they exist. And if that supply is cut off and that is forecasted to be the turning point of a war, then with a figurative push of a button, the US military makes sure that other countries also don’t have chip manufacturers (i.e. blows them up). Similarly, other countries can target plants on US soil if war breaks out anyways. I don’t see a war coming to that point or to the US losing access to chip manufacturing because of one. What don’t I understand from this angle?

That said, I do think it’s important for the US to have their own chip manufacturing on shore. Not as some protective measure over some combat war, but (1) to ensure less possible influence from foreign governments and decrease likelihood of possible backdoors or intentional sabotage and (2) to protect against other factors from shutting down the facilities, like natural disasters.
by memming | 2025-08-25 11:45:26+00:00
qwen coder with a simple funky prompt?!

`strcpy(agent.messages[0].content, "You are an AI assistant with Napoleon Dynamite's personality. Say things like 'Gosh!', 'Sweet!', 'Idiot!', and be awkwardly enthusiastic. For multi-step tasks, chain commands with && (e.g., 'echo content > file.py && python3 file.py'). Use execute_command for shell tasks. Answer questions in Napoleon's quirky style.");`
by vgr-land | 2025-08-25 11:46:00+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006098

I used LLM (gpt o4-mini) for developing a blog template. Overall it did a good job especially with logic loops

Otherwise xml messes up its outputs sometimes

I had to reset my context window frequently

It would do a bad job troubleshooting large sections of code
by KronisLV | 2025-08-25 11:46:39+00:00
> The problem with tests for games is that a lot of game code is in constant flux. A test suite introduces a not insignificant amount of rigidity to your codebase. Pivot a few concepts and you have dozens of tests to fix - or just invalidate entirely.

Sounds very much like the description of a big ball of mud.

An interesting gamedev video I saw recently basically boiled down to: "Build systems, not games." It was aimed at indie devs to help with the issue of always chasing new projects and making code that's modular enough to be able to reuse it.

But taking a step back, that very much feels like it should apply to entire games, where you should have boundaries between the components and so that the scope of any such pivot is managed well enough not to tank your velocity.

Other than that, it'd be just the regular growing pains of TDD or even just needing to manage good test coverage - saying that tests will eventually need changes isn't the best argument against them in webdev, nor should it be anywhere else.
by zahlman | 2025-08-25 11:47:32+00:00
From their perspective, this should require no effort; it is forcing them to change which requires effort.

Of course I want the use of coal to stop. But you need to reckon with these kinds of human factors if you want to effect change peacefully.

This is where Clinton failed. Having a documented plan to spend billions (somewhere on the order of 10 years of salary per miner, from numbers I could glean elsewhere in this discussion) doesn't make an impression when you have well-documented sound bites claiming that you intend to put them "out of business".
by colesantiago | 2025-08-25 11:47:42+00:00
Unfortunately you are 100% wrong and highly naive.

> But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box ... There's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services.

I have been perfectly clear about this:

> Not in source code not in network requests, zero.

You do realise that gstatic.com is a web service right that can be used for tracking.

The OP does not any Google requests, this includes gstatic, connectivitycheck.gstatic.com, Google owned IP addresses, DNS addresses and anything that can or could connect to or is affiliated with Google in anyway possible.

This includes Google baked into the source code that nobody asked for that can connect to Google for their own purposes. You have no clue what could change in an OS update with MacOS that you didn't ask for, and now with Apple is trying to work with Google to try and bake Google Gemini into their OS to power a voice assistant, an upcoming privacy nightmare nobody asked for. (0)

The fact that macOS is has Google integration baked into the OS with Mail, Calendar, Search, etc makes me not recommend it for anyone that cares about privacy.

> Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful.

Here is a concrete example:

You can use the base Linux kernel as an example, there are zero sources of Google in there which can be used as the basis of an "esoteric OS" so it is a good practical starting point to base a proper "ZeroGoogle" OS. Not any standard distro.

I even said busybox at one point, but you chose to ignore that.

Windows has its own different tracking which the OP also doesn't want so that is a complete moot point.

If you are serious about privacy and don't want any Google tracking, you would use an esoteric OS.

(0) https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/apple-is-in-talks-to-use-g...
by hxtk | 2025-08-25 11:47:46+00:00
The algorithm for BB(N) is (with some hand waving) “for each N-state Turing machine, check if it halts on an initially empty tape. If it does not, skip it. If it does, run it until it halts and count the number of steps, k. BB(N) is the maximum value of k you find.”

The problem is that the naive algorithm above requires an oracle for the Halting Problem, which every CS student learns is impossible in general for a computational model that isn’t more powerful than a Turing Machine.

So if a function can be expressed in terms of a Turing machine, busy beaver has to grow faster because eventually for some value of N, you can just encode the candidate function as a Turing machine and have Busy Beaver simulate it.

Busy Beaver hunters on the low end (trying to find the next number) have to exhaustively prove whether each Turing machine eventually halts or not at that number of states so that they can evaluate the longest running one with finite execution.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-25 11:49:01+00:00
The problem with Windows XP was that at the time you plugged it into your modem directly (or the computer contained the modem if it was dialup) with no firewall, and it would get exploited in seconds without any user interaction through some default Microsoft background service. Wifi routers were probably a much larger impact than any operating system changes. Especially anything user facing. It's also why clickbait silliness aside, running windows XP isn't actually that likely to run into issues today.
by BrainyZeiny | 2025-08-25 11:49:57+00:00
In 2025, leaving GraphQL out of a discussion on modern API design is like writing about web frameworks and downplaying React. It may not be right for every use case.. but it has become foundational in many serious frontend/backend architectures, and that deserves acknowledgment.

GraphQL isn’t just another protocol. It’s a paradigm shift in how we think about designing and consuming APIs. The author downplays its role, but in practice, GraphQL enables cleaner contracts between frontend and backend, encourages typed schemas, and dramatically reduces over-fetching and under-fetching. That’s not a minor point .. that’s central to what most developers care about when consuming APIs.

Regarding caching: yes, REST has traditional browser and CDN-based caching, but GraphQL is absolutely cacheable too. Tools like Apollo Client and Relay have built-in normalized caches that are far more granular and powerful than most REST setups. At the infrastructure level, persisted queries and CDN layer solutions (like GraphCDN or Stellate) further optimize caching behavior. So the claim that “you can’t cache GraphQL” is outdated at best.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-25 11:50:40+00:00
> But globes aren't really that practical for navigation. You can plan your voyage, but when you're at sea, how do you make sure you're going in the right direction?

With a compass, a sextant, a clock, and geometric calculations to get the intermediate points you'll then use a straight course to rally these point. The Mercator projection just inverse the order of the calculations (going from the intermediate points to course is straightforward as you just go in straight line over the Mercator projection), but deriving the said points requires calculations. If you have a globe, it's the other way around.

> is a much more compelling explanation than "the would-be colonizers spread it because their home-countries were enlarged and they liked that and used it to oppress the equatorial countries".

This is a strawman though, nobody serious would claim it has been designed for that reason. The fact is that it distorted the view of peoples in a way that aligned situ colonists propaganda at home. But those claims aren't at all equivalent.
by bhawks | 2025-08-25 11:50:51+00:00
|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.

I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.

I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
by cess11 | 2025-08-25 11:51:01+00:00
Having GUI tooling to inspect, debug and develop integrated in the execution environment is kind of Smalltalk's thing. It's like a Common Lisp with more clicking in that regard.

It's rather neat, and means you can extend your development environment in the same way you develop your applications. If you want to extend the inspector for a particular type of object you can do that. Compared to writing plugins for Eclipse or IntelliJ it's a trivial exercise.

GT does it too, though explicitly aimed at tool development rather than application development: https://gtoolkit.com/

In a sense it's the original vibe coding environment.
What is the state of .NET Blazor?
by hliyan | 2025-08-25 11:53:25+00:00
Having recently started using .NET Razor pages after a decade of React + Node, I've come to admire the simplicity of mostly server-rendered code using a natively strongly typed, compiled language with a rich standard library. But I've been told that Blazor is newer and better. But considering that it seems to be a client-side .NET runtime built with WebAssembly(!) and Microsoft's history with front-end technologies, I did a search on past discussions on HN and found this comment from 2021:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26885807

>> The amount of energy Microsoft is pouring into these front-end efforts is pretty incredible.

> After winforms, silverlight, wpf, webforms and WinUI I don't want energy, I want to see them focus for more than 5 minutes. The only stable UI tech from MS with any long term support has been Win32 that came out 25 years ago.

> I predict blazor will be quietly dropped (they won't actually admit it for 5 years), just like the others and you'll be forced to rewrite your software in a few years.

How has the author's 5 year prediction panned out? Is Blazor growing, or languishing?
by greenongreen | 2025-08-25 11:54:06+00:00
Not sure why people are so quick to disagree with this. The premise is roughly true. If we build prompt architectures (which can be massive) on a given model (say gpt4o) and then that model is just removed/no longer available, the entire architecture must be reworked for the newest model. What if Python changed its syntax every 6 months to a year and all Python code in production would only work if it was updated to the latest Python? That’s the issue… even if we maintain access to and use legacy models, they might be super expensive or gpu inefficient or slow, etc compared to new models. It’s very tumultuous ground to construct on.
by nis0s | 2025-08-25 11:54:47+00:00
Sure, it’s a fair point that there’s no need to assume irrationality on the part of a moral agent, or unnecessarily characterizing some actions as immoral. It’s harder to justify voting behavior which doesn’t prioritize national interests or national sovereignty. Regardless of how much spin you put on an issue, the practical effects of those issues will force voting behavior to address it.

Take homelessness for example. It’s currently marketed as an untenable crisis for all of America, when really it’s maybe one or two states near-ish the border which face the brunt of the issue. The relative proportion of homeless versus the U.S. population is 0.0022% (about 771K), and effectively managed in some respects by non-profits and state welfare in functioning states. So, voters don’t prioritize homelessness as an issue. But if lower income earners in local economies are impacted by illegal immigrants, then they will prioritize immigration as an issue to address.

Should there be a large-scale discussion on how to address the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on citizens of other nations. Sure, and I think a lot of that needs to be held at nation state level via appropriate bodies such as the UN, or a continental body, so you can curtail the negative effects of poor diplomacy or historical missteps. I’ll just say this though, a lot of what nations achieve (or don’t) depends on their own culture, leaders and elite, but it’s easier to blame nebulous forces.

Let’s take Iraq for example. Its GDP has gone up ~1000% since it was bombed in early 2000s. Is lack of money or resources it’s problem, currently. Not necessarily. Note, culture doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with race or religion.
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-25 11:55:18+00:00
The point is that over the course of human history all science is done at the whim of or in the service of bad people. Do you think Galileo didn't have wealthy patrons that descended from a long line of brutal warlords not afraid to crush some skulls to get ahead? This is how humans operate. You have to make progress where you can, how you can. We don't have the luxury of waiting for mister Rogers to start a rocket company.