MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 19:26:18+00:00
The human desire for interoperability would prevent writing everything from scratch, but to the extent that is reasonably possible, yes. We would already do that now if humans weren't a limiting factor. But coding agents, as I know the term, is about removing humans from the equation of writing code. I did ask if there is another interpretation for "coding agent" being used.

Of course, distinct projects is a human construct that computers don't care about. As coding agents evolve (if they do), it isn't likely that the idea of projects will persist long-term.
by com2kid | 2025-08-13 19:26:38+00:00
You are saying the exact same thing I am, just with different words.

JSX makes it impossible to crap out invalid HTML because it is a library + toolchain (+ entire ecosystem) that keeps it from happening. JSX is always checked for validity before it gets close to the user, so the most irritating failure case of XHTML just doesn't happen.

XHTML never had they benefit. My point is that if libraries like React or Vue had been popular at the time of XHTML, then XHTML's strictness wouldn't have been an issue because JSX always generated valid outputs (well ignoring compiler bugs which I far too damn many of early on in React's life)
by zevon | 2025-08-13 19:26:41+00:00
Let me assure you that the population that you will find at Congress is rather anti-fascist. And so is the constitution of country where the event happens. As far as I remember from a few side-notes in my history classes, there are a few historic reasons for that. One may go so far as to call those reasons pretty stark reminders of why anti-fascism is a good thing...
by noelwelsh | 2025-08-13 19:27:29+00:00
I saw a talk by someone from Google about their experiences using Rust in the Android team. Two points stuck out: they migrated many projects from Python, so performance can't have been that much of a concern, and in their surveys the features people liked most were basics like pattern matching and ADTs. My conclusion is that for a lot of tasks the benefit from Rust came from ML cicra 1990, not lifetimes etc. I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1] it could have been Rust. Unfortunately it fell into the gap between what academia could justify working on and what industry was willing to do.

[1]: Practically speaking, the 31-bit Ints are annoying if you're trying to do any bit bashing, but aesthetically the double semicolons are an abomination and irk me far more.
by b112 | 2025-08-13 19:27:54+00:00
It's a very simple metric. They had nothing of value, no product, no marketable thing.

Then they scanned your site. They had to, along with others. And in scanning your site, they scanned the results of your work, effort, and cost.

Now they have a product.

I need to be clear here, if that site has no value, why do they want it?

Understand, these aren't private citizens. A private citizen might print out a recipe, who cares? They might even share that with friends. OK.

But if they take it, then package it, then make money? That is different.

In my country, copyright doesn't really punish a person. No one gets hit for copying movies even. It does punish someone, for example, copying and then reselling that work though.

This sort of thing should depend on who's doing it. Their motive.

When search engines were operating an index, nothing was lost. In fact, it was a mutually symbiotic relationship.

I guess what we should really ask, is why on Earth should anyone produce anything, if the end result is not one sees it?

And instead, they just read a summary from an AI?

No more website, no new data, means no new AI knowledge too.
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-08-13 19:28:13+00:00
Here's one that's not a myth: IEEE-754 floats are the only "primitive types" that allow "a == a" to not be true.

I.e., two floats that are _identical_ to each other (even when it's _the same_ variable, on the same memory address) can be not _equal_ to each other, specifically if it's NaN. This is dictated by IEEE-754, and this is true for all programming languages I know, and to this day, this makes zero sense to me, but apparently this is useful for some reason.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-13 19:29:03+00:00
If you have an extremely simple theory that debunks the status quo, it is safer to assume there is something wrong with your theory, than to assume you are on to something that no one else figured out.

You are implicitly assuming that no statistical model acting on next-token prediction can, conditional on context, replicate all of the outputs that a human would give. This is a provably false claim, mathematically speaking, as human output under these assumptions would satisfy the conditions of Kolmogorov existence.
by jjk166 | 2025-08-13 19:29:43+00:00
Well first certain activities are very difficult to directly police so rather than getting better at dealing with the actual criminal behavior, you instead go after the money which is merely a proxy for the behavior.

Unfortunately tracking monetary transactions and finding the people doing heinous behavior you're supposed to be policing is still pretty hard, so you you hand off that task to someone else. The best way to go after the money is to put tight restrictions on money processors to collect data and high penalties for looking the other way, so they'll do your job for you.

Unfortunately determining which transactions are actually illicit is also pretty hard, so the payment processors go employ intermediate firms which give various buisnesses scores based on how well they comply with the payment processor's guidelines, which is a proxy for transaction suspicion.

Unfortunately scoring businesses on how well they comply with guidelines is also hard, so the intermediates make the businesses adopt operating guidelines and just compare how well those match up to the payment processor's, which is a proxy for how well the company complies. Typically these guidelines have certain moderation requirements.

Unfortunately moderating content is hard, so businesses that handle transactions for 3rd party content put the onus on those using their platform to self moderate, and put in place overly conservative moderation designed to satisfy the intermediates.

Repeat this a few times for a few different classes of behavior and suddenly the financial infrastructure is one of the most powerful tools to manipulate the population at scale in the world, much to the satisfaction of those who came up with the system. It's amazing how much extra you can get done by not doing your job.
by fl7305 | 2025-08-13 19:29:47+00:00
> Does ChatGPT ever ask the user, like, anything?

Yes. At least when I just tried ChatGPT-5:

Can I replace sodium chloride with sodium bromide?

ChatGPT said: Yes, in some cases — but it depends on the application.

Chemistry/lab use: Both are salts of sodium and dissolve similarly, but bromide is more reactive in some contexts and heavier. It can change reaction outcomes, especially in halide-sensitive reactions (e.g., silver halide precipitation).

Food use: No — sodium bromide is toxic and not approved as a food additive.

Industrial processes: Sometimes interchangeable (e.g., certain brines, drilling fluids) if bromide’s different density, solubility, and cost are acceptable.

What’s your intended use?
by jacquesm | 2025-08-13 19:29:54+00:00
Humanity doesn't own SpaceX. If humanity would have a vote on this I'd be happy to agree with you but it is just one US corporation that does this and they don't get to decide for all of us. If they just did their thing above the USA that would be another matter entirely but that's not how this works, as you well know. So you slip in the 'for the greater good' argument that does not necessarily hold and besides which isn't up to SpaceX to decide, especially not unilaterally.
by woodruffw | 2025-08-13 19:30:02+00:00
For what it's worth, I understand this concern. However, I want to emphasize that pyx is intentionally distinct from Astral's tools. From the announcement post:

> Beyond the product itself, pyx is also an instantiation of our strategy: our tools remain free, open source, and permissively licensed — forever. Nothing changes there. Instead, we'll offer paid, hosted services that represent the "natural next thing you need" when you're already using our tools: the Astral platform.

Basically, we're hoping to address this concern by building a separate sustainable commercial product rather than monetizing our open source tools.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-08-13 19:30:41+00:00
The payment processors are complying in advance with laws that don't exist yet but are expected to be made. The Visa Global Government Affairs Department and the Mastercard Government Affairs & Policy Team hire historians and political scientists with years of policy industry experience to assess the political risks of failing to align with the ruling party of the country they are headquarted in.

For example, one of the major banks in Weimar Germany was Mendelssohn & Co., which did not align with the ideology of the post-1933 government. In 1938 the bank was liquidated and the assets forcibly absorbed into Deutsche Bank. The executives of Mendelssohn & Co. who were not already members of the Nazi party were all arrested and later murdered in the Holocaust, with the exception of Rudolf Loeb who fled to Argentina and died in 1966 and Paul Kempner who fled to the United States and died in 1956.
by philsnow | 2025-08-13 19:30:56+00:00
You'd get rate limited pretty hard by Let's Encrypt, but if you're rolling your own acme servers you could do it this way.

If you wanted to use LE though, you could use a more "traditional" cert renewal process somewhere out-of-band, and then provision the resulting keys/certs through whatever coordination thing you contrive (and HUP the nginxs)
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-08-13 19:30:59+00:00
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime?

Not really. Maybe you just have really punchable face? Given the diarrhea you're spewing, those traits combined would probably make most people want to beat the crap out of you.

Which would explain quite a bit. Hey. Let's be careful out there![0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJDQewSMB-E
by const_cast | 2025-08-13 19:31:54+00:00
The reason is they have no choice. Consumers are the bottom of the totem pole.

Americans spend on average 15% of their gross income on automobile transportation. That's not including their taxes that went towards said automobiles, roads, and oil.

Nobody actually wants to do that. If you could get to work without an automobile, you would. But you can't, can you?

Automobiles are parasidic in nature. To work, they require vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design. But when you get said vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design, then automobiles are the only thing that makes sense.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-08-13 19:32:01+00:00
Just yesterday, I had a conversation with an MD/PhD at one of the major teaching hospitals in Boston. There is a lot of uncertainty right now - a lot of funding has already been lost, and there are real risks around more funding being lost in the future (just as one example, the administration's plans to limit reimbursement rates will cost the Boston area teaching hospitals hundreds of millions a year in research funding - the plans are currently on hold pending a court case). There are also risks around visas - many researchers are on visas. She has scaled back some of her planned research. She's concerned about bringing on grad students and postdocs - if she starts a multiyear project for a grad student and then loses funding in the middle, or they lose their visa, that would be devastating for that person's career, and for the research project.

Your comment is intended as sarcastic, but what you are describing is 100% happening. Industry does not fund a lot of the education and early-career work of scientists doing basic research. Most of those PhDs are funded through federal grants. Fewer grants and more uncertainty means fewer opportunities for young people to go into the field, which means fewer people choosing to go into the field.
by ivape | 2025-08-13 19:32:03+00:00
Yeah, well, won't matter. Those H-1B jobs are full on Java with the most vile old school stacks you can imagine.

Edit:

I'm mostly saying it because everyone now days thinks every tech job is some html and javascript and anyone can pick it up. Doesn't matter how smart you are, one does not simply walk into a h1b Java role. You have to be born in the darkness, molded by it.
by sshine | 2025-08-13 19:32:31+00:00
> My thought is that if FP languages like OCaml / Haskell / etc. let us compress a lot of information into a small amount of text, then that's better for the context window.

Claude Code’s Haskell style is very verbose; if-then-elsey, lots of nested case-ofs, do-blocks at multiple levels of intension, very little naming things at top-level.

Given a sample of a simple API client, and a request to do the same but for another API, it did very well.

I concluded that I just have more opinions about Haskell than Java or Rust. If it doesn’t look nice, why even bother with Haskell.

I reckon that you could seed it with style examples that take up very little context space. Also, remind it to not enable language pragmas per file when they’re already in .cabal, and similar.
Show HN: Multi-agent AI orchestration – lessons from a build log
by danielepelleri | 2025-08-13 19:33:01+00:00
I built a multi-agent AI orchestration system and then had AI generate the ebook about the build from the project’s real artifacts: test outputs, Git commits, and CLI-generated docs. It’s not a cleaned-up case study; it mirrors the actual workflow (failures, refactors, trade-offs).

What it is • AI Team Orchestrator: a free beta “captain’s log” of the build • Focus: architecture, orchestration patterns, memory, quality gates, evals/guardrails, and ops

Why it’s different • Content was compiled automatically by AI from dev exhaust (tests/commits/docs), then lightly edited • Emphasis on applied practices over prompt tinkering

Who it’s for • Builders shipping multi-agent systems • Founders/PMs evaluating AI ops beyond toy demos • Engineers interested in the glue: orchestration > single-agent prompts

Looking for feedback 1. Where should I go deeper: orchestration vs. monitoring/telemetry vs. cost control? 2. Would a starter repo + checklists be more useful than more chapters? 3. What quality-gate thresholds do you use to keep progress moving without rubber-stamping junk?

Notes • Free, no email gate • Early beta; happy to share prompts/pipeline if useful

Link: https://books.danielepelleri.com
by bluGill | 2025-08-13 19:33:38+00:00
Not really.

First of all more weight is good! Weight means more traction, and traction is important. Depending on the system traction or horsepower may be the real limit, but the other is still close.

Second while balance can matter typically doesn't. Even when balance matters, you still need weight on the other axles. Most of the time your are towing something with most of the weight not on the tractor so you just want more weight and you want it more or less evenly balanced - about what a cab gives you.
by cowmix | 2025-08-13 19:33:52+00:00
I’m sorry, but when someone posts about a medical miracle here on HN — sure, I spend 2 seconds appreciating it — and then my mind immediately jumps to the fact that the very system that directly and indirectly made it possible is being dismantled as I type. This topic doesn’t get nearly enough ink here on HN, IMHO — and the wreckage isn’t even over yet. Just like how the full effect of tariffs took time to hit, the systematic destruction of research and science in the US hasn’t fully been felt, here or abroad. The gaps we’re creating are insane — and no amount of LLM hype or VC funding is going to cover them.
by adornKey | 2025-08-13 19:34:14+00:00
So far I haven't met anyone there who was into politics. People there are sometimes slightly anarchic, but definitely not interested in any left and right. But there are a lot of furries - the biggest visible group of visitors - they're just there for sex and party.

As far I can tell only some of the organizers (the people with the money for equipment) seem to have some ties to the fascist left. (Nowadays called Europe Socialism - they absolutely don't like Europe Socialism being called National Socialism - Europe is absolutely not National... But they don't really do anything that looks like CCC - they just spend some money there - and put a little bit of fascist propaganda on display...
by flykespice | 2025-08-13 19:34:26+00:00
Yep, the copyrighted Socket code legal issue has stalled the BSD world for a considerable time. It's reasonable to conclude many users thought it was a deadend for BSD distros, and when Linux emerged as the most promising thing from all (free as in freedom, open to any contribution, not plagued by a closed governance like GNU hurd) they all emigrated en masses to the effort.
by sestep | 2025-08-13 19:34:46+00:00
And even if you do get opam working for a project, it's not at all reproducible and will just randomly break at some point in the future. For instance, I had this in a Dockerfile for one project:

RUN eval $(opam env) && opam install --yes dune=3.7.0

One day the build just randomly broke. Had to replace it with this:

RUN eval $(opam env) && opam install --yes dune=3.19.1

Not a big change, but the fact that this happens at all is just another part of building with OCaml feeling like building on a foundation of sand. Modern languages have at least learned how to make things reproducible with e.g. lockfiles, but OCaml has not.
by butteryflyer1 | 2025-08-13 19:34:46+00:00
With Storybookly, you describe your idea, a setting, a character, or even just a mood. The app helps you turn it into a fully illustrated story. It co-writes and illustrates page by page so you stay in control of the creative process.

I built it because I wanted storytelling tools to feel playful and collaborative, not like a vending machine.

Under the hood:

GPT for interactive story writing that responds to your direction

AI image generation to illustrate each page in your chosen style

Real-time preview so you see the book come together as you write

It is still early and I would love feedback from the HN crowd, especially on what would make it more useful for parents, educators, or indie authors.

Try it here: https://storybookly.app
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 19:34:55+00:00
> I don’t think any of these AI companies can justify their expenses without meaningfully automating a significant amount of white collar work

The businesses in question are building chatbots, not trying to automate jobs. Their primary goal at this stage is to get legions of people hooked on chatting with their service on a regular basis. Once (if) they have succeeded with that, then they can move on to step two.

> Am I going to have comments in my code with ads for McDonalds?

"Give me a function which stores a supplied string to a file in $HOME." -> "I have updated your code with said function. It [...] Have you considered storing the file on Amazon S3 for additional robustness and reliability?"
by ineedasername | 2025-08-13 19:35:01+00:00
Yes, people have died in preventable ways before, so as technology progresses and civilization has advanced in countless ways in the last 200+ years, we should not attempt to improve nor even critique preventable deaths that we either did not or could not before. It should be an area of advancement that we enshrine in status quo as we in other areas rush forward and even race for improvements.
by albumen | 2025-08-13 19:35:42+00:00
Love it. The tone is just right. A couple of suggestions:

Have you tried a "filled line" approach, rather than "outlined" strokes? Might feel more like individual marker strokes.

I made a demo video on the free tier and it did a great job explaining acoustic delay lines in an accessible fashion, after feeding it a catalog PDF with an overview of the historical artefact and photography of an example unit. Unfortunately the service invented its own idea of what the artefact looked like. Could you offer a storyboard view and let users erase the incorrect parts and sketch their own shapes? Or split the drawing up into logical elements and the user could redraw them as needed, which would then be reused where that element is used in other frames?
by cubefox | 2025-08-13 19:35:54+00:00
To print on non-white paper? But I think then the ordinary cyan, magenta and yellow inks can't be used. Normally those are translucent in order to create red, green and blue via subtractive color mixing. E.g. overlaying yellow and magenta dots creates a red dot.

But if the paper can't be assumed to be white, CMY need to be opaque, otherwise yellow on black paper would just look black. Then you can no longer create red, green and blue. So you need additional red, green and blue pigment, likewise opaque. So "CMYRGBKW". Then the other colors can be mixed via dithering the eight base colors as usual.

Or maybe your printer still needs white paper, and the white pigment has some other use?
by Timon3 | 2025-08-13 19:35:59+00:00
> And, regarding bcachefs still being marked as experimental: I'm being much more conservative with the experimental label than btrfs or ext4 were. Your data is safer on bcachefs than btrfs, today: you're not going to lose a filesystem, repair is thorough and robust and complete.

> You may still hit hiccups, which is why the experimental label is there, but robust and complete repair and rock solid multi device have been reason enough for a lot of people to switch already.

It doesn't matter how conservative you are being, it's _still_ marked as experimental. That simply means there's no great pressing need to get a new feature into the next possible release - users can either compile their own kernels, or wait if they aren't able to. They decided to use an experimental file system.

You're making life much harder for these users by causing bcachefs to be thrown out of the kernel. No matter how you twist and turn it, you're responsible for "breaking userspace" in this case. I have no interest in trying to convince you - I've seen people much better at explaining things than I can try to do so, and I've seen you ignore each and every one of them.
by nu11r0ut3 | 2025-08-13 19:36:04+00:00
Hi! I am the presenter. It is true that we have a lot of active peering. In Nikhef alone there are at least 3 IXPs one can join for free (with 10G ports!). AMS-IX makes that 4 with their Bright Networks Club [1]. This can set you up with a lot of peering at basically no cost.

If you can't get into Nikhef, you can become a member of Coloclue. One of their data centers has Frys-IX indoors, and members can get an XC there.

[1] https://events.ams-ix.net/bright-networks-club
by subsistence234 | 2025-08-13 19:36:44+00:00
AFAIK Qubic (the company) is paying people extra to mine XMR through Qubic (if you mine $1 worth of XMR, you get $1.50 worth of QUBIC (the coin) which you can then sell). Qubic (indirectly) loses those extra $0.50. If on average the miners sell too much (more than two thirds of the rewards), then Qubic has to buy their own coins back in order to keep the price stable. Qubic bets on their coin pumping from the publicity.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-13 19:36:55+00:00
I'd highly advise against using GHz here (without further context, at least), a 32Gbaud / 32Gsym/s NRZ signal toggling at full rate is only a 16GHz square wave.

baud seems out of fashion, sym/s is pretty clear & unambiguous.

(And if you're talking channel bandwidth, that needs clarification)
by johnisgood | 2025-08-13 19:37:50+00:00
Use "opam lock" and "opam pin". Additionally, Dune's lockdir feature uses opam's solver internally to generate a lock directory containing ".opam.locked" files for every dependency. This is Dune's way of having fully reproducible builds without relying on opam's switch state alone.

Additionally, see: https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorials/dune-package....