MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Peak Flow – An AI-Powered Task Planner That Aligns with Your Daily Energy Levels
by rashempandit48 | 2025-08-06 07:07:50+00:00
Most task planners treat time as the only variable. But anyone who’s tried to force deep work into a 3 pm energy slump knows: time is not enough. Traditional planning apps assume that productivity is linear throughout the day—but in reality, our energy, focus, and creativity fluctuate in cycles. Planning without considering these personal rhythms leads to burnout, procrastination, or shallow work.

I'm building Peak Flow, an energy-based task planning app powered by AI. It learns your unique daily focus and energy patterns and automatically schedules your tasks—whether it's deep work, creative projects, admin, or meetings—at the times when you're naturally best suited to tackle them.

The goal is to help people get more done without pushing harder—by working with their energy, not against it.

If this sounds interesting, then you can sign up for an early access here: https://80148b5ef306.ngrok-free.app/early-access

This will also help me with understanding the demand of this product.
by Dig1t | 2025-08-06 07:08:10+00:00
Netherlands has a bike-friendly walkable society in most metro areas, yet they still suffer super low birth rates. Same with most of Asia.

Places like the UK have right to roam laws, making it okay for people to wander one other people’s land, yet they also have super low birth rates.

There are too many counter examples for your anti-car argument.
by nickpp | 2025-08-06 07:08:53+00:00
> exponential growth will lead to economic inequalities that will inevitably be exploited by unscrupulous actors

This is a completely unproven theory. I haven't seen any society where unscrupulous actors wouldn't exploit various exploitable aspects for their own advantage.

The so-called "equalitarian" communist society I previously lived under (pre-1990 Eastern Europe) was basically raped though and through by unscrupulous players using political power (in lieu of straight financial power) to their own advantage.
by kashunstva | 2025-08-06 07:09:35+00:00
> The data is very inaccurate…

And that’s the reason they are being destroyed? I find it difficult to believe that the U.S. president has the ability or attention span to parse a fraction of this. And the same seems to apply to a majority of the next layer of decision makers in government.

Irrespective of the data quality issues which I have no expertise in, the motivation for this move is important. I understand that whether the satellites are being commissioned for data quality and efficiency issues, or whether they are being shut down for anti-scientific political reasons, they will stop functioning. But if it is the latter, it helps U.S. voters understand the depths of the anti-science, indeed anti-truth orientation of this administration. They have already shown a preference for firing personnel who are oriented toward actual numbers.
by ryao | 2025-08-06 07:09:55+00:00
> there is no empirical evidence for trickle down economy

I usually avoid responding to remarks like this because they risk forays into politics, which I avoid, but the temptation to ask was too great here. What do you consider computers, cellphones, air conditioners, flat screen TVs and refrigerators to be? The first ones had outrageous prices that only the exorbitantly wealthy could afford. Now almost everyone in the US has them. They seem to have trickled down to me.
by forty | 2025-08-06 07:10:19+00:00
I think people who are afraid that AI coding is going to replace them should try using it a bit seriously. They should be quickly reassured.

What worries me more (on coding related impact of AI - because of course all the impact on fake news and democracies are much more worrying IMO) is having to deal with code written by others using AI (yes, people can write shity code on their own, but with manageable pace)
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-08-06 07:10:28+00:00
> And for some reason a lot of people are afraid of disk encryption.

I can answer that.

Disk encryption is a risk factor. If my desktop fails and it is unencrypted, I can take the disk and put it into another desktop and it will work.

With encryption, I am less sure. I do encrypt my desktop with LUKS but I vaguely remember that setting up an encrypted disk in Linux is tricky, there is a loop device involved for the decryption layer, some LVM config. And the kernel has to support all that, which it probably does, but again. It's been a long time since I tried.

So while my desktop and my laptops have encrypted partitions, the server running my archives and backup is not, because I value simplicity and access more than the extra security.

People using Windows or Apple hardware should be even more afraid of disk encryption, as they understand it way less than me.
by clauderoux | 2025-08-06 07:10:43+00:00
This article nails it. The claim 10x is in my opinion one of these tactics used by large corporations to force engineers into submission. The idea that you could be replaced with an AI is frightening enough to keep people in check, when negotiating your salary. AI is a wonderful tool that I use everyday, and I have been able to implement stuff that I would have considered too cumbersome to even start working on. But, it doesn't make you a 10x more efficient engineer. It gives you an edge when you start a new project, which is already a lot. But don't expect your whole project of 100,000 lines to be handled by the machine. It won't happen any time soon.
by epolanski | 2025-08-06 07:11:04+00:00
For the curious, the laboratory I'm talking about is the Laboratory of Photonics Interfaces[1] at the EPFL in Switzerland ran by Michael Gratzel[2].

I want to stress out that the lab is great, the people in there are extremely hardworking, Gratzel is a great scientist, but at the end of the day research is what it is and stuff like this can slip under both your lab managers and reviewers. I have never ever seen the slightiest indication that lab staff ever encouraged nor tolerated such stuff, but it's easy for it to happen and there's not enough incentives (nor possibility) to review every single experiment.

But the reproducibility problem does exist and the number of scientists tweaking numbers by tiny percentages here and there to make sure they publish is relevant.

[1] https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lpi/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gr%C3%A4tzel
by kazinator | 2025-08-06 07:11:14+00:00
>> In our Lisp, when we re-assign a name we’re going to delete the old association and create a new one. This gives the illusion that the thing assigned to that name has changed, and is mutable, but in fact we have deleted the old thing and assigned it a new thing.

> Please don’t do that. What would be the result of evaluating:

(let ((a 1)) (+ (let ((a 2)) a) a))

That is off the mark; that example doesn't re-assign anything; it is binding a shadowing instance of a.

Removing a binding and destructively creating a new one in the same environment is a viable strategy for implementing assignment, compared to mutating just the value part while keeping the same binding cell.

You can implement it so that the semantics is absolutely identical; the program simply cannot tell.

If you try to make it nondestructive somehow, then the program can tell; e.g. if you functionally rewrite the current environment to produce a new environment in which the variable is edited to the new value. then closures will reveal the trick. Previously captured closures keep seeing the old environment and old value (obviously inapplicable discussion to dynamic scope).

If a variable that has been captured by any number of closures is destructively assigned, all the closures must see the new value after the assignment, otherwise you have something other than assignment.
by jongjong | 2025-08-06 07:11:33+00:00
I don't regret open sourcing my libraries. One of them got some traction and provided me with opportunities which eventually led me to earn passive income for 3 years and I was able to live in Malta, going snorkeling in the Mediterranean every other day while working casually on whatever side projects I wanted.

That said, I feel like things could have worked out better given how much time I invested beforehand and how everything had been clicking into place until my 5 year plan fell apart suddenly around the time of COVID. It all went perfectly until the very end when other people's irrationality and corruption ruined everything.

I probably won't be open sourcing my more innovative recent work. I'd want to see traction before I open source that one and I'm not convinced that open sourcing would make a difference in terms of getting traction.

When something could benefit from being open sourced, it's kind of obvious.

I think if I hadn't open sourced that other project, it would have gotten me nowhere and I would have gotten no value out of it so that was definitely the right move.

My more recent work is a serverless platform. I really wish I could open source it. It's probably better than anything else of its kind but I'm not convinced that people would understand the value provided because you have to use it for at least 1 hour to have your mind blown... But I can't convince people to invest 1 hour into trying it. Big chicken and egg problem.

Also, my understanding of business is that it doesn't make sense to offer a product whose quality exceeds people's perception limits. Outside of the luxury sector, nobody will pay for surplus value which they cannot fully sense, not even if it's 'free'; they won't invest their time. Also, my target audience are developers and they often like using suboptimal, time-consuming tools which allow them to do busy-work. They charge by the hour after all. It's like the target audience is communist so it's stupid to look at them through a capitalist free-market lens.
by danlitt | 2025-08-06 07:11:34+00:00
Like other commenters here, when I try to use them to help with my work, they don't. It's that simple. I have tried AI coding assistants, and they just guess incorrectly. If I know the answer, they generally give me the same answer. If I don't know the answer, they give me gibberish that ends up wasting time. I would love to look over the shoulder of an AI booster who had a really good interaction, because it's hard for me to believe they didn't just already know what they were looking for.
by dgoldstein0 | 2025-08-06 07:11:40+00:00
Good question.

I think something to keep in mind, the US hasn't fought a war on the home front since 1865. The Spanish American war, WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq - none of these were fought on American soil, with the exception of Pearl harbor, which was a navy base, not a major manufacturing site. So we haven't really had to reckon with what happens if our homeland is under fire - sure, we drilled for it during WWII, worrying about Nazi bombers and Japanese sabotage but neither actually happened.

It doesn't look like our wars are going to get closer anytime soon, but modern planes and rocketry have much greater range than in the 1940s the last time we were at war with countries with significant resources. If we ever come head to head with China, their missile capabilities could be a real concern.
by miki123211 | 2025-08-06 07:11:42+00:00
> I would never want to use something like ollama in a production setting

If you can't get access to "real" datacenter GPUs for any reason and essentially do desktop, clientside deploys, it's your best bet.

It's not a common scenario, but a desktop with a 4090 or two is all you can get in some organizations.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-08-06 07:12:26+00:00
I don't know why proton's leadership just doesn't shut up and make money while providing awesome pro-privacy services.

Is coca-cola american? most people would say so but their hq is in china!

These multi-nationals don't have 'branches' in Europe, they are incorporated there as well, that's why they're called multi-national. they pay European taxes and are subject to European laws such as GDPR and other data-residency laws, which means their data-center, and a large chunk of their support staff (Europeans are cheaper than Americans to hire/pay) are in Europe.

Should Americans avoid Proton and its products so they don't rely on Europe? Hypocrite much there friend? Should we avoid European cars? Maybe Ozempic/glp-1 medication should be manufactured by US companies in America (Denmark's GDP is seeing most of it's multi-digit growth thanks to American Ozempic usage).

Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP and now they want to promote nationalistic brand loyalty?

These people make it hard to be against trump's b.s. tariffs and hostility against our allies. Proton has a good product, why isn't that enough? They also have to meddle in politics and make it about "America vs Europe" or "Republicans vs Democrats"?

You know what would be great? if employee and customer owned companies replaced even the likes of proton so we can democratically vote incompetent leadership like this out. Make good products, let the products sell themselves. Why should Europeans have to put up with inferior products for the sake of nationalism? If you want to support Europe so much, tell us about how great your company's product is and how superior it is compared to American alternatives, I'd be down for that. Europeans can and do buy European goods and services of better quality, try finding a Swizz that enjoys American cheese and chocolate, or a European that drives oversized American pickup trucks.

Unless you're speaking as an individual or you are an elected politician, don't misuse whatever platform you have to meddle in politics.
by djtango | 2025-08-06 07:12:42+00:00
I studied chemistry at university and my master's was in medicinal chemistry.

My main takeaway was that "chemicals = bad" is a better heuristic for a starting point where you then look for exceptions or accept them as the last resort after exhausting other options.

Would you let AI loose on the software of your airplanes or nuclear power plants? Medicine is like a sensible idea that should be ok but is hard to rein in and localise to just the area of effect, we hope that it only makes the change we ask from it but we ultimately can't really say with certainty that it isn't also doing something else

I'm actually generally more surprised that people are so trusting of taking medicines and pop pills like they're candy
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-06 07:13:39+00:00
> The PEM format (that begins with `-----BEGIN [CERTIFICATE|CERTIFICATE REQUEST|PRIVATE KEY|X509 CRL|PUBLIC KEY]-----`) is already Base64 within the body.. the header and footer are ASCII, and shouldn't be encoded[0] (there's no link to the claim so perhaps there's another format similar to PEM?)

In practice, you will spot fully b64 encoded PEMs all the time once you have Kubernetes in play... create a Secret from a file and that's what you will find.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-06 07:15:18+00:00
r/ukrainewarvideoreport has been full of it for three years, but mind the survivorship (well, opposite of that) bias - the Ukranian war propaganda / media machine only publishes successes, the Russian one is suppressed or simply not posted on Reddit. Just because you don't see failed strikes doesn't mean they don't happen. The vehicles have drone shields, the roads have nets, and there's heaps of electronic countermeasures in place.

That said, if you're out in the field and there's one above you, you're boned. Can't imagine the horrors of vibing, then having a grenade plop down next to you.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-06 07:16:01+00:00
> American military doctrine seems to include the assumption that ...

Since at least WWI, the US military has been very aware of their dependence on the industrial base:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower_School_fo...

(That I know of, their awareness of high-capacity supply line issues goes back to at least the Civil War.)

Historically, the US military had a considerable industrial base of its own - arsenals, navy yards, etc. - which could manufacture anything from a pistol cartridge up to an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, Congress shut all of that down in the later 1900's, in favor of defense contractors. Gov't-owned facilities just couldn't compete at greasing Congressional palms.
by kazinator | 2025-08-06 07:17:17+00:00
Since JSON does not specify what happens with duplicate keys, that means it is "unspecified behavior" in language spec speak.

Software which prepares JSON with duplicate keys is causing unspecified behavior in downstream processors, and therefore its output can be regarded as broken.

If you put out JSON with duplicate keys, you are responsible for whatever consequently blows up in your face or the faces of downstream users.
by mchiang | 2025-08-06 07:17:25+00:00
It’s a different repo. https://github.com/ggml-org/ggml

The models are implemented by Ollama https://github.com/ollama/ollama/tree/main/model/models

I can say as a fact, for the gpt-oss model, we also implemented our own MXFP4 kernel. Benchmarked against the reference implementations to make sure Ollama is on par. We implemented harmony and tested it. This should significantly impact tool calling capability.

Im not sure if im feeding here. We really love what we do, and I hope it shows in our product, in Ollama’s design and in our voice to our community.

You don’t have to like Ollama. That’s subjective to your taste. As a maintainer, I certainly hope to have you as a user one day. If we don’t meet your needs and you want to use an alternative project, that’s totally cool too. It’s the power of having a choice.
by fzeroracer | 2025-08-06 07:18:12+00:00
Teachers using AI to generate all of their lesson material, read student papers and write comments.

Students using AI to generate their papers and solve complex problems.

What are we as humans even doing. Why not just connect two shitty models together and tell them to hallucinate to each other and skip the whole need to think about anything. We can fire both teachers and students at the same time and save money on this whole education thing.
by rictic | 2025-08-06 07:18:36+00:00
> like the Document APIs?

Yeah, the DOM in the browser, node APIs in nodejs, etc.

> especially if it was faster

Well, that's the thing. Initially it'll be slower, 'cause the code you call, and that calls you will be mostly unsound.

Unless you can run the sound code without the soundness checks at boundaries, at which point it becomes harder to reason about, and you'll be tempted to add some additional runtime checks to your code that the type system should catch.
by whizzter | 2025-08-06 07:18:48+00:00
2005 is already 25 years ago, and what the author is hinting at is the difference in difficulty between keeping 1980s software running vs keeping 2005 software running is momentous.

1980s NES software is "easy" as in emulating a CPU and the associated hardware (naturally there are corner cases in emulation timing that makes it a lot harder, but it's still a limited system).

I used to make demos as mentioned in the article, the ones I did for DOS probably all work under DosBox. My early Windows demos on the other hand relied on a "bad" way of doing things with early DirectDraw versions that mimicked how we did things under DOS (ie, write to the framebuffer ourselves). For whatever reason the changes in Vista to the display driver model has made all of them impossible to run in fullscreen (luckily I wrote a GDI variant for windowed mode that still makes it possible to run).

Even worse is some stuff we handle at an enterprise customer, Crystal Reports was even endorsed by Microsoft and AFAIK included in Visual Studio installs. Nowadays abandoned by MS and almost by it's owner (SAP), we've tried to maintain an customized printing applications for a customer, relying on obscure DLL's (and even worse the SAP installer builder for some early 2000s install technology that hardly works with modern Visual Studio).

Both these examples depend on libraries being installed in a full system, sure one could containerize needed ones but looking at the problem with an archivist eyes, building custom Windows containers for thousands of pieces of software isn't going to be pretty (or even feasible in a legal sense both with copyright and activation systems).

Now you could complain about closed source software, but much of a tad more obscure *nix software has a tendency to exhibit a huge part of "works on my machine" mentality, configure scripts and Docker weren't invented in a vacuum.
by simion314 | 2025-08-06 07:19:16+00:00
>This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.

The issue in your logic is assuming Ruzzia/Kremlin uses same natural logic as the rest of the world, I talked with many Zed patriots, that country uses a non natural logic, Zed Logic. Add on top of the unatural logic, the brainwashing and the fact that most of thye soldiers are murderers and rapists from prisons and you get a lot of civilians killed or abused by this asshols for fun or other reasons that make no sense in a natural logic.

An example of Zed logic

When Ruzzia attacks some civilian infrastructure in Ukraine (like grain storage) then Zeds claim it is legal, but when Ukraine strikes a military ship Zeds claim this is illegal, it is terrorism because... ... the ship was outside the SMO (special military operation) that Putin decided to be.

I am not joking, the Zeds are full of this bullshit logic, something ie legal/correct is always dependent of who makes the crime, where the crime is happening, who is the victim.

Second best Zed logic shit I heard is "USSR was the best democracy ever, in the entire human history"
by astrange | 2025-08-06 07:21:11+00:00
That would be how Linux works, but BSDs are a centralized development model where you actually do have to leave if you disagree with the project direction. That and given limited resources, you obviously have to focus them to get anything done.

Besides that, I'd say the current approach is just wrong because it's obsolete. FreeBSD sells itself as a "server/embedded OS", but the assumptions are those of basically someone who owns a single computer at home and makes random sysctl tweaks to because they read on a mailing list it was faster. Which is the kind of person who's an OS developer or a small-business/academic sysadmin - basically someone who loves being on the computer in the first place and wants an excuse to spend more time on it.

But they should've realized that was obsolete by the time Google released the SRE book (which has a chapter about how you should never make manual edits), and certainly by the time virtualization and cloud hosting became common.

Of course, many people still do think it's fun to own a computer with a silly name and make random sysctl tweaks to it, so they're not going to like me telling them it should be boring and impossible to do. At least there's Docker and Nix though.
by zeta0134 | 2025-08-06 07:22:27+00:00
Python even has venv and other tooling for this sort of thing. Though, admittedly I seem to have dodged most of this by not seriously writing lots of python until after Python3 had already happened. With any luck the maintainers of the language have factored that negative backlash into future language plans, but we'll see.

Mostly I recoiled in horror at bash specifically, which in addition to bash version, also ends up invisibly depending on a whole bunch of external environment stuff that is also updating constantly. That's sortof bash's job, so it's still arguably the right tool to write that sort of interface, but it ends up incredibly fragile as a result. Porting a complex bash script to a different distro is a giant pain.