MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Dave_Rosenthal | 2025-08-23 15:15:53+00:00
Sure, let's take a rug as an example. I don't think there is one breakpoint. I think there are a set of axis of quality you invest into, roughly sequentially, as you go up the price scale of objects:

- $50 - Something rug-shaped exists

- $100 - Durability

- $200 - Materials

- $500 - Comfort and design

- $1000 - Basic craftsmanship

- $2000 - Refinement of craft

- $5000 - Artistry & identity

- $10000 - Tradition

- $20000 - Mastery

- $50000 - Rarity/historical importance

- $100000+ - ?

Because most people don't cross-shop $20k rugs and $200 rugs, most people are focused on one or two aspects around their personal budget. The essayist mentioned being amazing by the craftsmanship and artistry (see scale above). A broke college student might just want something that holds up in their dorm room and see what materials it's made out of and comfort as meaningless and abstract. And a billionaire shopping for a rug for their office might take everything other than rarity/historical importance as a given and just be thinking about that.

I think there is a large cognitive bias to consider everything you can easily afford "tangible and important improvements" and everything you can't as "abstract"!
by ashenfad | 2025-08-23 15:16:18+00:00
I built `agex`—a Python-native agentic framework where agents work directly with your existing libraries and runtime, avoiding the usual boilerplate of wrapping code in tool abstractions and dealing with JSON.

Its closest relative is Hugging Face's excellent `smol-agents`. While both "think-in-code", `agex` focuses on interoperability, allowing agents to receive and return complex Python objects like DataFrames, Plotly figures, or even callables.

For example:

import math from typing import Callable from agex import Agent agent = Agent(primer="You are an expert at writing small, useful functions.") # Equip the agent with the math module agent.module(math) # The fn sig is the contract; the agent provides the implementation at runtime @agent.task def build_function(prompt: str) -> Callable: """Build a callable function from a text prompt.""" pass # The agent returns a real, callable Python function, not a JSON blob is_prime = build_function("a function that checks if a number is prime") # You can use it immediately print(f"Is 13 prime? {is_prime(13)}") # > Is 13 prime? True

From the agent's point-of-view, it lives in a Python REPL with its own stdout, allowing it to inspect data, see errors, and self-correct. An agent's REPL is persisted across tasks, so it can build its own helpers and improve over time.

Highlights:

* Code-as-Action: AST-style Python sandbox for agent actions. * Library Integration: Plug into libraries rather than tools (& skip the JSON). * Workspace Persistence: Git-like versioning for agent state (w/ time-travel debugging). * Multi-Agent: Orchestrate agents with natural Python control flow. * Observability: Real-time, notebook-friendly event streams. * Benchmarking: A framework for data-driven agent evaluation.

The project is early stage but the core concepts are stabilizing. I'm hoping to find a few brave souls to kick the tires. Feedback is welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/ashenfad/agex

Docs & Examples: https://ashenfad.github.io/agex/
by dgacmu | 2025-08-23 15:17:14+00:00
1) did you start them indoors or buy seedlings? Getting a late start could delay things.

2) did you water them enough?

3) did you have good holes for them? Tomatoes do well if they can root deeply - giving them a 2-3' deep hole filled with good soil and compost helps.

4) cages: indeterminate tomatoes can grow huge, So give them a cage with plenty of space - the crap little cages you get at Home Depot do not suffice. If they were determinant, this does not apply.

Tomatoes do well in full sun but need quite a bit of water if it's dry. And possibly some calcium - we compost our egg shells as one source.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-23 15:19:13+00:00
At a certain point market flows tend to prop up big names, due to so much passive investing being market cap weighted. Those indexes are mostly blind and buy size for size's sake.

The Tesla example is probably a good base case to have. It has a mediocre outlook, extreme valuation, and is no longer minting millionaires, but it's also sort of a mediocre short. Big tends to stay big. (That is, unless capital flows reverse, ex: during the tariff scare, when international money was flowing out of the US for once. Then that same passive complex becomes a liability to those names that heavily lean on it).
by orangeboats | 2025-08-23 15:19:15+00:00
Sometimes it's not just "your code". Strings are often interchanged and sent to many other parties.

And some of the codepoints, such as the surrogate codepoints (which MUST come in pairs in properly encoded UTF-16), may not break your code but break poorly-written spaghetti-ridden UTF-16-based hellholes that do not expect unpaired surrogates.

Something like:

1. You send a UTF-8 string containing normal characters and an unpaired surrogate: "Hello /uDEADworld" to FooApp.

2. FooApp converts the UTF-8 string to UTF-16 and saves it in a file. All without validation, so no crashes will actually occur; worst case scenario, the unpaired surrogate is rendered by the frontend as "�".

3. Next time, when it reads the file again, this time it is expecting normal UTF-16, and it crashes because of the unpaired surrogate.

(A more fatal failure mode of (3) is out-of-bounds memory read if the unpaired surrogate happens at the end of string)
by crazygringo | 2025-08-23 15:19:19+00:00
Practically speaking, for maximum lengths, you generally want to limit code points or bytes, not characters. You don't want to allow some ZALGO monstrosity in a password that is 5 characters but 500 bytes.

For exact lengths, you often have a restricted character set (like for phone numbers) and can validate both characters and length with a regex. Or the length in bytes works for 0–9.

Unless you're involved in text layout, you actually usually don't wind up needing the exact length in characters of arbitrary UTF-8 text.
by mrangle | 2025-08-23 15:19:23+00:00
The problem is that private elite colleges never used just SAT scores for admissions criteria, and no amount of assertion that they did or should will change that fact.

Focusing on SAT scores advances a false narrative, and serves to try to exert outside influence on adjusting admissions criteria to be more robotic.

While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.

What that means is that these students are more often found in elite prep schools. But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools.

Though I agree that there is definitely a common difference of opinion as to what such a candidate's profile looks like. If one doesn't have much experience in the Ivy competition pool, for example, it's hard to understand your specific competitiveness.
by ethin | 2025-08-23 15:19:36+00:00
I am of the opinion that LLMs do not, at all, belong in something as critical or as monumentally complicated as the kernel of an operating system. IMO that is just as stupid as using an LLM in a cryptographic library/implementation. There are, I believe, far, far more ways that that could go wrong than go right. Especially considering that a kernel is pretty much God when it comes to a computer: there is very little a kernel can't do. I'm sure some will argue that it "might" boost productivity (whatever that means), but IMO the cost is way, way too high for that kind of risk. This is, I think, even more important when you consider all the environments the Linux kernel runs in. The shear number of ways that LLM-generated code can introduce subtle bugs that will never be caught because the hardware trusts the kernel and is rarely going to stop it from doing something is practically infinite. To an extent the risk can be mitigated, sort of. But if this goes anywhere and people start using LLMs to generate code in a file system, or network controller, or other very important subsystems, this could get really bad, really fast. I'm sure some will say "Well just don't do that!" but really, we tell people not to do a lot of things with LLMs and they do it anyway so...
by neurostimulant | 2025-08-23 15:20:15+00:00
> The usability was surprisingly decent. LibreOffice and GIMP worked fine, although there was a bit of a lag. I would estimate about 70% of native performance, but still very usable.

You can get better performance and lower latency for your remote desktop and eliminate lag by using a gaming-focused remote desktop server, e.g. using Sunshine: https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine .

You will need to give it access to a gpu though.
by SwiftyBug | 2025-08-23 15:20:40+00:00
I've been finding myself liking TUIs more and more. I've been using lazygit, lazysql, and lazydocker for over a year now, and not once have I felt the need to use their native GUI counterparts. I'm getting to the point where I wish almost everything was a TUI. I think that as a macOS user, TUIs are simply better if your goal is to rarely leave your keyboard's home row, especially when TUIs implement common vim patterns like slash for search and hjkl for navigation.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-23 15:20:42+00:00
I think from so many examples that many don't think the laws will be imposed on them. See so many latino republicans tearful interviews when their relatives get deported after supporting the Trump 2024 campaign. Or farmers who's business is selling their crops harvested by migrant laborers to overseas buyers. Factory owners or resellers dependent on imported goods. The list goes on and on, with the common theme of "I didn't think it would affect/happen to me!".
by jibbit | 2025-08-23 15:20:48+00:00
Despite decades of being told about the benefits of exercise, I had absolutely no idea what the actual time investment looked like to go from unfit to fit. I couldn't put a number on it, and part of me assumed it must be enormous otherwise, why wouldn't anyone just say the number? Then I discovered Couch to 5K: 30 minutes, 3 times a week. A concrete, achievable number that delivered (to me) mind blowing results.

How could it be so low? How could i not know this? How is anyone walking around ignorant (as i was) of this?
by audunw | 2025-08-23 15:21:25+00:00
Even Loris Cro one of the Zig core members, mentioned in a very recent interview that he’ll wait for all the fallout of the IO changes to settle before updating and continuing work on his project using Zig.

The future looks bright after that though. Both Andrew and Loris seem to think this is the last major breaking change, so I hope we can see a 1.0 not too long after. The biggest uncertainty now is what the consequences of (re-)introducing stack-less coroutines will be.
by mirashii | 2025-08-23 15:21:32+00:00
I just wanted to clarify that I point this out to say that there was a real opportunity in this thread to try to push back on the language wars perception. To me, good community management would be taking the opportunity to say:

* Sorry you feel that way, we try not to foster an inclusive environment that avoids language flamewars and negativity towards other languages * Some specific examples of policies that are enacted in community spaces towards that end (e.g. some large programming language discord servers have specific rules against low effort language bashing content and memes) * Take the opportunity to link back to positive things that the Zig team has said about Rust and places where folks have recommended it.

Instead, we got a shallow dismissal and redirection, which unfortunately starts to look like a pattern, especially when coming from a person who's in a leadership position in the community being discussed.
by ec109685 | 2025-08-23 15:21:33+00:00
This article is bad in a lot of ways, but all of sudden it jumps to running Linux in a browser:

“After my failed custom image attempt, I found a promising XFCE-based Debian image on Docker Hub. I downloaded it in minutes and, with a few commands, launched it. When I opened the URL, I was greeted by a fully functional Linux desktop, running right in my browser. The pure geek joy of seeing a complete OS served from inside a Docker container was a feeling I won’t forget. It worked”

And on Windows, docker for Linux containers is just a VM, so this part isn’t really true:

“Containers are not isolated Operating Systems: Docker containers share the host kernel. This is what makes them lightweight and great for single services. Whereas desktop environments expect system services like (systemd, logind, udev, DBus) and device access to be available. Containers don’t provide that by default
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-23 15:21:44+00:00
That’s internet lore. Nobody is buying a $50,000 rug with cash. If any of the people were, the rug guy wouldn’t have a place to bank. Reality is you can move a few rugs a month and make ok money.

There’s a market for these types of businesses. In my area there’s a dude with a company that sells and maintains $50-150k+ Christmas light and decoration displays. He has ~100 customers. The men’s clothing place I go to is a group of guys hanging out having a good time - it doesn’t look busy, but their 4-5 customers a day are dropping $3-10k/visit.

Stores like that are “laundering” money like the rest of the commercial real estate world… by playing games with various (legal) tax schemes. They are no more illegal than a Hampton Inn or AirBnb guy.

Real money laundering places are restaurant/bar, laundromats, arcades, and low income residential.
by naasking | 2025-08-23 15:21:55+00:00
I think abstract principles deserve extreme skepticism. Pursuing material improvements will yield conditions that improve dignity, but pursuing dignity will not necessarily yield material improvements. Dignity is a luxury for those who don't have to desperately scrounge to live. There's a long and sad history of ignoring people's immediate material conditions to pursue some utopian vision of what "ought" to be. Unless there's some argument that sacrificing immediate material improvements will (not may) yield large scale material improvements, we're right back at the perfect being the enemy of the good.
by tw04 | 2025-08-23 15:22:42+00:00
While that argument makes sense from a purely philosophical perspective, it doesn’t hold water in the reality of this situation.

Nobody is entering the chip making business and growing to a size and scale to compete with Intel in 2025. If they collapse tomorrow there aren’t going to be startups filling in the gaps, there’s just going to be massive shortages of chips and chaos.
by Bjartr | 2025-08-23 15:23:12+00:00
Same. Still working on reducing body fat percentage (5'9", 230lbs, 32% body fat) but have been exercising twice a week with a personal trainer for over a year. Have put on quite a bit of muscle. Easily the strongest I've ever been and an in the best shape of my life.

Exercise still sucks. I hate it, it's an awful experience. The only thing I feel during and after exercise is tired and sore. There is no glow, no feeling of being refreshed, energized, satisfied, or accomplished. Just discomfort.

It doesn't matter the exercise, the intensity, cardio or strength, 15 minutes or an hour and a half. It also doesn't matter how long I consistently exercise. I'm at 13 months during this attempt and it's just as miserable an experience as it was day one. Despite assurance from multiple people it'll start feeling good after just a few months more than however long I'd been doing it.

In fact, I would say my actual day-to-day quality of life has gone down since I've started exercising regularly because now I'm sore from exercising most days of the week, whereas I was never sore like this before regular exercise. I deeply wish that exercise could be a positive experience.

I'm always worried I'll fumble and lose the habit because it would feel so, so much better to just stop exercising. (A personal trainer is quite expensive to boot, but there's no way I'd get to the gym and work out otherwise)

You at least have given me some hope that this might change if I get my weight down, so that's something I'll keep in mind.

At this point the only reason I put up with it is in 30 years I'll thank myself.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-23 15:23:44+00:00
In 2016, nine years ago, Andrew announced he'd been working on the new language "Zig" for a couple of months.

In 2018, seven years ago, Andrew announced he'd go full-time on Zig and quit his paying job to live off donations instead.

In 2020, so five years ago, Zig's 501(c)3 the ZSF was announced, to create a formal structure to hire more people in addition to the few already on Zig.

So, "most of its time" is just not true. For "most of its time" Zig was a small, largely independently funded project for multiple people, for a tiny period it was a part-time project, and for a while after that it was solo, but those weren't the majority of its existence.
by immibis | 2025-08-23 15:24:48+00:00
There is no way to prove that the earth isn't actually flat but every observation conspires to make it look round. For instance some flat earthers say that the atmosphere reflects light in the exact way that makes it look round.

Take any phenomena on a globe earth, describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered.
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-23 15:25:12+00:00
I was ok with the thesis of this article, right up to "letting AI decide". "AI" in this article is "LLM". LLMs don't "decide" per se. They give you something like the words other people wrote when they had a syntactically similar decision to make.

Using "Letting AI decide" sweeps that under the rug. If you're good with how basically everyone else decided for a syntactically similar problem, then fine. If you want something different, now you've got 2 problems.
by twunde | 2025-08-23 15:25:41+00:00
If you're in the northeast US it's very common to have free or have to pay a nominal fee for public tennis courts (this may depend on the quality of your town's Park and rec department)

In NYC, it's 15/hr or 100/season. In the town I grew up in it's 20/yr for residents and 40/yr for non residents. I'm my current town it's free. And I suspect that there are waivers/discounts for folks that can't pay that amount.
by arp242 | 2025-08-23 15:26:59+00:00
Excluding all of "legacy controls" not just as literals but also escaped strings (e.g. "\u0027") seems too much. C1 is essentially unused AFAIK and that's okay, but a number of C0 characters do see real-world use (escape, EOF, NUL). IMHO there are valid and reasonable use cases to use some of them.
by toss1 | 2025-08-23 15:27:31+00:00
YES, fully agree, and your kid is definitely doing it right!

I've also found LLMs to be very helpful in proofreading to find inconsistencies, missing items, stray edits, etc..

Here's one variant of prompt I've used with ChatGPT-4o that worked well:

"Focus particularly on inconsistencies and editing errors (stray words or characters, etc.). Be exact and do not include compliments to the author. Please ignore apparent duplicate listings of part numbers and dimensions which are under the illustrations, and single stray or inconsistent spaces."

I'm quite sure that LLMs used in the right way can be amazing for teaching, and I've used them to learn quite a few things. In fact, it seems this is one of the strengths of LLMs — they are not so good at 'reasoning' about unusual content at the edge of a field of knowledge, but are fantastic for compiling info that is commonly used by humans but not yet familiar to a particular human.

And yes, the "They will make us dumb!" response kind of depends if you are starting out dumb — just as a hammer will make you smarter if you use it to pound nails to build a house and a school, but dumber if you hit yourself in the head with it...
by natch | 2025-08-23 15:27:36+00:00
The written description in the App Store is gold. (Not the words in the screenshots… I’m talking about the long description, you have to scroll and look for it.

Everyone should read it. Anyone skimming this, take note. This dude’s app description in the app store absolutely wins the internet for today.

Advice to the developer, in the screenshots the concept is a bit vague. If you could somehow get a hook into the screenshots that leads people to read the full description (not an automatic action for most people) that would help a lot.
by immibis | 2025-08-23 15:28:08+00:00
FYI in some cities, replacing a car with public transport is an improvement. Don't have to find parking. There isn't enough parking for everyone in any city that didn't massively overbuild parking. Cars are physically huge.

Also don't have to be sober to go home from the bar. I'm convinced ubiquitous public transport (especially on Friday and Saturday all night) informed German drinking culture.

Similarly you can go from point A to B to C to D to A without having to go back to B to get your big metal box and drag it to D. Exploring the city is way easier. If you've never experienced the freedom of walking around a city designed to be walked around... you should, that's a pretty basic life experience and it's weird how the US government has blocked it from you.
by crote | 2025-08-23 15:28:25+00:00
Why do you trust your physical servers? Do you believe it is impossible for a backdoor to exist in the CPU's Management Engine? Do you inspect the contents of every single network packet entering and exiting? Do you have a way of blocking or inspecting all electromagnetic radiation?

Confidential computing is trying to solve the very problem you are worried about. It is a way of providing compute as a service without the customer having to blindly trust the compute provider. It moves the line from "the host can do anything it wants" to "we're screwed if they are collaborating with Intel to bake a custom backdoor into their CPUs".

To me that sounds like a very reasonable goal. Go much beyond that, and the only plausible attacker is going to be the kind of people who'll simply drag you to a black site and apply the big wrench until you start divulging encryption keys.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-23 15:29:16+00:00
You don't audit and review all $1k worth of tokens!

The AI might write ten versions. Versions 1-9 don't compile, but it automatically makes changes and gets further each time. Version 10 actually builds and seems to pass your test suite. That is the version you review!

—and you might not review the whole thing! 20 lines in, you realize the AI has taken a stupid approach that will obviously break, so you stop reading and tell the AI it messed up. This triggers another ~5 rounds of producing code before something compiles, which you can then review, hopefully in full this time if it did a good job.
by nelox | 2025-08-23 15:31:44+00:00
Right now the app leans heavily on punishment mechanics (loss aversion + alarms), which is super clever and already works better than the usual “one more minute” blockers. But there’s a whole toolbox of behavioral science that could take it further. Things like if–then planning (pre-deciding what you’ll do when the urge hits), shaping (starting with smaller blocks and leveling up), social accountability, or even sprinkling in variable rewards so it’s not only fear-driven. Add a bit of mindfulness at the start of each session, and suddenly you’re not just fighting your phone, you’re actually training focus like a muscle. That’s how you make it stick long-term.