MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a visual AI workflow builder because debugging prompts is hard
by JackFarrell | 2025-08-12 12:53:50+00:00
Hey everyone! I built this because I was tired of manually handling customer support for my web app and couldn't get an AI system to handle requests reliably.

I tried different AI tools to help with support tickets, but when they handled requests incorrectly, it was impossible to determine why, and even harder to figure out what I needed to change to improve the system.

I wanted to break down my logic of how the AI should think through the problem step-by-step, but everything had to be crammed into one prompt. Without the volume of clean training data needed for fine-tuning, I was stuck with prompt engineering guesswork.

What Chainix does: You drag and drop steps into a visual flowchart. Each step gets its own inference instructions, and based on the output, it branches to different next steps. The AI can also pause mid-flow to call your functions or check variables, then continue. This lets you visually map out exactly how you want the AI to think through the problem (like a flowchart).

I built it with flexibility in mind - you can create something as simple as a two-step workflow or build complex custom logic with multiple branches and conditions.

The key: when something goes wrong, you can see exactly which step failed. Instead of one big black box, you have a chain of smaller, debuggable pieces. My support flow might classify the ticket, look up account info, check for known issues, then craft a response. When the AI did something wrong, I could see "oh, this step classified the ticket incorrectly" and just fix that inference step (or add a new one).

It's handling ~60% of my support requests reliably now (and correctly ignoring the rest), so I'm very happy with it! The biggest win is that I can actually see how the AI is reasoning through each step, so fixing issues is straightforward instead of guesswork.

This works for any workflow involving text interpretation and action - content moderation, document processing, lead qualification, etc.

You can try it at https://www.chainix.ai - would love to hear if other people have hit this same wall with AI tools! Also curious what other workflows people might want to build with this approach.
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-08-12 12:54:18+00:00
I wonder if a similar technique could be used for Melatonin in saliva so that noninvasive circadian phase testing could be performed outside of the lab.

I'm convinced that if we actually looked at the circadian phase of the general population more closely we'd find A LOT of people with wonky clocks [1][2].

I've come to realize in recent months that I'm rocking a ~3h phase advance. Not terrible but it can sometimes make getting enough total sleep time challenging (bright light therapy in evenings really helps).

1. https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/07/16/depre...

2. Circadian Genes, Rhythms, and the Biology of Bipolar Disorder - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSL5hC8bzcU
by hoherd | 2025-08-12 12:54:19+00:00
I feel like Apple embracing OpenAI is a betrayal of the trust that Apple has been building up over the last decade around ensuring that your data stays local, or on Apple servers where security is tight. I do not see Apple Intelligence listed on their "iCloud data security overview" page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

It would be hard to imagine your Messages history showing up in Google search results, but ChatGPT just went through that same scenario with their user chats. Also, it used to be common (though I'm not sure how much it has happened recently) to sign into ChatGPT and see other people's chat history in your session. IMHO ChatGPT has not earned any trust.
by anonymars | 2025-08-12 12:54:35+00:00
Yeah, especially when shutting down. I think it went bananas if a second shadow copy was triggered while the first was still going

Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup

It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI

I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh
by pityJuke | 2025-08-12 12:55:02+00:00
> The exploit abused that feature to trigger a previously unknown path traversal flaw that caused WinRAR to plant malicious executables in attacker-chosen file paths %TEMP% and %LOCALAPPDATA%, which Windows normally makes off-limits because of their ability to execute code.

This seems... wrong? Isn't %LOCALAPPDATA% commonly used to store executables for programs that want to install for a single user and not the whole computer? An example of which includes Google Chrome?
by mrkramer | 2025-08-12 12:55:08+00:00
My idea was to have Wikipedia like platform where you could write about yourself and then have your friends, family and colleagues confirm that information or vouch for that. You can even turn things around and give permission to your friends, family and colleagues to write and maintain Wiki page about you.

I don't use LinkedIn but when I stumble upon someone's page, I often see testimonies from their work colleagues about them.
by HelloNurse | 2025-08-12 12:55:18+00:00
The article (including the attached presentation) seems to be the timely start of a marketing campaign for some GitHub replacement, a "Git-killer" only in the sense that a proprietary complicated walled garden would be preferred over an open DVCS like Git.

All "desired features" are unacceptably vague and either arbitrary or anchored to very specific, and not necessarily good enough to support, project types, organizations and usage patterns. For example, expecting a DVCS to evaluate what users are good enough to merge code is aberrant.
by wand3r | 2025-08-12 12:55:45+00:00
You are entitled to your opinion. Personally, I would only be able to accept your worldview if these artists grew up on something like an island without books or internet and pursued their craft 100% intuitively without any external influence. Then they could make a claim their work was 100% original. Otherwise, I find all human output to be derivative and build off the body of work of the entire race. This is one of mankind's greatest advantages IMO.

edit: When many make this argument, what they are really saying is "big fucks small". This may not be what you are saying, but seems to be the general philosophy of many who make this argument. I am sympathetic to that which is why I believe we should have something like a 15% tax or 2% of revenue of AI paid into a general tax fund. I find it impossible to litigate how much a news article should be "worth" when 400 of the same news article were written the same day with the value immeadiately diminishing after the "news" was new.
by skydhash | 2025-08-12 12:57:25+00:00
Apart from the whole argument about compilers being deterministic and not LLMS.

You don't collaborate on compiled code. They are artifacts. But you're collaborating on source code, so whatever you write, someone else (or you in the future) will need to understand it and alter it. That's what the whole maintainability, testability,... is about. And that's why code is a liability, because it takes times for someone else to understand it. So the less you write, the better it is (there's some tradeoffs about complexity).
by compsciphd | 2025-08-12 12:58:13+00:00
kodak spun off Eastman Chemical decades ago (my dad owned some of their stock and held it to their bankruptcy).

But looking at it, kodak shareholders were given 1 share of Eastman chemical for every 4 shares of Kodak they had. Eastman chemical has split once since then. Eastman chemical is now $60. Kodak ended 1993 (the new company was created jan 1 1994 I believe) at $56 a share.

So that would imply that eastman chemical, that was viewed as 1/5th the value of the combined company in 1994 is now the value of the parent that was left over then (and no longer really exists).
by terminalshort | 2025-08-12 12:58:20+00:00
Is there something in this multi-agent approach that makes the setup more specific to just the test at hand and less general to real engineering tasks? If not, then this multi-agent system will just become what you get out of the box in a future product. Multiple attempts per problem (as long as there's no human intervention or selection between them) is a perfectly fine approach for agents because that's not an issue from the perspective of an engineer using the product. A single agent is already a multi-step usage of LLMs and it sounds like this is just another meta level of that.
by dpassens | 2025-08-12 12:58:36+00:00
It's now too late to edit my original comment but I've skimmed your code a little too fast and now I see that you do understand that Zig works with reified types. But in that case, why conflate too very different things? Returning values of different types is not the same as returning types.

Regardless, we are now very far removed from the original code I was commenting on, which doesn't use auto to return different types.
by bluGill | 2025-08-12 12:58:44+00:00
> good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else.

A good negotiator is worried about more than price. There is quality, time to get the product, support. An lot of other things on those lines that I can't think of at the moment too. A good negotiator knows what is important to them and how to make the best trade off for their situation. Sometimes a good negotiator will offer more than the asking price because they know those others are important and if the company goes out of business they get none of them (this is rare, but it is sometimes needed).
by roland35 | 2025-08-12 12:59:24+00:00
There are certainly tradeoffs, but I find that in general shorter line lengths are better.

- easy to lay out multiple splits side by side. Over 100 tends to have issues.

- long variable names or function names tend to be a code smell. Same thing with too many parameters.

- git works much better at diffing and merging vertical lines than things on one long line.

The main downside is that monitors are wider than tall in general - so fitting more code on the screen is certainly nice! But I find moving my eyes and head up/down to be tiring over the course of the day and tend to use vim to keep things centered for myself anyways. zz, LSP search, go to definition, etc.
by CodeMaven | 2025-08-12 12:59:49+00:00
For most platform engineers and SREs, it’s a constant, high-stakes guessing game. You get a traffic forecast, you add a huge buffer “just in case,” and then you pay for expensive, idle resources, hoping you’ve over-provisioned enough to survive the next inevitable spike.

It’s a painful cycle that leaves you stuck between two bad options: 1. Wasting money on a massive, over-provisioned cluster. 2. Risking a production outage with a lean, under-provisioned one.

We saw this exact problem cripple the SRE team at the hyper-growth e-commerce platform POIZON. The root cause wasn't their forecasts; it was the tight coupling of compute and storage in Kafka's core architecture, making true elasticity slow and risky.

In this deep dive blog, we break down: The architectural constraint that makes traditional Kafka scaling so difficult in the cloud. How POIZON escaped the endless cycle of re-provisioning and manual expansion. A new cloud-native approach that decouples storage (using S3) from compute to make instant elasticity a reality.

This shift means you can stop predicting the future and start reacting to the present.

What's the biggest operational headache Kafka has given you or your team? Would love to hear your stories in the comments.
Ask HN: Built an AI fitness app in a month, but have no users. What should I do?
by canberkh | 2025-08-12 12:59:54+00:00
I’m a full-time software engineer and solo founder. I built an AI-powered fitness app in one month. I have 0 users so far and I’m looking for actionable advice on how to get the first ones.

https://thejakt.com/
by marksimi | 2025-08-12 13:00:15+00:00
Also used to be in that world and identify similarly in terms of my lack of love for gambling.

I'd suggest that you're empirically incorrect in saying that there is no perfect approach against a skilled player (6handed games which often reduce to a single heads-up interactions by showdown):

1. we know that a Nash equilibrium exists for every two-player zero-sum game such that it’s mathematically unexploitable

2. Pluribus approximated the Nash well enough (didn’t have to search over 10^161 possibilities) to crush high stakes skilled player over a good run of hands
by RiverCrochet | 2025-08-12 13:00:38+00:00
I remember RAR being popular in the early 00's but when 7-zip started becoming a thing I switched to that, and then I rarely saw .RAR's.

RAR seemed to handle large collections of files better on Windows than .zip back in the day, and it had a few features that .zip didn't, so it was something I typically installed on like Windows XP and such back then. But I'm not sure why anyone would use it over 7-zip today unless you have massive numbers of old .RAR files laying around.

I did work for a company that actually licensed WinZip because it was easier to use than the default Windows interface for .zip files.
by ecocentrik | 2025-08-12 13:00:40+00:00
You're assuming that fragmentation will occur under the same conditions that affected Latin or French, where there was limited educational infrastructure, no formal institutions to guide the development of language, no global economic pressure for standardization and no instantaneous global communications infrastructure. The feedback loop for standardization is much shorter now, languages are continuing to evolve but that evolution reaches global awareness for synthesis and consensus very quickly. Regional accents and dialects are slowly disappearing and are no longer strongly influenced by factors of regional dominance.

Could there be a reversal of this trend? Maybe, but it seems very unlikely, even with the potential for geopolitical instability from global warming, autonomous warfare, the rise of autocrats and other factors.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-12 13:01:11+00:00
The previous language might cause a C compiler developer to get very confused because it seems as though they can choose something else but what it is isn't specified, but almost invariably eventually they'll realise oh, it's just badly worded and didn't mean "should" there.

It's like one of those tricky self-referential parlor box statements. "The statement on this box is not true"? Thanks I guess. But that's a game, the puzzles are supposed to be like that, whereas the mission of the ISO document was not to confuse people, so it's good that it is being improved.
by rpdillon | 2025-08-12 13:01:30+00:00
I install apps all the time without seeing an ad, because 90% of the apps I use are installed from F-Droid.

The apps I install from F-Droid often help me block ads in my browser, so I see very few ads as I use my phone day to day.

Meanwhile, my understanding is that Apple's App Store has ads in it, but that's the only app store allowed. So it seems like maybe iOS is the one that "has ads in the operating system".
by cthalupa | 2025-08-12 13:01:40+00:00
There are 1.21 firearms for every person in the USA. There are .15 for every person in Europe.

If you don't understand how having 8x the number of firearms per capita increases the ease in which criminals have access to them, I'm not sure what to say. Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access.

I'm not even for gun control - I feel like the genie is so far out of the bottle at this point that there's no real sense in trying to put it back in, and the only way for everyday citizens to be on level ground when it comes to self defense, home protection, etc., is being armed themselves. But acting like states or cities with strict gun control actually have the ability to prevent criminals from having access to them is silly.
by blitzar | 2025-08-12 13:01:44+00:00
France, Italy and Spain are all places I have routinely seen parents offer their children a small glass with dinner, generally from age 12 onward.

https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/2...

> greater consumption in life

with equivalent or lower alcoholism or alcohol dependency disorders - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholis...
by bko | 2025-08-12 13:02:15+00:00
I think this is true and why programs like like Pluribus, Libratus and DeepStack have outperformed professionals in both heads-up and multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold'em. It's not reading social cues like traditional players, but just relying on probability. Even when giving perfect knowledge of the computer strategy to humans, they're still unable to exploit.

Humans are improving their game by using solvers and introducing randomness into their decisions. For instance, an optimal strategy given a hand might be "fold 80% of the time". One way to do that in live play is look at the second hand of a watch and fold unless it seconds (in this case) are about 48 (80% prob).
by ai-christianson | 2025-08-12 13:03:00+00:00
One thing with SWE bench is making sure there's zero leakage of information into the LLM context.

I.e. the agent cannot even know which tests are failing.

It has to both fix the issue based just on the issue text and fix it in the specific way the unit test, which it cannot see, expects.

For this reason I find the benchmark a little disconnected from the reality of software engineering.
by willvarfar | 2025-08-12 13:03:15+00:00
I don't think they were recorded. In fact, I don't think any of KDD gets recorded.

I think it was Dan Roth who talked about the challenges of reasoning from just adding more layers and it was Chris Manning who just quickly mentioned at the beginning of his talk that LLMs were well known for reasoning.

https://kdd2025.kdd.org/keynote-speakers/
by stego-tech | 2025-08-12 13:03:33+00:00
For whatever it’s worth, I also believe the two are separate feelings that aren’t always in alignment. I have no desire to procreate (gay man), but following the birth of my first nibling I felt this profound swell of emotion and drive commanding me to nurture and support its growth into an adult. It’s likely why, in my teens and 20s before I understood the full impact of the 2008 crisis, I wanted to eventually adopt children myself.

Biology is weird.
Show HN: I built an SEO tool for the terminal
by ugo_builds | 2025-08-12 13:04:39+00:00
Hi everyone!

This is just me scratching my own itch, but since every time I build an app or a website I spend hours wondering how to make it not invisible to the world, I thought I'd build an SEO app that perfectly fits my needs.

Most SEO tools are designed for agencies and copywriters, the usual pricing is simply too high for me, and there are just too many features that I don't need. I haven't found one that can crawl my local web server and that synergizes with my AI tools, so I made it myself.

What I need is an app that tells me how to make my pages fully optimized, on what keywords to focus the content I write, and how my competitors are ranking so well so that I can do better.

I've worked for an SEO tooling company for 2.5 years, so I built the tool using that knowledge, and made the localhost auditing free to use, I hope it can help others too.

Feel free to hit me with any feedback, I would truely appreciate it!
by ChicagoDave | 2025-08-12 13:04:45+00:00
I’ve taught all five of my kids how to play poker, and if they ever sit down at a cash game consider their stack gone and play the cards (remove the dopamine chaos). Learn the math, betting strategies, and look for villain patterns.

These all directly relate to real life.

I believe in it so much that I have a tournament training app startup: https://mach9poker.com/.

There’s a company in Chicago that teaches women poker in relation to business: https://pokerpower.com/.

Bankroll management is a critical skill regardless of the use case.
by drweevil | 2025-08-12 13:04:47+00:00
>But what happens when institutions responsible for building those capabilities are compromised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?

The deep irony here is that no establishment institutions can be trusted to build those capabilities without being strongly influenced by the ruling elites of their own countries. Output from these institutions on China, Russia, Israel, Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, etc. etc. cannot be trusted as they are typically infused with strong biases due to the roles as friend/adversary currently assigned to each of them by our ruling elites. This of course leads to (conveniently?) bad intelligence and even worse decisions (the Tren de Aragua nonsense, the mass arrests in the UK, and so forth). So the real question here is how we can get unbiased studies and accurate intelligence on other cultures, regardless of the source of outside interference.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-12 13:05:04+00:00
Even within the rust OSS community it's irritating. They will try to cancel people for writing libs using `unsafe`, and makes APIs difficult to use by wrapping things in multiple layers of traits, then claim using other patters are unsafe/unsound/UB. They make claims that things like DMA are "advanced topics", and "We haven't figured it out yet/found a good solution yet". Love rust/hate the Satefy Inquisition. Or say things like "Why use rust if you don't use all the safety-features and traits"... which belittles rust as a one-trick lang!
by jcranmer | 2025-08-12 13:05:47+00:00
Pointer provenance probably dates back to the 70s, although not under that name.

The essential idea of pointer provenance is that it is somehow possible to enumerate all of the uses of a memory location (in a potentially very limited scope). By the time you need to introduce something like "volatile" to indicate to the compiler that there are unknown uses of a variable, you have to concede the point that the compiler needs to be able to track all the known uses within a compiler--and that process, of figuring out known uses, is pointer provenance.

As for optimizations, the primary optimization impacted by pointer provenance is... moving variables from stack memory to registers. It's basically a prerequisite for doing any optimization.

The thing is that traditionally, the pointer provenance model of compilers is generally a hand-wavey "trace dataflow back to the object address's source", which breaks down in that optimizers haven't maintained source-level data dependency for a few decades now. This hasn't been much of a problem in practice, because breaking data dependencies largely requires you to have pointers that have the same address, and you don't really run into a situation where you have two objects at the same address and you're playing around with pointers to their objects in a way that might cause the compiler to break the dependency, at least outside of contrived examples.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-12 13:05:47+00:00
ESET's story seems to make more sense: https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/update-winra...

The exploit abuses ADSes with ..\ in the name to drop files on the system that aren't visible in the WinRAR file browser. It drops malware in the temp directory and then a .lnk in the Startup directory to activate an attack against COM, influencing the DLL that's being loaded by legitimate applications.