MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bhouston | 2025-08-19 14:09:44+00:00
You could sell kits for this btw. There would be demand. And I think you could be quite successful.

The reason is that Trump is tariffing the hell out of the main Chinese telescope accessories manufacturer, ZWO. So if you can provide a non-Chinese alternative....

Think of trying to be Prusa 3D solution in the astrophotography area.
by tech4fun | 2025-08-19 14:09:52+00:00
I built an AI agent that lets me speak directly to any car’s engine.

When I’m not tinkering with AI, I’m working with local dealerships as a contractor flipping cars.

Dashboard lights waste time and money, so I built a tool that uses AI to diagnose issues and streamline repairs.

We’ve tested it on 40 cars and it’s hitting 95% accuracy, making workflows faster, smarter, and more efficient.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-19 14:13:08+00:00
> Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders.

I'm starting to get asked, "Could AI help you do such-and-such faster?" At first I tried to explain why the answer is no, because such-and-such doesn't lend itself to what AI is good at. But I'm starting to realize I'm going to have to tell them I am using it and maybe give them an example once in a while, because they're hearing too much about its wonderfulness to believe there's something it can't help with. They're going to think I'm just being stubborn even though I tell them I'm not opposed to using AI where it makes sense. If that means the job actually takes a little longer to add in the part where I use AI to speed it up, they'll be happier.
by aredox | 2025-08-19 14:13:27+00:00
Meh, it is really annoying to define all those brarely-used variables (and pray you don't have more than one kind of "dough" in your program... Otherwise you begin to have cookie_dough/CookieDough/cookie-dough/cookieDough and friends everywhere, and refactors begin to become annoying fast)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-19 14:13:29+00:00
What does the ad-free internet look like?

People hate ads, they are annoying and provide virtually no value to the end user.

People hate subscriptions, they cost money, are annoying to track, and gravitate towards being impossible to cancel.

Donations are feel good, but no one donates. Conversion rates tend to be <5% of users.

This topic always draws tons of outrage and anger over ads, but no one ever provides a solution besides "Users are entitled to everything on the internet and don't owe anyone anything. If you put content online, you are dumb to expect compensation, but I really love your work!"
by ndr | 2025-08-19 14:13:50+00:00
It's true that it's at time conflicting, it's not true that it's meant to be so.

The term of art for this is "legal certainty" and finding the inconsistencies help iron out when something is off.

So yes, it does matter how logically an ad block is equivalent to bookmarklets, because inconsistencies crack and consistency composes.

I get your point that judges can rule, but it's not the end all be all of it.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-19 14:13:53+00:00
This is satire at its finest. Axel Springer's taboid "Bild" already blocks adblockers. Springer has a cooperation with copyright infringer OpenAI. Altman gets the Axel Springer Award:

https://www.axelspringer.com/de/ax-press-release/sam-altman-...

Large scale copyright theft is fine, individual consumers have to watch ads.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-19 14:14:08+00:00
So this is where I'd highlight the benefits that an actual human looked at and responded to my email (a rarity for Google), and hence could use human discretion to decide that what I indicated was indeed accurate, and not randomly from a random corrupt country. I really have to emphasize: Any security process that actually works has humans in the loop! (Security doesn't scale.)

The other thing of course, is that the domain was expiring. So similar to PyPI just accepting in the parent article that an expired domain isn't trustworthy, Google could verify shortly thereafter whether or not the domain was renewed by the developer in question.

And ultimately, you're suggesting paying off an official to pretend someone is dead, so you can block package updates to a domain, which doesn't really introduce a security issue, and of course, is trivially reversible when the person in question is, in fact, still alive. As Tony Stark would say, "Not a good plan".
by entropi | 2025-08-19 14:14:17+00:00
While it is completely absurd, I don't see why it would be non-enforceable. They can very well enforce it.

Here is one way to do it: they could take a page out of google's Web Environment Integrity proposal and make it illegal to serve any page within Germany unless the integrity is proven. Done. VPNs are problematic? Ban them. Seems very enforceable to me.

Why do you think it is un-enforceable?
by lesuorac | 2025-08-19 14:14:43+00:00
Sure "not all" but it's a lot.

Biden voted to make same-sex marriage Illegal [1] and later for legalizing same-sex [2]. A bit interesting that his running mate neglected to legalize it and instead just didn't defend it in court (Imagine how people would talk if Trump refused to defend a law in court, lol!)

But yeah, some politicians like Bernie actually have been consistent their career while others like Ron Paul just make a big talk about their stances but then vote to inflate the deficit anyways.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_for_Marriage_Act
by benoau | 2025-08-19 14:14:53+00:00
Worst desk I ever had was in a corner with a constant stream of chatty colleagues passing both behind and beside me. It might not be harassment but it severely undermined my ability to focus on complex tasks.

> She felt she was not respected when she asked for quiet and asked a manager if she could work from home but this was not allowed. Ritchie was told by one manager that she should concentrate on reaching her targets and not concern herself with what was going on around her.
Show HN: RoomCycle, iOS, ADHD-friendly home organizing, built with Claude Code
by 9wzYQbTYsAIc | 2025-08-19 14:15:10+00:00
I've been solo developing RoomCycle, an iOS app (macOS/tvOS on the way) that helps people (especially those with ADHD and/or MDD, like me) organize their living spaces using 2-minute micro-sessions and the OODA loop methodology (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act).

The entire app was built through vibe coding with Claude Opus using Claude Code - describing what I wanted and iterating on the implementation together. It features zone-based organization, CloudKit sync, and both "simple" and "advanced" modes to accommodate different cognitive loads.

Still squashing bugs before App Store submission, but wanted to share early and get feedback from the community. The app uses a gentle, non-judgmental approach to organizing - no before/after shame, just progress tracking and small wins.

Tech stack: SwiftUI, Core Data + CloudKit, MVVM + Coordinators, Semantic Colors

I had pretty decent success, so far - over the course of nearly a month, Claude Code only had a handful of instances of context poisoning and it felt like it got things right about 80% of the time. It was a daily experience of handholding and guiding, however. Still better not to take ones eyes off of the code, as I caught at least a couple of mistakes per day that would have led to a divergence from the expectation. Overall, very pleased with the experience, even if left with a slight headache.

There were some neat aspects to using the LLM, such as it creating semantic colors appropriately (after some trial and error) and using it to generate dynamic "smart behavior" without the app itself needing to reach out to an LLM to get feedback.

Would love feedback on the concept, UX approach, or the experience of vibe coding production iOS/macOS/tvOS apps with AI

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Kj9MZ9Mx

Website: https://roomcycle.app
by tom_ | 2025-08-19 14:16:00+00:00
But what if that's not how prayer works? What if rotating the prayer wheels is just as effective as saying the prayers out loud? And what if that effect really can be multiplied up mechanically, somehow, and what if it doesn't actually matter whether people say them out loud or not? There'd be little reason not to use prayer wheels. And the people using them would be doing the exact opposite of praying less. They'd be praying more!

You're claiming prayers are not real, but then seem not to be following through fully with this, by subsequently assuming that if they were real, it would be inevitable that they'd have to operate in some particular way. But that wouldn't automatically follow. I think this is the reply's point.
by peterfirefly | 2025-08-19 14:16:21+00:00
The code has some 386 things implemented but not protected mode 286 stuff.

Seems to be written by somebody who writes fairly neat and clean code, but hasn't discovered structs yet.

Definitely not cycle accurate. Video emulation only covers simple standard modes, not the undocumented ones, not proper hardware programming.

Does have a decent handling of (real-mode) interrupts. The AT keyboard interface (+ keyboard itself) is handled poorly on Windows/Linux -- the code for handling bytes sent to the keyboard is missing + there is no emulation of the receive queue in the keyboard controller. The code for the Raspberry Pi PICO is different: it actually bit bangs some pins to support a PS/2 interface (basically an AT interface). Still doesn't handle any buffering as far as I can see.

There is an 8K PC XT(?) BIOS included with no mention of where it comes from. The code there handles hardware interrupts. The software interrupt BIOS API is handled in C code (intcall86() in src/emulator/cpu.c).
Show HN: Mail42 – Disposable emails with AI-based text extraction
by fazlerocks | 2025-08-19 14:16:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Mail42 (https://mail42.ai) to make it easier to test email flows without dealing with regex or messy parsing.

The pain point: whenever I tested signup or checkout flows, I had to create throwaway inboxes and then write hacky regex just to grab a 6-digit OTP or a verification link.

With Mail42 you can:

- Generate disposable email addresses instantly for QA

- Query emails using natural language like "get the OTP" or "find the verification link"

- Use a simple REST API that works with curl, Postman, or your test suite

Example:

`curl "https://get.mail42.ai/?email=test.123@mail42.ai&prompt=get otp"`

Response:

847291

It’s lightweight and intended for testing env

I’d love your feedback:

- would you use this in your testing workflow?

- what features or integrations would make it more useful?

- are there cases where regex still feels more reliable?

Thanks for checking it out.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-08-19 14:16:38+00:00
I didn't really have a firm top 5 in mind, I meant it more in the sense of "this was very memorable indeed".

But what the hell, it would be fun to reminisce some more.

Kind of cheating because the book is a classic, so this is just for the story: I was 15 years old in 1996, and we took a family vacation near Westhoek in Belgium. There's a nature reserve with sand dunes. I spent a few days lying in the sand dunes while reading "Dune" for the first time. This was at the same time that Hale-Bopp was visible in the night sky. It's still one of my favorite books just because of how visceral that reading experience was.

"Diaspora" by Greg Egan starts in 2975 when the majority of humans are disembodied computer programs running in simulated-reality communities. Originally, humans were uploaded/digitized but by this point, new digital consciousnesses come into being. The first chapter describes the "birth" of such a consciousness, and again, I found reading this to be a very visceral experience, and rather beautiful. Given that this was written in 1997, it is also surprisingly prescient of today's understanding of auto-encoders and how LLMs train.

"The Carpet Makers" ("Die Haarteppichknüpfer" in the original German) completely blew my mind as a teenager because of how the story was structured. It starts with a description of a family that - like many other families - is working on an elaborate carpet made from human hair, a carpet that it will take them an entire lifetime to complete. Then the book begins to zoom out and you learn more and more about the universe it is set in, but not in an annoying fashion where a curtain is being pulled back and the author feels very clever. Its unusual structure exposed me to the idea that Sci-Fi didn't have to be primarily about rockets, if done well, it could just be quite good literature that happens to be set in space and speculates about technology and it's sociological impact. Other works demonstrate that better, but this is the one that made me realize that.

And then finally, and from quite recently, my hands down favorite short story ever. And it's actually metamodern! First you'd need to have read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) by Ursula K. LeGuin, who is generally worth reading. In 2024, Isabel J. Kim wrote "Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole" (https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/), and it's great. I re-read it every now and then, and it chokes me up every time. The way the prose is a complete juxtaposition to the original story: rough, unpolished, conversational. It pulls no punches whatsoever, and bounces between humor and moral horror. 10/10, will read again, many times, whenever I happen to think of it.
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-19 14:17:07+00:00
> it patches the security hole behind it

As the article notes, this isn't unheard of. Max Vision's 1998 worm fixed a BIND vulnerability. That seemed to be the worm's main purpose and motivation. Fixing a vulnerability or two behind malware is rare. There are WordPress-ecosystem malwares that seem to mostly exist to eliminate previously-installed malware.

The question is: why is that rare? Simulations of worms that patch holes as they go shows they easily out-compete worms that don't. Why don't feral software developers include code to fix the vulnerabilities they use to gain access in the first place?
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-19 14:17:22+00:00
This varies from country to country.

In the United States, it's legal to modify your machine to interpret the programs running on it other than the way intended by the machine creator and the program author (Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc, 1992). But every nation has its own system of laws and the precedents of one aren't binding on another (and I don't, personally, know if the Galoob v. Nintendo precedent extends to modifying the data on a PC or only protects the far-more-complicated approach of intermediating between PC storage and the CPU).

To my perception, the position of mods in the gaming ecosystem is mostly, for want of a better term, a "gentleman's agreement" or "gentleman's understanding." An awful lot of game devs got started by modding other games, and they feel more than zero empathy for the folks who are basically learning to be the next generation of developers, if not future employees. It's a bit akin to Adobe's position on cracked copies of Photoshop: they reserve the right to sue so companies can't just thumb their nose at their IP rights and use their product with no remuneration, but individual non-corporate users of pirated copies are, at worst, unpaid advertising for the product and, at best, future customers. Some game dev houses are exempt from this "empathy rule;" Nintendo is famously litigious (although even then, they tend to target projects that are, whether the developer knows it or not, in direct competition with Nintendo; AM2R puttered along happily for years until Nintendo decided to release their own Metroid 2 remake).
by Chinjut | 2025-08-19 14:17:24+00:00
Your description here does not quite match your linked code, in that it is not that the N-th pack contains integers spaced out by N. Rather, packs on the N-th row contain integers spaced out by N. For example, the third pack does not contain "every third integer", but rather draws alternating integers just like the second pack, because it is on the second row. The second pack contains (first cell of the second row) contains {101, 103, 105, ..., 299} and the third pack (second cell of the second row) contains {102, 104, 106, ..., 300}.

With this in mind, the seeming patterns of the figure you link to are explained by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106193
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-19 14:17:25+00:00
It's not harassment, but damn if it's not a great description of how much it sucks to work in an open office environment:

> In its summary of the case, the tribunal said Ritchie found the office a very noisy environment and that this was distracting when she was trying to make calls.

> She felt she was not respected when she asked for quiet and asked a manager if she could work from home but this was not allowed. Ritchie was told by one manager that she should concentrate on reaching her targets and not concern herself with what was going on around her.

I will say, though, that I don't have a ton of empathy for this bit:

> “She indicated that she found it unprofessional of colleagues to engage in personal conversations in the office, when they ought to be working. She referred to the fact that they were not paid to socialise and that she had difficulty in watching such time wasting and low productivity.”

Seems like a keep-to-your-own-knitting situation.
by b112 | 2025-08-19 14:18:14+00:00
Gas cars have absolutely zero issues starting in the cold, unless the battery is not good enough, or the car has another mechanical issue. EG, the car is broken.

To say it's because of the cold, is like saying they have trouble driving on flat tires too.

As a Canadian, who's been driving cars down to -45C mornings for decades, they just start. Older cars, and I don't mean "cars that have aged" but instead "cars from the 60s or 70s" sometimes needed a "block heater", which was basically just a fat resister you'd plug into AC. It kept the engine block warmer.

However I must reiterate... that's not commonly required any more. Not for 50 years.
by npteljes | 2025-08-19 14:18:33+00:00
I agree with flagging most political topics, and most such horrible happenings in the world as TFA. This place is supposed to foster curious, intellectual discussion, and the umpteenth report of what amounts to be the same horrible thing doesn't do that, at all. There is a disgusting glut of horribleness constantly happening in the world, and we don't need to discuss the particulars of most of it.

Something I think that has a chance to spark constructive discussion is when there are significant changes in such a thing, be that change positive or negative. And those discussions usually stay on the HN pages too, because while I'm sure many are flagging them, many are voting for them as well. As the HN guidelines put it: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
by waerhert | 2025-08-19 14:18:43+00:00
Cool project. What prompted you to write this? Asking because EKOS already has pretty good scheduling features (I've seen, not used). Along the way I did vibe-code a TUI for controlling the INDI server running on the MeLE 4C minicomputer attached to the telescope: https://www.svendewaerhert.com/content/blog/telescope-mount/... - I switched to a headless setup using a remote indi server after having a bad experience with reliability using remote desktop in Gnome. I'll probably put this TUI on Github once I clean it up a bit.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-19 14:19:11+00:00
When I first started at a previous employer, we had an open office plan with rows of desks. I was on a software eng team, building $PRODUCT with about four other people. The next two rows, for some unfathomable reason, was completely filled with sales people whose job was to be on the phone talking loudly to potential customers all day.

It was ... unpleasant, trying to focus on work while simultaneously hearing a dozen one-sided conversations at a time, plus phones ringing with incoming calls.

Eventually they moved them to an area with other people doing similar work - which I'm sure sucked for them, too. But at that point, I'd already developed the habit of having my headphones on all the time, and even today it's hard to concentrate without feeling the hug of headphones on my head.
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-19 14:19:43+00:00
CS was my intro to programming as well. Although for me it was in a very simplistic form - buy macros. It was something like this in the userconfig.cfg that would load when you start the game:

```

alias "buyak" "buy ak47; buy vesthelm; buy primammo"

bind "F1" "buyak"

```

I guess this is more configuration than programming but as a kid it was a significant threshold still.

It also delighted me that you could bring up a console in game. So cool.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-19 14:19:43+00:00
I don't think you've ever dealt with the likes of US credit bureaus if you think getting something like a death announcement is "trivially reversible".

I forever am and forever will be a civil engineer somewhere in upstate New York thanks to them. Nevermind I was still in high school at the time and don't even have a shred of engineering qualifications. Whoever you are, thanks for the borrowed ladder my friend.
by belter | 2025-08-19 14:20:20+00:00
Some down votes on this one, maybe from the Amazon crew, that it's a fact that by far they have the best Cloud and also:

- Amazon is consistently the top user of the H-1B visa program:

"Which companies secured the most H-1B visas in 2024?" - https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/which-comp...

- They pay below market rate so they can't have the same hiring power:

"AWS Compensation Explained" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-compensation-explaine...

"The AWS goal is to pay you roughly 50% to 65% of what “the market” will pay you, based upon a variety of sources plus some work with Excel."

- And everybody has seen their disaster execution on AI for the last four years.

"Amazon CEO Andy Jassy unleashed a meticulous 8-minute defense of AWS’ standing in the AI arms race amid investor stock freakout" - https://fortune.com/2025/07/31/amazon-aws-ai-andy-jassy-earn...
by MPLan | 2025-08-19 14:20:49+00:00
Should we care about Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Does GDP reflect what matters? Is GDP a good measure? Recently, an influential tech podcaster and interviewer, Dwarkesh Patel, brought up the topic in the following context:

"As measured by GDP, AI will be super undervalued. How would the datacenter of geniuses show up in GDP? GDP would show raw inputs (aka chip & energy), and raw outputs (aka cost of tokens). But wouldn't clearly reflect the value of the crazy new [stuff] that's being cooked up in those tokens. Similar problem to how the Internet's value is undercounted today (since many products are free, and thus contribute nothing to measured GDP).”

Dwarkesh Patel is both right and wrong. To understand why, we need go over what is the GDP measure, why we measure it, and does it capture what matters to us.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-19 14:20:57+00:00
The proper way to do this is to use a seedbox (basically a VPS w/ lots of storage, in a pirate-friendly jurisdiction, that comes preinstalled with all the tools you'd need). It's weird that top AI labs have been caught torrenting stuff, when the solution is obvious, and doesn't leave traces (i.e. no meta IP ranges would have been leaked)...
by tux3 | 2025-08-19 14:21:05+00:00
Web Environment Integrity was so heavily criticized at the time that it made Google itself backtrack. The same Google that forged ahead with Manifest V3. There is no realistic way the German government could get websites to implement an even worse version of that.

The whole Web would simply become incompatible with Germany. So this would be trivial to bypass on a technical level, and unacceptable on a social level. Completely unenforceable indeed.