MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Catalyst, a tool for short, playable interactive videos
by abracadabratony | 2025-08-13 20:25:49+00:00
Small tool for making short, watch and play interactive videos. No analytics yet. Focus is fast authoring and mobile feel. I really love how it generates horror now. It is fun to make tiny scare paths.

What works today

Scene based authoring with simple branching and light state

Choice timers in the 1.0 to 2.0 second range with auto advance

Preloading to cut stalls on mobile

Optional ecommerce embed so a CTA can be shoppable

Defaults I use

First choice at 5 to 7 seconds

Total length 20 to 60 seconds

One or two variables to gate a payoff

Prebuffer the next two scenes

Feedback welcome on better defaults, rough edges on low bandwidth, and what export or embed options you expect before this is useful.
by woodruffw | 2025-08-13 20:25:50+00:00
You're saying that would be more painful in a viral license setting, right? If so I agree, although I think there's a pretty long track record of financially incentivized companies being willing to take that pain. MongoDB's AGPL transition comes to mind.

But, to refocus on the case at hand: Astral's tools don't require contributors to sign a CLA. I understand (and am sympathetic) to the suspicion here, but the bigger picture here is that Astral wants to build services as a product, rather than compromising the open source nature of its tools. That's why the announcement tries to cleanly differentiate between the two.
by monknomo | 2025-08-13 20:26:28+00:00
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your estranged being.
by gdudeman | 2025-08-13 20:26:42+00:00
You don't say that - you instruct the LLM to read files about X, Y, and Z. Putting the context in helps the agent plan better (next step) and write correct code (final step).

If you're asking the agent to do chunks of work, this will get better results than asking it to blindly go forth and do work. Anthropic's best practices guide says as much.

If you're asking the agent to create one method that accomplishes X, this isn't useful.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-13 20:26:44+00:00
I’m always taken aback when people in power denigrate remote and flexible work, as if it’s lazy or incompatible with an organization succeeding. If you want people to have families and lean into them, they need this work arrangement. Remote and flexible work has been shown to be very beneficial to parents and working mothers specifically. Several other countries protect this as a worker right. There’s over $120B in remote first or highly remote compatible enterprises. But you still have the bros, from Silicon Valley to Jamie Dimon in finance, dragging people back in for the performance art. I hope the right people get into positions of power soon, who understand economic success and worker well-being go hand in hand.

It shouldn’t taboo to say “I’m here to do good work, but then I’m going home; my job is not who I am, but merely a means to a reasonable amount of economic and professional success.” We have to enable people do their best work with reasonable accommodations.

Mothers are leaving the workforce, erasing pandemic gains - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894464 - August 2025
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-13 20:27:03+00:00
> In Python there are dozens of tools/concepts related to packaging: pip, easy_install, setuptools, setup.py, pypy, poetry, uv, venv, virtualenv, pipenv, wheels,

Some of those are package tools, some are dependency managers, some are runtime environments, some are package formats...

Some are obsolete at this point, and others by necessity cover different portions of programming language technologies.

I guess what I'm saying is, for the average software engineer, there's not too many more choices in Python for programming facilities than in Javascript.
by duxup | 2025-08-13 20:27:03+00:00
The Pokemon card thing is strange as far as how they seem to tie it to places and things where it really isn't necessary to drum up demand. At Costco in the US where usually the deal is large volume of product, had videos of folks rushing and grabbing boxes and boxes of Pokemon cards, presumably for online resale. While Costco can be crowded, it's not the vibe I like at my Costco.

Maybe the Pokemon community likes it but I find it kinda distasteful.

The demand exists, just make a lot of cards ...
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-13 20:27:42+00:00
Yes, because community college professors know the latest best practices from spending years in the industry working with large enterprises and managing employees at scale…

I would be shocked if most BigTech developers don’t have admin access to their computers and some type of MDM software that automatically disable disallowed apps.

When was the last time you heard about an exploit to AWS’s or GCPs internal systems based on employee installed software? It might shock you, that it started at Google with the zero trust initiative. But AWS was rapidly moving away from requiring VPNs to gain access to any of their internal systems.
by nehal3m | 2025-08-13 20:28:38+00:00
Silicon Valley is pro-money and nothing else. The don't be evil rhetoric worked well to get a foot in the door but as soon as there was ever any choice between values and cash, greenbacks won. Hell, the entire industry is trying its damnedest to get rid of bodies in favour of chips. That should tell you how many fucks they give about breadwinners.
by martin-t | 2025-08-13 20:28:39+00:00
I went through exactly this process.

Then I discovered (A)GPL and realized that the system makes sense to protect user rights.

And as I started making my own money, I started paying instead of pirating, though I sometimes wonder how much of my money goes to the actual artists and creators and how much goes to zero-sum occupations like marketing and management.

---

It comes down to understanding power differentials - we need laws so large numbers of individuals each with little power can defend themselves against a small number of individuals with large amounts of power.

(Well, we can defend ourselves anyway but it would be illegal and many would see it as an overreaction - as long as they steal only a little from each of us, we're each supposed to only be a little angry.)

---

> Maybe another 10 years and we'll be in the spot when these things are considered illegal again?

That's my hope too. But it requires many people to understand they're being stolen from and my fear is way too few produce "content"[0] and that the majority will feel like they benefit from being able to imitate us with little effort. There's also this angle that US needs to beat China (even though two nuclear superpowers both lose in an open conflict) and because China has been stealing everything for decades, we (the west) need to start stealing to keep up too.

[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...
by MangoToupe | 2025-08-13 20:28:49+00:00
> That, I think, is the primary tension: not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between individual and collective ambitions.

I guess I don't see much difference? It would be hard to describe a family as anything other than an individual ambition in this country. The state certainly provides very little support to most people.

This in effect seems like a long-winded way of blaming people for wanting a family in the first place.

Edit: mod-limited so responding here: Sure that part I get, but isn't this also trivially a "family vs state" matter in addition to an "individual vs collective" manner? I don't get what is gained by ignoring the former interpretation.
by bluGill | 2025-08-13 20:28:50+00:00
Things like ping pong tables, free beer - those are bad for family life. They encourage you to stay at the office for more than your 40 hours - of course in many places the idea of a 40 hour week seems like a joke. If you want to encourage family life you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all.

My company has a branch office near LA. I asked someone there once why they don't move just a few hours north to the Bay - they could easially double their salary. There was no interest in that though - the LA office you arrive to work sometime around 9 or 9:30, take a lunch break, and if you if you are not clearly preparing to leave at 6pm they remind you to turn the lights off when you leave. (that is you are allowed to work later if you want but it is expected that you won't) That is worth far more than the extra money that they could make and so we have a lot of people who have been in that office for 20 years.
by phillipcarter | 2025-08-13 20:29:29+00:00
Sure. But Gartner is Gartner. They are a trusted brand and you can’t “hold them wrong”. And they also do a great job of being pulled into a meeting with the throat-choker to gaslight them into being fine with the decision.

Deep Research doesn’t do this, and even if it could today, human trust systems take a very long time to build.
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 20:29:56+00:00
> For the same reason they don't want to be unknowingly cheated on.

That's the thing, though, there is nothing about being a cheater that equates to loss of love (or never having loved). In fact, it is telling that you shifted gears to the topic of deceit rather than love.

It is true that feelings of love are often lost when one has been cheated on. So, yes, it is a fair point that for many those feelings of love aren't made available if one does not also have trust. There is a association there, so your gear change is understood. I expect you are absolutely right that if those aforementioned women dating GPT-4o found out that it wasn't an AI bot, but actually some guy typing away at a keyboard, they would lose their feelings even if the guy on the other side did actually love them!

Look at how many people get creeped out when they find out that a person they are disinterested in loves them. Clearly being loved isn't what most people seek. They want to feel the feelings associated with love. All your comment tells, surprising nobody, is that the feelings of love are not like a tap you can simply turn on (well, maybe in the case of drugs). The feelings require a special environment where everything has to be just right, and trust is often a necessary part of that environment. Introduce deceit and so goes the feelings.
Show HN: Docker container for Claude Code with complete host isolation
by nezhar | 2025-08-13 20:30:32+00:00
I created a Docker container that packages Claude Code in a completely isolated environment. This solves the problem of wanting to try AI development tools without installing them directly on your system.

Credentials are persisted via bind mounts, with clean workspace access and easy removal when done experimenting. Perfect for developers who are curious about AI coding assistance but cautious about system-wide installations.

The container maintains all the functionality of Claude Code while keeping your host system pristine. Just docker run, authenticate once, and start coding with AI help. Remove the container later and there are no traces left behind.

The README on GitHub has examples for easy integration into existing projects. I welcome suggestions and feedback!
by wrs | 2025-08-13 20:30:39+00:00
OK, but that seems like a funny definition of "military presence", since DARPA is the military.

The goal DARPA was trying to accelerate by funding self-driving, btw, was to "achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2015, one third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned". [0]

[0] https://www.grandchallenge.org/grandchallenge/docs/Grand_Cha...
by matrss | 2025-08-13 20:30:50+00:00
> NFS is a specific networked filesystem.

NFS is a set of protocols for networked filesystems. You can just as well implement an NFS server that "implements storage based on rat trained to push a button in reaction to lights turning on". Some people even argue it is a better way to do it than FUSE, because you get robust clients on most platforms with included caching out of the box. E.g. this is a library for building such a NFS server: https://github.com/xetdata/nfsserve
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-08-13 20:31:04+00:00
I get your frustration with TFA. I don't necessarily agree, but that's not really important IMHO.

Perhaps you might focus on the issues discussed rather than the author and their opinions?

The article certainly seems to have gotten your rhetorical "juices" flowing. So why not focus that energy on making reasoned arguments for the type of governance you think would be most appropriate for the tech industry, the US and the world?

I get it. You disagree with TFA's author. What do you agree with? What governance model do you think would serve the tech industry, the US and the world at large the best? A monarchy (with you as monarch, of course!)? Ancient Egypt style autocracy? Hoxhaism? Parliamentary system? Francoist Fascism? Anarcho-Capitalism?
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-13 20:31:18+00:00
>According to legal experts who have litigated these cases, the amount of debt levied on workers is often conjured up by employers once an employee leaves, rather than being stipulated in the contract.

If this is the state of US contract law, how can you do business there? Surely this is bullshit? If it really is this bad, and the judges don't understand why it's a problem, then why is there a US economy?

If it is real, I assume it's literally only applied against poor people? I don't have to fear this in business contracts when I start a company?
by charliermarsh | 2025-08-13 20:31:22+00:00
> Will `uv` inspect my local GPU spec and decide what the best set of packages would be to pull from Pyx?

We actually support this basic idea today, even without pyx. You can run (e.g.) `uv pip install --torch-backend=auto torch` to automatically install a version of PyTorch based on your machine's GPU from the PyTorch index.

pyx takes that idea and pushes it further. Instead of "just" supporting PyTorch, the registry has a curated index for each supported hardware accelerator, and we populate that index with pre-built artifacts across a wide range of packages, versions, Python versions, PyTorch versions, etc., all with consistent and coherent metadata.

So there are two parts to it: (1) when you point to pyx, it becomes much easier to get the right, pre-built, mutually compatible versions of these things (and faster to install them); and (2) the uv client can point you to the "right" pyx index automatically (that part works regardless of whether you're using pyx, it's just more limited).

> Since this is a private, paid-for registry aimed at corporate clients, will there be an option to expose those registries externally as a public instance, but paid for by the company? That is, can I as a vendor pay for a Pyx registry for my own set of packages, and then provide that registry as an entrypoint for my customers?

We don't support this yet but it's come up a few times with users. If you're interested in it concretely feel free to email me (charlie@).
by theZilber | 2025-08-13 20:31:34+00:00
Tbh, to keep my ego in check, whenever i get rejected ghosted, or whatever, I just assume the company/interviewer is doing a perfect job for screening for the kind of candidates they want and need, and if I don't pass it means "there wasn't a fit", tbh if we were totally honest with myself, I don't fit well into most corporate cultures, and I should not care if they ask me questions I did not care enough to answer well in the first place.

A highschool performance question is not odd. It is meant to filter me out - that is perfect, because why would I want to waste my time on an interview in a company with this mentality, in the first place?
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-13 20:31:40+00:00
> There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.

Drive through the metro areas of the Great Lakes and Great Plains states and tell me that's universally true.

There's a bump in prosperity for the people doing the financing and servicing in a given country. If you're not doing that, it's at best a wash. At worst it's turned otherwise sustainable communities into impoverished deathtraps.
by thresh | 2025-08-13 20:32:03+00:00
I'm currently working on getting the Trixie packages uploaded. It'll be there this week.

As you've said Debian 13 was released 4 days ago - it takes some time to spin up the infrastructure for a new OS (and we've been busy with other tasks, like getting nginx-acme and 1.29.1 out).

(I work for F5)
by Someone | 2025-08-13 20:32:21+00:00
> +R means "remote" or "retained", i.e. the variable doesn't live on the stack

I think that’s a bad name. Both “remote” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_procedure_call) and “retained” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retained_mode, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/nsobjec...) are existing terms in programming with wildly different meaning. What’s wrong with “reference” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_(computer_science)) ?
by crazygringo | 2025-08-13 20:33:23+00:00
> ...some of my favourites like Smitten Kitchen and Meera Sodha because I know they’re going to be excellent. I trust that the recipe is tried and tested, and the result will be delicious. ChatGPT will give you an approximation of a recipe made up from the average of lots of recipes, but they lack the personality of each individual recipe, which will be slightly different to reflect the experiences and tastes of the author.

It's funny, I want the ChatGPT "approximation". As someone who does a lot of cooking, when I want to learn a new dish, the last thing I want is the "personality" and "tastes" of some author, which is generally expressed by including bizarre ingredient choices, or bizarrely low or high levels of fat, sugar, and salt.

I used to have to read through 15 different "idiosyncratic" versions of a recipe because every single blogger seems to want to put their own "twist" on a recipe, and then I had to figure out the commonalities across them, and then make that. It took forever.

Now I can just ask ChatGPT and get something like the "Platonic ideal" of a particular recipe, which is great to start with. And then I can ask it for suggestions of variations, which will generally be well-chosen and "standard" as opposed to idiosyncratic "individuality".

Because let's face it: individuality is great in art, whether it's fiction or music. I love individuality there. But not in everyday cooking. Usually, you just want a fairly standard version of something that tastes good. Obviously if you go to high-end dining you're looking for something more like individual art. But not for regular recipes to make at home, usually.
by SamBam | 2025-08-13 20:34:25+00:00
I'm more than old enough to remember the birth of the internet.

Back when I had a GeoCities website about aliens (seriously) it was still mine. I had a comments section and I hoped people would comment on it (no one did). I had a counter. I commented on other people's sites in the Area 51 subsection I was listed under.

The aim wasn't just to put out my same-ol' unoriginal thoughts into the distributed global consciousness, it was to actually talk to other people. The fact that I wrote it under a dumb handle (a variant of the one I still use everywhere) didn't make me feel less like it was my own individual communication.

It's the same for everything else, even the stuff that was completely unattributed. If you put a hilarious animation on YTMND, you know that other people will be referencing that specific one, and linking to it, and saying "did you see that funny thing on YTMND?" It wouldn't have been enough for the audience to just get some diluted, average version of that animation spread out into some global meme-generating AI.

So no, "Google Zero" where no one sees the original content and is just "happy that their thoughts are getting out there, somehow" is not something that anyone should wish for.
by bluGill | 2025-08-13 20:34:28+00:00
Remote and flexible are nice, but not what is needed. What is needed is consistency and not too many hours. You have to be expected to not work or party late because you will be with the family. You have to be expected to work the same first shift schedule - that is the kids are in school or in child care when you are working (child care for young kids is expensive enough that one parent staying home until the kids are school aged looks really good, so support for going back to work after that is useful).

There needs to be one parent with flexibility, but it doesn't matter which. Just so that when a kid is sick at least one parent able to not go into the office. Most people reading this will have a job that can be done okay from home between cleaning vomit up and so it makes sense for us to get that flexibility. However there are a lot of jobs that must be in person (you can't work an assembly line from home)
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-08-13 20:34:38+00:00
> Why is that hard for the Python community to come up with a single tool to rule them all?

Whatever I would say at this point about PyPA would be so uncharitable that dang would descend on me with the holy hammer of banishment, but you can get my drift. I just don't trust them to come out with good tooling. The plethora they have produced so far is quite telling.

That said, pip covers 99% of my needs when I need to do anything with Python. There are ecosystems that have it way worse, so I count my blessings. But apparently, since Poetry and uv exist, my 99% are not many other people's 99%.

If I wanted to package my Python stuff, though, I'm getting confused. Is it now setup.py or pyproject.toml? Or maybe both? What if I need to support an older Python version as seen in some old-but-still-supported Linux distributions?

> They should remove the "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." from the Python Zen.

Granted, tooling is different from the language itself. Although PyPA could benefit from a decade having a BDFL.
by o11c | 2025-08-13 20:34:38+00:00
Don't forget the greatest enemy of both abusive companies and abusive government: the news media. And this definitely seems big enough for them.

See if you can "shop" around (start local) to see who's interested in publishing a story something along the lines of "The EU has declared war on small businesses. I'm being forced to pay thousands of euros because a brand-new company decided they wanted to steal my years-old project name."
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-13 20:34:44+00:00
You don't fork/exec everytime. You fork/exec once, and then use a standard C template for a select or epoll loop for a unix socket, and transport all the data that you need processed fast using that, with bidirectional comms.

Even more so, you can often time prototype in Python with rapid dev, and then when you want performance, you can translate it to pretty much whatever, including C, using LLMs that do a pretty good job. With coding agents, you can set them up to basically run the code side by side against a bunch of inputs and automatically fix stuff. We pretty much did this at our job to translate an internal API backend to a web server written purely in C, that was fully memory safe without any memory bugs.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-13 20:34:58+00:00
> you need to encourage going home and not thinking about work at all

Why would any company encourage that? The only use that business had with people having family was that having family put workers at a disadvantage, pressed them against the wall, forced them to suffer through even more exploitation than they would if they were childless. Make them existentially fear even trying to look for other opportunities. And give them a place to escape the burden of care of their children.