MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-10 07:30:22+00:00
> One of the unsung praises of Arch is that it's turned thousands of users into testers.

You can do that well enough with Debian's "testing" and "unstable" release channels. Aside from the few months leading up to a new "stable" release, which usually isn't a big deal (and fixing regressions in "stable" should then be a higher priority anyway). Just don't install it on systems that you actually depend on to keep working. But running it on your desktop at home that you only use to play and experiment with is just fine.
by b112 | 2025-08-10 07:31:53+00:00
Not many people know this, only myself and a few of my clan, but reflected photons are actually no longer quantumly entwined with the sun, bouncing off of normal matter de-entangles them.

Thus they become robbed of their primary source of rejuvenating power!

We've been working on a device to try to force re-entanglement for centuries. Once done, we will be able to get the proper nutrition fed to us by the sun at all times.

Bob, our thirdmost clan member, has done some work with a non-portable device. He provides, for a small subscription fee, bottled water infused with re-tangled photons. We can ship this to you worldwide, but you need to act fast as they're trying to stop us, and ewW)@# <NOCARRIER>
by Jensson | 2025-08-10 07:32:43+00:00
> If in 2022 I’d tried to convince AI skeptics that in three years we might have tools on the level of Claude Code, I’m sure I’d have heard everyone say it would be impossible because “it’s just a statistical model.”

We already had these coding models in 2022, they were already pattern matching engines with variables back then, all your imagination needed to do to go from that to Claude code today is to give it more code examples and make it bigger.

They still can't replace even a junior engineers ability to navigate tasks over even short periods of time, just like back then they need constant handholding to get anything done. So I don't see what changed except the model being larger with more examples and therefore you can get larger chunks of coherent code out of them.
Show HN: AI Coloring Pages Generator
by tomstig | 2025-08-10 07:34:12+00:00
Hey Ycombinator News community!

I'm excited to share AI Coloring Pages Generator with you all!

As a parent myself, I noticed how hard it was to find fresh, engaging coloring pages that my kids actually wanted to color. So I built this AI-powered tool that lets anyone create custom coloring pages in seconds - just describe what you want and watch the magic happen!

Whether it's "unicorn princess," "summer theme," or "cute kittens," the AI generates beautiful, printable coloring pages that are perfect for kids and adults alike. The best part? It's completely free to use!

I've already seen families, teachers, and even therapists using it to create personalized activities. There's something special about seeing a child's face light up when they get to color exactly what they imagined.

Would love to hear what you think and what kind of coloring pages you'd create!
by dns_snek | 2025-08-10 07:34:25+00:00
> in which case the whole program may finally crash.

This may happen if you let it, but it's basically never the desired outcome. If you were handling a user request, it should stop by returning a HTTP 500 to the client, or if you were processing a background job of some sort, it should stop with a watchdog process marking the job as a failure, not with the entire system crashing.
by throwaway3060 | 2025-08-10 07:34:59+00:00
If you open the comment separately as its own page, it should allow you to reply there.

Not trying to claim that they're the same at all, especially not in a physical sense. Maybe in a spiritual or cultural sense the consequences could be compared, and maybe Stalin was planning something more (we'll never know). The goals were completely different. As I mentioned somewhere else, the full scope of the Nazis goals were so much worse than most people know.

The only claim here is that Soviets did not have racial laws at all - they essentially did.
by pm90 | 2025-08-10 07:35:01+00:00
This. Its not really friendship (although sometimes it does turn into that too!) but a human connections. Understanding that the people that you’re working with are humans with hobbies, families and other interests makes it much more enjoyable to work with them. This is especially true for highly creative fields like Software Design. You’re also likely to create connections with people you may not work closely with (eg from Sales, from another team etc) that can lead to a better understanding of different perspectives of the company/product.
by int_19h | 2025-08-10 07:35:28+00:00
Viable alternatives are many when you look at minimum wage closely and see that it is, in essence, welfare funded by a regressive (even more so than usual) sales tax: businesses will pass most of it to their customers, and the fraction it in good or service sold is broadly inversely proportional to the price of that service. That is, people who buy the cheapest stuff - i.e. the poor - are those who are disproportionally taxed, as percentage of their overall spending. So it's taxing the poor to feed the poorest.

The obvious alternative is to tax the rich to feed the poorest. We can start with capital gains.
by com2kid | 2025-08-10 07:36:07+00:00
College in general was meant as a way for people to rise up, and for my generation (early millennials) it worked. My first job in software engineering paid way more than my parents combined income.

Society has managed to mess that pipeline up, first through massive student loans, and now through just general unemployment.

But the system worked for a long time.

The Ivy leagues are something different. Society can only have so many "elites", or else they stop being elite and just start being irritating rich people. There needs to be a path for new blood to enter the elites, so feeder lanes exist.

This all worked rather well for at least half the 20th century, but recently the elites have gone a bit too far into the "eat the poor" territory, and society is starting to crumble around the edges.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-10 07:37:04+00:00
> since the new minimum wage law went into effect, I've noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that in the meantime:

- unemployment has declined, which means it's harder to find people wanting to work in such a place.

- inflation has kicked in, raising prices over the board.

In that context, attributing the changes you've seen to a particular policy is very very hard (and the linked paper doesn't do a better job than what you do here…).
by pingou | 2025-08-10 07:37:07+00:00
"An article by Krebs on 27 March 2018 on KrebsOnSecurity.com about the mining software company and script "Coinhive" where Krebs published the names of admins of the German imageboard pr0gramm, as a former admin is the inventor of the script and owner of the company, was answered by an unusual protest action by the users of that imageboard. Using the pun of "Krebs" meaning "Cancer" in German, they donated to charitable organisations fighting against those diseases, collecting more than 200,000 Euro of donations until the evening of 28 March to the Deutsche Krebshilfe charity".

I approve of this kind of retaliation.
by exe34 | 2025-08-10 07:37:15+00:00
I think this is all true, but the "being my fault" part has gotten better for me with nixos. Broke it? just reboot into the previous version and get configuration.nix back from git. I had to reinstall exactly once in 2016 shortly after the first install, but I don't know what I did wrong. the third time I installed nixos was last week when I bought a new computer that came with Windows.
by HiPHInch | 2025-08-10 07:37:37+00:00
ported to macos using raycast

```

#!/bin/bash

# Required parameters: # @raycast.schemaVersion 1 # @raycast.title Ask LLM # @raycast.mode fullOutput

# Optional parameters: # @raycast.icon # @raycast.argument1 { "type": "text", "placeholder": "Your question" }

# Documentation: # @raycast.author Your Name # @raycast.authorURL https://github.com/you

QUERY="$1" [ -z "$QUERY" ] && exit 0

FULL_QUERY="Answer in as little words as possible, concisely, for an intelligent person: $QUERY"

# URL encode (pure bash) encode_query() { local query="$1" local encoded="" local c for (( i=0; i<${#query}; i++ )); do c="${query:$i:1}" case $c in [a-zA-Z0-9.~_-]) encoded+="$c" ;; *) encoded+=$(printf '%%%02X' "'$c") ;; esac done echo "$encoded" }

ENCODED_QUERY=$(encode_query "$FULL_QUERY")

# Get response RESPONSE=$(curl -s "https://ch.at/?q=$ENCODED_QUERY")

# Output to Raycast echo "$RESPONSE"

# --- Optional: also pop up a big dialog --- osascript -e 'display dialog "'"$RESPONSE"'" buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with title "LLM Answer"'

```
by raesene9 | 2025-08-10 07:38:04+00:00
But of course it does provide an additional layer of security that indeed could have reduced the likelihood of this issue being exploited.

For me, the core of the discovered issue was that applications intended purely for use by internal MS staff were discoverable and attackable by anyone on the Internet, and some of those applications had a mis-configuration that allowed them to be attacked.

If all those applications had been behind a decently configured VPN service which required MFA, any attacker who wanted to exploit them would first need access to that VPN, which is another hurdle to cross and would reduce the chance of exploitation.

With a target like MS (and indeed most targets of any value) you shouldn't rely solely on the security provided by a VPN, but it can provide another layer of defence.

For me the question should be, "is the additional security provided by the VPN layer justified against the costs of managing it, and potentially the additional attack surface introduced with the VPN".
by tiddles | 2025-08-10 07:38:10+00:00
Code is a liability. When I let a LLM take the wheel, I end up with thousands of lines of crappy abstractions and needless comments and strange patterns that take way more brain power to understand than if I did it myself.

My current workflow has reverted to primitive copy paste into web chat (via Kagi Assistant). The friction is enough to make me put a lot of thought into each prompt and how much code context I give it (gathered via files-to-prompt from simonw).

I have little experience with frontend and web apps, so I am trying out a supervised vibe coding flow. I give most of the code base per prompt, ask for a single feature, then read the code output fully and iterate on it a few times to reduce aforementioned bad patterns. Normally I will then type it out myself, or at most copy a few snippets of tens of lines.

What doesn’t work I found is asking for the full file with changes applied already. Not only does it take a long time and waste tokens, it normally breaks/truncates/rewords unrelated code.

So far I’m happy with how this project is going. I am familiar with all the code as I have audited and typed it out nearly entirely myself. I am actually retaining some knowledge and learning new concepts (reactive state with VanJS) and have confidence I can maintain this project even without an LLM in future, which includes handing it over to colleagues :)
by themafia | 2025-08-10 07:38:27+00:00
That and better libraries and continued improvements based upon feedback from usage in the field. Then open source very recently took a drastic turn and decided that reimplementing things in a new language was the best way forward, to move fast and break things, and to let the reference implementation _be_ the documentation.

I believe these two facts are connected by the financial interests of the companies that promulgate them. It's easier to believe since their financial interests are so directly entangled.

I feel bad for the author of this article. They're being led down a technological dead end. As always, the top reply to any of these posts, is a bunch of vague and hand wavy explanation as to why the OP is "doing it wrong" and how they're "getting actual value!" Never a link to the actual project or output. Probably because we could all search the produced code, find the prior examples, and once again point out that "AI" is just "copyright whitewashing."

This industry is no longer driven by engineering but by gross financial tricks.
by bfayyumii | 2025-08-10 07:39:57+00:00
After building and scaling my marketing agency to make anywhere from $10K to even $15K a month, I noticed something. Software subscriptions were eating up a huge chunk of my expenses. In fact, they were my second biggest cost. First was advertising, second was software, and third was payroll. I didn’t have many employees, but that’s not really the point.

I realized that switching to annual plans could save me anywhere from 20% to 40% on average, which is amazing. But here’s the problem—you have to pay the whole amount upfront. Sometimes I couldn’t afford it, and other times I could, but I still didn’t like the idea of dropping a big lump sum for an entire year all at once.

What I actually wanted was simple: get the annual discount, but still pay monthly. So that’s exactly what we’re building.

We help small to medium sized businesses get the annual discount while paying monthly, and at the same time, we help software companies sell more annual plans and get paid in full upfront. It’s a win win for everyone.

If you’re a software company or a small to medium sized business and this sounds interesting, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter/X at @bfayyumi.

Would love to know your thoughts on this!
by raesene9 | 2025-08-10 07:40:38+00:00
My own , small, experience with MSRC is indeed their bug bounty program is not good, they take any possible opportunity to avoid payouts.

this means that a lot of genuine bug bounty hunters just won't look at MS stuff and MS avoid getting things fixed, instead other attackers will be the ones finding things, and they likely won't report it to MS...
by Terr_ | 2025-08-10 07:41:11+00:00
That makes me think of another area that exploits the strong managerial desire to believe in magic:

"Once we migrate your systems to The Blockchain it'll solve all sorts of transfer and supply-chain problems, because the entities already sending lies/mistakes on hard-to-revoke paper are going to not send the same lies/mistakes on a permanent digital ledger, 'cuz reasons."
by userbinator | 2025-08-10 07:41:14+00:00
I played the "guess what it's going to be about before clicking on it" game with this item, and lost badly. I won't spoil the fun, but only remark that this site is neither about [1] a melon farming business, nor [2] a certain famous man with autocratic tendencies whose handle in "last-initial first" format would be "melon".
by donperignon | 2025-08-10 07:42:19+00:00
LLM’s are basically glorified slot machines. Some people try very hard to come up with techniques or theories about when the slot machine is hot, it’s only an illusion, let me tell you, it’s random and arbitrary, maybe today is your lucky day maybe not. Same with AI, learning the “skill” is as difficult as learning how to google or how to check stackoverflow, trivial. All the rest is luck and how many coins do you have in your pocket.
by themafia | 2025-08-10 07:42:24+00:00
> And he was. The results of such encouragement were amazing and almost unachievable by any other methods.

Oh boy. You've missed the glaringly obvious. They only did this because they couldn't pay him. In other countries that paid their engineers they produced more and better products. History is clear and obvious on this fact.

> You'll be surprised at what methods encourage people best.

There's very little surprise when you study the actual science of human psychology and performance and not the journals of demented cold war generals.

Anyways, thanks for being honest about wanting to create a Company Scrip Town, I and many others, of course, will never cooperate with you. You're right to fear rebellion.
by pabs3 | 2025-08-10 07:43:13+00:00
The LTS/Freexian people are all Debian members/contributors, so I would not say "Freexian is 100% not Debian" is correct. Basically, some Debian folks got together and started a company to get funding to do an LTS, and also offer other paid services.

At least for bullseye, the LTS team supposedly support all packages, except for games and a few other packages. Its trivial to find out which packages aren't supported too, just run a command, no need to email anyone.

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Bullseye https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Using#Check_for_unsupported_pack... https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-security-support/-/bl...

Agreed on the rest, although do note LTS contributors are paid, the security team probably aren't (although some are).

I think in practice, when contrib/non-free stuff has security updates from upstreams, Debian does get updates in stable/LTS. For example the Intel microcode, or WiFi firmware.

I too feel like Debian having LTS is a waste of time, people should be able to upgrade to the next stable within the one year of regular security support for oldstable.

BTW, Ubuntu security support has a similar issue; main is supported, universe is not.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-10 07:43:17+00:00
That really resonates. I've found myself questioning whether I'm wasting my time writing a piece of code: what if the LLM could do this more quickly? So I try it, almost every time, and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Am I really saving myself any work in the long run? Honestly I don't know. I feel like it's just causing me to work more because it feels like a game and that is, ultimately, where the results are coming from.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-10 07:43:35+00:00
> Most people act on gut instincts first as well

And we do not hire «most people» as consultants intentionally. We want to ask those intellectually diligent and talented.

> language model that is based on human representations

The machine is made to process the input - not to "intake" it. To create a mocker of average-joe would be an anti-service in both that * the project was to build a processor and * we refrain to ask average-joe. The plan can never have meant to be what you described, the mockery of mediocrity.

> we want better reliability

We want the implementation of a well performing mind - of intelligence. What you described is the "incompetent mind", the habitual fool - the «human mind model» is prescriptive based on what the properly used mind can do, not descriptive on what sloppy weak minds do.

> Can a "lesser" mind create a "greater" mind

Nothing says it could not.

> one free of human limitations

Very certainly yes, we can build things with more time, more energy, more efficiency, more robustness etc. than humans.
by WillFlux | 2025-08-10 07:44:28+00:00
I'm surprised by this. 1280x768 is an unusual resolution, what display timings are you using?

I've found 1024x768 and 1280x720 are both well supported. I tend to use these display timings: https://projectf.io/posts/video-timings-vga-720p-1080p/
by CjHuber | 2025-08-10 07:44:32+00:00
I understand your take, however my main use case is for the LLM to find subtle connections and biases in text or analyse nuances, so I figure more parms do make adifference in my case. Also in my experience it does also make a difference in summarization and filtering tasks, as a larger param one possibly knows better what is important and relevant in a text
by simonask | 2025-08-10 07:44:49+00:00
I also think it's worth mentioning that it apparently affects both sides of the political spectrum.

For example, a couple of years ago there were suddenly people protesting drag queens reading to children in Denmark, and it was so obviously an outrage they had imported directly from American social media. (Granted, these were fringe nutjobs and were quickly dismissed in public discourse, but nevertheless.)
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-08-10 07:45:42+00:00
> However, we don't parse markdown on the server and convert to HTML. Rather, we just prompt the model to emit HTML directly.

Considering the target audience it probably doesn’t matter but it sounds like this could lead to pretty heavy prompt injections, user intended or not. Have you considered that and are there any safeguards?

The domain is great by the way. Congrats on getting it!
by atoav | 2025-08-10 07:46:07+00:00
> You can create as many Slack channels as you want, but all that is worthless if you don’t build the culture where it’s okay to use them.

Well the problem with corporate offtopic spaces is obvious: It is (potential) surveillance. One of the essential properties of the coffee kitchen at the office is that only you and the person who was there know what you said.

People at work will occasionally like to talk about things their collegues or bosses don't need to hear. That doesn't even mean it needs to be badmouthing others. Let's say you're really into model trains, it is easier saying that in person to the one other guy who acts a bit nerdy, than to announce it online in front of potentially everybody.

I leave it to you how you think this could be fixed.
by josephg | 2025-08-10 07:47:19+00:00
> But let's be honest and admit that whiteboard coding exercises aren't actually a proxy for anything else, or at least we have no scientific evidence on that point.

Nah. Whiteboard interviews test a bunch of traits that are important in a job. They aren't designed to be a baroque hazing ritual.

More generally, we could make a list of desirable / necessary qualities in a good hire based on what they'll spend their time doing. Imagine you're hiring someone to work in a team writing a web app. Their job will involve writing javascript & CSS in a large project. So they need to write code, and read and debug code written by their coworkers. They will need to present their work regularly. And attend meetings. The resulting website needs to be fast, easy to use and reliable.

From that, we can brainstorm a list of skills a good applicant should have:

- Programming skills. JS + CSS specifically. Also reading & debugging skills.

- Communication skills. (Meetings, easy to work with, can explain & discuss ideas with coworkers, etc).

- Understanding of performance, UX concepts, software reliability, etc

- Knowledge of how web browsers work

- Capacity to learn & solve unexpected problems

And so on.

Now, an idealised interview process would assess a candidate on each of these qualities. Then rank candidates using some weighted score across all areas based on how important those qualities are. But that would take an insane amount of time. The ideal assessment would assess all of this stuff efficiently. So you want to somehow use a small number of tasks to assess everything on that big list.

Ideally, that's what whiteboard interviews are trying to do. They assess - all at once - problems solving skills, capacity for learning, communication skills and ideally CS fundamentals. Thats pretty good as far as single task interviews go!

> we have no scientific evidence

There's a mountain of evidence. Almost all of it proprietary, and kept under lock and key by various large companies. The data I've seen shows success at whiteboard interviews is a positive signal in a candidate. Skill at whiteboard interviews is positively correlated with skill in other areas - but its not a perfect correlation. Really, the problem really isn't whiteboard interviews. Its that people think whiteboard interviews give you enough signal. They don't. They don't tell you how good someone is at programming or debugging. A good interview for a software engineer must assess technical skills as well.

Speaking as someone who's interviewed hundreds of candidates, yes. There are some people who will bomb a whiteboard interview but do well at other technical challenges you give them. But they are nowhere near as common as people on HN like to claim. Most people who are bad at whiteboard interviews are also bad at programming, and I wouldn't hire them anyway.

The reality is, most people who make homebrew get hired. There's plenty of work in our industry for people who have a track record of doing great work. Stop blaming the process.