MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jchw | 2025-08-20 22:53:56+00:00
> This… makes no sense to me. Almost by definition, an AI vendor will have a datacenter full of compute capacity. It feels like this solution has the problem backwards, effectively only limiting access to those without resources or trying to conserve them.

A lot of these bots consume a shit load of resources specifically because they don't handle cookies, which causes some software (in my experience, notably phpBB) to consume a lot of resources. (Why phpBB here? Because it always creates a new session when you visit with no cookies. And sessions have to be stored in the database. Surprise!) Forcing the bots to store cookies to be able to reasonably access a service actually fixes this problem altogether.

Secondly, Anubis specifically targets bots that try to blend in with human traffic. Bots that don't try to blend in with humans are basically ignored and out-of-scope. Most malicious bots don't want to be targeted, so they want to blend in... so they kind of have to deal with this. If they want to avoid the Anubis challenge, they have to essentially identify themselves. If not, they have to solve it.

Finally... If bots really want to durably be able to pass Anubis challenges, they pretty much have no choice but to run the arbitrary code. Anything else would be a pretty straight-forward cat and mouse game. And, that means that being able to accelerate the challenge response is a non-starter: if they really want to pass it, and not appear like a bot, the path of least resistance is to simply run a browser. That's a big hurdle and definitely does increase the complexity of scraping the Internet. It increases more the more sites that use this sort of challenge system. While the scrapers have more resources, tools like Anubis scale the resources required a lot more for scraping operations than it does a specific random visitor.

To me, the most important point is that it only fights bot traffic that intentionally tries to blend in. That's why it's OK that the proof-of-work challenge is relatively weak: the point is that it's non-trivial and can't be ignored, not that it's particularly expensive to compute.

If bots want to avoid the challenge, they can always identify themselves. Of course, then they can also readily be blocked, which is exactly what they want to avoid.

In the long term, I think the success of this class of tools will stem from two things:

1. Anti-botting improvements, particularly in the ability to punish badly behaved bots, and possibly share reputation information across sites.

2. Diversity of implementations. More implementations of this concept will make it harder for bots to just hardcode fastpath challenge response implementations and force them to actually run the code in order to pass the challenge.

I haven't kept up with the developments too closely, but as silly as it seems I really do think this is a good idea. Whether it holds up as the metagame evolves is anyone's guess, but there's actually a lot of directions it could be taken to make it more effective without ruining it for everyone.
by baby_souffle | 2025-08-20 22:54:51+00:00
I understand why you'd reach for that data, not a ton of other alternatives... But I'm not convinced that an arbitrarily chosen brand could achieve those sales figures. Especially if it was a new or no-name brand that didn't have a proven track record with software updates and hardware build quality.

Maybe I'm just incredibly naive but I have this small hope that we'll see a return to smaller phones that are trifolds for when you need the real estate.
by zahlman | 2025-08-20 22:54:58+00:00
Nobody is forcing you to use the tiny packages.

The fact that the tiny packages are so popular despite their triviality is, to me, solid evidence that simply documenting the warts does not in fact make everything fine.

And I say this as someone who is generally pro having more small-but-not-tiny packages (say, on the order of a few hundred to a few thousand lines) in the Python ecosystem.
by starkparker | 2025-08-20 22:56:45+00:00
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-05-29-whats-cooking-q2/

> A few weeks after this blog post, I moved us from Anubis to go-away, which is more configurable and allows us to reduce the user impact of Anubis (e.g. by offering challenges that don’t require JavaScript, or support text-mode browsers better). We have rolled this out on several services now, and unfortunately I think they’re going to remain necessary for a while yet – presumably until the bubble pops, I guess.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-20 22:57:05+00:00
Happy to know which one you have used then because all the ones I have used in the past from Google, OnePlus and Xiaomi have been rock solid.

It’s simple my current iPhone 13 is the second worst phone I have ever owned after the 3S I had a decade before. It’s also the most expensive in a very Apple-like fashion.

iOS is a sorry mess. It manages to be both annoyingly limited and awfully buggy.
by Lerc | 2025-08-20 22:57:19+00:00
I don't suppose you have an eye towards verilog in the long term?

I'm curious as to the breadth of possibilities that could be searched. I would imagine something like this could invent flash attention if it cast its net wide enough, but that is a pretty broad net. [Edit: I scrolled back and saw flash attention was explicitly mentioned, cool stuff]
by johnfn | 2025-08-20 22:57:50+00:00
The article throws out a lot of potential issues with AI generated code, but doesn't stop for a moment to consider if solutions currently exist or might exist to these problems.

- Before LLMs, provided that your team did some of their due diligence, you could always expect to have some help when tackling new code-bases.

Has the author never worked on legacy code before?

- (oh, and it has forgotten everything about the initial writing process by then).

Does the author not think this can ever be solved?

- Because of the situation of a Bus Factor of zero that it creates, vibe coding is fundamentally flawed. That is, only until there is an AI that can generate 100% accurate code 100% of the time, and it is fed 100% accurate prompts.

Why does it require 100% accuracy 100% of the time? Humans are not 100% accurate 100% of the time and we seem to trust them with our code.
by poisonwomb | 2025-08-20 22:57:53+00:00
I think the governance stuff might push it over the top for a lot of organisations; it's pretty well integrated with IAM providers not only for structured/modelled data but also workspaces for the data sciencey stuff. Pretty much everything has permissions associated with it. When you have a big data engineering/science push off the back of the AI hype I think it appeals to the cheque writers to have something centralised and controlled.

Aside from that I do get the feeling that most small and medium sized companies have been oversold on it - they don't really have enough data to leverage a lot of the features and they don't really have the skill a lot of the time to avoid shooting themselves in the foot. It's possible for a reporting analyst upskilling to learn the programming skill to not create a tangled web of christmas lights but not probable in most situations. There seems to be a whole cottage industry of consultancies now that purport to get you up and running with limited actual success.

At least it's an incentive for companies to get their data in order and standardise on one place and a set of processes.

In terms of actual development the notebook IDE feels like big old turd to use tho and it feels slow in general if you're at all used to local dev. People do kinda like these web based tools tho. Can't trust people all the time! There's VS code and PyCharm extensions but my team work mainly with notebooks at the moment for good or ill and the experience there is absolute flaky dogshit.

I think it's possible to make some good stuff with it and it's paying my bills at the moment, but I think a lot of the adoption may be doomed to failure lol
by southwindcg | 2025-08-20 22:59:12+00:00
If you use uBlock Origin, you could add cosmetic filters to do it.

Something like...

news.ycombinator.com##.athing:has(a[href*="twitter.com"])

news.ycombinator.com##.athing:has(a[href*="twitter.com"]) + tr

news.ycombinator.com##.athing:has(a[href*="x.com"])

news.ycombinator.com##.athing:has(a[href*="x.com"]) + tr
Show HN: C/WASM Port of Iterated Function System Fractals
by drio | 2025-08-20 22:59:17+00:00
I came across Danielle Navarro's beautiful R/C++ implementation of IFS fractals and wanted to understand how they work by porting it to C. After that, I made modifications to compile to WebAssembly so you can try it directly in the browser without installing anything. You can generate static PNGs with the C version or interact with it live via the WASM demo. The math behind IFS is fascinating: simple geometric transformations create incredibly complex patterns. I hope you like it.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-20 22:59:51+00:00
> Why should would-be censors be granted power...

> how about if we address the problem ... which wouldn't cost anything?

This is not a Philosophy 487 essay, where clever arguments about "should" have the power to determine your, um, er - your essay grade.

Reality is that they already have a great deal of power, and are gaining more.

Could you explain your idea for "addressing the problem at the source ... which won't cost anything"? I'm concerned that that's just a "if all the Supreme Court Justices suddenly decided to do the Right Thing..." daydream.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-20 22:59:59+00:00
If you asked Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos if we should build nuclear plants, they’d say yes with hardly any hesitation. If you let them build the plants, they would.

I don't "want them to build them and charge me money" I want them to pay their fair share to fund the building of public utilities. Before you say these things are better private, go look at what happened to electricity prices in Australia are privatization.

The plebs are usually the problem

Sure mate.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-08-20 23:00:00+00:00
It has already started and hopefully will be on full display within months. Also the recent lawsuit finally opened the gates and Tesla will be buried in liabilities. They sold milions of cars that were supposedly becoming a Robotaxi with an OTA update. Oh how times have changed.

I believe launching the Robotaxi is his biggest mistake. He could have continued the grift for some time, but now there is an official service and the clock is ticking.

2 months in, it's still not open to the public, there is a safety driver in the car, and even the influencers notice that something is very fishy as there are still only ~10 cars in the fleet and they are not all available at the same time.

But yeah, once the house of cards collapse it will be pretty fun. "Hey, how anybody believed they actually have real world Robotaxis if the launch party was on a movie set with remotely operated cars ?". "10 straight years of FSD by the end of the year". "Robotaxi with a safety driver"
by ndneighbor | 2025-08-20 23:00:09+00:00
Yea, I found the article to be overly reductive. I work on a shared ownership codebase, which at times, I am not going to be able to pull the original author at all times when I work on my branch.

At least having a partner explain some aspects is a huge unlock for me. Maybe the OP shadowboxing a world with no humans, but no humans is already a status quo issue that my team and I face sometimes.
by londons_explore | 2025-08-20 23:01:25+00:00
Isn't the point that it makes no financial sense to ever turn it down?

You still need the same number of staff supervising. Still the same interest costs on the huge bank loan to build it. Still the same maintenance intervals, etc.

Might as well leave it at full power if there is any use whatsoever for the produced energy. Even if there isn't, using the energy to warm up the ocean avoids thermal cycling of the reactor core and therefore reduces maintenance.
by tgma | 2025-08-20 23:01:55+00:00
What good is optimizing for the open web when the Pixels lack a sufficiently fast processor for bloated web pages. Haven't tried the 10 yet, but Pixel 9 is sufficiently slow that you can see tearing artifacts when you scroll. This is at least two or three years behind the modern Qualcomm in Samsungs let alone Apple.
by rossjudson | 2025-08-20 23:03:10+00:00
At scale, the larger companies end up needing to be able to make policy decisions (read: authn/authz, most of the time) across a large number of "policies" in an efficient way. Everybody starts with simple representations that can go fast but have limited expression, then moves to various forms of extensions/templating/substitution/rules/etc.

OPA and Rego use a datalog variant to bring order to that bespoke mess. Think IAM policy, but you DRY because it's a real programming language with a library full of nice-to-have built-ins.

OPA and Rego can basically "become" other types of access control systems (see https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/comparison-to-other-sys...).
by aranelsurion | 2025-08-20 23:03:23+00:00
I dislike "$x is dead" as much if not more as you do, and I'm sure it works fine as something doesn't need to be the most popular choice to be working.

With that being said, just a quick look at, for example Stack Overflow 2025 survey tells me it doesn't have the same mindshare it once had.
by jonhohle | 2025-08-20 23:03:45+00:00
Besides the python scripts, everything is parallelized and is CPU bound on as many cores as it can be given. Because of licensing throwing more CI at it isn’t an option. This is an open source project, so there’s not really money for buy moar bigger.

The tools possibly wouldn’t exist, but there are options now that provide better ergonomics and are not slow.
by tshaddox | 2025-08-20 23:03:49+00:00
My and your personal preferences for one camera over the other isn't the issue. Nor am I claiming that one is objectively better than another. My point is that blind tests (between two cameras of similar quality) are worthless simply because they don't reflect the preferences the test-taker would actually have given extensive use of each camera.

The issues with blind tests like this are well-known. I assure you I have no interest in persuading you to alter your own preferences.
by themadturk | 2025-08-20 23:04:00+00:00
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.

For the same reason they liked it in the UX of 1985 and 1995...because Markdown gives you the ability to actually see the format codes that create your formatting and fix them if they're not what you want.

Now Obsidian (or any other Markdown editor) certainly isn't WordPerfect, but the one thing that diehard WordPerfect users loved was the ability to hit "reveal codes" and gain exacting control over their formatting...something Microsoft Word has never even tried to do. Markdown is far, far simpler, but the same control is there.
by ajross | 2025-08-20 23:04:43+00:00
There is no device ID, only ones tied to a user login on a phone, and the app must request a permission to get it. You can, for example, know that the user ID (which you obviously also need to have a permission to retrieve), is being used on the same device as was used to access your service in the past. Or you can know that this particular otherwise-anonymous user/device combination is being used again. I'm pretty sure that's likewise possible on iOS, but folks can chime in.

And of course there are guidelines that disallow most of the abuse scenarios I suspect people want to imagine: https://developer.android.com/identity/user-data-ids
by d_watt | 2025-08-20 23:06:18+00:00
It's potentially the opposite. If you instrument a codebase with documentation and configuration for AI agents to work well in it, then in a year, that agent will be able to do that same work just as well (or better with model progress) at adding new features.

This assumes your adding documentation, tests, instructions, and other scaffolding along the way, of course.
by fzeroracer | 2025-08-20 23:06:37+00:00
Unfortunately the corporate machine has been converging on a bus factor of 0. I've been part of multiple teams now where I was the only one holding knowledge over critical subsystems and whenever I attempted to train people on it, it was futile. Mainly because they would get laid off doing 'cost-savings measures'.

There were times where I was close to getting fed up and just quitting during some of the high profile ops I had to deal with which would've left the entire system inoperable for an extended period of time. And frankly from talking to a lot of other engineers, it sounds like a lot of companies operate in this manner.

I fully expect a lot of these issues to come home to roost as AI compounds loss of institutional knowledge and leads to rapid system decay.
Show HN: AI Terminal – The AI coding assistant that knows your codebase
by k0x | 2025-08-20 23:06:45+00:00
Built this after realizing that existing AI tools treat every file like it exists in isolation. AI Terminal actually understands your project structure and suggests changes that make sense.

What makes it different:

-Semantic understanding: Uses AST + ML to map your entire codebase

-Pattern recognition: Identifies and suggests code following existing architectural patterns

-Terminal-first: Built for developers who live in the command line

-Persistent intelligence: Remembers insights about your project across sessions

Benchmarks vs popular tools:

3.2x faster codebase navigation vs Copilot 91% relevant suggestions vs 67% for Cursor 45% faster debugging in large codebases vs Claude Code

Example workflow:

aiterm analyze # Understand project architecture

aiterm suggest "add error handling to user service" # Get contextual suggestions

aiterm template create "api_endpoint" # Generate code matching existing patterns

Perfect for:

Senior developers working on complex systems Teams with established coding patterns Anyone tired of AI suggestions that ignore existing architecture The tool runs locally (privacy-first) and has both CLI and VS Code extension.

Try it: npm install -g ai-terminal

Looking for beta testers.
by g4cg54g54 | 2025-08-20 23:06:51+00:00
i find a "import pages" but no "export ALL pages"? (i did see the "one-by-one option", but how about two trees?)

"closing the sidebar" seems to grant access to another menu that is not accessible elsewhere? (appears to be of the actual canvas? has "export as svg" options like the context-menu, but also has "redo & revert" for example)

also appears there is a bit of an a "dynamic pen" (similar to excalidraw´s thickness?) - this could be a bit more pronounced i think or/and maybe needs some smoothing (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915897 and some of the other demos linked in there)

a onbeforeunload (or whatever the current go to) to "warn before closing the tab" would be neat too (possibly gated behind Incognito-Mode detection - or only triggerd if the user himself did a import at the beginning or such?...)

very neat tho
by runarberg | 2025-08-20 23:07:33+00:00
Just to be clear we are talking about genocidal and racist hate speech here (you can see for your self). It it is not some one off things he has said (which to be clear would be bad enough) but something Shaun Maguire has defined his whole online persona around. Speech such as these are an integral part of every genocide, as they seek to dehumanize the victims and justify (or deny) the atrocities against them.

As an aside—despite the popularity of the trolley problem—people don‘t have a rational moral calculus. And moral behavior does not follow a sequential order from best to worse. Whatever your moral calculus be, that has no effect on whether or not the Zed team’s actions were a moral blunder or not... they were.
by gruez | 2025-08-20 23:07:37+00:00
>The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden.

Seems to be US only? iPhone also has the same thing, so it's probably something that US carriers are pushing, not something from OEMs.

>eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(

OpenEUICC works fine
by juancn | 2025-08-20 23:07:39+00:00
I think the article underestimates how much intent can be grasped from code alone. Even without comments.

Humans (and I strongly suspect LLMs, since they're statistical synthesis of human production) are fairly predictable.

We tend to tackle the same problems the same way. So how something is solved, tells you a lot about why, who and when it was solved.

Still, it's a valid point that much of the knowledge is now obscured, but that could be said too of a high employee churn organization.
by rchaud | 2025-08-20 23:07:47+00:00
Some that are ~20 years old and still kicking:

- Headphones and audio equipment: https://www.head-fi.org/forums/

- A/V equipment: https://www.avsforum.com/forums/

- Computers and Tech: https://hardforum.com/

- Music: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/

- General Entertainment and Discussion: https://forums.somethingawful.com/

RIP Notebookreview.net forums, IMDB forums, AbsolutePunk forums, Craigslist message board (still live, but mostly abandoned)
by observationist | 2025-08-20 23:10:18+00:00
Apple imposes "Artificial Incompetence" on their users. It treats them like children, gives them no agency, and limits their freedom, all while praising them for their taste and superior sense of... something.

This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.

Doing things weirdly and badly, and not allowing any other way, prevents skill transfer between operating systems and environments. It prevents easy transfer of software - it forces software to treat the weird and bad things as canonical.

Apple users, with their imposed muscle memory, not realizing how good things could and should be, insist on their high taste and discrimination, and point to things "just working" and other inanities as vehement cover for one of the darkest of dark patterns.

Interoperability, protocol, and freedom should be mandatory. Google is hardly better, but at least you can own the device you purchase.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-20 23:12:12+00:00
Because dragging politics into things is fucking obnoxious. It's off-topic, it gets people riled up so they are arguing about politics instead of having substantive discussion, and it degrades the community by threatening to destroy the focus on tech in favor of political slap fights. In short, going out of your way to bring up politics is being a jerk, and people don't appreciate that.
by ajross | 2025-08-20 23:12:21+00:00
> Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS

Not sure I understand this? One assumes that "daily driver" involves Linux VM use in this context[1], and ChromeOS's Linux VM integration is just wildly ahead of WSL (which really isn't bad) or the mess on OS X (awful). Installed Crostini apps appear as native apps in the UI. Transparent cross-filesystem access works flawlessly. Wayland and X11 apps appear with native decorations. Clipboard/WM/IPC integration does exactly what you expect. USB devices prompt you if you want to connect to the VM on insert (and remember the setting) etc...

And yes, I'm biased because I work there. But really it's a great development environment.

[1] I mean, if you're doing iOS development or need an M4 Max for performance reasons, or need some legacy Mac tooling like Adobe stuff, you're probably not looking at alternative platforms at all. Someone making the choice you posit is like 99% likely to be a web or embedded person working at a Linux shell as their native environment.