MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-29 06:17:37+00:00
Yes and no. Proper Agentic coding tools like Claude Code are a bit more than just a bunch of markdown rulesets.

For example: it uses Haiku as a model to run tools and most likely has automatic translations for when the model signals it wants to search or find something -> either use the built-in search or run find/fd/grep/rg

All that _can_ be done by prompting, but - as always with LLMS - prompts are more like suggestions.
by pama | 2025-08-29 06:18:29+00:00
If you make careful calculations and estimate the theoretical margins for inference only of most of the big open models on openrouter, the margins are typically crazy high if the openrouter providers served at scale (north of 800% for most of the large models). The high cost probably reflects salaries, investments, and amortization of other expenses like free serving or occasional partial serving occupancy. Sometimes it is hard to keep uniform high load due to other preferences of users that dont get covered at any price, eg maximal context length (which is costing output performance), latency, and time for first token, but also things like privacy guarantees, or simply switching to the next best model quickly. I have always thought that centralized inference is the real goldmine of AI because you get so much value at scale for hardly any cost.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-29 06:18:44+00:00
> I have Chrome on mobile configured as such that JS and cookies are disabled by default

My God, there's two of us!

(Though … you're being privacy conscious on Chrome? Come to Firefox. Ignore the pesky "it's funded by Google" problems, nothing to see, nothing to see, the water is fiiiine.)

> You might be surprised to learn that normally, this actually works fine

I guess I have a different experience there. A huge number of sites just outright crash. (E.g., the HN search.) JavaScript devs, I've learned, do not handle error cases, and the exceptions tend to just propagated out and ruin the rendering. There seems to be some popular framework out there that even just destroys the whole DOM to emit just the error. (I forget the text, but it's the same text, always. Always centered. Flash of page, then crash.)

I have a custom extension that fakes the cookie storage for those JS pages that just lies & says "yeah, cookies are enabled" and the blackholes the writes. But it fails for anything that needs a real cookie … like Anubis.

I'm empathetic towards where Anubis is coming from though. But the "I passed the challenge" cookie is indistinguishable from a tracker … although probably most people running Anubis are inherently trustworthy by a sort of cultural association so long as Anubis remains non-mainstream. I think I might modify it to have the ability to store cookies for a short time frame (like 1h) in some cases, such as Anubis; that's enough to pass the challenge, but weighed against tracking. I'm usually only blocked by Anubis for something like a blog post, so that should suffice.
by dingaling | 2025-08-29 06:20:04+00:00
Acceleration times say nothing about the character of a car.

Anyone can launch a Model S or Taycan at insane accelerations just by pushing a pedal and letting the computer sort things out.

Trying to do so in a 1970s Camaro or a 1980s Sierra XR4 requires skill and practice whilst listening to the howl of the engine, feeling the texture of the road through the steering and sensing the suspension loading-up. All of that has been lost.

Driving has been reduced to an ordeal to be ensured with as little interaction with the vehicle as possible.
by righthand | 2025-08-29 06:20:23+00:00
I think the hardest part of CSS is the weird specific lingo. I recently had to do some flexbox work, and while it's pretty easy to understand the naming conventions are just screwy. JustifyContent, AlignContent, JustifySelf, AlignSelf, etc. These all have to do with different axis depending on how you set FlexOrientation (column or row). This makes it difficult for Anyone to jump into CSS work. Is this intentional?
by pansa2 | 2025-08-29 06:21:14+00:00
Type hints aren’t a single addition - with every release they get more complex. It wouldn’t surprise me if the language included 20+ typing-related PEPs by now.

The other obvious example of complexity is pattern matching. The feature is very complex, especially how it breaks established rules of the language. It also required fundamental changes to the interpreter to accommodate it: a rewrite of the parser from simple LL(1) to PEG.
by alexjplant | 2025-08-29 06:21:35+00:00
XSLT is a declarative language for transforming XML to other formats. XML is a pretty poor solution for configuration files (which is what everybody seemed to use it for back in the day) but works great for, you guessed it, marking up documents. If you have an XML schema for representing documents semantically you can then write an XSLT that quickly and efficiently converts it to, say, XHTML. This way you can work in a nice intermediate representation rich with meaning and specify the presentation as a function thereof.

It's not particularly sexy technology but it works well when used judiciously. Part of me wonders if XML will make some bizarre comeback in the era of LLMs for training data annotation or something similarly niche.
by visarga | 2025-08-29 06:21:40+00:00
No, it does not stand, because you think linearly. Companies can't simply drop 33% of employees because there is competition. If competition uses both humans and AI they will get more value from both. No AI has sufficient autonomy or capability to be held accountable for its mistakes.

There is less upswing in reducing costs than in increasing profits. Companies want to increase profits actually, not just reduce costs which will be eaten away by competition. In a world where everyone has the same AIs, human still make the difference.
by Svip | 2025-08-29 06:21:54+00:00
Related:

"Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" (9 days ago, 388p, 534c) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

"XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites" (6 days ago, 157p, 142c) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987346

"Should the web platform adopt XSLT 3.0?" (6 days ago, 133p, 107c) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987552

"Google did not unilaterally decide to kill XSLT" (6 days ago, 102p, 130c) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987239
by mrkeen | 2025-08-29 06:22:06+00:00
Managers only have one phrase in their vocabulary: "Get this one feature out as quickly as possible." Everything else is just making devs 'heard' (so they can get back to feature).

There have been a few variations over the years: "Just focus on the happy path" and "Build the feature now, and we'll work on stabilisation later". This week I heard twice: "The sooner we get the feature out to the customers, the sooner we can gather feedback and change our product".

Anyway you all know the punch line: there's no 'later', there's no 'stabilisation', only the next feature. And the feedback that we get from the customer is support tickets because the product doeesn't work.

Behind every 500 you encounter in the wild, every piece of lost data or missing transactions, there's a manager really good at keeping his devs focused.
by atoav | 2025-08-29 06:22:23+00:00
Yes but this is about the difference between:

engage_turbo_encabulator(True, False, True, False, True, False, True, False)

and:

engage_turbo_encabulator( enable_hydrocoptic=True, allow_girdlespring=False, activate_marzelvanes=True, sync_trunnions=False, stabilize_panametric=True, lock_detractors=False, invert_logarithms=True, suppress_lunar_wane=False )

The latter is how you should use such a function if you can't change it (and if your language allows it).

If this was my function I would probably make the parameters atrributes of an TurboEncabulator class and add some setter methods that can be chained, e.g. Rust-style:

encabulator = ( TurboEncabulator.new() .enable_hydrocoptic(True) .allow_girdlespring(False) .enable_marzelvane_activation(True) .enable _trunnion_syncing(False) .enable_param_stabilization(True) .enable_detractor_locking(False) .enable_logarithm_inversion(True) .enable_lunar_wane_supression(False) .build() )
by brailsafe | 2025-08-29 06:22:50+00:00
> Claude Code integration in Xcode would be very cool indeed, but I might still stick with VSCode for pure coding.

I'm sticking with VSCode too, but it's a bit silly to suggest that anyone is using XCode because it's their preferred IDE. It's just the one that's necessary for any non-trivial Apple platform development.

Adding a code generator isn't a marketing ploy to get people to switch editors, it's just a small concession to the many hapless souls stuck dealing with Apple on the professional side, or masochistically building mac SwiftUI apps just to remind themselves what pain feels like.
by jedberg | 2025-08-29 06:23:34+00:00
I worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all.

They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs.

The big question is were to build them. There are only a few places with cheap and plentiful power. One of those is Quebec (but it's not that big and there is a lot of regulation). Another is Texas (except their grid isn't very stable). And the last is China. And you can't build a datacenter in China unless you're Chinese.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Maybe the current admin (which is big on deregulation) will make it easier to build power plants, especially nuclear ones.

Edit: I wrote this comment four days ago. I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly getting a bunch of replies to it. Apparently when HN does a second chance, they just reset the time on all the comments. Odd, but I guess it makes sense knowing what I know about how the sorting is calculated. It's probably the easiest way.
by elcritch | 2025-08-29 06:23:40+00:00
Python was similar for me after learning Perl and some C in highschool. During university I used Python 2 on and off. It was amazing during that era and what I could build.

Then came Python 3 and it just never felt the same. PyQT projects faltered. Deps split. Strings broke.

However I started using Nim a few years back which has given me that Python 2 feeling – except with static types, better overall language design, meta-programming, and performance!
by Martin_Silenus | 2025-08-29 06:24:42+00:00
> "They don’t think. They don’t understand anything. They’re probabilistic guessing machines, using complex mathematical models to predict the next set of characters in a sentence."

That's the boring point to me. I've read that so much.

It's not because it is a false statement. It's because it does not EVER question what WE are doing ourselves. Even when the author titles "People Are the Point".
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-29 06:27:01+00:00
> It would be like someone saying that antivirus is useless because if someone doesn't have a virus then it doesn't do anything.

Suppose you have an "antivirus" program that works like this: The system makes a list of every program that runs as root during boot and then at the end of boot the antivirus program checks the list for unexpected programs and if it finds any it displays an error and refuses to display the login prompt to prevent the user from typing their password into a compromised device.

That "antivirus" system is useless, because if a malicious program did run as root during boot then it could just reconfigure the system to display the login prompt unconditionally.

The way attestation is nominally supposed to work is that a remote system cryptographically verifies the state of the local machine before giving it some secret. But that doesn't work in this case because the secret -- the thing that allows the user to sign in -- is coming from the local user rather than a remote machine. The attacker doesn't need to perform attestation or retrieve anything from a remote machine in order to display a local login prompt and collect the user's credentials, and that's the end of the game.

> Rooted android devices can be set up in a way that malicous apps can gain root and then read it.

So can PCs, or various non-rooted android devices that bank apps run on even though they have known unpatched vulnerabilities.

> But this comes with a different risk profile. A bank can reduce risk for a subset of their customers.

How is it reducing risk for anyone? Each person still has the same risk profile as before. The person with a locked Android device still has a locked Android device, the person with an unlocked Android device is now forced to use a PC which is an inconvenience with no security advantage.
by epolanski | 2025-08-29 06:27:19+00:00
I'm Italian and both the previous story as well as your comment trigger me.

1) You could've asked the password to literally anybody in the dorm.

2) Unless this was geological ages ago, by law, all you need to close a bank account is a certified email (or PEC) or a certified letter (you go to the post office with a document and a simple form that specifies where you want your stuff transferred) you don't need to go in person anywhere at all.
by trabant00 | 2025-08-29 06:27:25+00:00
I was hoping for a review from a server perspective. That's where Debian shines in my opinion. I feel like the desktop part is a secondary priority for them. That's not a criticism, there's no other distribution I would use in production if it where my choice. On the desktop though they are a bit too stable. Even if one uses testing or unstable the focus on long term versions is still there.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-08-29 06:27:43+00:00
I cannot code to music at all. I miss either the music or the code or keep switching and get tired. I can do a mechanical job, e.g. adding records to a database.

(I also find AI repulsive and have no intention to engage in anything AI-related. Recently I turned off AI "help" in DDG.)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-29 06:28:26+00:00
nextdns recently created geo spoofing methods, I may be wrong, I usually am but I am curious as to if these censorship can be fixed by nextdns.

I don't know if indonesia is becoming exactly like china/ so a complete crackdown as people are discussing things as if its for china, but I feel like that there are definitely some easier things than hosting your own server or using shadowsocks.

Check if proton vpn/mullvad vpn are working once please, they are definitely plug n play and proton even offers a free tier.
by edanm | 2025-08-29 06:28:44+00:00
> The reasons why the original problem is so confusing is the same reason why the Monty Hall is so confusing: people have different understandings of the question, and don't realize it in discussions.

I think this is true of the "children" question, but I actually disagree that this is what makes the Monty Hall question so confusing.

For one thing, I vaguely recall this being asked directly, and even after people agree on all the definitions explicitly, they still consider the answer wrong. (See e.g. some mathematicians like Erdos refusing to believe the correct answer without actually running simulations on computers... by that point you clearly have a real definition.)

For another, when I personally talk to people about Monty Hall, even after I explain the correct answer, and explain all the nuances, people tend to still have a hard time accepting the correct solution and claim to find it counterintuitive (as did I!).
by finaard | 2025-08-29 06:29:21+00:00
Pretty much all the guidelines about swap partitions out there reference old allocator behaviour from way over a decade ago - where you'd indeed typically run into weird issues without having a swap partition, even if you had enough RAM.

Short (and inaccurate) summary was that it'd try to use some swap even if it didn't need it yet, which made sense in the world of enough memory being too expensive, and got fixed at the cost of making the allocator way more complicated when we started having enough memory in most cases.

Nowadays typically you don't need swap unless you work on a product with some constraints, in which case you'd hand tune low memory performance anyway. Just don't buy anything with less than 32GB, and you should be good.
by yeymail | 2025-08-29 06:29:21+00:00
I’ve been frustrated with how email is either bloated with ads or too complex for everyday use. So I built yey.email — a lightweight, privacy-first email service with no ads, no trackers, and a clean UI.

It’s still early, and I’d love feedback from the HN community. Things I’m especially curious about:

What would make you trust a smaller email provider over the big ones?

Which features matter most for you: speed, encryption, simplicity, integrations?

Any red flags that would stop you from trying it?

This is a side project I’ve been hacking on, so feedback (both positive and brutal) would be super valuable.
by brailsafe | 2025-08-29 06:30:00+00:00
I was being a bit intentionally facetious and suggesting that your comment is basically the nature of elections regardless of who you vote for. But I feel like with regard to the U.S there are many better contemporary examples of overthrowing governments. Iraq, Afghanistan, all throughout central and south america, it's pretty much their job at this point. The fact that someone has come in and started swinging a morning star around in the head office is an interesting and dangerous new twist, one that will hopefully end up incomparable to the infamous leaders of atrocity in history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
by visarga | 2025-08-29 06:30:04+00:00
> When the Internet arrived, it opened up the floodgates of information.

But initially is was non commercial and good. Not perfect, but much more interesting than today. What changed is advertising and competition for scarce attention. Competition for attention filled the web with slop and clickbait.

> When social media arrived, it gave every Joe Six Pack a megaphone.

And also made everyone feel the need to pose, broadcast their ideology and show their in-group adherence publicly. There is peer pressure to conform to in-group norms and shaming or cancelling otherwise.
by m463 | 2025-08-29 06:30:43+00:00
> The acceleration in an EV tapers off, whereas in an older performance cat the performance builds in a more exciting way I think.

I think this might be like the yamaha v-max motorcycle. It wasn't as fast as other motorcycles, but the way the throttle opened up at a certain rpm range made the boost seem exciting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_VMAX#V-Boost
by niemandhier | 2025-08-29 06:31:01+00:00
Energy efficient computing is a very exciting field. I hope it will get more attention driven by these economic constraints.

As a short teaser: Landauers principle suggests that the energy required to erase one bit off information is bounded from below by k_BTln(2). This could lead us down a path towards reversible computing, to avoid energy costs for deleting information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
by 0xml | 2025-08-29 06:31:36+00:00
If VPNs don't work for you, I recommend using an anti-censorship tool with an obfuscation protocol like v2ray which is commonly used in China.

https://github.com/v2fly/v2ray-core https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core https://github.com/net4people/bbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall
by bakugo | 2025-08-29 06:31:47+00:00
What you're doing wrong is that you're asking it for something more complicated than babby's first webapp in javascript/python.

When people say things like "I told Claude what I wanted and it did it all on the first try!", that's what they mean. Basic web stuff that that is already present in the model's training data in massive volumes, so it has no issue recreating it.

No matter how much AI fanatics try to convince you otherwise, LLMs are not actually capable of software engineering and never will be. They are largely incapable of performing novel tasks that are not already well represented in their weights, like the ones you tried.
by worthless-trash | 2025-08-29 06:32:08+00:00
I'm still a fan of poly instantiated /tmp and PrivateTmp (systemd). This may confuse/annoy admins who are not aware of namespaces, but I know that it definitely closes the attack vector of /tmp abuse by bad actors.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/polyinstantiating-tmp-and-var...
by pjmlp | 2025-08-29 06:33:44+00:00
Yes, and in the enterprise space, many workflows are nowadays done with lowcode/no-code tooling, like PowerApps, Adobe Workfront Fusion, Outsystems, among others.

Many of these tools, have started to go one step further, and the traditional ways are supplanted with AI, reducing even further the amount of low code/no code scenarios that a human has to produce.

The only thing left are the few serverless deployments to call into some code that needs more complex integration logic, and that is about it.

I have seen enough of these projects, to realize it is going to happen, not everywhere maybe, but in specific industry sectors certainly, it already is.
by cycomanic | 2025-08-29 06:33:45+00:00
Sure, but note that your usecase goes specifically against fhs and posix specs:

>Programs must not assume that any files or directories in /tmp are preserved between invocations of the program.

>Although data stored in /tmp may be deleted in a site-specific manner, it is recommended that files and directories located in /tmp be deleted whenever the system is booted.

https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s18.htm...

Now you can obviously use your Filesystem whichever way you like, but I would say Debian shouldn't have to take into consideration uses which are outside the general recommendations/specs.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-29 06:33:46+00:00
Pretty much all of them? They usually implement the Ye Olde Google Reader API and a few more so that mobile applications can connect in a standard way.

- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A...

- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...

FreshRSS implements two APIs
by dsign | 2025-08-29 06:33:48+00:00
Just a reminder that this kind of user-to-user interaction feature makes your website a "social network" according to UK regulation (and Mississippi's, and more jurisdictions coming soon), and therefore you must get copies of government ID of your users so that you can deny them access if they are underage, and rattle them to the police if you suspect they are committing thought crime by sending certain fruits. Obey the law.
by cofob_ | 2025-08-29 06:35:02+00:00
Cool!

How are messages counted? For example, in Cursor, one request is 25 tool calls. Does 100 messages in a subscription here mean 100 tool calls or 100 requests each with 25 tool calls?

When it comes to privacy, there are also some questions. It says that requests can only be used for debugging purposes, but it later mentions a license for using the requests to improve the platform, which can mean that you can use it not only for debugging purposes.
Show HN: Aika – a minimalist browser timer for 20-20-20 eye care and timeboxing
by sopuli | 2025-08-29 06:36:07+00:00
While spending long hours coding, I wanted a simple way to follow the 20-20-20 eye care rule (every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds). I couldn’t find a browser-based timer that allowed recurring notifications with custom intervals, so I built Aika.

It’s also been useful for timeboxing meetings and as a lightweight Pomodoro timer.

- Runs in any browser - Free, no sign-up - Minimal by design

Sharing in case anyone else needs something like this. Feedback is very welcome!
by robinhouston | 2025-08-29 06:36:16+00:00
Interesting. My guess is that it's not prohibitively hard, and that someone will probably do it. (There may be a technical difficulty I don't know about, though.)

David Renshaw recently gave a formal proof in Lean that the triakis tetrahedron does have Rupert's property: https://youtu.be/jDTPBdxmxKw