MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bcrl | 2025-09-04 02:41:22+00:00
Read the following commit log:

Pull btrfs fixes from David Sterba: "Several zoned mode fixes, mount option printing fixups, folio state handling fixes and one log replay fix. - zoned mode: - zone activation and finish fixes - block group reservation fixes - mount option fixes: - bring back printing of mount options with key=value that got accidentally dropped during mount option parsing in 6.8 - fix inverse logic or typos when printing nodatasum/nodatacow - folio status fixes: - writeback fixes in zoned mode - properly reset dirty/writeback if submission fails - properly handle TOWRITE xarray mark/tag - do not set mtime/ctime to current time when unlinking for log replay"

Sounds like they added a feature back in that was removed 10 major releases ago. Why is that not considered a feature? By this logic that btrfs merge request should have been rejected.

The "feature" label is messy. If the "feature" means that a user doesn't lose their data in a filesystem, is it really a "feature" or is it a bug fix? It's very much shades of grey.

What a lot of people are missing here is that bcachefs has a lot of test cases for regressions that are run as part of Kent's continuous integration infrastructure. A lot of Linux filesystems do not have this kind of easy regression testing, in part because this kind of testing is easiest when you do it as part of development, but very difficult to achieve any scale of coverage if it's done after the fact. The older the code is in Linux, the more likely it is that it tends to get coverage via the stress tests and intregration tests that various folks run on kernel releases. But such tests are not regression tests for data structures, I/O failures, corrupted data...

So much of what is going on is bikeshedding the process of submitting changes. It would be far more productive for people to look at the process Kent follows during development, and to then make educated comments about the code that arises from that process.

Good developers know the value of tests. Great developers know that improving your test coverage with every bit of new development means you can develop faster over the long run by not getting bogged down by silent regressions.

Edit: I do have to shout out to the XFS folks. xfstests is a huge contributor to the improvement of Linux filesystems over the last few decades.
by rolph | 2025-09-04 02:42:42+00:00
at face value id expect two things just due to the nature of a paywall bypass:

--Add-ons and their content must conform to the laws of the United States. (Add-ons that violate or have content that violates the law in other jurisdictions may also be removed or have access limited.)

--Add-ons with the sole purpose of promoting, installing, loading or launching an outside website, application or add-on are not permitted.
by homefree | 2025-09-04 02:43:43+00:00
Yes! It's fun to just order 500 $2 bills and carry some everywhere for tips. I do this all the time, it's an easy way to add a little whimsy into someone's day.

Wozniak famously went further and would order sheets of them uncut (costs more), then pay a shop to perforate them for him so he could peel them off for people (making it look really fake).

He had a funny story about doing this at a casino for a slot machine and getting interrogated by the secret service iirc where he handed the guy a fake ID where he had an eye patch and it said he was a laser operator or something. He played dumb about the bills to look more suspicious instead of explaining the truth.

Hard to tell if it was just a tall tale, but given that it was Woz it was probably mostly real.
by godelski | 2025-09-04 02:44:36+00:00
Depends which question you're asking.

Ability to win a gold medal as if they were scored similarly to how humans are scored?

or

Ability to win a gold medal as determined by getting the "correct answer" to all the questions?

These are subtly two very different questions. In these kinds of math exams how you get to the answer matters more than the answer itself. i.e. You could not get high marks through divination. To add some clarity, the latter would be like testing someone's ability to code by only looking at their results to some test functions (oh wait... that's how we evaluate LLMs...). It's a good signal but it is far from a complete answer. It very much matters how the code generates the answer. Certainly you wouldn't accept code if it does a bunch of random computations before divining an answer.

The paper's answer to your question (assuming scored similarly to humans) is "Don’t count on it". Not a definitive "no" but they strongly suspect not.
by the_af | 2025-09-04 02:44:44+00:00
There's a leap you're making I cannot follow.

I agree with this: the physical configuration of neurons, their firings, the atoms that make them, etc, cannot be "right" or "wrong". This wouldn't make sense in reality; it either is or isn't, and "right" or "wrong" are human values. The universe is neither right nor wrong, it just is.

What about the thoughts those neuron firings mean to us? Well, a good argument can be made that they are also not "right" or "wrong" in isolation, they are just phenomena. Trivially, a thought of "2+2=4" is neither right nor wrong, it's only other thoughts that consider it "right" or "wrong" (often with additional context). So the values themselves can be a physical manifestation.

So it seems to me your problem can be resolved like this: in response to a physical configuration we call a "thought", other "thoughts" can be formed in physical configurations we call "right" or "wrong".

The qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.

And voila! There's no incompatibility between the physical world and thoughts, emotions, "right" or "wrong".
by cperciva | 2025-09-04 02:45:28+00:00
The Bank of Canada did a report about this a few years back, and found that cash was the cheapest payment form for merchants to handle for transactions of up to $6 while debit cards were cheaper above that point; credit cards of course were never the best option for merchants.

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2017/03/staff-discussion-paper-2...
by raincole | 2025-09-04 02:45:47+00:00
In Taiwan, there is a similar system called EasyCard. That works offline.

...And as you expect it is vulnerable to double spend attacks. Hilariously the vulnerability was revealed in 2014 and nothing has been done to mitigate it. Yes, you can double spend in Taiwan today if you don't mind risking jail time.

From my (rudimentary) understanding of CAP, there is no prefect solution to this. I wonder how Japan handles it.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-09-04 02:46:03+00:00
>Carrying 20,000 yen in cash is easy when it's 2x 10,000 notes, but when it's a mix including coins, it's a pain.

Carry a coinpurse. I use an old faux-suede Samsung camera pouch.[1] Plus it's fun when someone is running an errand for you, like getting you a snack from the konbini across the street, and you plop your coinpurse on the desk with a thud, then pour out a handful of 500-yen coins and say "this should cover it", like a feudal lord.

[1] kinda like this: https://www.amazon.ie/DFVmobile-Samsung-Galaxy-Camera-Closur...
by ompogUe | 2025-09-04 02:46:37+00:00
I, unarguably, agree. My all time favorite part is "Psalm". Love the story behind it, too: They had just moved from the city to Long Island, and he said it came fully formed into his mind. He then spent days and days in solitude intensely teasing it out to perfection.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/...
by ethin | 2025-09-04 02:48:15+00:00
I agree quite strongly with this article. I've used AI for some thing,s but when it comes to productivity I don't use it in big codebases I contribute to or code which I want to put into production. I've mainly only used it to build little concept demos/prototypes, and even then I build on top of a framework I wrote by hand like last year or so. And I only use AI to get familiar enough with the general patterns for a library I'm not familiar with (mainly because I'd like to avoid diving into tests to learn how the library works). But even then, I always have the docs open, and API docs, and I very carefully review and thoroughly test on my own system and with what I'm really trying to do before I even consider it something I'd give to others. Even so, I wouldn't say I've gotten a productivity increase, because (1) I don't measure or really care about productivity with these kinds of things, and (2) I'm the one who already knows what I want to accomplish, and just need a bit of help trying to work towards that goal.
by cybersquare | 2025-09-04 02:48:42+00:00
This argument is predicated on what might become an outdated idea of software as an asset. If I can quickly generate software from natural language to solve a very specific problem, that software isn't worth maintaining, let alone publishing or selling. Its value to people who aren't me is low, and its defensibility against being copied by someone else with an adequate coding agent is even lower.
by djoldman | 2025-09-04 02:49:08+00:00
Faster? At making what? Pipe dev/null and you'll get a lot of stuff fast.

What if someone came out with a study saying they had a tool to make the fastest doctors and lawyers? You'd say that doesn't even make sense, what kinds of doctors doing what kinds of work?

AI coding isn't some across the board, helps everyone do anything kind of tool.

Maybe sometime soon we'll stop strawmanning this.
by dartharva | 2025-09-04 02:49:31+00:00
I started abandoning cash around a decade ago, and have steadily moved to mobile-only payments for the past five years (India has ubiquitous instant bank-to-bank transfers through mobile payment platforms).

Not having to carry your wallet around and make trips to ATMs is rather convenient, but in aggregate, I'll still NOT recommend this. I realize I have ended up spending several times I would have had I stuck to cash. There seems to be a psychological aspect that makes you keep track subconsciously of how much you are spending when you have to physically draw cash. With mobile payments? It's just scan a code and forget about it. I am planning to stop by the end of this year.
by noduerme | 2025-09-04 02:50:16+00:00
This makes me think something else, though. Once we were able to reason about the physics behind the way things can move, we invented wheels. From there it's a few thousand years to steam engines and a couple hundred more years to jet planes and space travel.

We may have needed a billion years of evolution from a cell swimming around to a bipedal organism. But we are no longer speed limited by evolution. Is there any reason we couldn't teach a sufficiently intelligent disembodied mind the same physics and let it pick up where we left off?

I like the notion of the LLM's understanding being "shadows on the wall of Plato's cave metaphor," and language may be just that. But math and physics can describe the world much more precisely and, of you pair them with the linguistic descriptors, a wall shadow is not very different from what we perceive with out own senses and learn to navigate.
by credit_guy | 2025-09-04 02:50:27+00:00
> There is no second internet

I don't know about that. LLMs have been trained mostly on text. If you add photos, audio and videos, and later even 3D games, or 3D videos, you get massively more data than the old plain text. Maybe by many orders of magnitude. And this is certainly that can improve cognition in general. Getting to AGI without audio and video, and 3D perception seems like a non-starter. And even if we think AGI is not the goal, further improvements from these new training datasets are certainly conceivable.
by carpo | 2025-09-04 02:50:33+00:00
Maybe developers are using it in a less visible way? In the past 6 months I've used AI for a lot of different things. Some highlights:

- Built a windows desktop app that scans local folders for videos and automatically transcribes the audio, summarises the content into a structured JSON format based on screenshots and subtitles, and automatically categorises each video. I used it on my PC to scan a couple of TB of videos. Has a relatively nice interface for browsing videos and searching and stores everything locally in SQLite. Did this in C# & Avalonia - which I've never used before. AI wrote about 75% of the code (about 28k LOC now).

- Built a custom throw-away migration tool to export a customers data from one CRM to import into another. Windows app with basic interface.

- Developed an AI process for updating a webform system that uses XML to update the form structure. This one felt like magic and I initially didn't think it would work, but it only took a minute to try. Some background - years ago I built a custom webform/checklist app for a customer. They update the forms very rarely so we never built an interface for making updates but we did write 2 stored procs to update forms - one outputs the current form as XML and another takes the same XML and runs updates across multiple tables to create a new version of the form. For changes, the customer sends me a spreadsheet with all the current form questions in one column and their changes in another. It's normally just wording changes so I go through and manually update the XML and import it, but this time they had a lot of changes - removing questions, adding new ones, combining others. They had a column with the label changes and another with a description of what they wanted (i.e. "New Question", "Update label", "Combine this with q1, q2 and q3", "remove this question"). The form has about 100 questions and the XML file is about 2500 lines long and defines each form field, section layout, conditional logic, grid display, task creation based on incorrect answers etc, so it's time consuming to make a lot of little changes like this. With no expectation of it working, I took a screenshot of the spreadsheet and the exported XML file and prompted the LLM to modify the XML based on the instructions in the spreadsheet and some basic guidelines. It did it close to perfect, even fixing the spelling mistakes the customer had missed while writing their new questions.

- Along with using it on a daily basis across multiple projects.

I've seen the stat that says developers "...thought AI was making them 20% faster, but it was actually making them 19% slower". Maybe I'm hoodwinking myself somehow, but it's been transformative for me in multiple ways.
by mkhalil | 2025-09-04 02:50:52+00:00
Every time I see a something with the ability to import code from Git, especially if they allow specifying a branch (this pack even supports commit hashes), I wish they would document (and that more people would know) that they can "checkout" a branch at a specific time; because a lot of branches (vim plugins included) don't even bother with versioning.

ex: you can use this to checkout a repo @ a specific datetime: > git checkout 'master@{2025-05-26 18:30:00}'

just doing my share to help people steer away from another leftPad disaster (or the xz apocalypse that almost was...)
by spaceisballer | 2025-09-04 02:51:31+00:00
I’m in the same boat. My Boox Go 10.3 is collecting dust. I used it for a while, but I just find it easier to flip back through paper notes as opposed to tapping or swiping through files. I don’t want to connect to work WiFi either on it. So now I’ve found pens I enjoy writing with and decent notebooks with paper I like and it’s great. I actually spend time journaling on paper. But I do have both a Boox Palma for reading and also a Kobo Clara.
Show HN: Empromptu.ai – Solving the production reliability crisis in AI
by anaempromptu | 2025-09-04 02:52:06+00:00
After burning through thousands of credits on AI builders, we kept hitting the same wall: applications that worked in demos but crashed in production. The core issue isn't the building process - it's that most AI applications plateau at 60-70% accuracy, which makes them unusable for real users.

We realized these aren't actually "AI app builders" - they're website builders with ChatGPT wrappers. The fundamental architecture problems:

- Context Amnesia: Most builders suffer from conversation state loss, forcing users to repeat information and burning credits on iteration cycles. - Static Prompt Bloat: App Builders try to handle edge cases by cramming everything into massive 5-page prompts, which actually confuses LLMs and degrades performance. - Black Box Optimization: No granular control over individual components or transparent performance metrics.

Our technical approach centers on dynamic AI response optimization architecture:

1. Context Engineering: Persistent conversation memory with intelligent context discovery eliminates the repeat-and-iterate problem

2. Real-time Prompt Selection: Instead of one massive prompt, we maintain specialized prompt families and dynamically select optimal ones based on input characteristics (travel chatbot automatically switches between LAX context for LA vs Pearson for Toronto)

3. Individual Task Optimization: Granular control over each workflow component with transparent scoring metrics (you can optimize payroll queries separately from HR policies)

This consistently achieves 98% accuracy vs industry 60-70% - and we can demonstrate this live with side-by-side comparisons.

But solving accuracy alone wasn't enough. We also needed complete production infrastructure:

Full AI Stack: RAG, LLM operations, real backends with dynamic optimization (not just hosted demos)

Production Deployment: Docker containers, GitHub integration, on-premise options

Performance Transparency: Visible quality scores, edge case identification, systematic optimization

The result: Technical teams can build production-ready AI applications without dedicated ML expertise, while maintaining the control and visibility needed for business-critical deployments.

Technical founders and developers: Try it at https://builder.empromptu.ai

We'd love feedback from the HN community, especially if you've hit similar production reliability problems or have thoughts on the architectural approach.
by anon-3988 | 2025-09-04 02:52:28+00:00
If you become the bat, you become the bat. There is nothing permanent that is being transferred. When you think of "being the bat", you have this image of thinking "oh shit, i am a bat now!? I can echolocate and shit". Its more like, ...what? The imagination of being another person is simply an imagination that arises within this body, spirit, soul, or whatever it is.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-04 02:52:47+00:00
Almost everything in ios since ios1 has been a sort of in house copy of a jailbroken tweak. I feel like that is just how these huge companies actually innovate featuresets now. No one has agency to drive change from within, so they see what the community has built and is using and shamelessly copy it as it. Easier to sell to management that you should steal an already bright idea than to try and prove your own novel idea is worth pursuing.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-09-04 02:53:07+00:00
> Abusive parents are extremely rare.

The people who actually study this say you could not be more wrong. They probably also say you should stop randomly making things up and should consider what else you're also wrong about.

"Approximately 1 in 4 children experiences child abuse or neglect in their lifetime ... 91% of the time, the perpetrator is a parent." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470337/

"Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States." - https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/index.html#cdc...

"Statistics provided by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) ... show that in about 82% of substantiated abuse cases the alleged perpetrator was the birth parent." - https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS98/rpt/olr/htm/98-R-0509.htm (adoptive parents are in there too but counted separately, in case you're wondering)

I don't care how you slice the numbers, there's no way to get from 23% of children (90% of 25%) in the US having abusive parents to abusive parents being "extremely rare" unless your definition of "extremely rare" here is utterly insane.
by raylad | 2025-09-04 02:53:24+00:00
I used to be a full-time developer back in the day. Then I was a manager. Then I was a CTO. I stopped doing the day-to-day development and even stopped micro-managing the detailed design.

When I tried to code again, I found I didn't really have the patience for it -- having to learn new frameworks, APIs, languages, tricky little details, I used to find it engrossing: it had become annoying.

But with tools like Claude Code and my knowledge about how software should be designed and how things should work, I am able to develop big systems again.

I'm not 20% more productive than I was. I'm not 10x more productive than I was either. I'm infinity times more productive because I wouldn't be doing it at all otherwise, realistically: I'd either hire someone to do it, or not do it, if it wasn't important enough to go through the trouble to hire someone.

Sure, if you are a great developer and spend all day coding and love it, these tools may just be a hindrance. But if you otherwise wouldn't do it at all they are the opposite of that.
by rtpg | 2025-09-04 02:53:36+00:00
tbh the write path on just paper is so good, and at least for me it's very rare that I need to actually digitize anything.

I just invested in a printer that works and print out a lot of stuff I want to deeply annotate. Otherwise I have the ipad for some other stuff.

I really enjoy eink for reading but it's really a super specific market. Competing against the ipad is tough! The generalist devices tend to get so good that the specialized devices stop being worth it.
by rurp | 2025-09-04 02:55:58+00:00
> the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.

Sure, but that doesn't necessarily change the marginal cost of hiring another dev if the tax incentives have worsened.

The time value of money over 5 years is significant, especially in a fast moving industry like tech. The correlation between this change passing and tech hiring dropping is strong so I'm inclined to think there's some signal there.
by cnst | 2025-09-04 02:55:59+00:00
As an Android user, although I'm not too happy about the Sept 2026 upcoming changes, but also the impact is far overstated in these comments over here.

First of all, it's simply a trial, a whole year from now, in Sept 2026, and only in 4 mid-sized countries around the world.

Second, they'll only be verifying developers, not users. They won't be reviewing the apps any more than they already do today. They already do scan all third-party apps, which is partly why people are upset about the needless doxxing of the devs.

Also, as far as I understand it, an app store like F-Droid already does app signing on behalf of other developers, to ensure funny stuff couldn't simply slip through undetected, so, as such, F-Droid probably already "owns" the Aurora Store and all the other apps you can download through the F-Droid app store, so, it would be my expectation that even in those 4 countries in Sept 2026 during the trial, you could still sideload the same apps the same way I do today.

In turn, the apps installed by Aurora Store are signed by the Play Store; this ensures that the private data cannot be hijacked through modified updates of the app, since the developer profile won't match. So, there's no concern there, either, since everything is signed.

Basically, it's not a good precedent, but at the same time, nothing will really change at least for my own workflow (as a non-publisher), where I don't install anything outside of F-Droid or Aurora Store anyways.

Keep in mind, it's still just a trial. And even if it goes worldwide in 2 years in 2027 (which is still a big if), it's still FAR more consumer-friendly than anything Apple has ever allowed on iOS in any jurisdiction I'm aware of.