MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-23 09:21:17+00:00
Well, you need both. You are going to suck at implementing algorithms if you don't learn how to test they actually work as intended.

Most algorithms are used in library form. Unless you are writing those libraries, you probably should not be reinventing a lot of wheels. So there's a valid argument there that most of the stuff you learn as part of your computer science courses, you will not be implementing over and over again (if ever). So, you could argue that testing is a more universal skill that you need either way.

But algorithms can come up once in a while. And it helps if you can guesstimate complexity of various algorithms and make some trade offs over picking one or the other. The skill you learn in college is not any particular algorithm but a broad knowledge of which mainstream ones are there, how they work, their tradeoffs, and the skill of implementing those or similar algorithms.

You gain the skill of good judgment, being able to figure out how stuff works, and general intuition of how things are done at a high level. I've never developed a file system. But I know tree data structures such as b trees and red black trees have something to do with it. It's been decades since I looked at that stuff. But I could read up in an afternoon or so if it comes up. That doesn't qualify to start working on a file system. But, I don't think that's going to come up anyway. I have plenty of other things to do.

I do dabble a bit with search algorithms once in a while. More of a hobby than work related. But there's some room in that space for being able to do some basic things with algorithms instead of using some prefab search product.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-23 09:21:49+00:00
Sanctions from individuals. The US did the opposite, and supported South Africa no matter what. Just like Israel - In both ways. Israel supported South Africa, and the US supported Israel. The dramatic sanctions against US citizens for refusing to buy from Israel and endorsing that people not buy from Israel are meant to prevent such a horrible thing as the fall of Apartheid from ever happening again.
by locallost | 2025-09-23 09:22:37+00:00
I am all against bubbles and irrational valuations etc. but I think in this case the prospect of future growth was fully justified. There are never guarantees, but Nvidia's price went up 10x or more in three years and e.g. their PER stayed mostly flat. But their PER of 50 three years ago would be 5 today, which would be extremely undervalued. I would say the "market" got it correctly this time.
by sorenstarck | 2025-09-23 09:22:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I built SessionWatcher, a lightweight macOS menu bar app designed to help developers track and visualize their Claude Code usage.

While experimenting with prompts and running tests, I found it tiring to dig through terminal tools to see how much I had spent or how many tokens I had consumed. So, I created a simple utility that:

Sits in the macOS menu bar Tracks real-time usage Displays live stats (sessions, tokens, cost estimates)

Claude's 5-Hour Session Limit: Claude Code enforces a 5-hour rolling session limit, resetting every 5 hours. This means that after 5 hours of continuous use, the session expires, and users must wait for the reset to continue. This limit can impact workflows, especially during intensive coding sessions. My tool helps you to monitor your usage through the session to run out of tokens too quickly

Tech details:

Built in Swift for MacOS 15+ Lightweight UI with SwiftUI + menubar integration Packaging/updates handled via Sparkle

I'm seeking feedback from fellow developers:

Is this kind of utility useful for your workflow ? Any features you'd want ? Any concerns ?

Thanks for your time!
by a_bonobo | 2025-09-23 09:22:57+00:00
>Once you’ve achieved that — once you are virtuously selfconstituted — you will be self-assured and have reason to be so. You will be emotionally invulnerable to being pushed around.

I don't feel that's true? I am currently in a massive turmoil at work because my line-manager is breaking all ethics rules, with higher leadership caring little. Because I try to follow my values I've spoken up numerous times and all I got for that is a mountain of stress. Turns out I am not emotionally invulnerable.
by tinco | 2025-09-23 09:23:06+00:00
"For example, tell it to “compile customer feedback from Slack, Notion, and email into actionable insights” and watch it research across your tools, synthesize findings, create a structured database, then notify you when it’s done."

I wonder when for the first time a team of humans will complete a full project based on a finding that turned out to be hallucinated in a sub step of an AI agent.
by 3cats-in-a-coat | 2025-09-23 09:24:49+00:00
On the path they've started with pipelining calls parametric on previous calls, they'll quickly realize that eventually they'll need basic transforms on the output before they pass it as input i.e. necessitating support for a standard runtime with a standard library of features.

I.e. imagine you need this:

promise1 = foo.call1(); promise2 = foo.call2(); promise3 = foo.call2(promise1 + promise2);

Can't implement that "+" there unless...

promise1 = foo.call1(); promise2 = foo.call2(); promise3 = foo.add(promise1, promise2) promise4 = foo.call2(promise3);

You can also make some kind of a RpcNumber object so you can use their Proxy function to do promise1.add(promise2) but ultimately you don't want to write such classes on the spot every time. Or functions on the server for it.

The problem is even that won't give you conditions (loops, branches) that run on the server, the server execution is blocked by the client.

Once you realize THAT, you realize it's most optimal if both sides exchange command buffers in general, including batch instructions to remote and local calls and standardized expression syntax and library.

What they did with array.map() is cute but it's not obvious what you can and what you can't do with this, and most developers will end up tripping up every time they use it, both trying to overuse this feature and underusing it, unaware of what it maps, how, when and where.

For example this record replay can't do any (again...) arithmetic, logic, branching and so on. It can record calling method on the Proxy and replaying this on the other side, in simple containers, like an object literal.

This is where GraphQL is better because it's an explicit buffer send and an explicit buffer return. The number of roundtrips and what maps how is not hidden.

GraphQL has its own mess of poorly considered features, but I don't think Cap'n Web survives prolonged contact with reality because of how implicit and magical everything is.

When you make an abstraction like this, it needs to work ALL THE TIME, so you don't have to think about it. If it only works in demo examples written by developers who know exactly when the abstraction breaks, real devs won't touch it.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-23 09:24:55+00:00
> Anyways, now I’m a full-time lecturer teaching undergraduate CS courses (long story)

I would love to hear that story if you're willing to tell it.

It sounds like you're a great lecturer, though, giving the students exactly the sort of stuff they need. I remember a university lecturer explaining to us that "JIT" just meant that Java loaded the class files when it needed them, rather than loading them all at the start, so your lesson sounds like a far cry from those days!
by nicbou | 2025-09-23 09:26:08+00:00
Collective hysteria does not need to be planned. Sometimes things just fall into place, just like the conditions for a hurricane.

It seems to me like too many yearly bonuses are tied to AI implementation, due to FOMO amongst C-levels. The hype trickles down to developers afraid that they won't get hired in the new AI economy.

I don't think there's a conspiracy, just a storm front of perverse incentives.
by solumos | 2025-09-23 09:26:38+00:00
> It’s not unlike a research mathematician being expected to solve quadratic equations. He may not need them in his day-to-day work, but with a little preparation he should be able to handle them. If he struggles with quadratic equations in an interview where such knowledge is expected, that would raise a red flag about his training.

The absurdity of this indicates a big part of what’s wrong with modern SWE interviews.

You wouldn’t ask a research mathematician to derive the quadratic formula, and you wouldn’t give a writer a spelling test — passing or not isn’t related to their aptitude or proficiency.

Additionally, imagine interviewing a complex analyst and quizzing them only on calc 1 — sure, it may be a course that they were expected to take at some point, but it really has little to do with what their actual work entails, and so half of the interview they’d be trying to slot what the proper layer of abstraction is in the limited context of the problem.
by bambax | 2025-09-23 09:28:01+00:00
The US obsession with "security" is striking (not least in IT). I recently realized it has its roots in the fact that Americans are invaders and slave owners. They have this constant fear of being killed in their sleep by the people they stole the land from, and the slaves who live with them.

There's an Irish comedian who has a bit that goes like this "As an Irishman I don't have white guilt. At all. In Ireland we had potatoes on the ground. We picked them up ourselves. We didn't steal people from another continent to come do it for us. That would be insane."
by froobius | 2025-09-23 09:30:10+00:00
> I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it

Erm, both windows and macs can be shut down

Edit: I'm getting downvoted but the way it's phrased I don't understand the issue with shutting down on macs / window. I always shut them down.
by Jensson | 2025-09-23 09:30:22+00:00
That was what I had at google 8 years ago, today its not expensive at all, any serious developer should have about that.

If you develop on a weak laptop then that is on you / your company, should get a proper machine.

Its good if tools are fast, but in general developers are expected to have fast machines so the tools are made with that in mind.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 09:31:07+00:00
> if you ever celebrate a death, anyone’s death, I don’t want you as my doctor, my kid’s teacher, my lawyer, not even flipping my burger

Uh, I'll toast to Hitler's death. Bin Laden's, too. I think your criticism is narrower than just all death, or if it isn't, you have to concede your views are outside the mainstream.
by donatj | 2025-09-23 09:31:13+00:00
This has me lamenting just how fiddly it really is to implement a standalone "cd" that isn't a builtin.

I am certainly there are a whole host of security reasons not to, but it sure would be handy if a parent process could easily just read the final state of all environmental variables of a child process and possibly integrate them back into its own.

Shells could just have a syntax for accepting sub process environmental variables. I'd propose something easy like starting a line with = absorbing all set environmental variables.

We could build a custom cd tool, "custom-cd-bin" in this example and all that would need to do is change the PWD variable.

$ =custom-cd-bin ./foo

Maybe this will be something for my dream shell I'm never going to actually get around to building. It would take something gross like wrapping setenv though
by l11r | 2025-09-23 09:31:15+00:00
S0 is a step forward. Disabling CPU entirely is just a "workaround". Both S3 and hibernation has a lot of security implications which S0 solves. Apple uses their own S0 alternative and it works... Perfectly?

The real problem is that both AMD and Intel S0 implementations are mediocre at best and this is what they should fix. Also most vendors are dickheads and cannot even verify that their system even goes to S0ix states without any problem before releasing it. Because of their laziness you can buy brand new certified "Linux ready" machine which won't even achieve S0ix states out of the box.
by bdcravens | 2025-09-23 09:31:23+00:00
> “Twenty years from now, the older generation — our grandfathers — will likely no longer be here. And those of us who are still young now will then see our grandchildren involved in the next” version of Ise, said Yosuke Kawanishi, a Shinto priest whose family company crafts miniature replicas of the shrine. “After 20 years, the shrine we are building will have deteriorated quite a bit. But instead of thinking, ‘It’s a shame to tear down something we worked so hard to build,’ we think, ‘It’s been 20 years, so we want the deity to move into a beautiful, fresh, new shrine.’”

Reminds me of what Jefferson said about the US constitution, but it should be rewritten every 19 years
by themgt | 2025-09-23 09:32:19+00:00
Now, SpaceX may be building a lot of profit into that $70m, but from the customer's POV it hardly matters

Ariane 6 cost $5 billion to develop, more than NASA paid SpaceX for all of HLS development and lunar landing, and has had as many successful launches (2) in its entire 14 month launch history as Falcon 9 has had in the last 2 days. And Falcon 9 is the old, boring, table stakes rocket.

If your goal is actually getting stuff to space then only being able to get ~1/100th the stuff to space does matter quite a lot.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 09:32:33+00:00
> It was about beliefs, that's why the right wing is winning, always, just from a game strategy viewpoint

It wasn't always like this. But if you remove the classics and philosophy from high school, and then dilute the liberal arts in undergrad into gimme courses, you wind up with generations who can't think about values. And then you devolve into purely transactional politics.
Show HN: Run a local LLM to analyse email for threats
by nullandvoid | 2025-09-23 09:32:55+00:00
After seeing sophisticated phishing attempts slip through Gmail's filters, a friend and I built a browser extension that uses local AI to analyse emails for threats.

It runs entirely in your browser using web-llm, with any threat being clearly labelled with an explanation of why it's suspicious.

Still early days, but we'd love feedback from the HN community. Even if you're not comfortable installing it yet, we have screenshots showing how it works.

https://www.eguard.app

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eguard/dnpofinmilhb...
by CCHappy | 2025-09-23 09:33:26+00:00
We’ve deployed a unified character replacement demo on https://wananimate.video . Here’s what you can expect: Browser-first workflow – Just upload a character image and a reference video. No hardware required – No GPUs, no environment setup. Fast results – Within minutes, you’ll receive an animated output. Right now, our version still trails the official implementation in some areas — like edge refinement and lighting consistency in complex scenes — but we’re iterating quickly. Expect smoother, sharper results soon.
by cauch | 2025-09-23 09:33:33+00:00
Not sure what is your point, the "test achievement" mentioned in the document refers to totally different "test" that the ones we were talking about.

Also, on just pure logic, I don't think the document shows what you think it shows. The document you provide (which is 30 years old, so with just this one, we should not assume it reflects today's consensus) explains that the difference is not understood, and that there is no _obvious_ answer, neither from biology, from group culture or from bias in the tests. In other words: the difference is due to something _not obvious_, for example (but not limited to, of course, it's just an example), _not obvious_ form of bias.
by Megranium | 2025-09-23 09:33:35+00:00
I've carried my laptop around in so many different bags over the years ... sling bags, tote bags, waterproof messenger backpacks, IKEA backpacks with laptop sleeve compartment, drawstring bags. I usually pick the bag depending on the occasion ...

bike ride in the rain? -> waterproof messenger backpack

downtown stroll to satisfy my inner hipster? -> tote bag etc ...

All I know is that I'm a "single compartment" person ... I've always found that having a separate compartment for everything just comes at excess weight and loss of flexibility.

I'd give the movie prop a try for sure. Still looking for a decent source of Tyvek to take an attempt at making my own bag (it's not super commonly used where I live).
Show HN: a web dashboard for displaying on tablets
by patrykt | 2025-09-23 09:33:52+00:00
I just launched TabletDay - a web dashboard for displaying on tablets. The idea behind the project is to repurpose unused tablets as functional information centers (clock, weather, calendar, task list).

Initially, this was just my private toy - an old tablet converted into a home dashboard. I've been using it daily for years, and it has become an indispensable part of my routine. Friends who saw it asked if they could have something like this too.

Of course, tablets have their built-in dashboards, but I wanted to focus on something different - a clean and minimalist design that references the classic wall calendar. No distractions, just time, weather, events, and tasks. That's why I thought I'd create a version for everyone, so others could benefit from it too.
by decimalenough | 2025-09-23 09:34:02+00:00
The Sydney Fish Market is one of the few remaining exceptions. Even more amazingly, it's set to stay that way, as a shiny new tourist-friendly but, critically, still wholesale-geared fish market is about to open later this year right next to the old one, still in the inner city in Pyrmont.

https://www.sydneyfishmarket.com.au/Corporate/The-New-Sydney...

Japan's Tsukiji was also a famous inner city market, only about a kilometer away from the Ginza, but it has been moved into the semitrailer-friendly boonies of Toyosu.
by josephg | 2025-09-23 09:34:17+00:00
> Technically an algorithm that lets the last writer win is a CRDT because there is no conflict.

Yes. It’s called a LWW register in the literature. Usually a MV (multi value) register is more useful. When there is a conflict, MV registers store all conflicting values and make any subsequent reader figure out what to do.

But for my money, usually what you want is something operation based. Like, if we both append to a transaction list, the list should end up with both items. Operation based CRDTs can handle any semantics you choose - so you can mix and match different merging approaches based on the application. And the storage for LWW and MV is the same, so you can start simple and grow your app as needed.

IMO the reason local first software is still not popular is the same reason encrypted messaging apps took awhile. There’s a lag from good CS research enabling a class of applications and good implementations being available with good UX. Most CRDT implementations are still pretty new. Automerge has been really slow until quite recently. Most libraries don’t support ephemeral data or binary blobs well. And there aren’t a lot of well defined patterns around user login and authentication. Local first apps today have a lot of work ahead of them to just exist at all. Give it some time.
by CCHappy | 2025-09-23 09:34:44+00:00
What Is Wan Animate?

Wan Animate is an AI video generation system developed by the Wan team. It focuses on two core capabilities:

Character Replacement – Keep the motion, rhythm, and background of the original video while swapping in a custom character image.

Expression Transfer – Capture facial details and expressions from the source video and accurately map them onto the new character.

Style Flexibility – Works across photography, illustrations, anime characters, game avatars, or even pets.

Built on the Wan2.2-Animate framework, the model combines diffusion techniques with transformer-based architectures to generate natural, detailed, and stylistically consistent results.

Our Web Demo

We’ve deployed a unified character replacement demo on wananimate.video . Here’s what you can expect:

Browser-first workflow – Just upload a character image and a reference video.

No hardware required – No GPUs, no environment setup.

Fast results – Within minutes, you’ll receive an animated output.

Right now, our version still trails the official implementation in some areas — like edge refinement and lighting consistency in complex scenes — but we’re iterating quickly. Expect smoother, sharper results soon.
by davydm | 2025-09-23 09:35:19+00:00
the sad part is how people find "companionship" from the "bag of words" simply using math to predict the next likely word, without any understanding, as it's always been

i still blame the ai hype-bro grifters who are still taking major losses whilst they try to bait people into paying big dollars for over-excited auto-corrects.
by Jensson | 2025-09-23 09:35:30+00:00
> (to be pedantic "Excel" doesn't make mistakes, people trusting its defaults do)

So what is your point? An expert that mastered excel don't have to check that excel calculated things correctly, he just need to check that he gave excel the right inputs and formulas. That is not true for LLM, you do have to check that it actually did what you asked regardless how good you are at prompting.

The only thing I trust an LLM to do correctly are translations, they are very reliable at that, other than that I always verify.
by XorNot | 2025-09-23 09:35:34+00:00
This feels like a return to the moment just before Deepseek when the market was feeling all fat and confident that "more GPUs == MOAR AI". They don't understand the science, so they really want a simple figure to point to that means "this is the winner".

Framing it in GW is just giving them what they want, even if it makes no sense.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-23 09:35:48+00:00
That factors into financial incentives, doesn't it?

There are also products that still have licensing costs even when you self host.

I've worked at a large company that self-hosted Atlassian products that were a big part of a full-time team's job.

I've worked at a large company that built virtually all their internal tooling in house.

I've worked at a large company that used cloud-based vendors.

They all had tradeoffs.

One of those companies even forced a migration from cloud based CI to internal CI for cost reasons then stopped us halfway through because they couldn't scale up our hosted CI to keep up fast enough.

I could argue your answer is just as short-term thinking when your critical tools end up costing you more hardware, data center, and salary opex than you planned for (which I have seen).
by irjustin | 2025-09-23 09:35:55+00:00
> The issue with your analogy is that calculators do not hallucinate. They do not make mistakes. An accountant is able to fully offload the mental overhead of arithmetic because the calculator is reliable.

If you've ever done any modeling/serious accounting, you'll find that you feel more like a DBA than a "person punching on a calculator". You ask questions and then you figure out how to get the answers you want by "querying" excel cells. Many times querying isn't in quotes.

To me, the analogy of the parent is quite apt.
by threeducks | 2025-09-23 09:35:56+00:00
> So did you run the model offline on your own computer and get realtime audio?

At the top of the README of the GitHub repository, there are a few links to demos where you can try the model.

> It seems it needs around a $2,500 GPU

You can get a used RTX 3090 for about $700, which has the same amount of VRAM as the RTX 4090 in your ChatGPT response.

But as far as I can tell, quantized inference implementations for this model do not exist yet.