MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prash2488 | 2025-09-13 09:13:47+00:00
Totally agreed, tried agents for a lot of stuff (I started creating a team of agents, architect, frontend coder, backend coder and QA). Spent around 50 USD on a failed project, context contaminated and the project eventually had to be re-written.

Then I moved some parts in rules, some parts in slash commands and then I got much better results.

The subagents are like a freelance contractors (I know, I have been one very recently) Good when they need little handoff (Not possible in realtime), little overseeing and their results are a good advice not an action. They don't know what you are doing, they don't care what you do with the info they produce. They just do the work for you while you do something else, or wait for them to produce independent results. They come and go with little knowledge of existing functionalities, but good on their own.

Here are 3 agents I still keep and one I am working on.

1: Scaffolding: Now I create (and sometimes destroy) a lot of new projects. I use a scaffolding agents when I am trying something new. They start with fresh one line instruction to what to scaffold (e.g. a New docker container with Hono and Postgres connection, or a new cloudflare worker which will connect to R2, D1 and AI Gateway, or a AWS Serverless API Gateway with SQS that does this that and that), where to deploy. At the end of the day they setup the project with structure, create a Github Repo and commit it for me. I will take it forward from them

2: Triage: When I face some issues which is not obvious from reading code alone, I give them the place, some logs and the agent will use whatever available (including the DB Data) to make a best guess of why this issue happens. I often found out they work best when they are not biased by recent work

3: Pre-Release Check QA: Now this QA will test the entire system (Essentially calling all integration and end-to-end test suite to make sure this product doesn't break anything existing. Now I am adding a functionality to let them see original business requirement and see if the code satisfies it or not. I want this agent to be my advisor to help me decide if something goes to release pipeline or not.

4: Web search (Experimental) Sometimes, some search are too costly for existing token, and we only need the end result, not what they search and those 10 pages it found out...
Show HN: Quick Postgres Backup Dump Browser
by bhasinanant | 2025-09-13 09:13:52+00:00
Just created a simple Postgres DB backup viewer.

For those times, you just want to have a look, but importing to a postgres instance is too much hassle.

No uploading. No login. All local.

Haven't tested with larger files(> 20mb). Everything under is snappy Would love to see what mileage we can get out of this.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 09:14:04+00:00
> It seems like paid communities

Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account.

It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential.

Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
by lucraft | 2025-09-13 09:15:26+00:00
Right - don’t make subagents for the different roles, make them to manage context for token heavy tasks.

A backend developer subagent is going to do the job ok, but then the supervisor agent will be missing useful context about what’s been done and will go off the rails.

The ideal sub agent is one that can take a simple question, use up massive amounts of tokens answering it, and then return a simple answer, dropping all those intermediate tokens as unnecessary.

Documentation Search is a good one - does X library have a Y function - the subagent can search the web, read doc MCPs, and then return a simple answer without the supervisor needing to be polluted with all the context
Ask HN: The quiet demolition of self‑learned skill
by Haeuserschlucht | 2025-09-13 09:15:55+00:00
So I am a self-taught programmer and I have my way of creating programs. So it's easy to read, to comprehend and then I made the mistake of giving a part of this code to an LLM. And it turned out that it shortened my code to about 10% of the lines that I used and the code is now much more performant. At first I was psyched but then I thought I put so much effort into that. Years of my life went into being able to code like this, I used to be proud of it, and this LLM just does it in a fraction of the time. Just like that. Better, quicker. It now feels like it's not my code anymore. It's not my idea anymore.

Yes, it threw me into a small existential crisis.

Can you relate?

PS: I'm certain that every artist right now and every voice actor can relate.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-09-13 09:16:09+00:00
But his take on San Francisco transit is just like really bad. Pokey streetcars and buses, doomed to fail. You build out there in those blue areas, and they are mostly all driving.

One of the best parts about where I lived in San Francisco was that I was around the corner from a streetcar stop. Pre-pandemic the streetcar was absolutely packed during commute hours because people absolutely do take advantage of "pokey streetcars and buses".

My take is you build it, and THEN they come. Put in some GOOD transit.

What is GOOD transit? The Bay Area's spent a fortune building out BART (yuck) and every extension has only succeeded in siphoning money away from other transit.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-13 09:17:19+00:00
Nuclear is more expensive and more geopolitically dangerous than renewables. For a short time, Germany was even leading in PV technology, it could've been our new sector we dominate in. But, as always, greedy investors and corrupt right wing politicians starved out any possibility of positive change.

And I find it horrendously hilarious that you believe the same people that work tirelessly against renewables would actually EVER build nuclear. It's about milking the status quo for cash as long as possible and then fucking off into retirment with that stolen money.

Btw, what's the german energy companies opinion on building nuclear? RWE a big fan? (They aren't!)
by akch | 2025-09-13 09:18:18+00:00
You are serving Menlo font on your website (monospace). This is not an open font. It is Apple IP and is not licensed for being served over the internet.

Although it is a derivative of the FOSS fonts-- Bitstream Vera and DejaVu, Menlo itself is not released with an open license. It's only meant for use with Apple devices.

I'd suggest changing to one of the many high quality FOSS fonts available online.
by jorams | 2025-09-13 09:19:53+00:00
That is covered in the article:

> Recently, however, that long-held truism has been shaken: The show has started releasing statistics about buzzer attempts, revealing that some contestants, especially those in the game’s upper echelons, ring in much more often than others. It’s not that the buzzer doesn’t matter—it just matters much less than was previously believed, a shake-up that has reelevated the importance of subject-matter expertise.
by asddubs | 2025-09-13 09:20:20+00:00
the fact that there is seemingly no interest in fixing this, and if you want chinese and japanese in the same document, you're just fucked, forever, is crazy to me.

They should add separate code points for each variant and at least make it possible to avoid the problem in new documents. I've heard the arguments against this before, but the longer you wait, the worse the problem gets.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-13 09:20:34+00:00
Well, good thing that we have no reason to build these reactors as far away from population centers as possible, right?

We already have enough heat for that, from industries. Distribution is the biggest factor, and in that, distance. It's really cool, but it's stupidly expensive up front. Not to mention, you need to require EVERYONE in the area to buy in and stay in to have any hopes of being worth it in the long run. NIMBYism strikes again.
by immibis | 2025-09-13 09:21:06+00:00
WP Engine literally paid for the conference at which Matt said WP Engine never paid for anything.

Also, Matt gave them permission to do what they're doing.

Also, Matt did to someone before him (that nobody remembers including me), what WP Engine did to Matt. So he doesn't really have a leg to stand on here - if WP Engine is bad, Matt is bad.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-13 09:21:09+00:00
I can almost see this complaint with poorly designed (ie, common and cheap) polarizers in LCDs and/or non-IPS/IPS-like LCDs at normal DPI.

However, that doesn't really work with OLEDs or MicroLEDs at any DPI, or any HighDPI IPS/IPS-likes.

Also, ultrawides are pretty rare. Multiple monitors have a lot more use, are a lot cheaper per pixel, and back to gaming again, a lot of games simply do not support anything but their native aspect ratio and will blackbox the viewport to prevent bugs and cheaters.
by mkesper | 2025-09-13 09:23:11+00:00
Little bit shallow article. Raspberry 3/4/5 are in a different league than RP2040. Newest Zynthian kits are updated for Pi5. There is also a big difference between using Linux (e.g. Zynthian) and running barebones (e.g. Minidexed, MT32-pi, probably some proprietary offerings).

https://shop.zynthian.org/

https://github.com/probonopd/MiniDexed

https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi
by eviks | 2025-09-13 09:25:21+00:00
This isn't about adapting to future changes, but noticing breakage in the current system.

But also, even in FOSS there can be projects that value stability and isolation, so if you fix some plugin that misbehaves you don't need to adapt because the underlying editor APIs that plugin relied on are stable and also isolated in a way where your changes can't break other users
by mft_ | 2025-09-13 09:25:34+00:00
I think we're still at least an order of magnitude away (in terms of affordable local inference, or model improvements to squeeze more from less, or a combination of the two) from local solutions being seriously competitive for general purpose tasks, sadly.

I recently bought a second-hand 64GB Mac to experiment with. Even with the biggest recent local model it can run (llama3.3:70b just about runs acceptably; I've also tried an array of Qwen3 30b variants) the quality is lacking for coding support. They can sometimes write and iterate on a simple Python script, but sometimes fail, and for general-purpose models, often fail to answer questions accurately (not unsurprisingly, considering the model is a compression of knowledge, and these are comparatively small models). They are far, far away from the quality and ability of currently available Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT models. And even with a good eBay deal, the Mac cost the current equivalent of ~6 years of a monthly subscription to one of these.

Based on the current state of play, once we can access relatively affordable systems with 512-1024GB fast (v)ram and sufficient FLOPs to match, we might have a meaningfully powerful local solution. Until then, I fear local only is for enthusiasts/hobbyists and niche non-general tasks.
by rufasterisco | 2025-09-13 09:25:39+00:00
I'm commenting while agents run in project trying to achieve something similar to this. I feel like "we all" are trying to do something similar, in different ways, and in a fast moving space (i use claude code and didn't even know subagents were a thing).

My gut feeling from past experiences is that we have git, but now git-flow, yet: a standardized approach that is simple to learn and implement across teams.

Once (if?) someone will just "get it right", and has a reliable way to break this down do the point that engineer(s) can efficiently review specs and code against expectations, it'll be the moment where being a coder will have a different meaning, at large.

So far, all projects i've seen end up building "frameworks" to match each person internal workflow. That's great and can be very effective for the single person (it is for me), but unless that can be shared across teams, throughput will still be limited (when compared that of a team of engs, with the same tools).

Also, refactoring a project to fully leverage AI workflows might be inefficient, if compared to a rebuild from scratch to implement that from zero, since building docs for context in pair with development cannot be backported: it's likely already lost in time, and accrued as technical debt.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 09:28:21+00:00
I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.

Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.

Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.
by T-A | 2025-09-13 09:30:49+00:00
A methane molecule is one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms. More than half of the energy released by burning it (53% according to [1]) comes from oxidizing the hydrogen to water. So it's roughly half as bad as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and does not have the additional problems of sulfur (acid rain) and soot.

[1] https://people.wou.edu/~courtna/GS361/Energy_From_Fossil_Fue...
by bubblethink | 2025-09-13 09:31:13+00:00
The lack is established by a good faith recruitment process, not an exhaustive search. This is intentionally vague because it's a non-sensical requirement that is hard to prove one way or the other and was only added as a political compromise. The company is free to tailor the minimum requirements to its liking. Recall that this is a free capitalistic country. So you can establish that you can't fill the req. locally and hence are hiring a foreigner. The reason I'm pointing this out is because you have picked some type of textual or literal interpretation of things ("this is what EB is for"), and companies have lawyers who are good at following the text.
by jjav | 2025-09-13 09:31:26+00:00
> When social media emerged, I remember how excited I was how it could connect like-minded people around the world.

I remember that feeling of being blown away at talking (typing) with people across the world without any limitations!

But for me this was in the late 80s and earliest 90s on the Internet. When all communication was standards-based, fully interoperable and completely free.

What we call today "social media" is just the proprietarization, for profit, of what existed before in a much more open fashion.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 09:32:08+00:00
> to me the difference is plain to see.

Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.

It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
by js2 | 2025-09-13 09:35:19+00:00
During WWII there were wage freezes so employers started providing benefits:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...

> In 1942, with so many eligible workers diverted to military service, the nation was facing a severe labor shortage. Economists feared that businesses would keep raising salaries to compete for workers, and that inflation would spiral out of control as the country came out of the Depression. To prevent this, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9250, establishing the Office of Economic Stabilization.

> This froze wages. Businesses were not allowed to raise pay to attract workers.

> Businesses were smart, though, and instead they began to use benefits to compete. Specifically, to offer more, and more generous, health care insurance.

> Then, in 1943, the Internal Revenue Service decided that employer-based health insurance should be exempt from taxation. This made it cheaper to get health insurance through a job than by other means.

----

Hysterical raisins strikes again.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-13 09:35:21+00:00
...and when you install Rain (or similar tools like Waterfall or CPUIdle) on Windows 95/98, counterintuitively, the Task Manager will show permanent 100% CPU usage, even though the CPU is actually idling and running cooler.

For me, the fact that Windows 95/98 can't use the HLT instruction is a reason why I wouldn't use these legacy operating systems to run older software. Not that many programs ran on Win95/98 but not on Win2000. Perhaps except for DOS games, which are better served by DOSBox.
by diggan | 2025-09-13 09:35:42+00:00
I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.

I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.
by gchamonlive | 2025-09-13 09:36:09+00:00
Didn't say they were equivalent, I've said Borg is enough for me, specially when pacman does a very good job updating the system atomically. In the rarest cases where a pacman update breaks the system, which is usually when the user doesn't have informant installed and forces a failed installation, I'd just chroot from an arch live install disk and fix the OS.
by rwmj | 2025-09-13 09:36:34+00:00
It's true that qemu doesn't aim for fidelity. (Despite the name, qemu isn't exactly an emulator!) The development efforts upstream are almost all about getting modern OSes to work well, and quite often the OS is aware that it's running on qemu and adjusts itself - most notably with the installation of virtio drivers, but also in smaller ways. The Linux kernel has over 1000 references to QEMU in its source code.

Also if you look at qemu's device emulation, that's usually "done" when it can run modern operating systems. Qemu doesn't try hard to emulate the entire IDE or SCSI command set in every detail, or every aspect of old hardware.

Another thing is that qemu is not cycle-accurate at all. Instruction and device timings will be wildly different from real hardware, especially if using TCG.
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-13 09:37:14+00:00
The tidal bulges are easy to understand if you think through a force diagram with the different forces on the various parts of the Earth. The gravitational force is weaker on the more distant parts of the Earth from the moon.[1]

So everything is pulled towards the moon, but the more distant parts are pulled less, and the sides are pulled inwards, so the resultant shape is the familiar ellipsoid

[1] http://nicholasbsullivan.com/page_oceanography/Meeting6/01_t...
by noodletheworld | 2025-09-13 09:37:43+00:00
No, this has been my experience as well.

I see lots of people saying you should be doing it, but not actually doing it themselves.

Or at least, not showing full examples of exactly how to handle it when it starts to fail or scale, because obviously when you dont have anything, having a bunch of agents doing any random shit works fine.

Frustrating.
by tumdum_ | 2025-09-13 09:38:43+00:00
> someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.

It’s is perfectly possible today. Sony still produces Walkmans and there are 100s digital cameras (not to mention analog ones). I don’t think there was ever a time when SM and e-mail had separate devices.
by blululu | 2025-09-13 09:38:52+00:00
I too have always found this strange but I have never found a solid reason. Having an explicit declaration of intent is not a terrible feature in a data type so this is not exactly a bad choice. Also this means that a camera roll from a single sensor can be stored as an array in C since every image has the exact same size. It also does make life easier for the camera developers (but harder for photo viewer developers). If anyone knows the history here I would actually really be interested.
by pzo | 2025-09-13 09:39:24+00:00
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).

And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
by BoredPositron | 2025-09-13 09:39:26+00:00
This makes the situation even worse for me. CERTs lack any legal authority to compel action or enforce compliance. Without a thorough and fast post mortem analysis, this incident is deeply concerning for anyone who relies on Proton as their primary email provider. I guess getting trigger happy just comes as soon as you get a bigger user base but that's exactly when you get caught slipping. Like they did with the false positives it honestly reads like:

"We have good relationships and trust this CERT so we carpet bombed all accounts they send us without even looking at them."

I wonder what would have happened to accounts or users without the reach on socials.
by latexr | 2025-09-13 09:39:44+00:00
> Would serve as an automatic "You're 18"

You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).

https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/

https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a...

And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations.

In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification.

> It just sucks

I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
by groggler | 2025-09-13 09:40:14+00:00
I don't see how you get there. It's harder to move chemistry work than simple laptop use so chemists in the US would have less pay equalization than developers.

Why should we work to lower salaries in professions where we agree the salary is already depressed enough to lose new entrants to an easier and higher paying profession? (I think I can say this since I'm a lazy STEM drop out developer who makes more than twice what I estimated for my preferred path that I also found more challenging.)