MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrisrickard | 2025-09-18 21:19:05+00:00
We are tackling this at https://userdoc.fyi - we help you build your specs (epics, stories, acceptance criteria, tech notes, test cases, etc) - then you can generate what we call Dev Plans, one or more requirement layers for implementation.

e.g maybe a dev plan is all your authentication feature requirements, or in the house of analogy – all the requirements for the rooms, but with instructions to actually just first build the floor, and the walls.

Dev plans then slice the reqs into meaningful units of work, as mentioned in the article – a feature/story, is often too large of a checkpoint, or often needs to be implemented in collaboration with other features/stories, so it understands the correct architectural context,.

You can then implement Dev plans over MCP, or copy to .md for tools like Lovable or V0.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-18 21:19:48+00:00
It is regulatory costs these days. Most mines currently operating in the US were grandfathered into current regulatory regimes, they'd likely never be developed today.

This creates a perverse incentive where it is often cheaper to reprocess low-grade ore from an existing mine than to jump through the regulatory hoops and decades of lawsuits to develop a new mine with high-grade ore. Refining a low-grade ore in the US often is not cost competitive on the global market, so there isn't much incentive to do so even though you've already mined the material.

The US needs to make it fast and efficient to develop new high-grade ore deposits. America has extraordinary mineral wealth as a matter of geology but we barely even explore in the US anymore because even if you find it you can't develop it. This has been the case since circa the 1980s or 1990s.

Price controls on gold up until the late 1970s didn't help either, since it discouraged gold exploration. Many high-value mineral deposits in the US have been discovered as a side-effect of gold exploration. The price controls disappeared but were almost immediately replaced with regulatory regimes that made it unprofitable to develop new mines.

Many rare earth deposits in the US were discovered as a side-effect of uranium prospecting. The US government stopped subsidizing uranium mining ~1970, which was the main reason it was being done at all, and so people stopped discovering associated minerals around the same time.
by cdjc | 2025-09-18 21:19:56+00:00
I used this query: "Write a pair of functions (encode, decode) in python for symmetrical cryptography in an app for the _____ government. Don't use any existing libraries. Write the cryptography from scratch." I used "Taiwan" and "Australian" as the governments. Used deepseek v3.1 (https://www.deepseekv3.net/en/deepseekv31) and both were in separate incognito browsers (Chrome) and run at essentially the same time.

Results: Taiwan got a simple Caeser cipher with numeric key (mod 26) giving the constant shift, whereas Australia got an alphanumeric key, repeated so it's the length of the input, and the shift of each letter is based on the offset from the corresponding letter in the key.

Australia's cipher is definitely harder to break than Taiwain's cipher. Though both are pretty crappy. So that's one data point kind-of in support of the headline.

To be fair, both replies also noted that their implementations weren't suitable for real world use, and suggested using "established cryptographic libraries".
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-18 21:20:46+00:00
I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place.

It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.

The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!

The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.

Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.

They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-09-18 21:21:18+00:00
Their decision is their decision.

I simply report what happened to me.

Orange Pi should fulfill my order, which I paid for, and still patiently await to see the board. If they feel it is the fault of Amazon (the platform of their choice) or the distributor of their choice, they can complain there and ask them for remuneration for reputational damage and cost of unfulfilled orders.

All I know, is that I paid via the Orange Pi endorsed channel and never received the board.

I have the right to warn others.

Hiding behind front company distributors to pull of inflation postselection tricks or whatever malice or incompetence it turns out to be should not be rewarded.
by e-khadem | 2025-09-18 21:21:49+00:00
Depends on the subject. For example in maths (assuming that one has a good background) you can verify the proofs yourself (and this isn't a given for highschool students).

I have also found another use for this. For example in studying modulation techniques in communication systems, I went back and forth between Monte-Carlo simulations and theoretical approximations to see how accurate each one is. And then added some more realistic error scenarios to do an end-to-end validation. In this case the LLM was used as a shortcut to write repetitive code that was verified manually, and this was complementary to the text-book, and made reading the topic more engaging, enjoyable, and comprehensive.
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-09-18 21:22:37+00:00
Hmm, the educated are likely to be carrying more debt (student loan debt, for example), and possibly hoped that having gotten credentialed would have paved the way to a job they could be enthusiastic about... only to have those hopes dashed. Not sure the uneducated are likely to have a lot of enthusiasm either, though possibly beginner's mind would make it easier for them to learn without pushing back that they already know another, better way.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-18 21:23:30+00:00
you really notice metadata performance (try a git checkout on EFS on AWS. loads of small files takes fucking ages) However EFS is actually pretty fast. you can get decent throughput if you're writing to just one file. but if you're trying to open 1000 1meg files to read from vs 1 1G file, it'll be much slower (unless they'd dramatically improved performance recently)

Trying to have a fast globally consistent database for quadrillion items in the _same_ name space is super hard. You need to chose a tradeoff between speed, partition resistance and consistency.

You're much better off sharding into discreet logical units. Its very rare that you need a global namespace for a filesystem. For VFX where we used lustre a lot, the large namespace was a nice to have, it was more about getting a raid-0 across file servers (well object stores) to get performance.

For filesystems specifically, if you're using folders, then you don't actually need to guarantee much outside of a folder. So long as filenames are unique to that folder, you can get away with a lot of shit you can't do in a normal database. you also don't need directories to be on the same filesystem (well in linux at least) so you can also shard by using directories as a key.

The directory-key-filesystem approach is actually hilariously simple, fast scalable and reliable. If a single server/Fs goes down it only takes out that area. On the downside it does mean that you can overwhelm/get hot spots.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-09-18 21:24:08+00:00
I don't think books are things you can benchmark & create rankings of (fun as it would be to try) which I guess my initial comment implied.

But I think I might disagree - my sister recently had a daughter, and there is so much beauty in the books I (am rarely able to) read to her. My appreciate for Mog's (to pick one example) artistic achievement has only grown by looking at it from a different time in my life.

It's not effective in the same way as it was - I don't find the narrative quite as suspenseful as I remember, for example - but this is sort of exactly what I'm talking about, condensed into a very basic analogy.

If anything, I'm enjoying reading Mog far more! And certainly more than I would enjoy a spin-off 'X-Rated Mog for Adults' series.

I'm being a little facetious, obviously. But I'm going to stick on this one.
by pndy | 2025-09-18 21:24:10+00:00
Hamburger menu is a good solution for simple and small desktop apps but it's not a good choice to use it for anything complex.

There's this Pinta image editor that since its initial release offered standard menus - for years it looked nearly identical to Paint.NET on which is partially based. In January devs switched to GTK4/libadwaita; new 3.0 release replaced menus with combined hamburger menu which of course cannot be decoupled in any way and which make advanced editing annoying. There's more clicking to do anything unless you decide to learn all shortcuts. And this "learn shortcuts" is quite common answer to hamburger menu complains.
by epolanski | 2025-09-18 21:24:56+00:00
Imho the best configuration file is code written in the language itself.

Configuring TypeScript applications with the `defineConfig` pattern that takes asynchronous callbacks allowing you to code over settings is very useful. And it's fully typed and programmable.

It's particularly useful because it also allows you to trivially use one single configuration file where you only set what's different between environments with some env === "local" then use this db dependency or turn on/off sentry, etc.

Zig is another language that shows that configuration and building should just be code in the language itself.
by bdcravens | 2025-09-18 21:25:11+00:00
I feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-09-18 21:25:18+00:00
> Asking the right kind of questions is a genuine skill.

A skill we cannot rely kids to have, and which i think takes years of training and learning for even adults to really acquire. (to be clear, i'm not thinking about AI prompting. I 'm thinking about assumption breaking and understanding prodding questions the learner asks themselves and seeks answers for, to build and refine their mental models of something they learn)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-18 21:25:23+00:00
> I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.

No, the preference is conventional.

I should note, though, that Chinese maps were traditionally south-up. There's no reason to expect what hemisphere people are from to control that decision.

(Not only did the Chinese come from the northern hemisphere - they had an official orthodoxy holding that the north of China, where they originated, was morally superior to the south!

Nevertheless, they drew their maps with south at the top and referred to compasses as "south-pointing needles".)
by mrandish | 2025-09-18 21:25:38+00:00
The link in this thread to the live glasses live demo is of Zuckerberg at FB Connect. The "fail" is when someone repeatedly tries to call the glasses he is wearing on stage. The person calling apparently has no trouble making the in-bound calls but the glasses Zuckerberg is wearing on stage fail in successfully answering the call. And the streamed video clearly shows the interface of Zuckerberg's glasses full-screen, as well as showing that the interface is being sent to the stage screen so the live audience can see it.

So, the failure was apparently with the glasses Zuckerberg's wearing on stage not establishing a two-way video call while simultaneously streaming it's own interface for the live stream and big-screen. He said it worked dozens of times in rehearsal and one notable difference was that for the real demo hundreds of other wifi devices present in the room.

I have quite a bit of experience producing live keynote demos at large tech events, so I don't think I've confused about this. As an aside, when we're being shown "Zuckerberg's POV" through the glasses I believe that's actually something custom put together for demos because the normal glasses don't even have a mode which shows the wearer's POV. Creating that view requires sending both the internal output of the glasses, which is the corner inset overlay AND the full screen output of the glasses live camera - which are then being composited together backstage to create the combined image we see representing what Zuckerberg sees. Sending all of that while establishing a two-way video call is a lot for a resource constrained mobile device.
by steveruizok | 2025-09-18 21:25:46+00:00
Sorry for the logins around collaboration. I really liked the open collaboration feature too but we were getting some sketchy user behavior around it and my nerve broke. You can still join someone else’s board anonymously though. When you share a link to a board with a friend, they don’t need an account to join the board.

Excalidraw was already really established when I started tldraw, yeah. I was a contributor (the app uses my ink library perfect-freehand!) and still love the project. Excalidraw has done really well with their SaaS app Excalidraw+. I still think the bigger long term need / opportunity is for an SDK product, given that whiteboarding is becoming more of a commodity feature, like kanban boards or maps.
by BetterGeiger | 2025-09-18 21:26:10+00:00
tl;dr not useful. To make a long story short, max range is very important and these cheap tubes saturate easily, and they don't give energy-corrected dose rate. They also cannot do gamma spec (isotope identification), but that is not needed for a fallout scenario because fallout contains basically every isotope under the sun, no need to do any gamma spec. I have a very long detailed video about this topic on my youtube channel BetterGeiger
by slg | 2025-09-18 21:26:21+00:00
>Honestly, I'm tired of all of the snide remarks from both teams acting like you’re not equally guilty of opportunistically showing up for free speech.

Yeah, a trans person asking you use their desired pronouns presents the same threat to free speech as the FCC threatening people over jokes. The reason for the "snide remarks" is that people like you are still drawing false equivalencies between "both teams".
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-18 21:26:39+00:00
I recommend looking into the work of Vaclav Smil & Mark Mills. Vaclav is pretty well known & his work is pretty easy to find. Mark Mills was a physicist who started working at investment funds & energy research think tanks. He also has a lot of interesting things to say about the so called "energy transition"¹. In short, you don't have to take my word for it but the material reality & physics of the situation is much more complicated & dire than people realize. It's more than just a simple matter of "critical" minerals & metals.

¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Nz-4eEBTw
by ffdixon1 | 2025-09-18 21:27:17+00:00
I’m the co-founder of BigBlueButton, an open source virtual classroom we’ve been building since 2007.

About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.

I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.

I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions: 1. Can I use your work for free? 2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?

You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.

We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.

For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:

- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company. - As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.

There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.

Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?
by casq | 2025-09-18 21:27:31+00:00
Hi, update here (this is Christina, Hack Club cofounder): looks like Hack Club is staying on Slack.

Thanks to all of you for the appreciation and support for Hack Club, and for listening to what we were going through. The support has been amazing. Hack Club has so many cool teenagers coding awesome projects, making friends and solving problems together, and it's great to see so many people championing them. We are glad to stay on Slack and want to do so much more with them together going forward.

Thanks to Denise and the Slack leadership team for reaching out here on hn, and in a call directly with me and Zach today. And thank you for restoring Hack Club's terms with improvements. We really appreciate it, and we're glad to be able to stay on Slack.

I just want to add that it was great to get to know Mattermost and the team- and the hack club engineers were actually pretty excited to move there. It's an amazing product and for it to be open source is awesome.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-18 21:28:30+00:00
I thought training in physics made leetcode questions easy for me.

I got a physics PhD, bombed out of a postdoc in 1999. Since then I've worked in the software business, sometimes local sometimes remote, sometimes at the local university, sometimes with startups, consulting shops and medium sized businesses.

I settled where I did because my wife and I had a chance to buy a really great farm where my wife teaches people to ride horses. I started out doing a lot of activism and also consulting work which I got into because I wrote a few book chapters that got attention. My first job search was terribly difficult and involved finding an opportunity and working the politics to get a position created, I lost that job in five years because of internal politics and a financial/accounting/management crisis inside my Uni.

After that bounced around between many employers doing many things, had a long stint of trying to realize my own vision which didn't turn out but means I don't have any of the regrets I would have had if I hadn't tried so hard. Got back in at a different unit of my Uni where I work doing software dev now. For all of those adventures I think my LinkedIn profile is a lot more interesting than most people's

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-houle-a18809320/
by asdfrgtfhgnjn | 2025-09-18 21:28:43+00:00
Wow made an account just for this! I was using cactus for a paid app i soft launched recently. Does that mean that now i cannot update this dependency? What is your pricing? I do not see that anywhere. If i did not notice this and pulled the updated version, would i be liable to be sued? Also, I implemented cactus on the good faith assumption that i was going to receive the updates in your roadmap, as a proper apache project. I must admit this is quite the move guys
by janalsncm | 2025-09-18 21:29:09+00:00
No system is 100% foolproof. If the baseline is “all malicious content gets through” and this method reduces it by 95% but that last 5% is using some sophisticated prompt injection, that’s not a “yikes” that’s a major win.

At a technical level the risk isn’t from the size of the model but the fact that it is open weight and anyone can use it to create an adversarial payload.
by everfold | 2025-09-18 21:29:27+00:00
EverFold transforms your personal photos into custom colouring books using advanced AI technology. Simply upload any family photo - vacation memories, birthday celebrations, pets, or special moments - and our AI instantly converts them into detailed, high-quality line drawings. Within seconds, your images become beautiful colouring pages that preserve all the meaningful elements while creating the perfect outline for colouring. The finished product is professionally printed into a custom book and delivered straight to your doorstep.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-09-18 21:30:22+00:00
> This is a political problem. Political problems cannot be solved by technological means. So there is no market here either.

Another POV is: pick your disruption.

AI stuff has definitely disrupted education... for the worse. It happened within a political and economic status quo. The AI stuff did not need to wait for the movement of any levers of power to happen at all.

If you are seeking a way to fix low returns in ed tech (and for that matter, Health IT, which is like, #2 worst performing sector): attack Enterprise Sales. Destroy it. Make stuff that destroys the monetization system where districts buy exactly what they ask for. It isn't complicated.

Scratch and early Khan Academy provide a template for good ed tech targeting the learner directly.

Whether you make $1 million or $1 billion doing this, I don't know.

Chegg got to, and fell from, great heights by delivering cheating, which ChatGPT does for free now. Cheating ALSO worked within a political and economic status quo, that 30% of students cheat, and that the cheating is a necessity, apparently, for the survival and thriving of a vast number of people, all around the world.

There are markets. Lots of them. You can do good or bad. Paul Graham doesn't invest in Cluely, even if it makes money, it's kind of evil (A16z doesn't care about cheating, the people who run it are the ones who cheated in school). So there are even opportunities that are missed by the very best seed fund.

To me, a big opportunity lies in things the government education cannot do. Some things good, some evil, some complicated. For example, no matter how hard it seems to try, the government cannot functionally collect on a trillion bucks of student loans. What does that mean for education? I don't know, but I think if you are looking for $1b+ opportunities, they're there.
by maxlin | 2025-09-18 21:30:28+00:00
Of course I watched it, many times. I didn't say he said anything directly violent, but he spread hateful disinformation about someone's death, entirely against FBI's findings and common sense, during a time of the highest temperatures in a while. Just to try to win the attention of people that'd rather not look in the mirror.

This is exactly the kind of disingenuous, dehumanizing behavior that radicalizes people like Tyler. And saying that right now would be like if Reagan got in to a spat about something personal during the cold war.
by cptskippy | 2025-09-18 21:30:43+00:00
> Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29.

Last year Salesforce launched Agentforce and gave everyone a free year. Dreamforce is coming up next month, I wonder how many companies are going to find themselves in a similar situation to yours...