MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vanderZwan | 2025-09-01 12:42:57+00:00
> In fact, you could use Nim as a production-ready alternative to the upcoming Carbon language. Nim has fantastic interoperability with C++, supporting templates, constructors, destructors, overloaded operators, etc. However, it does not compile to readable C or C++ code, which is unlike Carbon's goals.

Well, that really depends on what the reason for one's interest in Carbon is, which is slightly hinted at by the last sentence. From what I understand big goal is to be able to do automated migration of large C++ codebases at Google to a saner language. Mond had a nice blogpost musing about it[0]. Nim is not that.

Of course, neither is Carbon yet, and we'll have to wait and see if it reaches that point or if it ends up on killedbygoogle.com. I'm rooting for Carbon though, it's a cool idea.

Anyway, that is a different ambition than looking for a successor language that lets you use existing C++ code without requiring that the latter is changed, which is what Nim is suggested to be good at here.

[0] https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/02/carbon-is-not-a-languag...
by Symbiote | 2025-09-01 12:43:14+00:00
At a very rough estimate with Hetzner's calculator, which doesn't have exactly the systems I most recently bought, our servers cost about 18 months of renting the closest Hetzner dedicated server.

Add to that rackspace costs, staff time doing installation (or cost of remote hands etc). I don't have our figures for rackspace costs, but staff time is fairly low — an hour or two when the server is purchased and later thrown out, and maybe the same to replace a HDD at some point in the 5-8 years we keep it.

Also add the time to get competing quotes from Dell, HP etc and decide on the configuration, but then a similar process is needed to choose from Hetzner vs their competitors.
Show HN: HTML Capture Compare – Chrome Extension to Debug Flaky Tests
by qaas | 2025-09-01 12:43:33+00:00
Hi HN! I’m excited to share my first product launch, HTML Capture Compare. This is also my first time posting on Hacker News, so thank you for any feedback you might have.

I recently founded qaas.work, a company that helps small teams without automation expertise. We get embedded with a client’s team to set up automation frameworks, CI/CD flows, and reporting from scratch. Once the client's team is comfortable and up to speed, we step back. This approach helps smaller companies get robust automation without the high cost of a full-time engineer.

In my work, I've constantly seen a huge time sink: debugging flaky tests caused by changes in the UI. Automation teams waste countless hours manually inspecting HTML to figure out why a locator broke.

That's why I built this Chrome extension. It’s a simple, visual tool to quickly capture and compare HTML structures, making it easy to find what’s causing test failures.

Here are the main features:

Side-by-Side Compare: Get a clear view of the old and new HTML structures in a separate window to pinpoint exactly what changed.

Merged Compare: See the updated structure directly on the webpage for a more streamlined view of the changes.

Manage Baselines: Keep track of all your captured HTML baselines in one place, with the ability to view and delete them as needed.

My goal is to help you debug tests faster and keep your automation pipelines running smoothly, which is a key challenge for every team I've worked with.

You can try it out directly from the Chrome Web Store: [https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/html-capture-compar...]

I’d really appreciate any thoughts or feedback from the community. If you’ve dealt with this problem before, I'd love to know what other features would be helpful!
by avianlyric | 2025-09-01 12:44:13+00:00
It’s a limitation of the early versions of the PD spec. The PD spec now includes features that allow a device to express its needed power draw, and wanted power draw, along with info like the fact they’re a battery pack.

In addition the spec now has messages that allow a charger to renegotiate the PD contract with a device with resetting the entire USB-C connection. So if you have chargers and devices that support these elements, you can connect and disconnect devices with interrupting the power to anything else connected. The charger just does a live renegotiation and redistribution of its available power envelope.

Also means that when a phone and battery pack get plugged in, the charger can pull power allocation from the battery pack to send to the phone so the phone charges first. Then once the phone is charged, reallocate the power budget to the battery packs again.
by kragen | 2025-09-01 12:44:20+00:00
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%99%B0#Traditional_Chinese (陰) lists the following definitions:

1. cloudy; overcast; gloomy

2. hidden; secret

3. negative [of electrical charge]

4. the Moon

5. shade; shadow

6. north of a mountain or south of a river

7. back side

8. of the nether world; of ghosts

9. (philosophy) "female" principle; yin in yin-yang

10. in intaglio

11. treacherous; deceitful; cheating

12. (dialectal) to deceive; to trick; to trap

13. (Chinese phonetics, of a syllable) open; not having a consonant coda

14. (Cantonese) bangs; fringe

15. genitalia (of humans)

16. a surname

The one (American) person I know who has 陰 as a surname reports that Chinese people are often shocked at her surname upon meeting her. I think it might be a bit like having the surname Death in English (https://www.ancestry.com/last-name-meaning/death?geo-lang=en...).

That is to say, black kind of does mean "bad" here, in the popular conception anyway. Taoism and Buddhism promote a worldview that sees birth and death, creation and destruction, as neither good nor bad, simply inseparable parts of a larger whole. But most everyday people try to avoid darkness, death, destruction, cloudiness, gloominess, shadows, ghosts, treachery, traps, and so on, most of the time. It's more that Taoism teaches that this attempt is foolish.

Not all the senses are unpopular; plenty of people like human genitalia, the Moon, and intaglio, and the shady side of a river can be nicer when it's hot out.
by shelajev | 2025-09-01 12:44:21+00:00
I recently was trying to build an AI assistant to help with various chess things, which took shape of an MCP server: https://github.com/shelajev/mcp-stockfish

it builds as a docker image which has stockfish and maia (maiachess.com) together with different weights so it can simulate lower-level players.

It was a fun exercise, I tried a bunch of local models with this MCP server, which isn't particularly optimized, but also doesn't seem that bad. And the results were quite disappointing, they often would invent chess related reasoning and mess up answering questions, even if you'd expect them to rely on the tools and have true evaluation available.

It was also fun to say things: fetch a random game by username 'X' from lichess, analyze it and find positions which are good puzzles for a player rated N.

and see it figure out the algorithm of tool calls: - fetch the game - feed the moves to stockfish - find moves where evaluation changed sharply - feed it to maia at strength around N and to stockfish - if these disagree, it's probably a good puzzle.

I don't think I got to have a working setup like that even with managed cloud models. Various small issues, like timeouts on the MCP calls, general unreliability, etc. Then lost interest and abandoned the idea.

I should try again after seeing this thread
by Chriztiaan_dev | 2025-09-01 12:44:21+00:00
Author here. The TL;DR is that architecting apps with a synced in-app database eliminates a whole category of work like managing network requests, handling loading states, implementing retry logic, and orchestrating state management because all you have to do is query the local database.

Real-time sync engines are the technology enabling this. I’m working on PowerSync[1] but there’s also cool work being done by Zero[2] and Electric-SQL[3]. Other interesting projects include like InstantDB[4] and Convex[5].

[1] https://powersync.com/

[2] https://zero.rocicorp.dev/

[3] https://electric-sql.com/

[4] https://www.instantdb.com/

[5] https://convex.dev/
by palata | 2025-09-01 12:44:36+00:00
Not sure what your point is. Are you saying that Google should be forced by law to allow unverified developers on their own OS, but that it would not be possible to have a law making it mandatory to allow alternative OSes?

I mean if they are above the law, they are above the law. No need to discuss anything. If they are not, then we can discuss what's best for the users. And it is my opinion that allowing alternative OSes is better for the users than allowing sideloading of unverified apps.
by tgtweak | 2025-09-01 12:44:45+00:00
I've been doing hybrid colo+public cloud for over a decade and it's always been the most cost effective route at a certain scale. That specific break even point is lowering over time with the density and cost effectiveness of hardware.

Sure you need net/infra admins but the software and hardware these days are pretty management friendly and you'll find you still need (often more expensive "cloud") admins so you're not offsetting much management cost there.

Colocation is plentiful and providers often aggregate and resell bandwidth from their preferred carriers.

At one point we were up to 8 dell vrtx clusters and a few SANs, with 500+ VMs from huge msSQL servers to kube clusters the public cloud bill would have been well into the 6 figures even with preferred pricing and reserved instances. Our colocation bill was $2400/mo and that was mostly for power. The one thing that always surprised me was how much faster everything was - every time we had to scale-over into the cloud the public cloud node was noticably slower even for identical CPU generations and vcpu.

You need to be very keen about server deals, updates, support contracts and licenses - but it's really manageable and interconnecting with the cloud is trivial at this point - you can get a "cloud connect" fiber drop to your preferred cloud provider and connect your colo infra to your vpc.
by benreesman | 2025-09-01 12:45:45+00:00
In 2025 if you need convenience and no red tape you've got fly.io in the general case and maybe Vercel or something on a particular framework (there are some good ones for a particular stack).

If your needs go beyond that? Then you need real computers with real configuration and you have OVH/Hetzner/Latitude who will rent you MONSTER machines for the cost of some cheap-ass surplus 2017 Intel on The Cloud.

And if you just want a blog or whatever? Zillion VPS options.

The traditional cloud is for regulatory/process/corruption capture extraction in 2025: its machine economics and developer productivity use case is fucking zero I've seen. Maybe there's some edge case where a completely unencumbered team is better off with DMV trip permissions theatre, remnant Intel racked with noisy neighbors at massive markup, and no support recourse.
by yorwba | 2025-09-01 12:46:00+00:00
You might be able to start with German, since German-Yiddish cognates tend to have fairly regular spelling correspondences (not exactly one-to-one, but often few-to-one).

So given a Latin-script token from a model that does OK in German (bonus points if it also does Hebrew), generate several candidate Hebrew-script tokens with some regex search-and-replace, then use the resulting vocabulary to tokenize your Yiddish corpus and for each original token keep the candidate replacement that was used most often in the tokenization.

This vocabulary replacement should give you a model that does OK in German-in-Hebrew-script. I think that would be a better base for a Yiddish model than training from scratch, but of course that's just a hunch that might turn out to be wrong.
by arcbyte | 2025-09-01 12:46:24+00:00
> git stash is not that simple. you'd need to remember what branch that stash applies to to get back to where you were.

This quote confused me for a while. I was thinking "git stash isn't branch specific its just a single bucket". But I realoze you must be making lots of little changes that are highly branch specific and then not wanting to commit those, but instead stashing them. Which would leave you with a hellscape of stashes that can't just be unstashed.

The biggest problem with git is people just inventing asinine ways to do things and ending up with absolutely stupid problems like that. No sane person does these things but yet I do keep encountering people digging holes and falling in them. It's a bit like people who invent the clever idea of having one repository with multiple code bases on different root branches. It's possible but you dont deserve to be working in this industry if you think its a good idea.

Git is simple. It's stupid simple. That's its problem.
by chongli | 2025-09-01 12:46:59+00:00
evaluate positions at low depth and high depth and select positions where the best move switches.

Won’t that bias in favour of common sacrifices in the endgame? The issue with using depth is that humans don’t struggle with depth uniformly. Humans can calculate to a lot more depth with a sequence of obvious moves (recaptures, pawn races) than they can in more complex situations (closed positions in the midgame).
by tucnak | 2025-09-01 12:47:13+00:00
To be fair, if you take your agument from the last paragraph, i.e. that the function of chess as the game is to entertain, your earlier argument re: min-max doesn't really stand, does it? I think, you're right that chess probably quite interesting in terms of abstract maths, like surely there are ways to represent the pawns (pawn structures?) as well as the pieces (knights, bishops, etc.) in terms of some supersymmetry. However, it doesn't seem like much progress has been made in this area academically since the 20th century. It may be helpful to tap into AlphaFold and related results for interpretability! Stockfish has incorporated some probabilistic programming (neural network-based) but it's comparatively small-scaled, and behind SOTA of the bleeding-edge Transformer architectures (in terms of interpretability, nonetheless!) Surely, if we can't get supersymmetries in some complex forms, we could get ahead with the modern interpretability and RL techniques. Given the appropriate knowledge representation, by combining self-play with known playing sequences and behaviours by forcing the model into known lines, & perhaps partitioning by player styles so there's incentives for the model to learn some style feature, it should be possible for it to learn what we refer to as the essence of the game, i.e. archetypal human playing styles comfortably. Using insights learned from interpretability, it should be possible to further influence the model during inference.

If they were to get to that point, we could say that chess would be solved...
by richrichardsson | 2025-09-01 12:47:24+00:00
It's possibly because of conflating USB-C (the connector) with the USB protocols (what goes down the wires).

I could put a USB-C connector on a device and have it not even try to do any USB protocol over the wire. If not being careful about pinouts, it could be super easy to destroy either device if plugged into some other USB-compliant device.
by 0x000042 | 2025-09-01 12:47:28+00:00
Migadu SMTP servers and MX relays seem to have been down most of today.

The status page (https://status.migadu.com/) seems to switch between saying they are online/offline due to maintenance.

Users are unable to send outgoing emails at the moment and have been for the entire day.

Anyone else experiencing problems with them at the moment?
by p_l | 2025-09-01 12:47:42+00:00
And a major issue with OpenFirmware was that like other comparable interfaces from its time it required you to release a new OS version to support a new machine if it used different devices.

Something as simple as handling evolution in available steps in backlight control can require updated OS build on OpenFirmware.

ACPI was built for a world where a newly released computer had to still boot properly a system that predated it, which is major source of complexity in its bytecode.
by JeremyNT | 2025-09-01 12:48:56+00:00
While this matches my experience, it's worth mentioning thar the act of breaking a task up into the correct chunk size and describing it in English is itself a non trivial task which can be more time consuming than simply writing the actual code.

The fact that it works is amazing, but I'm less convinced that it's enhancing my productivity.

(I think they real productivity boost for me is if I still write the code and have the assistant write test coverage based on diffs, which is trivial to prompt for good results)
by thunfischtoast | 2025-09-01 12:50:17+00:00
I agree, but your points becomes stronger when you leave Netflix away. Netflix is a private entertainment company, and when I don't like their conditions I can always quit.

Banks on the other hand have so much more control over my life. With their apps being locked to the two major mobile OS I have many hoops to go through when I want to use an alternative one. It's not impossible yet, but it becomes very cumbersome to do so.
by t_mahmood | 2025-09-01 12:50:20+00:00
So, I am paying $20, for a glorified code generator, that may or may not be correct, to write a small function that I can do for free, and be confident about the correctness, if I have not been lazy to implement a test for it.

If you point out, with test it's also the same with any AI tool available, but to come to that result, I have to continuously prompt it till it gives me the desired output, while I may be able to do it in 2/3 iterations.

Reading documentation always made me little bit knowledgeable than before, while prompting the LLM, gives me nothing of knowledge.

And, I also have to decide which LLM would be good for the task at hand, and most of them will not be free (unless I use a local, but that will also use GPU, and add an energy cost)

I may be nitpicking, but I see too many holes with this approach
by jibal | 2025-09-01 12:50:56+00:00
There were no arguments against a virus causing respiratory disease being carried airborne. There was uncertainty as to whether the disease could be contracted from surfaces.

And viruses being airborne (carried on droplets) simply isn't what miasma theory is. Actual miasma theory is wrong and has no kernel of truth ... a fine example of how correlation is not causation.

And let's get back to the point:

> somehow the head doctor in our country believes in the miasma theory of disease

The man is an extraordinarily dangerous crank who is putting the health of Americans at grave risk ... he has already killed numerous children and it will soon get much worse. Any attempt to defend him in any way is vile.
by Telemakhos | 2025-09-01 12:51:22+00:00
The contact buttons at the bottom of the web page (email, "global community," and a phone icon) do nothing: they're just span elements in divs. There's a "Twitter" link instead of "X," and it links to "@afritales," which doesn't exist.

As others have pointed out, the web page promises "cultural heritage" and "authentic stories from Africa," but the demo shows AI slop. If you're offering both, then that needs to be made more clear: highlight the authentic stories, and then make clear that users have an option to AI-generate more stories like them. If you're offering only AI-generated stories (and your words "the stories are created to cover…" make that sound possible), you need to be forthright about that, because you'll be called out, with righteous indignation, for selling AI slop as if it were a particular people's cultural legacy.

Also, speaking of "particular people," if you actually want to do something good with this project, make the provenance of each story clear and specific: not just "African," not just "West African," but "a tale from a Wolof griot, collected by Birago Diop." Africa is the largest continent of all, and its cultures are many and diverse with many different storytelling traditions.
by palata | 2025-09-01 12:51:46+00:00
> It is the most important tech issue we are facing today.

How so? I cannot anonymously get a bank account, I cannot anonymously get a phone number, I cannot anonymously get a domain name. I don't see how terrible it is to have to be verified to distribute your app.

Noting that if you worry about banned apps like NewPipe, then first I don't know that Google will prevent its sideloading, and anyway NewPipe is open source so you can build and install it yourself.
by epolanski | 2025-09-01 12:53:34+00:00
Imho your post summarizes 90% of the posts I see about AI coding on HN: not understanding the tools, not understanding their strenghts and weaknesses, not being good at prompting or context management yet forming strong(ish) opinions.

If you don't know what they are good at and how to use them of course you may end up with mixed results and yes, you may waste time.

That's a criticism I have also towards AI super enthusiasts (especially vibe coders, albeit you won't find much here), they often confuse the fact that LLMs often one shot 80% of the solutions with the idea that LLMs are 80% there, whereas the Pareto principle well applies to software development where it's the hardest 20% that's gonna prove difficult.
by codeclimber | 2025-09-01 12:53:51+00:00
I pulled ideas from posts by Simon Willison, Orta Therox, the Anthropic team, Indragie Karunaratne, Chris Dzombak, and others, then tried them on real projects with Claude Code and Codex CLI. This page keeps only what proved useful, organized by stage (planning → coding → debugging → tests → refactoring). New techniques and real‑world experiences welcome.
by WalterBright | 2025-09-01 12:54:04+00:00
The drawings, being made after the fact to fulfill a contractual requirement, would leave crucial details out, and were never checked for accuracy.

If you farmed the drawings out to machinists to make the parts, they would not fit together.

One of the things I did in my engineering work at Boeing was to work out the tolerances for each part. The idea was that if the parts were within tolerance, they'd all fit together. If the tolerances are missing or incorrect, then you're in for a lot of very expensive rework.

Some of the engineers were incompetent, and when the first run of parts were received, they could not be fit together. I'd be assigned to fix it. The assemblies I worked on all fit together first try.

The stab trim system had very powerful motors, and if the jackscrew nut was run into the stops too many times, it would tear it apart. So there was a mechanical cutoff system with cables and levers which would turn the motors off between 1/4 and 3/4 turn from the stops. It was not adjustable, since Boeing did not trust mechanics to adjust it properly. So, it relied on accurately machining the parts. I got the job of figuring out all the tolerances.

On the first build, I got a call from the factory saying, since I'd designed it, I get to be there for the first rigging. I arrived, and the seasoned mechanics laughed at me (I was very young) and said the rigging never worked the first time, and would have to be redesigned. We all crawled into the fuselage behind the rear pressure bulkhead. They manually set the cables to have it 1/2 turn from the bottom stop. Then they chortled, said they were going to break it, and turned the motors on. (Those motors make quite a racket.) They watched the stab trim go full travel to the top. The cutoff system shut off at exactly 1/2 turn from the end, dead center in the tolerance zone. I said "bye guys", climbed out, and went back to my desk.
by Havoc | 2025-09-01 12:55:13+00:00
> And the providers also need enough capacity to handle unforeseen spikes.

Indeed but the headroom the cloud needs overall is less than every customers individual worst case scenarios added up. They’d take a percentage of that total because statistically a situation where 100% of customers are at 100% of their peak at 100% same point in time is improbable

Must admit little surprised this logic isn’t self evident