MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sfn42 | 2025-09-03 12:13:10+00:00
I consider it my job to figure out the requirements. The fact that they aren't specified in detail allows me to do what I think is best rather than being bound by often arbitrary specifications.

I judge which decisions I make and which ones I bring up to my team/PO/whatever. Most of the time I just do what I think is best, some times I'll do something and then bring it up later like "I did this this way but if that doesn't work I can change it", typically for things that will be easy to change later. Some things I ask about before I do them because they won't be easy to change later.

I'll often take technical liberties with frontend designs, for example I'll use a html select rather than reinventing the drop-down just to be able to put rounded corners on the options. I'll style scrollbars using the very limited options css provides rather than reinvent scrollbars just to follow the design exactly. Most of the time nobody cares, we can always go back later and do these types of things if we really want a certain aesthetic.

I have never had the impression that my questions bother people, rather the opposite. I've had multiple designers say they appreciate the way I interact with them, I respect their work and their designs but I ask them if something looks like an oversight or I'm not exactly sure what their intention is. POs and such are always happy to answer simple questions, I make it easy for them: here's a decision we need to make, I want you to make it. Maybe I have a suggestion for what I would prefer and some reasons why I prefer that solution.

I don't expect them to think of everything and answer all my potential questions in advance, that's just unnecessary and difficult work.
by bambax | 2025-09-03 12:13:54+00:00
I don't know if it's sad; it's a different story, it's a kind of riff on the same themes.

In Genesis III, it's necessary for Adam and Eve to acquire knowledge and leave the garden, because in so doing they have sex and make children. While in the garden, they didn't know they were naked, and presumably didn't have sex or reproduced.

Also, when God finds out, he fist asks the man, who accuses "the woman you gave me". So then God turns to the woman, who says the snake deceived her. But here God stops his inquiry. We know the snake can talk because he talked to the woman, so why didn't God ask the snake why he did what he did?

An interpretation is that the snake ("the most clever of all animals God had made") is in fact God's instrument. He works for the boss.
by cardanome | 2025-09-03 12:14:23+00:00
The difference is that neurotypical people often have a super power that is called not having a executive dysfunction. If they want to do the task, think the task is important and are able to do the task, they can just do the task.

It is hard for me to even imagine that such a thing can exist but it absolutely is the case.

The difference is how strict the "need" it. Like neurotypical people also benefit from working on something they are interested at but for ADHD people it is not optional but necessary to function.

Also neurotypical people get much more dopamine out of even simple tasks while I can have the best conversation ever with someone and still need some fidget toys to not go crazy from sitting around.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-03 12:14:25+00:00
Oh, don't worry about the downvotes. Happens every time someone starts talking about improving software Quality around here.

Unpopular topic. I talk about it anyway, as it's one of my casus belli. I can afford the dings.

BTW: I used to work for Canon's main [photography] competitor, and Magic Lantern was an example of the kind of thing I wanted them to enable, but they were not particularly open to the idea -control freaks.

Also, it's a bit "nit-picky," I know, but I feel that any software that runs on-device is "firmware," and should be held to the same standards as the OS. I know that Magic Lantern has always been good. We used to hear customers telling us how good it was, and asking us to do similar.

I think RED had something like that, as well. I wonder how that's going?
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-03 12:14:42+00:00
I really hope someone within Microsoft is naming their open source coding agent Microsoft VibeCode. Let this be a thing. Its either that or "Lo" then you can have Lo work with Phi, so you can Vibe code with Lo Phi.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azure-ai-foundry-bl...
by moooo99 | 2025-09-03 12:15:45+00:00
Its of course true that this will somewhat even out once storage becomes more available. But there are still market forces at play. If the electricity prices are higher, operators have a renewed financial incentive to generate more power (more power = more revenue), for example by re-powering solar and wind farms.

Theoretically this would be an endless cycle, which is of course constrained by very practical needs of the electricity users.
by kentonv | 2025-09-03 12:16:08+00:00
No no no, Pages will not be "shut down".

Pages is gradually being unified into the Workers platform. For new projects we suggest just starting with Workers as it is strictly more powerful. But eventually existing Pages projects will be migrated to Workers automatically -- either that or we will just keep supporting Pages forever.

There are an enormous number of web sites hosted on Pages, it would be insane for us to turn them off.
by dgacmu | 2025-09-03 12:16:55+00:00
I decided on a foolish whim to upgrade from a 9 pro to a 10 pro, and so far I'm nothing but disappointed - it does nothing better than my old phone and the battery life is worse despite the newer CPU and larger battery , presumably due to all the background AI processing that I don't want. (The hope for increased battery life is the reason I upgraded.)

(I will say, though, that the 9pro was an amazing phone if you want a good camera to take annoying numbers of pictures of your kids.)
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-03 12:17:09+00:00
I dunno, 1kWh seems quite natural as a unit of building-scale energy usage when you know a kettle or space heater is about 3kW. We think about energy usage much more in terms of kW and hours than in watts and seconds. And even in small devices like an LED bulb, 5W is more obviously 0.005kW than, say, 2 hours is 7200 seconds.

And in this context it's much more obvious that it can notionally deliver energy at a peak rate of about 1% capacity per hour. If you said 1MW/360GJ, I don't think that would be nearly as clear.

Same for batteries, which started with car batteries/deep cycle batteries, rather than AA batteries, which usual don't even say, and phones. A battery that provides 1 amp (at 12V, but that's already given in a system) for 50 hours. Makes immediate practical sense, especially when equipment is often labelled in current draw and you can measure amps with an ammeter. 2.16MJ far less so.
by Chris2048 | 2025-09-03 12:18:08+00:00
AFAIK skin prick tests are the best for contact allergies, blood tests unlikely to find anything but severe allergies.

and I'm not sure how to find mild food allergies directly, seems to be all food diaries and correlation which feels mostly useless..

There also seems to be a hair test that AFAI can tell is an outright scam.
by rollcat | 2025-09-03 12:18:39+00:00
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned OpenBSD yet.

They've been advocating against SMT for a long while, citing security risks and inconsistent performance gains. I don't know which HW/CPU bug in the long series of rowhammer, meltdown, spectre, etc prompted the action, but they've completely disabled SMT in the default installation at some point.

The core idea by itself is fine: keep the ALUs busy. Maybe security-wise, the present trade-off is acceptable, if you can instruct the scheduler to put threads from the same security domain on the same physical core. (How to tell when two threads are not a threat to each other is left up as an exercise.)
by vintermann | 2025-09-03 12:19:18+00:00
I see two (really just one) reasons to try to learn to like something you currently don't.

The first one, and the only real one, is to get closer to other people. Someone you like, who you want to understand, and maybe more like. Someone it's worth becoming at least a slightly different person for, in terms of how you approach the world.

The second reason is boredom. It's actually just the first reason in disguise.

But this is why recommendation algorithms and culture-related ads can be so viscerally offensive. "Hello kids! Want to be more like Spotify's ideal of the perfect music consumer?" and the answer of actual kids is often yes, because they think other kids will say yes too, and they'd be too lonely only liking things no one else likes.
by Tiberium | 2025-09-03 12:19:33+00:00
The article itself appears to be largely AI-edited. And I'm really surprised that anyone would want to write an article on this, I assumed it was widely known? You can go onto Censys and find thousands of exposed instances for lots of self-hostable software, for LLM there are exposed instances of things like kobold, for image gen there's sd-webui, InvokeAI and more.
by freehorse | 2025-09-03 12:20:02+00:00
Author discovers that performance does not scale proportionally to %CPU utilisation, and gets instead to the conclusion that %CPU utilisation is a lie.

There are many reasons for the lack of a proportional relationship, even in the case where you do not have hyperthreading or downclocking (in which cases you just need to interpret %CPU utilisation in that context, rather than declare it "a lie"). Even in apple silicon where these are usually not an issue, you often do not get an exactly proportional scaling. There may be overheads when utilising multiple cores wrt how data is passed around, or resource bottlenecks other than CPU.
by anonymars | 2025-09-03 12:20:07+00:00
This isn't "deprecate a few functions" -- it's basically an effort on par with migrating to Unicode in the first place.

I disagree you could just "easily" shove it into the "A" version of functions. Functions that accept UTF-8 could accept ASCII, but you can't just change the semantics of existing functions that emit text because it would blow up backwards compatibility. In a sense it is covariant but not contravariant.

And now, after you've gone through all of this effort: what was the actual payoff? And at what cost if maintaining compatibility with the other representations?
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-03 12:20:38+00:00
I never had any of these back then, and I keep wondering what it would have been like to be all-in on these ecosystems. Especially Nintendo; gameboys with link cables, N64s with controller add-ons to insert your GB cartridges into, Super Nintendos with cartridges that add 3D hardware to your system, etc.

Closest thing is that a friend of mine had a NES and a cartridge with 365 games on it (in a menu with snails crawling towards each other), two controllers and the gun.
by iamwil | 2025-09-03 12:21:42+00:00
A computational notebook/knowledge base for building and running company workflows on just markdown files.

I recently started using Claude code for non-code tasks, and it does pretty well when automating parts of my workflow. I’m using it to generate blog post images, coach me on my cust dev sessions, etc., all from prompts and workflows written in markdown.

Anyone out there: have you done something similar? What specific workflow did you automate, either for your own second brain or for work related stuff?
by DavidWishengrad | 2025-09-03 12:21:47+00:00
---

Clarifier: The point of this preprint isn’t that “life alone solves everything,” but that life is the necessary baseline for any value, truth, or system to matter at all. The claim is:

Without life, no truths can be known, no values can be held, no debates can even occur.

Therefore, any system that doesn’t start with life as its first axiom is unsafe by design, because it can rationalize destroying the very condition that makes values possible. This doesn’t end the conversation about freedom, justice, or flourishing — it sets the floor those discussions stand on.
by procrast33 | 2025-09-03 12:21:48+00:00
I am curious why the TPDE paper does not mention the Copy-And-Patch paper. That is a technique that uses LLVM to generate a library of patchable machine code snippets, and during actual compilation those snippets are simply pasted together. In fairness, it is just a proof of concept: they could compile WASM to x64 but not C or C++.

I have no relation to the authors.

https://fredrikbk.com/publications/copy-and-patch.pdf
by dhx | 2025-09-03 12:21:51+00:00
"Job" objects allow some resource limits to be applied to groups of processes (including any children they spawn) but don't do much or anything for restricting the system resources accessible to process in a job.[1] Instead that is a feature called "silos"[2][3][4], as well as the accompanying use of Windows Brokering File System filter driver[5] (or is it UCIFS, or BFS+UCIFS...?[4]), as well as SeAccessCheck interception[6], and whatever else applied to a "silo" or processes.

Hardly anything about "silos" and seemingly nothing about BFS (for providing a virtual filesystem to a process) is documented publicly by Microsoft. Unless a Windows application developer has a particular interest in reverse engineering the Windows Kernel, they're probably not going to be using much of Windows Kernel sandboxing/isolation techniques beyond the simple interface that UWP exposes for GUI applications because it's just too hard otherwise.

For example, in the excellent description of this officially undocumented mess at [2] and [3], the author notes:

"What is interesting here is that there does not seem to be any general mechanisms for restricting access to syscalls globally, which means that the attack surface can be quite large. Indeed, even if it is possible for the Kernel to know if the execution comes from inside a Silo, each syscall must set up its checks (or not). In addition, some syscalls do not directly block access to Silos, but rather implement a different logic between a host and Silo context."

Another author at [4] finds all sorts of unexpected behaviours from this complex use of call interception, filter drivers, etc, such as endpoint security software not being aware of silos and use of filter drivers like BFS, etc, and not properly restricting or logging activities of "sandboxed" processes as developers and users of endpoint security software may expect.

Even if someone reverse engineered an adequate understanding of silos and whatever else Microsoft call "Process Isolation", they'd also potentially have to then learn the completely different Hyper-V isolation approach, as well as Mandatory Integrity Levels (MILs), as well as old school Windows ACL permissions, as well as the newish "Virtual Secure Mode" (VSM)[7]. It'd be like setting up a Linux system that has every Linux Security Module (LSM) enabled at once because SELinux is just too simple on its own.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/procthread/j...

[2] https://blog.quarkslab.com/reversing-windows-container-episo...

[3] https://blog.quarkslab.com/reversing-windows-container-part-...

[4] https://www.deepinstinct.com/blog/contain-yourself-staying-u...

[5] https://ht3labs.com/Brokering-File-System-January-2025-Patch...

[6] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/imp...

[7] https://github.com/tpn/pdfs/blob/master/Battle%20of%20SKM%20...
by spaceprison | 2025-09-03 12:22:34+00:00
If I say “flourishing is more important than life,” I am not denying the necessity of being alive. I am saying bare survival is insufficient.

Imagine a being kept alive forever in agony, if life alone is the irreducible axiom, then preserving that agony-life satisfies the principle.

So I would say that Flourishing life is the most important truth, because unlike non-death the denial of flourishing does not collapse into absurdity.
by rmccue | 2025-09-03 12:23:00+00:00
I don't think they're directly proportional, seems to be some sort of tailing off - Seagreen 1 (1075) and Torness (1200MW) seem to be a very similar size to Neart Na Gaoithe (450MW). (This could just appear similar because area of circles isn't a great way to visualise data though.)
by DrillShopper | 2025-09-03 12:23:05+00:00
I worked on a project that made a vest with controller vibration motors in it connected to a microcontroller. That microcontroller was connected by a serial -> USB converter and was controllable by the computer it was attached to.

Sadly, it wasn't for gaming. It was part of a study into the limitations of how much information humans can absorb at once, with the haptic feedback being tested as yet another input when there was a lot of auditory and visual input. I joked they should just use smell, but I don't think they wanted to subject the undergrad research subjects to weird smells.
by Difwif | 2025-09-03 12:23:15+00:00
I took a quick informal poll of my coworkers and the majority of us have found workflows where CC is producing 70-99% of the code on average in PRs. We're getting more done faster. Most of these people tend to be anywhere from 5-12 yrs professional experience. There are some concerns that maybe more bugs are slipping through (but also there's more code being produced).

We agree most problems stem from: 1. Getting lazy and auto-accepting edits. Always review changes and make sure you understand everything. 2. Clearly written specification documents before starting complex work items 3. Breaking down tasks into a managable chunk of scope 4. Clean digestible code architecture. If it's hard for a human to understand (e.g: poor separation of concerns) it will be hard for the LLM too.

But yeah I would never waste my time making that video. Having too much fun turning ideas into products to care about proving a point.
by Rohansi | 2025-09-03 12:23:21+00:00
It's a marketing issue. LLMs are being marketed similar to Tesla's FSD - claims of PhD-level intelligence, AGI, artificial superintelligence, etc. set the expectation that LLMs should be smarter than (most of) us. Why would we have any reason to doubt the claims of something that is smarter than us? Especially when it is very confident about the way it is saying it.
by Daishiman | 2025-09-03 12:23:28+00:00
> If the answer was yes, why do you think we’re in a situation where you need to dedicate that much of your own free time, sans compensation, just to make yourself attractive to companies so you can at best fall back on temporary employment?

Do you think good products just sell themselves? Do you think marketing departments exist because companies love to waste money? There's your answer.
by simiones | 2025-09-03 12:23:28+00:00
I read the comments praising these voices as very life like, and went to the page primed to hear very convincing voices. That is not at all what I heard though.

The voices are decent, but the intonation is off on almost every phrase, and there is a very clear robotic-sounding modulation. It's generally very impressive compared to many text-to-speech solutions from a few years ago, but for today, I find it very uninspiring. The AI generated voice you hear all over YouTube shorts is at least as good as most of the samples on this page.

The only part that seemed impressive to me was the English + (Mandarin?) Chinese sample, that one seemed to switch very seamlessly between the two. But this may well be simply because (1) I'm not familiar with any Chinese language, so I couldn't really judge the pronunciation of that, and (2) the different character systems make it extremely clear that the model needs to switch between different languages. Peut-être que cela n'aurait pas été si simple if it had been switching between two languages using the same writing system - I'm particularly curious how it would have read "simple" in the phrase above (I think it should be read with the French pronunication, for example).

And, of course, the singing part is painfully bad, I am very curious why they even included it.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-03 12:24:46+00:00
Yeah, a lot of the TTS has gotten really impressive in general. Definitely a clear leap from the TTS stuff I worked with for training simulations a bit over a decade ago. Aside: Installing a sound card (unused) on a windows server just to be able to generate TTS was interesting. It was required by the platform, even if it wasn't used for it.

I generally don't like a lot of the AI generated slop that's starting to pop up on YouTube these days... I do enjoy some of the reddit story channels, but have completely stopped with it all now. With the AI stuff, it really becomes apparent with dates/ages and when numbers are spoken. Dates/ages/timelines are just off as far as story generation, and really should be human tweaked. As to the voice gen, saying a year or measurement is just not how English speakers (US or otherwise) speak.
by cyanydeez | 2025-09-03 12:24:58+00:00
Sure, but its a boiling frog with cancer. Certain states made choices to skew far right and other states mde choices to "keep business open" and others made choices to remain ignorant.

This becomes diffusion of responsibility because every cycle maybe 1% were directly embracing far white religious authoritarian. The consistency of those choices were sticky because the oligarchy spent decades ensuring.

The point being, very few people actively participated and there was no progressive decadal length comspiracy. But the reverse isnt true.

There was and is a decadal length conspiracy to become a far right ethnostate run by religious minority.
by tintin888 | 2025-09-03 12:24:59+00:00
Most professional development tools are boring. So I tried to flip it: what if learning felt like playing a board game?

I built ThinkFast Arena: a Monopoly-style property-building game where you take on a professional role (software developer, marketer, etc.) and face real-world career challenges.

AI generates personalized scenarios that test your actual workplace skills.

You can create custom learning boards on any topic (leadership, technical skills, interview prep).

Compete against AI opponents, acquire “career properties,” and level up as challenges get more complex.

Runs as a progressive web app, so it works on any device.

Would this be fun or useful for you? What do you think would make it more engaging (or actually something people would want to use)?

Demo: https://thinkfast-arena.com/
by TrackerFF | 2025-09-03 12:25:20+00:00
It is the natural result of an industry where:

- There are low barriers to entry (education is not required, profession licences is not a thing, etc.)

- A strong culture of "job hopping" has emerged, which means companies are continuously interviewing candidates, and candidates are continuously looking for jobs.

- A big willingness to sacrifice the false positives, for the sake of keeping out the false negatives. Basically companies will increase the threshold/bar to keep out the "fakers" and bad hires, even if it means rejecting legitimate hires. The mantra that it is very expensive to hire the wrong people rings throughout the industry, and has for the past decades.

- Candidates are willing to play the game. Some people are willing to grind leetcode questions for months, years, if it means they get a shot at big tech companies. Smaller companies cargo cult.
by xenobeb | 2025-09-03 12:26:01+00:00
I am certain it has much to do with being in the training data or not.

I have loved GPT5 but the other day I was trying to implement a rather novel idea that would be a rather small function and GPT5 goes from a genius to an idiot.

I think HN has devolved into random conversations based on a random % of problems being in the training data or not. People really are having such different experiences with the models based on the novelty of the problems that are being solved.

At this point it is getting boring to read.