MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throaway5445454 | 2025-09-30 15:34:52+00:00
Well that's all well and good, but the ignorant masses who called EA the most evil company did so for basically the same reasons that you'd critique those other companies. Big corporations that put out productions designed to do nothing but take money from (often poor) people at the expense of their health.

To me, the constant criticism of gamers over the issue reads like shilling for that pathetic open letter EA put out in response. Classic deflection from a toxic entity.
by thegrim33 | 2025-09-30 15:35:07+00:00
I like how it's always "oh just safeguard people's data", oh "just" don't do anything bad with people's data.

Then you look up what the actual regulation says and it's hundreds of pages of pure legaleese (over 100 pages for GDPR, over 300 for Online Safety Act), that you'd need to hire a team of lawyers to parse and interpret to make sure you're not breaking any of the regulations therein.
by rAum | 2025-09-30 15:35:20+00:00
lol you should absolutely merge it and go with it in such cases, just collect evidence first to have enough deniability and enjoy the show. You can tell a child not to do the thing over and over or just accept it will very quickly learn for their life that touching hot oven is not a smart thing to do. With so much AI hype induced brainrot seems for certain individuals the only antitode is to make them feel direct consequences of their false beliefs. Without feedback loop there is no learning occurring at all.

More dangerous thing is such idiot managers can judge you by their lens of shipping LLM garbage they didn't applied in reality to see consequences, living in fantasy due to lack of technical knowledge. Of course it directly leads to firing people and adding more tasks/balloning expectation on leftover team who are force trapped to burn out and be replaced as trash as that makes total sense in their world view and "evidence".
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-30 15:35:46+00:00
> I'm curious if anyone has found any serious performance benefit from using a Span<T> or a "public readonly record struct" in a .NET CMS, where the pages are usually fire and forget?

Most of the benefits of Span<T> you gain by keeping up with .NET upgrades. Span<T> is a low level optimization that benefits things like ASP.NET internals far more than most user code. Each version of .NET since Span<T> was added has improved the use of it. Additionally in C#, the compiler prefers Span<T> overloads when they make sense so just rebuilding for the most recent .NET opts you in to the benefits. Whether or not those are "serious" benefits is a matter of taste and also a reminder that your code probably doesn't spend all of its time doing low level things. (Your database query time, for instance is generally going to have a bigger impact.)

I'd add a big word of caution for "public readonly record struct". I've seen a few codebases start using that wordy version "by default" and then build themselves into a far bigger terrible performance pit than they expected. There's a lot of good reasons that "record" defaults to class and has you opt in to struct behavior. It's a lot easier to reason about classes. It's a lot easier to understand the performance trade-offs on the side of classes. The GC is your friend, not your enemy, even and sometimes especially for short-lived data. (Gen0 collections are often very fast. The "nursery" was designed for fire-and-forget data churn. It's the bread-and-butter job of a generational garbage collector to separate the churn from the stable, handle the churn quickly and keep the stable stabler.)

Structs are pass-by-value, which means as soon as they exit the "lucky path" of staying in the same stack they are copied from place to place. If your models include a lot of other structs, you start copying memory a lot more regularly. If your structs grow too large for certain stackframe quotas they get boxed onto the GC heap anyway not saving you heap allocations.

Classes are pass-by-reference. If you are using "readonly" as a part of your structs to build immutable data models, all the copies add up from every immutable data change creating a new struct. Whereas "regular' immutable records (classes) can share structure between each other by reference (the immutable parts that don't change can use the same references and thus share the same memory).

If your models are more than a couple integers and have any sort of nesting or complex relationships, "public readonly record struct" can be a premature optimization that actually ends up costing you performance. Not every bit of data can be moved to the stack and not every bit of data should be moved to the stack. Keep in mind there are trade-offs and a healthy performing .NET application generally uses a smart mixture of stack and GC, because they are both important tools in the toolbelt. Like I said, there are reasons that "public record" defaults to "class" and "public readonly record struct" is the wordy opt-in and it is useful to keep them in mind.
by irusensei | 2025-09-30 15:35:55+00:00
I've retired mine in favor of a Switchbot. Battery was tired and the cost of a new one is 1/3 the price of a new one so I got this K10.

At first I've liked it but the bruise rotor is already making rattling noises. It advertised itself as Matter compatible but I had to buy a hub thing to integrate it in HomeKit.

Worst thing it relies on Chinese servers for its metrics. I got China blocked on my router due to reasons so I can't check the status of the parts without leaving my wifi. I already bought a box of 1 year replacement parts for this but I'm getting rid of it as soon as I can.
by panarky | 2025-09-30 15:35:55+00:00
People always wring their hands that operating at a new, higher level of abstraction with destroy people's ability to think and reason.

But people still think and reason just fine, but now at a higher level that gives them greater power and leverage.

Do you feel like you're missing something when you "cook for yourself" but you didn't you didn't plant and harvest the vegetables, raise and butcher the protein, forge the oven, or generate the gas or electricity that heats it?

You also didn’t write the CPU microcode or the compiler that turns your code into machine language.

When you cook or code, you're already operating on top of a very tall stack of abstractions.
by mpicker0 | 2025-09-30 15:36:46+00:00
Travel videos, for one. I've had to wade through a bunch of "Top 10 must-see places in $CITY" that are obviously thrown together listicles, narrated by an AI voice, with no value whatsoever.

Makes me wish they'd start showing thumbs-down counts on videos again, maybe that would have some impact on the problem.
by some_furry | 2025-09-30 15:36:52+00:00
> how are you going to get "adversarial attacks" with prompt injection

Lots of ways his could happen. To name two: Third-party software dependencies, HTTP requests for documentation (if your agent queries the Internet for information).

If you don't believe me, setup a MITM proxy to watch network requests and ask your AI agent to implement PASETO in your favorite programming language, and see if it queries https://github.com/paseto-standard/paseto-spec at all.
by Jeremy1026 | 2025-09-30 15:37:04+00:00
Same. I don't stray from my core Youtube. I don't even subscribe to channels, but my algorithm is still only offering me videos from creators that I've been watching for years and trust. When one of them jumps the shark, looking at you Veritasium and Mark Rober, I just stop clicking their videos and eventually they stop showing up in my list.
by archon810 | 2025-09-30 15:37:57+00:00
What are your thoughts as obviously someone with deep knowledge of the ecosystems at play on the various parental control laws that are going into effect in the US?

The one in Utah that was already signed and the one in California plus the looming federal bill? The ones that make app stores verify kids' ages and request permission from parents?

How is F-Droid planning on tackling this?
by pixl97 | 2025-09-30 15:38:00+00:00
This means really little in itself.

Can your customer switch to another product, yes or no. If no, then polish won't happen.

Do customers actually value 'real' polish and not just a slick looking UI? If no, then real polish doesn't matter.

As a software writer you'll get your ass kicked into the ground by another company that writes catchy features and nice looking interfaces 9 times out of 10. So few actual customers know out to measure 'polish' that it's almost a non consideration.
Show HN: Manta – open-source, graph-based IDE
by makosst | 2025-09-30 15:38:21+00:00
Hi HN!

I am Konstantin, building Manta (https://github.com/manta-ide/manta) alongside my co-founder Yehor. It is a graph-based IDE with natural-language nodes, that lets you index your codebase and work by creating and connecting nodes.

I always loved how Miro works - you can describe software in a few different ways, and make it clear how you think it should work on technical or product level.

I tried several solutions that let you build software by using nodes, but all those are forcing you to use the nodes they created, with strict connectors, and instead of making it easier, it becomes visual programming which is just harder to maintain than plain code.

That's why we build this solution, that is not restrictive of which nodes and connections you want to make.

We use a coding agent (your local Claude Code) underneath, and it is smart enough to understand what did you mean by the nodes you created.

This has a few interesting effects: - You can describe software on different levels of abstraction - You can choose to work with features, user flow, architecture diagram, timeline, or any other way you want - Node properties are now chosen by you, so you can decide which configuration (or no at all) you need for some component.

We are also working on more features for describing your software - edge and node types, comments on the canvas, supporting multiple graphs for a single solution.

On the technical level, it is a graph described in XML, that is editable on the screen. There are 2 states of the graph - "base" that is already implemented, and "current" which you are editing, and you see which nodes are modified.

Once you are ready to build it into code, you click a "build" button and the agent sees the difference between current and previous version, and can build out the changes and iteratively "fill in" the base graph with implemented changes.

For the property system we tried generating properties directly in code as a configuration, but it required to change the code while indexing a codebase. So while it worked well, it might introduce new bugs, and we switched off to graph-only properties. So the properties only exist on the graph, and once you modify them you need to "build" with the AI agent to see the changes. The AI agent just sees the direct commands of implementing some specific change in some node.

To make the coding agent's work easier we added metadata to the node, and it can specify which files were modified during creation of the node. While editing it next time he can go directly to the right files.

You can also use the chat to ask the agent directly for some fix, to index the codebase or to do some graph changes to automate some of the work. I personally either ask it to index on some level of abstraction/projection or if I know the codebase already - I just create the rough outline of how the architecture looks, and ask it to index in, to expand the descriptions and fill in the properties for nodes.

Would love to hear your feedback!
by ferguess_k | 2025-09-30 15:38:46+00:00
Interesting. I heard about FullSail and Digipen back in the day. I guess nowadays they are less relevant, because a lot of stuffs are online now.

I think shaders are usually written in a higher level language, but for drivers it is in C, right? Never written any graphic stuffs actually, but would be fun to try it out -- instant gratification and I can choose what level I want to reach -- once I can write software 3d renderer I can technically make any 3d games I want.
by paxys | 2025-09-30 15:38:58+00:00
The only time I hear about this “AI actress” is when there is online outrage against it. I’m assuming the negative attention is part of their marketing campaign, and it is working wonderfully. So much so that I actually want to see the end result of casting “her”.

Like everything else in the attention economy if you want something/someone to go away then just...stop talking about them. Or at least let it become a real thing first.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-30 15:39:00+00:00
> Despite the fact that this was actively debated for decades, modern math courses seldom acknowledge the fact that they are making unprovable intellectual leaps along the way.

That’s not at all true at the level where you are dealing with different infinities, usually, which tends to come after the (usually, fairly early) part dealing with proofs and the fact that all mathematics is dealing with “unprovable intellectual leaps” which are encoded into axioms, and everything in math which is provable is only provable based on a particular chosen set of axioms.

It may be true that math beyond that basic level doesn’t make a point of going back and explicitly reviewing that point, but it is just kind of implicit in everything later.
by taeric | 2025-09-30 15:39:07+00:00
They are also much more interaction based than people typically ack. Ctrl-z sending something to the background and being able to list the currently active jobs for the current shell are specifically affordances for someone sitting at the keyboard. Even the pushd/popd workflow is again for the operator.

Python and a few others such as LISP, smalltalk, etc., have some affordances made for a developer at the keyboard. Oddly, most of them are not taught to developers, it seems. The number of people I have worked with that didn't know of python's `help` is stark.
by bluGill | 2025-09-30 15:39:09+00:00
And how hard it is proves that zfs didn't make a bad choice in not trying the same. (though it would be interesting if either had a goal of a clone - that is same on disk data structures. Interesting but probably a bad decision as I have no doubt there is something about zfs that they regret today - just because the project is more than 10 years old)
by fabbari | 2025-09-30 15:39:23+00:00
Did you actually look at the numbers? You should give it a try. The best you can get from those numbers is that people are more likely to donate to the Democratic party than the Republican one.

For example: true, 99.4% of the donations from the USDA employees went to the Democratic part. 99.4% of how many donations? Less than 3,000. - Source [0] - and that's an overestimate, since that filter will include donations from 2015.

How many employees work for the USDA? About 100,000 [1].

That means that 97,000 people made no donations - to either party.

[0] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

[1]
by N70Phone | 2025-09-30 15:39:51+00:00
> I.e., understanding a code base, the algorithms, etc.?

The big problem is that LLMs do not *understand* the code you tell them to "explain". They just take probabilistic guesses about both function and design.

Even if "that's how humans do it too", this is only the first part of building an understanding of the code. You still need to verify the guess.

There's a few limitations using LLMs for such first-guessing: In humans, the built up understanding feeds back into the guessing, as you understand the codebase more, you can intuit function and design better. You start to know patterns and conventions. The LLM will always guess from zero understanding, relying only on the averaged out training data.

A following effect is that which bunderbunder points out in their reply: while LLMs are good at identifying algorithms, mere pattern recognition, they are exceptionally bad at world-modelling the surrounding environment the program was written in and the high level goals it was meant to accomplish. Especially for any information obtained outside the code. A human can run a git-blame and ask what team the original author was on, an LLM cannot and will not.

This makes them less useful for the task. Especially in any case where you intent to write new code; Sure, it's great that the LLM can give basic explanations about a programming language or framework you don't know, but if you're going to be writing code in it, you'd be better off taking the opportunity to learn it.
by agloe_dreams | 2025-09-30 15:39:58+00:00
Honestly the best argument for uncompressed is actually nothing to do with file quality or loss - it's that Apple only supports uncompressed Fuji RAWs.

You cannot preview or process lossless compressed Fuji RAWs on iOS natively but the uncompressed files are equal to Apple's own RAWs in support. On the field, it is sadly worth every byte to be able to grab a file directly off the camera and tweak it or send it to an editor. :/
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-30 15:40:22+00:00
Are there any useful generalizations of how complex attractors like this typically work? Some systems will have multiple attractors - stable points of the system's dynamics, but what about features/regions of a complex attractor like this - e.g. the circular regions looking like Jupiter's red spot - are they typically/ever sub-attractors in their own right (enter once and never exit)?
by sylens | 2025-09-30 15:40:43+00:00
> Let's also not forget video games are discretionary spending, meaning they could charge $400 and it would still not be any more immoral than an expensive handbag. It would just mean that I'm not buying it, just like how I don't buy expensive handbags.

This is a problem in the video game community, where they feel that they have to buy new games, new hardware, etc. because their identity is built on being a "gamer" and they have to maintain that identity. That's why you see so much toxicity about cosmetics, microtransactions, raising prices, buggy games on launch - these people literally cannot help themselves from buying everything, so they feel like their only recourse is to complain (and in some cases, harass others) about it relentlessly.
by jfengel | 2025-09-30 15:40:46+00:00
I don't think that's correct. The novel was inspired in part by the 1979 revolution in Iran, but the basis for it was her research on Puritanism. It's set in Boston, where Atwood was doing research at Harvard.

I doubt Atwood would write a novel about Islam. Her work is far more potent when commenting on her own culture, not somebody else's.

As for what liberals support... this liberal supports not killing people. Even anti-gay bigots. I'm Jewish and I have a lot of support for Israel, and an extreme skepticism about the claims of casualties from propaganda sources, but the level of brutality has managed to make me question that.

Once the Gazans are alive, then I can challenge their anti-gay view (and long list of other atrocities). For the moment, they're too busy dying to actually persecute anybody.
by blackboattech | 2025-09-30 15:40:47+00:00
A new way for realtors and potential buyers to do property research.

A "trying to solve my own problem" project. Managing my realestate portfolio and getting an unbiased estimate pricing estimate for new locations i'm interested in is tedious. Doing my own research on a location takes hours.

https://realestate.blackboattech.com/ makes this easier converting all real-estate research into a one click affair. Agent automatically accesses the location and neighborhood to score amenities and gets an average price range for similar homes. Research reports are great for consumers and realtors can have on-demand reports generated for the most up-to-date information. Over time the plan is to have passive tracking of my existing real-estate portfolio notifying me of local events or litigations that may affect my property pricing.
by ferguess_k | 2025-09-30 15:41:08+00:00
Thanks! Sorry I don't have any specific questions so don't want to throw random stuffs at you. I think I'll begin by writing a software renderer and see what happens. Once I have a 3d renderer I can technically build any 3d games I wish to build (as long as it doesn't require eye candies!) so I can go from there. Drivers are still too far away from me -- and as others pointed out, it's extremely to write one without being an insider.
by erezsh | 2025-09-30 15:41:23+00:00
I like the promise, and it looks nice. But I'm not sure what are the selling points.

- pytest already works with assert. Why brag about something that is already commonplace?

- It could help if your docs explained the alternative to using fixtures. I assume it would be done by re-using givens, but you could make it clearer what is the preferred way to do it, and what is gained, or lost, but doing it that way.

- Can you explain how your diff is better than the pytest diff? (I'm asking as someone who hates the pytest diff)
by pavon | 2025-09-30 15:41:45+00:00
I agree in general that keyword searching for a buzzword will have false positives, as people work it in to their description just to ride the trend. However, that is a bad example. If the core of your business is developing new AI models, then you are an AI startup. Personally I think it is great that someone is using the recent breakthroughs in AI and applying it to something other than LLMs, as well as trying to fuse rules based systems (physics) and AI. Way more interesting than AI startups that are just trying to slap an LLM onto a task that it isn't ready for. But still an AI startup.
by claytongulick | 2025-09-30 15:41:47+00:00
I'm so glad someone has finally described the phenomena so well.

"Comprehension debt" is a perfect description for the thing I've been the most concerned about with AI coding.

One I got past the Dunning-Kruger phase and started really looking at what was being generated, I ran into this comprehension issue.

With a human, even a very junior one, you can sort of "get in the developer's head". You can tell which team member wrote which code and what they were thinking at the time. This leads to a narrative, or story of execution which is mostly comprehensible.

With the AI stuff, it's just stochastic parrot stuff. It may work just fine, but there will be things like random functions that are never called, hundreds or thousands of lines of extra code to do very simple things. References to things that don't exist, and never have.

I know this stuff can exist in human code bases too - but generally I can reason about why. "Oh, this was taken out for this issue and the dev forgot to delete it".

I can track it, even if it's poor quality.

With the AI stuff, it's just randomly there. No idea why, if it is used, was ever used, makes sense, is extra fluff or brilliant.

It takes a lot of work to figure out.