MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ekidd | 2025-10-12 12:41:32+00:00
> I'm so curious around what people's median experience is of AI coding tools.

My experience is coding agents work best for either absolute beginners, or for lead engineers who have experience building and training teams. Getting good results out of coding agents is a lot like getting good results out of interns: You need to explain clearly what you want, ask them to explain what they plan to do, give feedback on the plan, and then very carefully review the results. You need to write up your preferred coding style, you need a document that explains "how to work on this project", you need to establish rigorous automated quality checks, etc. Using a coding agent heavily is a lot like being promoted to "technical lead", with all the tradeoffs that entails.

Here's a recent discussion of a good blog post on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503867

I have gotten some very nice results out of Sonnet 4.5 this past week. But it required using my "technical management" skills very heavily. And it required lots extremely careful code review. Clear documentation, robust QA, and code review are the main bottlenecks.

I mean, the time I spent writing AGENTS.md wasn't wasted. I'm writing down a lot of stuff I used to teach in pairing sessions.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-10-12 12:41:59+00:00
htmx isn't dead, but, from a semantic stand point, it's pretty done:

https://htmx.org/essays/future/

there are bugs, but we have to trade off fixes against potentially breaking users sites that depend on (sometimes implicitly) the current behavior

this makes me very hesitant to make changes and accept PRs, but i also feel bad closing old issues without really diving deep into them

such is life in open source
by throwaway173738 | 2025-10-12 12:42:35+00:00
Yeah 100%. CPS has in their manuals repeated the phrase “it is not considered neglect for a family to be poor.” That suggests they’ve been weaponized often against “people we don’t like.”

The other thing of note is that that same group of people are more interested in fostering and adopting and that it’s also a way to indoctrinate the children of “people we don’t like.”
by Telaneo | 2025-10-12 12:42:47+00:00
> 1. I looked at AdGuardHome but I preferred PiHole because I found its documentation a bit more helpful for my purpose (the Unbound sample, the Wireguard setup, etc)

Probably the right call, but funnily enough, I had to go the other way. PiHole started using 100% of the CPU on my Raspberry Pi 1B after an update to version 6.x, which then obviously slowed the entire network to a crawl and made it unusable. Although later versions supposedly fixed that, whatever was the latest version at the time still had that problem for me, even on a completely fresh install.

AdGuardHome worked for me without any hassle, but I would never have even considered it, given I'd been happy with PiHole for 5+ years, if it hadn't been for the fact that whatever update PiHole did completely borked its usability.
by thasso | 2025-10-12 12:43:01+00:00
This part is bewildering to me:

> Now, if you try to watch file descriptor 2000, select will loop over fds from 0 to 1999 and will read garbage. The bigger issue is when it tries to set results for a file descriptor past 1024 and tries to set that bit field in say readfds, writefds or errorfds field. At this point it will write something random on the stack eventually crashing the process and making it very hard to debug what happened since your stack is randomized.

I'm not too literate on the Linux kernel code, but I checked, and it looks like the author is right [1].

It would have been so easy to introduce a size check on the array to make sure this can't happen. The man page reads like FD_SETSIZE differs between platforms. It states that FD_SETSIZE is 1024 in glibc, but no upper limit is imposed by the Linux kernel. My guess is that the Linux kernel doesn't want to assume a value of FD_SETSIZE so they leave it unbounded.

It's hard to imagine how anyone came up with this thinking it's a good design. Maybe 1024 FDs was so much at the time when this was designed that nobody considered what would happen if this limit is reached? Or they were working on system where 1024 was the maximum number of FDs that a process can open?

[1]: The core_sys_select function checks the nfds argument passed to select(2) and modifies the fd_set structures that were passed to the system call. The function ensures that n <= max_fds (as the author of the post stated), but it doesn't compare n to the size of the fd_set structures. The set_fd_set function, which modifies the user-side fd_set structures, calls right into __copy_to_user without additional bounds checks. This means page faults will be caught and return -EFAULT, but out-of-bounds accesses that corrupt the user stack are possible.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-10-12 12:43:21+00:00
A great idea, bypassing as much conversion as possible between vector space and natural language tokens. Reminds me of a discussion of having AI’s “talk” to each other using vector space.

There was an interesting quote “plain old BM25 from 1994 outperforms vector search on recall” and super relevant to what I did yesterday. I am trying to use small local models more often and yesterday I wrote Common Lisp code that uses a large corpus of text and a user query or prompt to construct a fairly concise one-shot prompt with select context from the text corpus. This is RAG, and I used both BM25 and vector embeddings matching. I added the code and an example as a new chapter in my CL book (link directly to new material: https://leanpub.com/lovinglisp/read#leanpub-auto-autocontext...) yesterday afternoon. BM25 is fast. This is new code, and I will certainly be experimenting more with it, but as-is it is useful when working with small local LLMs.
by oreally | 2025-10-12 12:43:35+00:00
I'm not sure if you even read the article nor his books, and I disagree with your interpretation of his actions because they have very extravagant presumptions, judging from your comments.

I don't think he was afraid. I think he mapped out his late age future, and wanted to fast forward to what his next adventure even in post-death while leaving his last touches on the world a good one. Leaving the world a better place than when he started, as they say.

> I’m less concerned about what was in his head than the message that he sends.

As quoted from the article: Daniel Kahneman did not want to make a statement or start a debate. "I am not ashamed of my decision," he wrote, "but I don't want it to be discussed publicly either."
Show HN: I built a free tool to make Before–After comparison videos
by Lazycathy | 2025-10-12 12:43:48+00:00
I often wanted to show photo restoration results in a clean before–after format, but most video tools were either paid or overly complicated.

So I built a simple web tool — you upload two photos (before and after), and it automatically generates a sliding or fade video showing the transformation.

It’s useful for photo restoration, AI art comparisons, makeup, design edits, and more.

You can try it for free here: https://beforeafter.online/

Would love your thoughts or feature suggestions!
by 7373737373 | 2025-10-12 12:44:12+00:00
In addition to x-rays, hyperspectral cameras can also be used to discern material composition at least superficially: https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Hyperspectral_Imaging_Ass...

https://www.specim.com/hyperspectral-imaging-applications/hy...

awesome tech
by Razengan | 2025-10-12 12:44:40+00:00
These type of calculations don't really work for things like skyscrapers, high-rise apartment complexes, or the slum-towns of Asia and South America, and conversely for very sparsely populated regions like the fringes of the Sahara. Antarctica has people too but it doesn't make any sense to count it as "populated".

I think we can just draw an outline around cities, towns, and villages and count that area as populated, no matter how many people are actually in there.

For long stretches of land where there's just a single highway going through and a few gas stations, motels and shacks, totaling maybe <100 people for many miles around, we can count that land as unpopulated.

Isolated islands with indigenous/uncontacted tribes, not sure.. We may have to consider their population growth and see if they're in "equilibrium" with "nature" and so on.

A simple glance at Google Earth shows large parts of Russia as clearly unpopulated/undelevoped, then there's the deserts of China and Africa, and some natural land in the Americas, and finally of course there's Antarctica, until the Elder Things awaken.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-12 12:45:09+00:00
Unfortunately:

> Some of uv's functionality cannot be expressed in the pylock.toml format; as such, uv will continue to use the uv.lock format within the project interface.

> However, uv supports pylock.toml as an export target and in the uv pip CLI.

— https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/layout/#the-lock...
by mallowdram | 2025-10-12 12:47:39+00:00
He makes cause and effect statements and posits them as definitive. This person does this and that reaction occurs. These are the causal illusions we build history from after the fact. It's a kind of game that becomes addictive. He happens to have a skillset that makes it more addictive then the usual History channel offering. Our problem though, is that history as we design it, is not really there. Sayyd Qutb going to a sock hop no more caused 9/11 than a chance encounter bin Laden had with a courier in 1977. There are thousands of factors, mistakes, etc that lead to 9/11. Designing a casual narrative out of it is an illusion.

That we are entranced like moths to history is not well-understood by the general population. We like well-designed narratives that simplify what are only validly scientifically correlated events. The real question now is how do we evade the addiction and grow up to become self-sufficient using information.
by mattkevan | 2025-10-12 12:48:32+00:00
I loved quartz composer. It made it really easy to build all sorts of motion graphics. I’d see it used a lot at gigs to create audio-driven visuals. There was even a pretty cool VJ app built on it.

I’ve tried things like Touch Designer and Max MSP but they’re too heavy to just pick up and play with. QC was the right balance between simplicity and power.
by 9dev | 2025-10-12 12:48:34+00:00
In ecosystems with hundreds of dependencies, that requires you to review the changelog and source code of all of them all the time, especially if you want to avoid security issues fixed in more recent versions. I’d rather have a clear indication of something I need to take care of (a new major version), something new I might benefit from (a new minor version), or something that improved the library in some way (a new patch version). That alone slices required effort on my part down considerably.
by floundy | 2025-10-12 12:48:36+00:00
I have two pi-holes running concurrently, mainly so it doesn’t ruin the internet for my wife if one goes down. In 4-5 years of running pi-hole I’ve had I think 3 complete failures, 2 were due to cheap SD card corruption and one due to a failed upgrade to pihole v6.

I also excluded most of her devices from any filtering by the pihole because she wants to be able to click the sponsored links and ads on Google. Whatever.
by c0balt | 2025-10-12 12:49:16+00:00
> That's a new package with a new name.

Well, yeah, it's reasonable people flame you there. What is the difference between,

- zlib-1 v 23

- zlib 1.2.3

except that automatic updates and correlation are harder for the first approach. It also will likely make typosquatting so much more fun and require namespacing at the very least (to avoid someone publishing, e. G., zlib-3 when official projects only cover zlib-{1,2}.
by ednite | 2025-10-12 12:50:00+00:00
I'm sharing a piece inspired by a fellow HN member who asked what to do when dealing with a bad manager. IMHO, and from someone who's lived this, unless you're a founding member, it's best to start quietly looking for another job. No matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise, a toxic environment will always hold you back from your full potential. Been there, done that, and never looked back.

TL;DR: A tiny spider kept rebuilding its web on my car mirror, only for the wind to destroy it every day. Watching it became a metaphor for staying in toxic environments and calling it "resilience."

We often mistake endurance for progress. Like the spider, we keep rebuilding in places(workplaces, relationships, or online spaces) that are tearing us down or, at very least, holding us back, believing endurance equals strength. True resilience is knowing when to stop rebuilding and move somewhere healthier.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-10-12 12:50:23+00:00
> as far as I can tell that's not useful for low-power computing—the NAND Flash chip is going to use an order of magnitude more power than the CPU

Agreed that the NAND can consume a ton more than the CPU, so duty cycle has to be kept low. There's a few places where XIP NAND excels: it's big, it's cheap, and it can saturate the XIP memory bus just like NOR for large reads - it's a great place to store bitmap graphics. One downside is that the random access latency is pretty terrible.

> with XIP you can't predict or even really measure how much you're accessing it

There are a couple incomplete options here:

Just for measuring, you can fence off the XIP address range to generate MPU access violations, then work out a duty cycle.

The cache has performance counters, but at the cache level they don't tell you anything about internal flash vs XIP flash.

> The (non-SPI!) NAND I'm going to attempt to use only uses 18μW in standby

There are similar low standby QSPI parts available(10uA@1.8v typical), like W25N01GV.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-12 12:50:58+00:00
> LTE is far worse, with several dozen different bands

The national radio regulators are mostly to blame for that part, as far as I understand. So ultimately the national militaries, who hogged most of the relevant spectrum for radar(?) at a time when you couldn’t viably communicate over it, and will now never let go of it, at least not in a coordinated fashion (see: 5G rollout).

E.g. 2.4 GHz WiFi avoided the same problem by using a mostly-unregulated band, which as far as I can tell (but can’t reliably confirm) seems to have been essentially allocated for microwave ovens (a rotational absorption band of water molecules, which is why it’s difficult to heat up frozen things in a microwave).
by sunsetMurk | 2025-10-12 12:51:27+00:00
Divvy has a pretty UI to choose the size and location of windows, and puts little buttons in the top corner of windows to change their size and location.

Rectangle provides hot keys and an icon in the menu bar to set window size and location.

I use rectangle now, but have used divvy in the past and I think is better for people who like to use their mouse vs hot keys.
by thejohnconway | 2025-10-12 12:51:41+00:00
Species is a concept that isn't particularly well defined, and certainly not in palaeontology. One can see, however, diverging body plans (disparity), distinct lineages (diversity). If we take our extinction further, it will probably be tens of millions of years before we see the kind of diversity and disparity we had until the last couple of centuries. Its the period of imbalance that causes the problem.

Anyway, congrats on not caring about nature. It's must feel very free.
by jemmyw | 2025-10-12 12:52:04+00:00
> You want to know how to address someone? Sure, in English polite forms have "Sir/Madam" variations

I've got long hair but other than that you'd be hard pressed to mistake me for a woman. Yet 2 times recently I've been addressed as "madam" in stores. Both times they realized immediately, one person just didn't address me again. The other continued to call me madam and obviously didn't know what to do as I hadn't corrected. I was just thinking at the time it's odd how it makes you feel something even though it's just an innocuous word and I've got no reason to care.
by pavlov | 2025-10-12 12:52:06+00:00
The roadmap is revealing. Before any actual product-related work they have these three bullet points:

- Rebrand from Ai23T → Coral Protocol - New Token live on Solana - Major exchange listings

It’s all about pumping another token that’s a rebrand from a previous one.

What happened to “Ai23T”? Did it ship anything? Who cares! There’s a new token to list on exchanges and a new wave of hope and dreams.

These things are no different from penny stocks of 1980s except that they’re promoted globally rather than by boiler room scam callers.
by ciabattabread | 2025-10-12 12:52:08+00:00
> The guest only has to deflect the "tough" question a few times and then nothing else happens, they just move on.

How about 12 times? See BBC News’s Jeremy Paxman interview with Michael Howard - https://youtu.be/IqU77I40mS0?si=NpW7cSqi2eXsQt8s
by em-bee | 2025-10-12 12:52:53+00:00
can you give an example of how variable substitution in your language looks like?

one of the things i think a lisp for shell should have, and i agree that this may not be easy, but unix commands should be first class functions, as in, you should not need a $ or sh macro to make them work. the other thing is that strings should not be quoted, and so you need something else to designate variables like $path or ($ path)
by JimDabell | 2025-10-12 12:54:51+00:00
> you seem shocked and angry that anyone would imply that this would lead to safe mandatory scans on your phones for that and the other

Where have I given you that impression? The thing that annoys me is the sensible discussion being drowned out by ignorance.

> If you can't acknowledge this, it puts you in a position where you can't be convincing to people who need you to deflect obvious, well-known criticisms before beginning a discussion.

I cannot parse this, it’s word salad. People who need me to deflect criticisms? What? I genuinely do not understand what you are trying to say here. Maybe just break the sentences up into smaller ones? It feels like you’re trying to say too many things in too few sentences. What people? Why do they need me to deflect criticisms?
by atherton33 | 2025-10-12 12:55:46+00:00
I agree with you about what's described here.

There is engineering when this is done seriously, though.

Build a test set and design metrics for it. Do rigorous measurement on any change of the system, including the model, inference parameters, context, prompt text, etc. Use real statistical tests and adjust for multiple comparisons as appropriate. Have monitoring that your assumptions during initial prompt design continue to be valid in the future, and alert on unexpected changes.

I'm surprised to see none of that advice in the article.
by gassi | 2025-10-12 12:56:59+00:00
> There is only one viewpoint present on the Gaza page

That's because there's an entirely different page that outlines the war in Gaza and Israel's justification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war#Initial_Israeli_count...

> For some reason the word "dictator" is not mentioned here

You're looking in the wrong place again. Maduro's article names him a dictator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicol%C3%A1s_Maduro, third paragraph). Chavez's doesn't go that far, but it does state the dictatorial claims of his political opponents in a few locations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez#%22Socialism_...).

> Did you know Iran never had any socialists or students in their ayatollah-dictatorship revolution?

"However, as ideological tensions persisted between Pahlavi and Khomeini, anti-government demonstrations began in October 1977, developing into a campaign of civil resistance that included communism, socialism, and Islamism."

A search for "iranian revolution" on this page will return many results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Iran

> you will still find these facts if you dig into the detail pages on wikipedia

Yes, that's called "research"...

> the current leader of the UN, in his youth as a violent communist, used violence against LGBT protestors, or that he beat a few of his own students into the hospital

This sounds like a conspiracy theory, and I couldn't find any reference to those events anywhere online. Even the incredibly biased socialist/communist prolewiki doesn't name him as a communist: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Guterres

> Did you know that North Korea is not communist? It is a "a highly centralized, one-party totalitarian dictatorship"

That's correct, the state ideology of north korea is "juche", which has it's roots in marxism/communism but splintered decades ago, with a focus on nationalism, historical revisionism and reverence for the leader(s). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche)

> Same for "socialist dictatorship", where you will only find explanations of Marxist theory, not the many disasters, some of which mentioned above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_socialism#Develo...
by frou_dh | 2025-10-12 12:57:19+00:00
Sounds like a nice gig.

> It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder

IIRC around that time, you could also distribute full-blown desktop applications (C# WinForms) in a special way via the browser, by which they were easily installable and self-updating. The tech was called ClickOnce https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/cl.... I think the flow was possibly IE-only, but that was not a big issue in a business context at that time.
by lproven | 2025-10-12 12:57:54+00:00
I haven't seen a machine shipped with firmware RAID in decades.

It's still enabled in the firmware of some vendors' laptops -- ones deep in Microsoft's pockets, like Dell, who personally I would not touch unless the kit were free, but gullible IT managers buy the things.

My personal suspicion is that it's an anti-Linux measure. It's hard to convert such a machine to AHCI mode without reformatting unless you have more clue than the sort of person who buys Dell kit.

In real life it's easy: set Windows to start in Safe Mode, reboot, go into the firmware, change RAID mode to AHCI, reboot, exit Safe Mode.

Result, Windows detects a new disk controller and boots normally, and now, all you need to do is disable Bitlocker and you can dual-boot happily.

However that's more depth of knowledge than I've met in a Windows techie in a decade, too.
by diffeomorphism | 2025-10-12 12:58:13+00:00
No, that does not seem to be what they are saying.

> We evaluated the diagnostic power of the device in a cohort of 45 LC patients and 14 healthy pediatric donors. We estimated a 94% accuracy for the microclot count using the devices, significantly higher than the traditional counting of microclots on slides (66% accuracy).

They are comparing the predictive power and using accuracy (instead of sensitivity, recall, F1, etc.). For their method "using the devices", they compute an accuracy of the predictive power, not of the count, of 94%. For the previous method they say the accuracy is 66%.

Basic questions: Is accuracy even a good metric for this? Is 94% a good value or just the difference between bad and very bad?

It might very well be that their improvement is from bad to really good, but the point is that a raw stat of "94% accuracy" is useless without context and so is the headline.