MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by attogram | 2025-10-28 12:36:14+00:00
See the spread-the-word script in https://github.com/attogram/bash-screensavers/tree/main/spot... This script generates a series of shell commands to create a "spotlight" message on the main GitHub repository page. It does this by generating commands that make trivial changes to the top 12 files and directories and then commit those changes with custom messages.
by c0wb0yc0d3r | 2025-10-28 12:36:37+00:00
This is the thought that I always have whenever I see the mention of coding standards. Not only should there be standards they should be enforced by tooling.

Now that being said a person should feel free to do what they want with their code. It’s somewhat tough to justify the work of setting up infrastructure to do that on small projects, but AI PRs aren’t likely a big issue fit small projects.
by kakacik | 2025-10-28 12:36:41+00:00
Small kids do this to everybody. The only solution - if you have good family nearby, use them as parenting services from time to time, to get me-time, couple-time and social time with friends. Buy them gift or vacation as return. Its incredibly damaging to marriage which literally transforms overnight from this rosy great easy-to-manage relationship into almost daily hardship, stress and nerves. Alternative is a (good) nanny.

People have issues admitting it even when its visible for everybody around, like some sort of admission you are failing as a parent, partner, human being and whatnot. Nope, we are just humans with limited energy and even good kids can siphon it well beyond 100% continuously, that's all.

Now I am not saying be a bad parent, in contrary, to reach you maximum even as a parent and partner, you need to be in good shape mentally, not running on fumes continuously.

Life without kids is really akin to playing game of life on easiest settings. Much less rewarding at the end, but man that freedom and simplicity... you appreciate it way more once you lose it. The way kids can easily make any parent very angry is simply not experienced elsewhere in adult life... I saw this many times on otherwise very chill people and also myself & my wife. You just can't ever get close to such fury and frustration dealing with other adults.
by dust-jacket | 2025-10-28 12:36:48+00:00
in the uk job losses and firings are different things, with different meanings, so the criticism here is a bit off.

job loss / redundancy = there is no need for this role any more. your job is gone firing = you are not appropriate/fit/whatever for this role. your employment is gone. someone else can have your job

(the passive/active criticism is totally right though. this should read "Amazon CUTS / REMOVES 14,000 jobs")
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-28 12:36:54+00:00
> The intended workflow of TDD is to write a set of tests before some code. The only reason that makes sense conceptually is to prevent possible future bugs from going undetected.

Again, I don't do that for correctness, I do it because it's faster than not having something to work against, that you can run with one command that tells you "Yup, you did the thing!" or "Nope, not there yet". When I don't do TDD, I'm slower, because I have to manually verify things and sometimes there are regressions.

Catching these things and automating the process is what makes (for me) TDD worth it.

> Put another way if your TDD always pass then there’s no point in writing them

Uuh, no one said this?

I'm not sure where people got the idea that TDD is this very strict "one way and one way only", the core idea is that your work gets easier to do, if it doesn't, then you're doing it wrong, probably following the rules too tightly.

We don't have to be so dogmatic about any methodologies out there, everything has tradeoffs, chose wisely.
by sudahtigabulan | 2025-10-28 12:37:06+00:00
> once you develop a good enough utility library for it.

What happens when everybody comes to the job with their own utility library and start working on the same codebase?

Would you like it if you had to get up to speed with several utility libraries your coworkers developed for themselves?

A common set of tools, like the Unix commands, makes it easier for people to collaborate. They were put in an official standard for a reason.
by darkwater | 2025-10-28 12:37:08+00:00
The title doesn't make justice to the content.

I really liked the paragraph about LLMs being "alien intelligence"

> Many engineers I know fall into 2 camps, either the camp that find the new class of LLMs intelligent, groundbreaking and shockingly good. In the other camp are engineers that think of all LLM generated content as “the emperor’s new clothes”, the code they generate is “naked”, fundamentally flawed and poison. I like to think of the new systems as neither. I like to think about the new class of intelligence as “Alien Intelligence”. It is both shockingly good and shockingly terrible at the exact same time. Framing LLMs as “Super competent interns” or some other type of human analogy is incorrect. These systems are aliens and the sooner we accept this the sooner we will be able to navigate the complexity that injecting alien intelligence into our engineering process leads to.

It's a similitude I find compelling. The way they produce code and the way you have to interact with them really feels "alien", and when you start humanizing them, you get emotions when interacting with it and that's not correct. I mean, I do get emotional and frustrated even when good old deterministic programs misbehaved and there was some bug to find and squash or work-around, but the LLM interactions can bring the game to a complete new level. So, we need to remember they are "alien".
by dangus | 2025-10-28 12:37:12+00:00
Q3 results [PDF]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/...

Numbers are all in the black and up year over year and compared to previous quarter.

Double digit revenue growth in both retail and AWS.

Often I wonder whether corporate leaders took any kind of logic class in college or if they just have a fetish for harming people for no reason. Either that or whatever business school they went to believes that poor customer service and bad products increase revenue.
by Zigurd | 2025-10-28 12:37:20+00:00
There's a certain amount of time you have to spend at a company to put it on your résumé without it prompting questions. This is a tacit deal in Elon companies. Elon gets his age discrimination and cheaper employees by throwing people into the deep end of the pool before they're ready, and those employees get experience putting a big AI on Nvidia chips. I bet he has to pay the hole diggers more, because his brand counts for less than that business.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-10-28 12:37:57+00:00
It's not only not benefitting you but actively putting you at a disadvantage because of the way you where born.

Why do you think that? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
by joshuacc | 2025-10-28 12:38:34+00:00
“firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.”

That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.
Primary Purpose of Business Monitoring in Agentic AI Systems?
by insightgridnews | 2025-10-28 12:38:41+00:00
The primary purpose of business monitoring in agentic AI systems is to ensure autonomous outputs and actions align with strategic objectives, comply with regulations, operate efficiently, and drive continuous improvement. Six crucial “superpowers” of monitoring include: goal alignment, compliance oversight, performance tracking, trust & transparency building, continuous improvement, and security risk reduction. Monitoring helps AI agents make more accurate, data-driven decisions, enhances accountability, improves regulatory adherence, and increases resource efficiency. In industries like finance, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing, robust monitoring is vital for applications such as fraud detection, securing patient records, customer behavior analysis, and predictive maintenance. The strategic shift is towards proactive, real-time surveillance and scenario analyses, moving away from periodic audits, which is critical for the resilience, sustainability, and long-term competitiveness of businesses leveraging agentic AI. https://insightgridnews.com/agentic-ai-monitoring-purpose/
by djoldman | 2025-10-28 12:38:41+00:00
Some say it's not the phone, it's the app a company makes.

So is it the company that is bad?

Company products and services are a result of the system of regulations. The market is a playground where companies survive, thrive, and die, always trying to maximize total future profit, which is dictated by the shape of what is allowed and what things humans will pay for.

The cause of "bad stuff" like "addiction" to a legal product/service is human nature. If a human will pay for something that is legal, there will be a market for it.

In other words: it's not the company, it's the system.
by Bender | 2025-10-28 12:38:53+00:00
Agreed. I should have clarified that is what I meant by there are places I can build literally anything. Of all of the places I found to be the case I would not want to reside in any of them. If one digs deeper they may find the local government to have corruption issues and county/state services are often not reliable or useful. Crime is usually high in such areas. There are probably a few hidden gems but it was not worth it to me to find them.
Ask HN: Has anyone hosted a local HN Meetup?
by TealMyEal | 2025-10-28 12:39:03+00:00
I've Been thinking about hosting a HackerNews Meetup in my city (Dublin, Ire) but having been to a few meetups what i want is an actual social event, i don't want an agenda pushing event of people decending looking for someone to code there next big AI app (Uber for dogs), I jsut want a space to chat about the things that come up on this fourm, Complain about digital ID, why you think Rust is the second coming of a religious entitiy.

has anyone had sucess in orgainised one of these kind of meetups in a pub like once a month?
by joeiq | 2025-10-28 12:39:18+00:00
Rude indeed—one hundred percent. I’m, by far, the least phone-distracted person in my social group. This is a painful communication barrier that presents itself daily.

I only have one strategy to address a friend whipping out their phone when it’s my turn to speak: I stop talking entirely. Once I have their attention again, I pick up where I left off.
by lproven | 2025-10-28 12:39:45+00:00
> I wonder how much faster the ARM2 would have been compared to the 68k in a first-generation Amiga.

Considerably faster. I looked at both (and the ST) and bought an Archimedes.

ARM chips benchmarked from the ARM2 up to the RasPi 3B+:

https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20379

68000 benchmarks around that time:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/motorola/68k-chips-faq/

ARM2:

Dhrystone/sec 5463

68000 @ 8MHz:

Dhrystones

68000 2100

MIPS

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/acorn/microarchitectures/arm2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second

ARM2: from 6 to 10 million instructions per second, depending on instruction mix

68000: 1.4 MIPS typical.

(For comparison: Intel 8086 at the same speed, something like 300 Whetstones, 0.5 MIPS. So either of them stomped all over a comparable x86 machine from that time.)

So, very roughly, ARM2 was between 2-3x faster in typical use.

Note:

. Neither CPU could do FP in hardware.

. Neither had cache memory.

. The Amiga had a lot of complex hardware acceleration for graphics; the original ARM2 machines from Acorn (Archimedes A2305, A310, A400) had essentially none.

So, Amiga games could do things that on the Arc required raw CPU, typically done careful hand-coded assembler.
Everything You Need to Know About Character AI
by insightgridnews | 2025-10-28 12:40:01+00:00
Character AI is a revolutionary technology enabling virtual characters with human-like personalities, memory, and emotional responses. It operates using advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), deep learning models, and large language models (LLMs). Key components include Human Level Attributes (HLAs) for personality, event-driven context for memory, and specialized retrieval-augmented/fine-tuned architectures for vast knowledge. Platforms like Character.AI allow users to create their own characters or interact with a massive library of existing ones. Character AI differs significantly from traditional chatbots by offering distinct personalities, conversational memory, emotional responses, and extensive customization. Important considerations include addressing safety, ethics, misinformation, and manipulation to ensure a positive user experience. The future of Character AI promises even more realistic personalities, improved emotional intelligence, and integration with technologies like virtual and augmented reality. https://insightgridnews.com/what-is-character-ai/
by cool_dude85 | 2025-10-28 12:41:21+00:00
>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company

Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?

Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-10-28 12:41:33+00:00
> “I am closing this but this is interesting, head over to our forum/issues to discuss”

I really like the way Discourse uses "levels" to slowly open up features as new people interact with the community, and I wonder if GitHub could build in a way of allowing people to only be able to open PRs after a certain amount of interaction, too (for example, you can only raise a large PR if you have spent enough time raising small PRs).

This could of course be abused and/or lead to unintended restrictions (e.g. a small change in lots of places), but that's also true of Discourse and it seems to work pretty well regardless.
by jcgrillo | 2025-10-28 12:42:38+00:00
> For our team, every commit has an engineer's name attached to it, and that engineer ultimately needs to review and stand behind the code.

Then they claim (and demonstrate with a picture of a commits/day chart) a team-wide 10x throughput increase. I claim there's got to be a lot of rubber-stamp reviewing going on here. It may help to challenge the "author" to explain things like "why does this lifetime have the scope it does?" or "why did you factor it this way instead of some other way?" e.g. questions which force them to defend the "decisions" they made. I suspect if you're actually doing thorough reviews that the velocity will actually decrease instead of increase using LLMs.
by alex-moon | 2025-10-28 12:43:06+00:00
I don't accept the unregulated and uncontrolled use of LLMs for therapy for the same reason I don't accept arguments like "We should deregulate food safety because it means more food at lower cost to consumers" or "We should waive minimum space standards for permitted developments on existing buildings because it means more housing." We could "solve" the homeless problem tomorrow simply by building tenements (that is why they existed in the first place after all).

The harm LLMs do in this case is attested both by that NYT article and the more rigorous study from Stanford. There are two problems with your argument as I see it: 1. You're assuming "LLM therapy" is less harmful than "no therapy", an assumption I don't believe has been demonstrated. 2. You're not taking into account the long term harm of putting in place a solution that's "not fit for human use" as in the housing and food examples: once these things become accepted, they form the baseline of the new accepted "minimum standard of living", bringing that standard down for everyone.

You claim to be making a utilitarian as opposed to a nonmaleficent argument, but, for the reasons I've stated here, I don't believe it's a utilitarian argument at all.
by tirant | 2025-10-28 12:43:08+00:00
Numbers do not support that. Jobs might be shrinking within Amazon, but globally the situation is the opposite.

Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005).

That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005.

[1] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-expects-global-unemplo... [2] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-annual-jobs-report-say... [3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
by elric | 2025-10-28 12:43:09+00:00
Different processes happen during different sleep stages. Typically people go from light sleep to deeper sleep stages (slow wave), to REM in a cyclical pattern. We go through each of the stages roughly every 90 minutes of "quality sleep". There's usually more deep sleep at the start of the night, and more REM towards the end of the night.

If you end up with too much deep sleep (e.g. after being very physically exhausted for a while), you will have little or no REM sleep and your sleep quality will suffer.

It's not just "too much deep sleep" that could fuck things up, being woken up multiple times can also mess up your sleep cycle, whether it's by crying children or sleep apnea.
by martin-t | 2025-10-28 12:44:23+00:00
> you get a regular paycheck

No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.

Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.

And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.

---

The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.

1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.

2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.

In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.

They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.
by bloppe | 2025-10-28 12:44:34+00:00
Everyone seems to be focusing on the school car accident. I was focusing more on "Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%". People just don't like waking up super early in winter.

> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer

That's a weird way of putting it, but sure. Spain is also famous for their absurdly "late" schedules (e.g. dinner at 11pm). People will naturally adjust if the baseline is offset like that. France does as well, but to a lesser degree. Importantly, both countries still observe the shift twice a year, because having a DST shift is actually popular (at high latitudes; obviously it makes no sense in the tropics).
by suzulenboga | 2025-10-28 12:44:39+00:00
Hey HN! I built a VPN using V2Ray protocol after getting frustrated with commercial VPNs being blocked in Turkey/China/Iran.

Unlike OpenVPN/WireGuard, V2Ray mimics HTTPS traffic and bypasses DPI.

Tech stack: Flutter + V2Ray core. No user accounts = zero data to log.

Free tier with ads, optional premium. Would love technical feedback!

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vpn-v2ray-ratatosk/id674234891...
Show HN: Ball X Pit – Physics Roguelite with 42 Ball Evolutions
by aishu001 | 2025-10-28 12:44:46+00:00
iny team (3 devs, 1 artist) here—sharing our first game: BALL x PIT, a survival roguelite focused on physics-based ball combat. Key bits: Unique ball types (Bomb, Black Hole, etc.) with distinct bounce/effects 42 evolutions via clear fusion (no random unlocks) Base-building for permanent run perks Launched 5 days: 300k+ sales, 95% Steam positive. On PC/PS5/Xbox (Game Pass free)/Switch ($14.99). Happy to answer questions, and we’re prepping an update with more fusions. Thanks for checking!
by spacedcowboy | 2025-10-28 12:45:08+00:00
It’s funny, this could be me. Also a PhD in physics, also thought “the mind’s eye” was a euphemism until pretty late in life.

I’ve written about this his before …

It's funny because I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.

My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.

Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.

So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.

I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct.

Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
by RickJWagner | 2025-10-28 12:45:33+00:00
I agree.

This is the first message I am hearing, “There are more important things than climate change.”

It’s almost shocking to hear it. The cynical side of my mind is wondering if this is the start of a slow pivot for the political masses. Another news item today says that emissions reduction pledges are not forthcoming in new world climate discussions. Perhaps messaging about climate change is evolving.