MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-10-12 06:26:36+00:00
> I can't think of it ever really paying off

Sure worked for Bell Labs

Also it is what big tech was doing until LLMs hit the scene

So I'm not sure what you mean by it never paying off. We were doing it right up till one of those things seemed to pay off and then hyper focused on it. I actually think this is a terrible thing we frequently do in tech. We find promise in a piece of tech, hyper focus on it. Specifically, hyper focus on how to monetizing it which ends up stunting the technology because it hasn't had time to mature and we're trying to monetize the alpha product instead of trying to get that thing to beta.

> But from a business perspective it seems to almost never pay off.

So this is actually what I'm trying to argue. It actually does pay off. It has paid off. Seriously, look again at Silicon Valley and how we got to where we are today. And look at how things changed in the last decade...

Why is it that we like off the wall thinkers? That programmers used to be known as a bunch of nerds and weirdos. How many companies were started out of garages (Apple)? How many started as open source projects (Android)? Why did Google start giving work lifestyle perks and 20% time?

So I don't know what you're talking about. It has frequently paid off. Does it always pay off? Of course not! It frequently fails! But that is pretty true for everything. Maybe the company stocks are doing great[0], but let's be honest, the products are not. Look at the last 20 years and compare it to the 20 years before that. The last 20 years has been much slower. Now maybe it is a coincidence, but the biggest innovation in the last 20 years has been in AI and from 2012 to 2021 there were a lot of nice free reign AI research jobs at these big tech companies where researchers got paid well, had a lot of autonomy in research, and had a lot of resources at their disposal. It really might be a coincidence, but a number of times things like this have happened in history and they tend to be fairly productive. So idk, you be the judge. Hard to conclude that this is definitely what creates success, but I find it hard to rule this out.

> I'd tell them to go become academics.. but all the academics I know are just busy herding their students and attending meetings

Same problem, different step of the ladder

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45555175
by shoobiedoo | 2025-10-12 06:26:39+00:00
I was on oxycodone for about 6 weeks for a growth inside my knee. After it was removed, I had to wean off the drugs. Wasn't too bad, took less than a week.

Soon after I thought I'd try to kick the caffeine habit. Went from 4 cups, to 1 over a month, then just green tea, then just water. I only lasted about 6 weeks on water only.

My god. I couldn't believe how unmotivated, soulless, and empty I felt. Judging by the reddit sub for kicking caffeine, this can last for over a year. It's terrifying
by acupofnope | 2025-10-12 06:26:50+00:00
I did something similar. I use Karabiner and I mapped the right Option key on my external keyboard to Option+Shift (A1), and right Control key to Control+Option+Shift (A2). I've configured Aerospace such that if I want to change focus, I use `A1 + hjkl` to move the focus around, and if I want to move windows around, I use `A2 + hjkl`. I use `A1 + ui` to switch workspaces, and `A2+ui` to move windows between workspaces. For shifting focus between monitors its `A1+m,` and moving between them `A2 + m,`

By far these are the shortcuts I use most often and if there are apps with conflicting shortcuts, I change those to something else. I haven't thought about it much but I'm sure I can extend this pattern further for better ergonomics. It works great so far.
by krishnaatul | 2025-10-12 06:28:07+00:00
In this video, I’ll walk you through building a ReAct agent using LangGraph from scratch. We’ll cover everything step by step — from understanding graph architecture, nodes, edges, states, and tools — to implementing an agent that can query Wikipedia.

I’ll first build the agent using LangGraph’s basic building blocks and test it. Then, I’ll also show you how to create the same agent using LangGraph’s prebuilt create_react_agent for faster development.

To make it more practical, I’ll showcase how you can trace and debug the workflow in LangSmith, giving you clear insights into how your agent is reasoning and acting.

If you’re learning LangChain, LangGraph, or AI agents, this tutorial will help you build a strong foundation.
by aw1621107 | 2025-10-12 06:28:19+00:00
I think you'd need a "proper" formal spec (e.g., JSCert's version of ECMAScript 5 in Coq/Rocq [0]) for that to be feasible. Not exactly sure how "verifiable" would work otherwise.

[0]: https://github.com/jscert/jscert
by remarkEon | 2025-10-12 06:34:00+00:00
The decision to invade sits with the leaders in Beijing. "The enemy gets a say", as the saying goes, and whether they would be successful is not obvious. It would be arguably the most complex amphibious invasion in history, definitely rivaling Normandy. The US has a lot of tools, both software and hardware, to bring to the fight in this scenario. Perhaps the question is on acceptable cost. There's also really only two times in the year when the weather in the Straight is calm enough to support that kind of invasion, and the sheer volume of hardware and systems they would have to move makes this kind of operation almost impossible to hide, though there are limited and imperfect ways to mask the preparation.

>It isn't winning these fights.

It absolutely is, right now, in Ukraine. The US has been able to use the Ukraine war as a massive real-time R&D laboratory for our weapons systems. The result is that Russia can no longer project naval power, their strategic air force is completely neutered, and they have tipped their hand for much of their signals and EW systems. The war is stalemated ... without the direct involvement of NATO (the wisdom of direct involvement is not relevant here).

This is to say that I disagree, there is a military solution to this problem.
by dlcarrier | 2025-10-12 06:34:42+00:00
That's a bottleneck getting data out of the DOCSIS network, into your home network.

There's far more bandwidth within the DOCSIS network than can enter and exit it, which is why running communication tests between DOCSIS devices has no effect on the the usefulness of the network.

Fun fact: The current workaround to the slowness of DOCSIS modems is to put more modems in your modem and trunk then together, so you can get gigabit speeds with 100+ megabit upstream, by simply having a half dozen or more concurrent connections.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-12 06:35:54+00:00
Every generation also thinks that the uncanny valley will be conquered in the next generation ;)

The quest for graphical realism in games has been running against a diminishing-returns-wall for quite a while now (see hardware raytracing - all that effort for slightly better reflections and shadows, yay?), what we need most right now is more risk-taking in gameplay by big budget games.
by pndy | 2025-10-12 06:36:07+00:00
Years ago I installed it on my sister's computer as Windows replacement. She was initially happy but soon started to complain that it was hard for her to use, apps would freeze and graphic artifacts would remain on the screen in similar way as on XP once. In the end we went with Xubuntu because we thought that reinstalling as "upgrade" is not worth it.

It's a stop-gap for those who were using OSX and not a permanent solution, or something for people who want to try Linux but want a really easy way. But then, there are better managed and newbie friendly distributions already.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-10-12 06:37:39+00:00
This is not to try and devalue the nature of your specific experience at all, okay? But, with your and some other descriptions here of how therapy works and how much looking around and trying out a number of vaguely defined things it involves, i'm getting a distinct woo vibe from much of the industry, made, maybe, all the worse given how much more fashionable the idea of therapy has become in recent years and how few concrete standards some parts of the business (and it is a business in large part) really require.

Add to the above the subtle notion of the onus on improvement lying with oneself as the patient, and it becomes all the easier for a therapist to fail because they don't know what they're doing, and then claim their patient failed because they didn't "try hard enough" or do the right things.

I've seen cases of therapy working, and know there's a lot of good exploration in related psychological fields, but it's definitely an area in which to tread carefully as someone seeking help.
by djtango | 2025-10-12 06:38:16+00:00
Kyoto is one of my favourite places in the world. Besides the obvious "Kyoto" being on your doorstep, you only need to jump on a train for 15 minutes to arrive at Lake Biwa. Amazing to think that so much beautiful nature is a stone's throw away from such a lovely city. Itself only a bullet train away from Tokyo
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-12 06:39:04+00:00
Good luck trying to tell a "cinematic story" with that approach, or even trying to prevent the player from getting stuck and not being able to finish the game, or even just to reproduce and fix problems, or even just to get consistent result when the player turns the head and then turns it back etc etc ;)

There's a reason why such "build your own story" games like Dwarf Fortress are fairly niche.
by teo_zero | 2025-10-12 06:39:49+00:00
> [dead keys] should be avoided for common operations in newly designed programming languages.

If that's the rationale for choosing which symbols should be allowed, then let's ban {} as they require AltGr+Shift in many layouts. And let's avoid <> (used as parentheses, e.g. for templates or XML tags, not as less-than/greater-than) because in ISO keyboards they loose all their symmetry. And what about shells, with /, one of the most used characters, relegated above 7 in many layouts?

Jokes apart, I like the choice of ^ or any other characters distinct from * for pointer dereference. To be more precise, I despise the use of the same symbol with different meaning. In C the same * is used for multiplication, pointer dereference and takes part in commments, too. You need full context to parse some cases, or you have to play with spaces:

(a)*(b) // multiplication or casted deref? x/ *y // multiplication x/*y // comment start

Same with &

m&&n // logical and m& &n // masked address
by traceroute66 | 2025-10-12 06:40:01+00:00
> EU governments keep auditing us, so we gotta stay on our toes, do things by the book

Erm, dude ....

IANAL, and I am sure most people do not need to be lawyers to figure out that not allowing people to permanently opt-out of photo scanning is almost certainly going to be in contravention of every EU law in the book.

I hope the EU take Microsoft to the cleaners over this one.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-12 06:40:06+00:00
> Being a US citizen doesn't mean anything in a combat zone. You can't pause the battle and have a trial

This isn't about an air strike on some base where they later found out that an American citizen was among the insurgents they targeted.

This was a deliberate strike targeting a known American citizen in a country with which the US was not at war (Yemen), for accusations of terrorism. This would be exactly as if Trump declared Hassan Piker a terrorist threat for helping organize AntiFa and sent drones to kill him while he's on a trip to France.

> As far as drone killings, would you prefer airstrikes that have high collateral damage?

No, I would prefer that no killings take place at all. I should think that Alfred Nobel would also have preferred that his peace prize were not given to someone who invented/popularized a new "cleaner" weapon.

Obligatory note: Obama is far from the worse person who received the peace prize. He did genuinely good things in addition to his targeted killings (even for peace in the Middle East, the Iran nuclear deal was a major milestone and attempt, as short lived as it turned out to be).
by troupo | 2025-10-12 06:40:24+00:00
> Sounds to me like you'd benefit from providing detailed instructions to LLMs about how they should avoid duplicating functionality

That they routinely ignore.

> which means documenting the functionality they should be aware of

Which means spending inordinate amounts of time writing down about every single function and component and css and style which can otherwise be easily discovered by just searching. Or by looking at adjacent files.

> which is exactly the kind of thing this new skills mechanism is designed to solve.

I tried it yesterday. It immediately duplicated functionality, ignored existing styles and components, and created ad-hoc queries. It did feel like there were fewer times when it did that, but it's hard to quantify.
by alex_smart | 2025-10-12 06:40:47+00:00
The use case for modules is to have a unit of organizing code (deciding what is visible and accessible to who) at a higher level of abstraction than a package. It allows library authors to be much more explicit about what is the public API of their library.

Ever wrote "List" in Intellij and instead of importing "java.util.List" Intellij prompts you to choose between like twenty different options from all the libraries you have included in your classpath that have implemented a public class named "List"? Most likely 90% of the libraries did not even want to expose their internal "List" class to the world like that but they got leaked into your classpath just because java didn't have a way to limit visibility of classes beyond packages.
by chanux | 2025-10-12 06:40:49+00:00
Everpix: Looked like good execution but they were probably ahead of time.

Also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676494

Redmart (Singapore): Best web based online store to this date (obviously personal view). No one even tries now that mobile apps have won.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/alibaba-lazada-redmart-con...
by tsv_ | 2025-10-12 06:41:37+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to explain your perspective, this is exactly the kind of thoughtful feedback that helps me understand different testing philosophies.

Your distinction between assertions (preconditions/invariants) vs tests (things being verified) is really interesting. I can absolutely see how using different syntax helps communicate intent: "this MUST be true for the test to even make sense" vs "this is what we're actually testing". That semantic clarity is valuable, it reminds me of contract programming in languages like D where preconditions and postconditions have distinct roles.

You're absolutely right about the special assertion handling, that's definitely special behavior and I should have been clearer. What I meant was that the expressions themselves evaluate using Python's normal rules without hidden transformations. For example, Playwright's `expect(loc).to_have_text("text")` silently normalizes whitespace, so "hello world" might match "hello world". With plain asserts, `assert element.text == "hello world"` means exactly that: no normalization, no special matching rules. The expression evaluates the same way it would in a REPL.

But yes, extracting the failure details does require machinery that I'm not thrilled about either. It's the one compromise I made to support the plain assert syntax that many Python developers expect. But actually, you can use the `asserts` helper which does exactly what you described without any special handling:

from vedro import scenario, asserts as _ @scenario def calculate_discount(): product = ... discounted = apply_discount(product, 0.2) _.assert_equal(discounted.price, 80.0)
by chipx86 | 2025-10-12 06:41:52+00:00
Love seeing this one. My uncle was co-founder of Quarterdeck, and I grew up in a world of DESQview and QEMM. It was a big influence on me as a child.

Got a good family story about that whole acquisition attempt, but I don't want to speak publicly on behalf of my uncle. I know we've talked at length about the what-ifs of that moment.

I do have a scattering of some neat Quarterdeck memorabilia I can share, though:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0ca1omn2kwda9op5go34e/ACpO6bz...
by sofixa | 2025-10-12 06:42:04+00:00
I'm sorry, but how many activists have any fame or clout that they use in any way other than for causes ? I can only think of Greta Thunberg, but can't really remember her ever using her "fame and clout" for anything other than bringing attention to problems. When she signs a sponsorship deal, then we can talk, but until then...
by IshKebab | 2025-10-12 06:43:42+00:00
The point of doing it declaratively is that you can easily expose all that information in the UI, and process it to set up the pipeline in the first place (multiple runners, which OS they run, dependencies between steps).

I agree most of your `run` steps should just be one or two lines to call out to another script though, and you shouldn't split things into multiple steps unless necessary.

How does Buildkite do it? Their website doesn't seem clear but it looks like it also uses YAML, you can just use a script to generate it. Gitlab supports that somewhat awkwardly, and I've definitely had one project where that would have been useful (though I couldn't convince my colleagues to do it).

I don't think it would be difficult to add support for it anyway.
by Eisenstein | 2025-10-12 06:43:59+00:00
In US history, the pendulum swung hard in favor of mining interests getting whatever they wanted at the expense of workers and the people who lived near mines, and the environment.

But the pendulum swung back just as hard when blowing the tops off of mountains and letting towns of people live surrounded by poisons became unacceptable.

The way to prevent the excesses from pendulum swingbacks isn't to call people cynical or ideological for reacting in a disproportionate way to the very real excesses and psychopathic tendencies of purely profit driven resource exploitation, but to understand those tendencies and to put real guardrails in that will stop the incentives from becoming powerful enough to drive them.
by user5534762135 | 2025-10-12 06:45:08+00:00
> Tough luck, buddy. Engineering is about precision, science, math

Which is why software development, even if the field has decided to grace itself with the title of "Engineering", just isn't that. Say what you will, Software development is NOT about science and math the same way that civil engineering is. Otherwise, we'd have loads more data handbooks and ISO norms that we have a legal requirement to fulfill.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-12 06:45:30+00:00
You are not replying to my core point. Do you believe that a person with severe late stage Alzheimer is the same person they were before the disease reached that point? Do you believe that their old mind and personality still exists at that point? If so, why?

For many other neuro-psychiatric diseases, we know that moments of psychosis are reversible, at least to some extent, with drugs and therapy and the kindness of others. The same is manifestly not true, tragically, for dementia: everything lost is gone forever.
by alex_smart | 2025-10-12 06:45:32+00:00
>Directly or indirectly many (or most) projects ended up depending on something which was using an unsupported backdoor API because it provided a marginally useful capability. The module system restricted access to these APIs and everything stopped working, unless you added some magic command line arguments to gain access again.

Is it even theoretically possible for a project like this to not run into these kind of issues? Like literally the project's goal is to enable library authors to be more explicit about their public API. So breaking use cases that use unsupported backdoor APIs very much seems like a predictable and expected result?
by Aerbil313 | 2025-10-12 06:45:54+00:00
I’m not a US citizen, nor living there. Pretty much nothing surprised me about US news till the last Trump administration, even then, I chalked it up with “oh guess they have an actual dictator with unlimited power now”.

Last week I looked up the ICE and it shocked me. How can people let citizens and neighbors literally get kidnapped out of the street and then held in prisons indefinitely, with intentional zero traceability. You can get lost in the system and be held forever as a prisoner in inhumane conditions, without even being told on which continent you are on.

All because you made comments on social media criticizing the current administration. Or because of your skin color or country of origin.

That’s beyond 1984, beyond dystopia.
by Kadmino | 2025-10-12 06:46:37+00:00
I have been following this shit show since the beginning. It was definitely not a responsible disclosure, but given the track record of Austrian and German justice with white hat hackers, I guess it is somewhat understandable. The hacker took it upon himself to inform every customer of the weak security of their data.

After the third update where the startup outlined their steps to fix the situation, the hacker added an addendum to their website with a link to the full incident report (in English). You can still find it on the web archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251008231051/https://security....

Direct link to the incident report (in English): https://anonfile.co/CZqiAMqc3sYyvHZ/file

The hacker accuses them of vibe coding their entire infrastructure and thus not understanding what they have created. And if only half of the content of the incident report is true, I am inclined to believe him. If you look at the founders and employees on LinkedIn, not even the CTO seems to have any IT-experience. Which in itself wouldn't be that big of a problem but they explicitly marketed their product as extremely secure and local. Seems very hypocritical to me to then not even give a second thought about securing your own infrastructure.

All in all with how they handle it, the startup seems to be just trying to save their image without really working on the flaws in their security, but here is hoping that I am wrong for the sake of their customers.

Some more links to news articles (in German): https://www.borncity.com/blog/2025/10/06/desaster-sicherheit... He did 3 parts on this, as apparently the hacker contacted him directly with insider information.

https://www.derstandard.at/story/3100000291066/localmind-sic...

https://www.heise.de/news/Sensible-Unternehmensdaten-ueber-S...
Show HN: Sober not Sorry – free iOS tracker to help you quit bad habits
by molozhenko | 2025-10-12 06:46:58+00:00
I made Sober not Sorry, a clean and simple iOS tracker to help quit bad habits — alcohol, smoking, or anything else. Open it → log your start date → it tracks your streak. No ads, no sign-up, no subscriptions. I built it because most “sober” apps felt cluttered or too motivational. This one just quietly tracks progress and stays out of the way. Would love feedback — especially from people who use streak or sobriety trackers.
by zem | 2025-10-12 06:48:13+00:00
> Let's set the stage for what lead to this feature (pun intended, as you'll see shortly). During a high-profile OpenAI keynote, a demo was rudely interrupted by a Ghostty update prompt

quite apart from the article itself, I'm reminded of how much we put up with from our operating systems. presentations and screen sharing have been a fact of life for a couple of decades now; why is it so hard to tell the operating system to strictly not allow anything other than that one window access to the screen?
by gertop | 2025-10-12 06:48:23+00:00
> Those who value craftsmanships would value LLM, since they can pick up new languages or frameworks much faster. They can then master the newly acquired skills on their own if preferred, or they can use LLM to help along the way.

That's like saying those who value books would value movie adaptations because they can pick up new stories much faster.

Is it really so alien to you the someone might prefer learning a new language or framework by, gasp, reading its documentation?