MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwwgisgreat | 2025-10-30 16:34:24+00:00
> if we reverse: does Kafka also handle 80% of what Postgres does with 20% the effort?

First, it would be inverse, not reverse.

Second, no it doesn't work that way, that's the point of the Pareto principle in the first place, what is 80% is always 80% and what is 20% is always 20%.
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-30 16:34:27+00:00
Minitel was offered by France Télécom, then a government-operated service, under what was originally the Ministry of Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones. (The name "Minitel" is not short for "ministry of telecommunications", but rather Médium interactif par numérisation d'information téléphonique. Though I suspect some advantageous ambiguity was exploited.

France Telecom was privatised during the 1990s with the aquisition of the Orange Group, its current (commercial) branding.
by intrasight | 2025-10-30 16:34:28+00:00
Same. But is same for most people. Average American retirement savings is like $200k. I've done better that that but not by orders of magnitude.

About six years ago I was hired to make an investment simulator. I wish someone had show the results to me when I was a teen. I did show it to my daughter at the time (she was in college), and used it to explain the power of compounding interest.

I found they still an old preview online (sorry not https)

http://simulators.gibsoncapital.com/new-preview-for-total-si...
by Aurornis | 2025-10-30 16:34:43+00:00
> tends to require a tight feedback loop between testers, designers, implementers, and users

Some FOSS projects attempt something like this, but it can become a self-reinforcing feedback loop: When you're only testing on current users, you're selecting for people who already use the software. People who already use the software were not scared away by the interface. So the current users tend to prefer the current interface.

Big software companies have the resources to gather (and pay) people for user studies to see what works and what does not for people who haven't seen the software before, or at least don't have any allegiances. If you only ever get feedback from people who have been using the software for a decade, they're going to tell you the UI must not change because they know exactly how to use it by now.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-30 16:35:02+00:00
From the linked thread

"I have updated a new 1.0.21 release and removed the unused sig driver file. And I also add a README document about the httpdisk driver https://github.com/ventoy/PXE/tree/master"

As in the author responded and removed this and explained why it was in there in the first place.

So Ventoy has all it's code audited and documents every case of a binary blob with the source code and instructions to build the binary blob. iVentoy above did have an issue which was promptly resolved.

It seems to be an extremely trustworthy project. If you want to blacklist them because they once had an issue since corrected fine but it seems waaaaaay over the top to me.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-10-30 16:35:23+00:00
Good points, but to add to the sources of instability ... a first time user of a piece of software may be very appreciative of its simplicity and "intuitiveness". However, if it is a tool that they spend a lot of time with and is connected to a potentially complex workflow, it won't be long before even they are asking for "this little extra thing".

It is hard to overestimate the difference between creating tools for people who use the tools for hours every day and creating tools for people who use tools once a week or less.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-30 16:35:37+00:00
Yeah, and that's because the article's advice is bad.

It works exactly for TV remote controls. Or, rather, it worked before everybody had an HDMI player or smart TVs. It doesn't work for TV remotes now either.

Handbrake is a bit like TV remotes in the turn of the century. That's an exception even among free software, and absolutely no mainstream DE is like that.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-30 16:36:07+00:00
From the linked thread

"I have updated a new 1.0.21 release and removed the unused sig driver file. And I also add a README document about the httpdisk driver https://github.com/ventoy/PXE/tree/master"

So he fixed the issue, noted the use of WKDTestCert and links to it and he also has a post explaining why this happened.

That doesn't seem lackluster or negligent to me?
by MayeulC | 2025-10-30 16:36:19+00:00
I agree, though I wish you had specified in what context that aversion was.

To give a specific example, I can cite units in the metric system, often written as kg.s⁻².J⁻¹ instead of the more ambiguous kg/s²/J; which could technically be read as kg/(s²/J), giving kg.J.s⁻¹.
by SecretDreams | 2025-10-30 16:37:17+00:00
Contact is a hard problem to solve and there's some tangential softwares that do it well within the FEA space. I'd be curious to know how this does with materials/geometries of vastly different stiffnessess and if it produces realistic reaction/contact forces (one cheap way to manage contact is to jack up the contact stiffness, which will prevent penetration, but drive some unrealistic forces at those interfaces).
by dejicarr | 2025-10-30 16:37:33+00:00
Thanks so much, really appreciate this. I love that perspective about the tools - it’s true, the imagination behind them makes all the difference.

The physical artworks are complete, but the challenge now is designing the digital experience - figuring out how to make the audio layer feel part of the art itself rather than just a separate player.

Also, I realised the GitHub link in the post isn’t clickable - if you copy and paste it, you can actually see the full visuals and story context. Would love your thoughts if you get a moment.
by veganjay | 2025-10-30 16:37:48+00:00
Reminds me of an old calculator trick:

Pick an integer between 1 and 9. Multiple it by 9. Take that number and multiply it by 12345679. (Skip the 8)

>>> 3 * 9

27

>>> 12345679 * 27

333333333

This all works because:

>>> 111111111 / 9

12345679.0
by longnguyen | 2025-10-30 16:37:48+00:00
This has been a major UX problem for me when building my app [0] (an AI chat client for power user).

On the one hand, I want the UI to be simple and minimal enough so even non savvy users can use it.

But on the other hand, I do need to support more advanced features, with more configuration panels.

I learned that the solution in this case is “progressive disclosure”. By default, the app only show just enough UI elements to get the 90% cases done. For the advanced use cases, it takes more effort. Usually to enable them in Settings, or an Inspector pane etc. Power users can easily tinker around and tweak them. While non savvy users can stick with the default, usual UX flow.

Though even with this technique, choosing what to show by default is still not easy. I learned that I need to be clear about my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and optimize for that profile only.

[0]: https://boltai.com
Ask HN: LLMs enhance productivity so why don't we have more/better software?
by dboreham | 2025-10-30 16:37:48+00:00
Lifelong AI skeptic now turned LLM proponent here. I'm almost in the Adrian Cockroft/Joe Magerramov camp: for me today's LLMs are by far the most productivity-increasing tool for software development since the compiler. Yes I'm so old that I remember making software without a compiler. Reinforcing my non-koolaid-consuming cred: I've been using LLM tools to write programs I'd never have time to write, find bugs I'd have taken much longer to track down myself, understand the design of large complex codebases I'd have previously left as mystery-meat. The new tools are helping me work through the seemingly endless pile of stuff that always needed to be done but never got done.

Although the media narrative and previous HN discussions focus on developer layoffs supposedly due to AI adoption, I'm wondering about the inverse perspective. Since LLM tools improve software developer productivity significantly, why haven't we seen much better software? Why haven't we seen startups making new useful applications? Is there something about the wider business context that precludes improved productivity being applied to increase capacity and/or improve quality? After all when Walmart discovered how to optimize retail they didn't use that capability to make one super-efficient store. They built stores everywhere. Are we somehow stuck in some crappyness equilibrium where there's no overall benefit to improving software. Was that always the case but we never realized because by chance we had just enough developers to get by?
by dataflow | 2025-10-30 16:37:51+00:00
I don't see the problem with grabbing binary blobs from other trusted projects. Isn't it sufficient just to be able to prove the hashes match what you'd get directly from the origin? If you got your blob from (say) Debian, and their blobs were backdoored, the world has... much bigger problems to worry about. Feels like trying to verify that your pharmacy is making your medication from scratch, lest their supplier had contaminated it.
by monitron | 2025-10-30 16:37:53+00:00
I'm sorry if it has that effect on you. Personally I've been on tirzepatide for about a year now and have not experienced anything like that.

It seems to reduce my impulsivity, but I still enjoy things very much. I am just able to stop when I "should," or wait for delayed gratification, when previously I had trouble doing so.

I'd say my mood has been higher overall. Feeling like I am in control is an everyday boost.
by latentsea | 2025-10-30 16:38:28+00:00
Analyzers are a first class citizen in C#. You can get access to the AST during compile time and use it to output diagnostics with error or warning level, so it's more robust than just regex.

I've not seen teams personally write them because they're abstract and most devs shy away from it, but working in the C# ecosystem the one place I do see them pop up occasionally is from library authors.

For example xunit has some.

https://github.com/xunit/xunit.analyzers

So far I have found the value in them to be they help you constrain the possible valid moves that can be made in a codebase. This is valuable with teams of human engineers, but even more so with LLMs. It just so happens LLMs are really good at helping you write them too given you know what you want to enforce.

I doubt the tooling is as good in other languages as it is in C# in this respect, but at least for devs working in the C# ecosystem LLMs have unlocked access to writing custom analysers on a whole new level, and with that it's now significantly easier to define and enforce rules regarding what constitutes a valid program, such that the set of valid programs matches your intended architecture.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-30 16:38:31+00:00
I bought Affinity as well. If Affinity remains free now for one year, that means that every person who needs them can make enough money during one year to pay for Photoshop for the next 10 years if they want to.

And if neither free nor paid professional software suits you, then program your own or use a physical photo editing lab. Or use your old Affinity software. It's not being deleted from your computer. That's what I'm going to do.
by anonymousiam | 2025-10-30 16:38:52+00:00
Ventoy is cool and I've used it to boot many different operating systems. The one OS that I've had issues with is FreeDOS. Ventoy will boot it, but I've been unable to access any media on the target system. I'd like to be able to access a separate USB drive, or a hard disk. Maybe there's some trick to doing this that I'm unaware of...
by president_zippy | 2025-10-30 16:39:11+00:00
Maybe this explains why another company just entered into a bidding war with Pfizer to acquire Metsera (MTSR).

Thank God, because my $60 strike call options just turned from a $55k loss to a $180k gain overnight. I shoulda read the CVRs BEFORE buying calls, but I was so blinded by the prospect of easy M&A arbitrage gains I couldn't risk missing out by taking 30 minutes to read the terms of the acquisition.

Glad I have the chance to quit while I'm ahead! Last time I ever fuck around with options trading!
by zahlman | 2025-10-30 16:39:41+00:00
A while back I tried out SuperCollider for programmatic music generation... I distinctly remember thinking, "this language feels like some weird awkward blend of Smalltalk and Ruby".

Somehow I hadn't thought of the two as similar or related to each other.

Anyway, certainly you can write in this style in Python, since functions are first-class objects. It just has limits on its anonymous functions, and doesn't happen to provide a `times` method on integers (at least partly because the old parser would have struggled with seeing `10.times` and thinking "this should be a floating-point number, but `t` isn't a decimal digit").

>>> class rint(int): # r for Ruby, of course ... def times(self, func): ... for i in range(self): ... func(i) ... >>> rint(3).times(print) 0 1 2

> In Python, Java or C++, calling object.method() asks the compiler to find the method in the class and call it.

This is incorrect, as noted later. In Python, the lookup occurs at runtime. It also checks the object first, in most cases.

... The writing keeps anticipating my objections and then sort of correcting them and leaving something else not quite right. So trying to edit as I read has been frustrating. The point being, I just don't buy the philosophical difference that the author is trying to draw.

In Python the reason you're dealing with "attributes" rather than "messages" is because functions are first-class objects, which entails that they'll be treated the same way as ordinary data. A method call is two separate steps — the method-lookup and the actual attempt to "call" the result — which also has the implication that you can cache a "bound method" for later use. (By comparison, Ruby lets you "cache" the symbol, which in Python-think looks like some kind of magic string that tries to look itself up as an attribute name on other objects.)

But, I contend, this doesn't meaningfully change how the language is used overall.

> By including Enumerable and by implementing each, we get access to so many methods that we didn’t need to manually implement.

Okay, but in Python `map` and `filter` are just builtin functions, and you can use list comprehensions and `functools.reduce`. It's just a difference between external and internal iteration.
by jfengel | 2025-10-30 16:39:58+00:00
As a UX guy, I'd like to note that the normal people aren't so great at knowing what they want, either.

I dread "Can you add a button..." Or worse, "Can you add a check box..." Not only does that make it worse for other users, it also makes it worse for you, even if you don't realize it yet.

What you need is to take their use case and imagine other ways to get there. Often that means completely turning their idea on its head. It can even help if you're not in the trenches with them, and can look at the bigger picture rather than the thing that is interfering with their current work flow.
Launch HN: Propolis (YC X25) – Browser agents that QA your web app autonomously
by mpapazian | 2025-10-30 16:40:02+00:00
Hi HN, we're Marc and Matt, and we're building Propolis (app.propolis.tech/#/launch). We use browser agents to simulate users in order to report bugs and write e2e tests. Today, you can launch 10s-100s of agents that collaboratively explore a website and report back on pain points + propose e2e tests that can run as part of your CI.

You can try an initial run (two minute set up) to get a feel for the product for free here: app.propolis.tech/#/launch. Or watch our demo video: https://www.tella.tv/video/autonomous-qa-system-walkthrough-...

The Problem

Both Matt and I have been thinking about software quality for the last 10 years. While at Airtable Matt worked on the infrastructure team responsible for deploys and thought a lot about how to catch bugs before users did. Deterministic tests are incredibly effective at ensuring pre-defined behavior continues to function, but it's hard to get meaningful coverage & easy to "stub/mock" so much that it's no longer representative of real usage.

I like to pitch what we're building now as a set of “users” you can treat like a canary group without worrying about impacting real users.

What we do: Propolis runs "swarms" of browser agents that collaborate to come up with user journeys, flag points of friction, and propose e2e tests that can then be run more cheaply on any trigger you'd like. We have customers from public companies to startups running "swarms" regularly to massively increase the breadth of their automated testing + running the produced tests as part of their CI pipeline to ensure that more specific flows stay working without needing to worry about updating playwright/selenium tests.

One thing that really excites me about this approach is how flexible "checks" can be since they're evaluated partially via LLM, for example we've caught bugs related to the quality of non-deterministic output (think a shopping assistant recommending a product that the user then searches for and can’t find).

Pricing and Availability

It's production-ready today at $1000/month unlimited-use + active support for early users willing to give feedback and request features. We're also happy to work with you for capped-use / hobby plans at lower prices if you'd like to use it for smaller or personal projects.

We'd love to hear from the HN community - especially curious if folks have thoughts on what else autonomous agents could validate beyond bugs and functional correctness. Try it out and let us know what you think!
by drbroom | 2025-10-30 16:40:30+00:00
ok... to start off, i'll date myself: first computer 1977 Apple 1, build (and owned) by best friend and myself in 10th grade. so mac/pc commercials :-) but i also remember "i bleed in 6 colors" & our beloved "Clarus the dogcow" i'm old!

so to answer your question... HELL YES!!! unless you are talking about detail of the bottom line.

To my view Apple care little about quality of product these days mostly because they Cook cares more about deliverables then usability. 1st piece of evidence developers no longer need to adhere to anything like "The Human Interface Guidelines" so there is no consistent UI. Developers all think they are designers, they are not!

Steve was and ASSHOLE but he was also a humanitarian; among his many skills was that he understood that humans crave at least the appearance of control over our environment, he looked for how we did things in the real world and worked with great developers, designers & END USERS to build them. AND LEGACY was at least considered carefully before replaced.

This was the Apple we loved and "evangelized" The Macintosh Way

So at this point i'm not buying new Apple hardware or staying in their ethos. I'm looking for a couple of guys in a garage... Maybe Ive's 'little' project?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-30 16:40:46+00:00
Account balance is a litmus test. If you can't liberate even that information, you've lost control over the banking and your own device.

> 2FA is either a standard TOTP generator or an SMS.

For now. Be grateful while you have it. Most banks everywhere are moving to 2FA through push notifications to their proprietary app, and are deprecating other channels. TOTP is becoming unusual in a bank; where I live, I haven't seen it in use in banking in over a decade (though I'm not counting SMS here; they're technically kind of like TOTP, but they're generated by the service, not on your end).

Between that and a web-wide push for passkeys, having a locked down smartphone is already becoming a soft requirement for doing anything on the web.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-30 16:40:50+00:00
I find it funny that people think OAI can enter the ad business and just compete easily with Google, given the years Google has had investing in research etc to build the behemoth it is today in the market for online advertising.

By the time OAI even figures it out, they will have run out of funding. All they can do now is prop up usage numbers to signal to investors that their market position is durable.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-30 16:41:05+00:00
5 years is very specific.

Its origin is important to know, to interpret that specificity. Did Feynman derive five years for innovations. No? Does the Chinese calendar have five years per “year week”? No.

So where did “5” come from? The Soviet Union.

Now questions about how well 5 years works can focus on historical successes and failures, instead of “where the heck did that number come from?”.
by thijsvandien | 2025-10-30 16:41:28+00:00
Mixed feelings about this. The apps were great and it's always uncomfortable when the future becomes uncertain due to a big acquisition. So far, it seems it could've gone worse. Their business model makes sense. I like that everything got integrated now, because Photo, Designer and Publisher being separate with so much overlap didn't feel natural. Hate the new logo, though... Some elegance was definitely lost.
by franga2000 | 2025-10-30 16:41:33+00:00
Ventoy is great, but what I really miss is DriveDroid from the good old days. It still exists, but it's not quite as reliable on modern Android as it was on rooted Cyanogenmod back in the day and the distro download links have rotten away.

For those not familiar with it, it turns your Android phone into a USB DVD drive, meaning not only can you just download and host any distro with a few taps, you also don't need any hybrid ISOs or anything like that, the computer sees a real DVD so even old or weird machines accept it.
by neogodless | 2025-10-30 16:41:44+00:00
I really think in-person Gloomhaven is a great use case, if it's handled well.

Scene 0: Enter player count / difficulty / etc.

Scene 1: Map. Press UI to pick a location / scenario

Scene 2: Loads hex map and enemies, manages all NPC activity for you

Players still use physical cards, and importantly, physical stands for their characters. Would be worth discussing if the screen handles modifier cards... for physical cards the names might be on screen, then the players select their actions (top or bottom) and define movement or action targets. Some animation and NPC health / reactions are handled by software.

So there's a reduction in set up (hex maps, NPCs) and a reduction in managing NPC actions (which is why the PC versions are so appealing in the first place.) But instead of all players focusing on their own screen, they are still getting some face time and tactile board game play.
by jraph | 2025-10-30 16:41:45+00:00
> Personally I think the "best" workaround for this is to decouple the text representation and the representation the editing happens in. Allow people to type e^abs(x) and then the editor translates that into e^{abs(x)} while letting you edit it as an exponential, but if you're working on the underlying text file then you have to write e^{abs(x)}. For that matters, you can just have the editor represent it as a literal superscript.

I'm pretty sure that's how LyX does it, possibly others as well.
by questionableans | 2025-10-30 16:42:00+00:00
Authoring and reviewing PRs when no one person owns them individually sure sounds like influencing the direction of the team without any authority to make a unilateral decision to me.

You’re right about politics, but I think the part where people may vary is the definition of authority. Does being consistently influential make someone an authority? It depends on what that means. They will be believed more often (they have soft power) but they don’t have hard power to command someone to do something. What makes it a gray area is they almost surely have influence with someone else who does have hard power.