MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saulrh | 2025-10-26 18:49:15+00:00
I think one obvious approach would be to assign "roles" - one person is "operations" and is the only one allowed to read the instructions to you, one person is "research" and has access to the list of ingredients, etc. But that probably bottlenecks things too hard and you have to figure out a fast way to assign roles. You could just increase the difficulty by requiring more precise instructions? Ah, you split the list of instructions into four parts and put one list in each corner of the classroom, then randomly sort people into the corners - one corner has ingredients, one corner has operations, one corner has conditionals, one corner has goals, and the class has to communicate to build valid instructions. Maybe give the ingredients tongue-twister names and make them devise ways to communicate without getting things confused. And obviously the end of the demo is "so why didn't any of you just take a list of ingredients and walk over to the list of operations so you didn't have to shout?".
by samat | 2025-10-26 18:49:43+00:00
I think it’s an artifact of AI being used to write it.

I spotted a few more down the page and stopped reading.

I trust the judgment (and curation) of a person who invested significant time into learning stuff and then took even more time to write it down.

I don’t trust people who use AI to generate text.

If I want to read AI slop — I can generate one myself.

I want some soul in texts.

It is a sad day for the internet.
by anthomtb | 2025-10-26 18:50:24+00:00
In a past life I held the title Firmware Engineer. The day-to-day development process did not differ from subsequent positions as a Software Engineer. Write-Compile-Test-Repeat. Then put it up for review so your colleagues can skewer it, or, on rare occasion, offer considerate and thorough feedback.

Firmware development is indeed taught in higher education. But not under the name "Firmware". It will be an "embedded systems" course or series of courses. At least in my experience, those courses are run by the Electrical Engineering department and the average Computer Science student stays far away from them.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-26 18:50:41+00:00
It's not an argument, it's just true.

In medicine, there is obviously a benefit in having less data. If I told you that you have a vein in your brain that could aneurysm at any point and instantly kill you, but no, we can't do anything about that - would that help you?

No, that would exclusively make your life worse, at least for the vast majority of people. It's also true for a lot of people. It could be true for you, right now.

Also, just because the error is in interpreting DOES NOT mean that the MRI is somehow magically off the hook. The risk came from the MRI. If you never did the MRI, then it would be impossible for that scenario to happen. That's just plainly true.

So therefore, if you do the MRI, there is a risk of that happening. Taking that risk without any complaints is deemed not worth it, so we don't do it.
Show HN: Cozy Keys, play MIDI keys in the browser
by sultson | 2025-10-26 18:50:56+00:00
Hi HN, I've built a low-friction web app for playing and recording MIDI keys.

Cozy Keys serves as a sweet spot between full-blown DAW/piano apps and lighter online tools. Former often have setup hassle, and might not be readily available on all devices and online options tend to be either learning-focused or filled with paid features/ads.

What you can do: - connect MIDI and play keys, you've got the grand piano + additional synth presets (personal favourite is the Juno Synth modelled after the famouse Juno 60/106 lushness) - choose an "environment" aka preconfigured delay/reverb setting - record plays, both audio and MIDI are recorded - playback with preview on keys - share recordings - download recordings

There's also a "Chords with Cora" option as an exploration of handing chord creation tooling to a voice agent.

Note: Mobile support is quite limited, working on that.

Source: https://github.com/sultson/cozy-keys
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-26 18:51:53+00:00
> AI books should come with warning labels

I disagree. AI use is diffuse. An author is specific. Having people label their work as AI free is accountable in a way trying to require AI-generated work be labeled is not.

> similar to those found in cigarettes

Hyperbole undermines your argument. We have decades of rigorous and international evidence for the harms from cigarettes. We don’t for AI.
by spauldo | 2025-10-26 18:53:28+00:00
It's my nameserver/DHCP server. I used to have it set up as an iSCSI target for backups and as a boot server for my firewall, but I do something else these days.

My main reason for using NetBSD for this is to have easy access to the man pages. Like the other BSDs, the man pages are exceptionally well-written and are a tremendous resource for doing POSIX programming. Plus I find myself digging through the code when I'm interested in how something is implemented. Having a local repository of good C code with a liberal license is worth having the extra OS to manage.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-26 18:53:41+00:00
The profit margin on selling brewed coffee is normally counted in thousands of percent. Any tariff on the imported coffee beans does not have any noticeable effect on operating costs of a coffee shop, so you can safely assume that the owners are just lying in order to jack up their prices, which might work depending on customer base.

Operating costs for coffee shops mainly come from other things than the beans, such as rent, utilities, wages.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-26 18:53:41+00:00
It's both, obviously. You asked for one reason, I gave it to you, you didn't like it, so I gave another reason. These are all speculative, of course, and just my opinion.

> If you’re going to keep ignoring my points and making up new things while moving the goalposts, I don’t see the point in having a discussion.

I'm not ignoring anything - it's called disagreeing with your points. Because I do disagree with them, to an extent.

I agree that Firefox is missing features. I DO NOT agree that this is generally, keyword generally, a bad thing.

Also, Firefox is not even the most behind browser. Uh, that would be Safari, and it's not even close.

If you don't support Firefox but you DO support Safari, then:

1. You must not give a flying fuck about web standards or features, as Safari is missing the most of both OR

2. You squarely target primarily Apple users so you have no choice but to put up with Apple's subpar software, i.e. you're Stockholm'd in

For option 2, the only way to stop that is to do what I said - stop playing Apple's games and don't target their bespoke barely-functional bullshit.

Also, let me just say: there is absolutely no shame in number 2. You have to make your money. Just a couple years ago, I was maintaining an application that still targeted IE 6. Yes, really. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to reach the users where they are.
by y-c-o-m-b | 2025-10-26 18:53:46+00:00
This is victim-blaming mentality to a T.

I don't understand the goal of your post. What is the solution you're proposing for those things? That they don't use anonymization techniques? They kick out the other people from their home?

The OP is saying they don't watch that kind of content and they mark the videos as "not interested" and Youtube is still pushing the content. The onus is on Youtube to stop. Presumably OP is logged in, or if they're not, then Youtube still uses browser fingerprinting techniques. It seems simple on Youtube's side to fix the problem. Blaming the OP here doesn't make sense.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-26 18:54:08+00:00
Er, yeah, the math there looks right, but my point is that with a non-exotic solar setup, I can't supply more amperage to my house via solar than what my grid connection allows... though actually looking at how the ratings work, solar capacity is going to be limited by the busbar rather than the grid connection... so I could upgrade my panel to 200A, keep 100A service and get maybe 80A of solar capacity at the max if I got around the solar sizing limits... which, as we've both noted, isn't enough to heat my house resistively.

While your description was funny, my house isn't especially palatial - it's a pretty bog-standard <2000 sqft house from the 70's with new windows and attic insulation. Unfortunately, the insulation can't otherwise be upgraded much without extension/expensive renovations, and it just takes a lot of energy to keep it heated when it's -35° outside.
by damageboy | 2025-10-26 18:54:15+00:00
I can see why systolic arrays come to mind, but this is different. While there are indeed many ALUs connected to each other in a systolic array and in a data-flow chip, data-flow is usually more flexible (at a cost of complexity) and the ALUs can be thought of as residing on some shared fabric.

Systolic arrays often (always?) have a predefined communication pattern and are often used in problems where data that passes through them is also retained in some shape or form.

For NextSilicon, the ALUs are reconfigured and rewired to express the application (or parts of) on the parallel data-flow acclerator.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 18:54:41+00:00
> defining AGI as matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult

Seems most of the people one would encounter out in the world might not posses AGI, how are we supposed to be able to train our electrified rocks to have AGI if this is the case?

If no one has created a online quiz called "Are you smarter than AGI?" yet based on the proposed "ten core cognitive domains", I'd be disappointed.
Show HN: VibeScrape – Paste a URL and JSON schema, get working web scraper code
by sourdesi | 2025-10-26 18:55:11+00:00
Hey HN, I built VibeScrape — it takes a website URL and a JSON schema describing the data you want, then analyzes the page, writes real Python code to extract that data, and refines the code until the output is accurate.

While there's lots of tools these days (e.g. Firecrawl) that feed the entire HTML of a webpage to an LLM to extract data from it, this always seemed like a really slow & expensive approach to me.

On the other hand, handwriting web-scraping code seems archaic at this point. This type of code is incredibly tedious to write, and immediately becomes throwaway code once the webpage's layout changes even a little.

VibeScrape aims to automate the process of writing this type of code.

1. Grabs the rendered HTML — the same view a browser sees. 2. Has an LLM extract data from the HTML into your target JSON schema (the “ground truth”). 3. Generates Python scraper code to reproduce that "ground truth" output. 4. Runs and compares results against the ground truth. 5. Refines the code automatically until the outputs match.

I've found that letting the LLM take control of both the code generation and iteration process e2e has worked pretty well for producing working scraper code for many of the websites I've tested it on!

It still has some limitations in terms of handling pagination, captchas, infinite scrolling, etc. Hoping to get some early feedback from the HN community to see if this is a valuable tool. There's a promo code FIRST5 on the site that gets you 5 credits for free, but am happy to give more credits to anyone that reaches out at contact@vibescrape.ai !

Thanks!
by kace91 | 2025-10-26 18:55:22+00:00
You actually led me into a dive to learn what worktrees are, how bare repos + worktrees behave differently from a regular clone and how a repo behaves when it’s at the receiving end of a push, so thanks for that!

I’ve never worked with decentralized repos, patches and the like. I think it’s a good moment to grab a book and relearn git beyond shallow usage - and I suspect its interface is a bit too leaky to grok it without understanding the way it works under the hood.
by physicsguy | 2025-10-26 18:55:24+00:00
Yes. I worked for a large company who made engineering software and we had all sorts of license checks that would ping our servers when an unlicensed copy pinged up.

We regularly found IPs linked to large companies using it and the licensing team regularly had a field day. Universities basically got a stern letter because there is no money in chasing those, but large companies certainly got contacted by licensing compliance.
by sometimes_all | 2025-10-26 18:56:09+00:00
> Would it really be similarly offensive if a headline referred to something happening in "South America" when actually it happened in Guyana?

Yes. It's like saying that the art and culture in Georgetown is very similar to the art and culture in Santiago. Especially when you claim to be an arts-and-culture website. Would a Texan like being stereotyped by a tourist who thinks all of America is just like New York City?

> Or, a headline about something happening in "Europe" when actually it happened in Andorra?

What many people here are trying to point out is that the chances of seeing such a line about a European country (even a relatively unknown one) is waaaay less than the chances of seeing such a line about African/South American countries.
by QuiEgo | 2025-10-26 18:57:19+00:00
A friend of mine once said "the warranty expires at 25."

Your body peaks in your late 20s or early 30s. It will get a hell of a lot harder to lose weight, and undo any bad choices you make now the older you get.

Build a sustainable base of eating habits and exercise and *never* let it drop. You don't have to do anything crazy at all, just be consistent. Oh, and use sunscreen.
by mobilejdral | 2025-10-26 18:58:05+00:00
The title is a bit link-bait. It should really be "Disrupting circadian rhythms of plaque-clearing brain cells is associated with Alzheimer's"

> He found that too much of YKL-40, which is linked to Alzheimer’s risk in humans, leads to amyloid build-up, an accumulation that is a hallmark of the neurodegenerative disease.

There are countless studies that highlight how genetics or lifestyle and other factors that result in a reduction of estrogen signaling are associated with Alzheimer's. Estrogen, primarily activated at night decreases the expression of the YKL-40 gene. All of the known interventions, from vitamin D, Mg, to gut, choline, etc all can improve estrogen signaling, decreasing YKL-40 gene. One can end up with Alzheimer's from many different routes so interventions depend on the person.

If there was a pill on the market today that would only increase the plaque-clearing all this really does is move the needle, they still have reduced estrogen signaling and the next weakest part of the system would fail such as from animpaired immune system and they will probably die of pneumonia.

But we could back up and say what is the most common cause of the global reduced estrogen signaling? Often increased oxy-androgens (which increase as we age), so for example 11-ketotestosterone (11-KT) which can't convert to its estrogen form results in upregulates HSD17B2. Why do we have so much inflammation causing increased oxy-androgens from the adrenals? Senescence cells releasing inflammatory factors SASP. More time more time spent on repair resulting in identity loss and mesenchymal drift. All a fancy way of saying we get older and will probably die from whatever weakest part of the system we have genetically. Fix one thing and something else breaks instead.

And for those that want to bring in the most well known genetic mutation APOE e4: APOE e4/e4 has elevated choline demands hindering estrogen signaling as well as raising HDL and lowering LDL. Low estrogen influences Cholesteryl Ester Transfer Protein, raising HDL and lowers LDL beyond what e4/e4 does by itself. With less choline and less phosphatidylcholine, it decreases GLUT1 transporters reducing glucose entering the brain. All of the above leads to an escalating amyloid plaque burden. Then reduced deep sleep and the glymphatic system cleaning is reduced too and you have Alzheimer's.

The above was just from memory probably had an error, but the point is Alzheimer's is not "simple" like this article pretends.
by jjmarr | 2025-10-26 18:58:10+00:00
Consumer-visible hardware bugs are extremely uncommon nowadays. There's approximately 10x as many people working in design verification as actual hardware design.

I say "consumer-visible" because the bugs still exist and people who can catch them early get promoted quickly and paid a lot. It's very exciting work if you can get it, since you really have to understand the full GPU to break it.

Good luck!!
by akudha | 2025-10-26 18:59:19+00:00
This depends on the subject of the book, but there are enough books written pre-1970 (or some other year one is comfortable with, before the era of “book spinners”, AI etc) to last multiple lifetimes. I used to spend hours and hours in bookstores, but so many books these days (AI or otherwise) don’t seem that interesting. Many, many books could just be 3 page articles, but stretched to 150 page books.

So yeah, simply filtering by year published could be a start
by tcdent | 2025-10-26 18:59:51+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I am super excited about what AI is doing for technology. But this endless conversation about "what is AGI" is so boring.

It makes me think of every single public discussion that's ever been had about quantum, where you can't start the conversation unless you go through a quick 101 on what a qubit is.

As with any technology, there's not really a destination. There is only the process of improvement. The only real definitive point is when a technology becomes obsolete, though it is still kept alive through a celebration of its nostalgia.

AI will continue to improve. More workflows will become automated. And from our perception, no matter what the rapidness of advancement is, we're still frogs in water.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 19:00:00+00:00
I remember many similar cycles of having different browsers open side-by-side, and trying to pinpoint (without the developer tools we know and love today) the exact reason why one border was one pixel in one browser, and two pixels in the other, throwing the whole layout off.

Also remembering when Firebug for Firefox appeared, and made so many things so much easier. Suddenly things that took hours took days, and it was so much easier when you had some introspection tools.
by Fnoord | 2025-10-26 19:00:36+00:00
> If you're still stuck, maybe ask a friend for help, or come back to the puzzle later. You can also ask for hints in the subreddit.

Not sure why this is OK but prompt engineering isn't? If someone wants to test that skillset, let them be instead of asking 'please don't'. Especially given the competitive nature is now optional.
by dmurray | 2025-10-26 19:00:57+00:00
I thought the writing was banal but fine. The stars of the show are the images, not the text. Assuming it's largely LLM written, this seems like a good use of that technology.

The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone: they were painted on flour sacks, used at mobile cinemas, now exhibited at galleries in the West, etc. And it provides citations and artists' names for those who want to learn more.

The art criticism is unsophisticated, the images don't completely match the descriptions, and some of the facts might well be hallucinated or at least taken out of context. But you got that with traditional media and human writers/editors too.

For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, though his personality is more interesting, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-26 19:01:15+00:00
Secrets? Just leak them, it only has to happen once. Guilds? Revoke their privileges and protections, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Absolutely an improvement. Information wants to be free. Stop criminalizing it and people will find a way to free it. And once it's out there it's over, there is no containing it.
by spauldo | 2025-10-26 19:01:15+00:00
You aren't going to see OpenBSD share a kernel with anyone - it's too different and makes trade-offs the others won't accept. And NetBSD doesn't need the heavyweight kernel FreeBSD uses.

From what I've seen, the BSD community swaps code around on a regular basis. But they pick and choose what code to use based on their own goals. It seems to work pretty well.
by yupyupyups | 2025-10-26 19:01:18+00:00
What advice? I'm not sure what you mean.

Do you mean that there is no valid use-case where you wish to interrupt a blocking thread due to I/O, for example?

Or maybe you think Python can do that. Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell Python is not good at doing that.

Perhaps my choice of word "kill" confused you, and in that case I should've picked better wording reflecting what I meant. Perhaps you thought I meant people should kill threads/processes instead of fixing buggy CPU-intensive tasks? That's certainly not what I meant.

You don't seem to be very charitable in how you interpret what I'm saying. Instead of a very vague comment, it would've been better if you'd have explained your concern, and given me a chance to understand you.
by pm215 | 2025-10-26 19:01:18+00:00
The problem is that it's relatively easy to add "supports both endiannesses" in hardware and architecture but the ongoing effect on the software stack is massive. You need a separate toolchain for it; you need support in the kernel for it; you need distros to build all their stuff two different ways; everybody has to add a load of extra test cases and setups. That's a lot of ongoing maintenance work for a very niche use case, and the other problem is that typically almost nobody actually uses the nonstandard endianness config and so it's very prone to bitrotting, because nobody has the hardware to run it.

Architectures with only one supported endianness are less painful. "Supports both and both are widely used" would also be OK (I think mips was here for a while?) but I think that has a tendency to collapse into "one is popular and the other is niche" over time.

Relatedly, "x32" style "32 bit pointers on a 64 bit architecture" ABIs are not difficult to define but they also add a lot of extra complexity in the software stack for something niche. And they demonstrate how hard it is to get rid of something once it's nominally supported: x32 is still in Linux because last time they tried to dump it a handful of people said they still used it. Luckily the Arm ILP32 handling never got accepted upstream in the first place, or it would probably also still be there sucking up maintenance effort for almost no users.