MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rictic | 2025-10-13 17:52:46+00:00
Is true. I wrote a ton of tests, testing just about everything I can think of, including using a reverse parser I wrote to exhaustively generate the simplest 65k json values, ensuring that it succeeds with the same values and fails on the same cases as JSON.parse.

Then added benchmarks and started doing optimization, getting it ~10x faster than my initial naive implementation. Then I threw agents at it, and between Claude, Gemini, and Codex we were able to make it an additional 2x faster.
by ianbutler | 2025-10-13 17:52:50+00:00
That's fine, less entitled people is healthy for a projects ecosystem.

For a proper way this would work, you the user would contribute your time for those features so you don't overburden the maintainer, but people like you won't and so this is where we're at.

I'd rather avoid burnout (which will kill a project entirely) and lose a few folks like you.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-10-13 17:53:48+00:00
AI assisted boardgame design process.

I enjoy exploring AI-assisted process development. Things I've learned are:

* Building nôn pipelines for generating placeholder art. GPT-5 excels at writing code nodes.

* LLM for LaTeX generation (note: GPT-5 generally fails at even moderately complex LaTeX and often adds complexity while endlessly orbiting the problem without solving it. On of the other hand, it's failed solutions eventually give me enough datapoints to develop the correct solution on my own. Probably faster than learning enough LaTeX to develop them on my own. Sadly I can fix broken LaTeX much easier than writing correct LaTeX.

* Using LaTeX to read card data out of CSVs is difficult to get right (esp with embedded LaTeX) but honestly pretty good for rapid prototyping.

* Searching games for mechanics to solve specific interaction problems is an ok-ish problem for GPT-5. I wish I had a vector DB of indexed PDF manuals for the top 5k bgg games, but that's too big of a problem to solve.

It's incredibly cheap and easy to generate reasonable approximations of thematic text sufficient for a prototype.

Overall, I went from idea to first round of playtesting in about 2-3 weeks. Previous similar attempts had been 2-3 months. I feel quite a bit less attached to darlings, but the downside is a bit of shame attached to having playtesters work around errors originating from AI usage rather than errors generated by my own oversights
by arghwhat | 2025-10-13 17:53:49+00:00
Are you likening the UK to Russia?

This is not a fictive fine, it's threats of imprisonment, and ignoring the whole thing means having to avoid travelling to or through the UK for life, and that's assuming the UK doesn't try to activate any sort of extradition agreements.

Even without going to prison, that's a permanent and quite significant theft of freedom of movement. If you ever travel abroad, you could end up accidentally booking a transfer through the UK.

No one ends up unintentionally transferring through Russia anytime soon. And likening the legal threats of a foreign nation to a joke from your neighbor makes no sense.
by tantalor | 2025-10-13 17:53:52+00:00
Fun fact: they're edible too

> In addition to the rationing system, the government provided food through soup kitchens in the cities. As the intensity of the famine increased, the reliance on soup kitchens increased. In April 1945, 1.8 million people in the cities were served daily. One pint of soup per person was the normal ration. The quality of the soup deteriorated over time and some people considered it inedible. The caloric content of a soup ration diminished from 483 calories to 268 calories. The soup served was often made from sugar beets, tulip bulbs, and potato peels. Pet dogs and cats were sometimes eaten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongerwinter
by motorest | 2025-10-13 17:54:12+00:00
> Environment variables are often used to pass secrets around. But, despite its ubiquity, I believe that's a bad practice:

I think environment variables are recommended to pass configuration parameters, and also secrets, in containerized applications managed by container orchestration systems.

By design, other processes cannot inspect what environment variables are running in a container.

Also, environment variables are passed to child processes because, by design, the goal is to run child processes in the same environment (i.e., same values) as the parent process, or with minor tweaks. Also, the process that spawns child processes is the one responsible for set it's environment variables, which means it already has at least read access to those secrets.

All in all I think all your concerns are based on specious reasoning, but I'll gladly discuss them in finer detail.
by shawneechase | 2025-10-13 17:54:31+00:00
We keep hearing: “AI agents need non-human identity.” That they’re “silicon employees” deserving their own identity and permissions.

That’s backwards.

Here’s the problem: when an agent acts on your behalf, the question isn’t “Who is the agent?” — it’s “Who is the user, and what is allowed?” Trying to force-id agents leads into messy territory fast: whose permission is it? The agent’s? The user’s? A hybrid?

In practice, this breaks real systems.

The key insight

Agents are not a new class of identity. They’re applications with smart components. They should sit inside your existing security model, not break it.

Treat agents just like any other app:

They have their own OAuth client/app identity.

Users authorize those apps with specific scopes.

Runtime enforcement checks: is this user allowed this action on this resource?

You don’t grant blanket authority up front — you request access when needed (just-in-time authorization).

What most people get wrong

Two common anti-patterns:

Service accounts with broad permissions You give the agent elevated access. If the agent runs as “superuser,” you get privilege escalation risks and surface area for abuse.

Hardcoded user credentials Storing the user’s credentials for the agent to use. That might work in toy or single-user setups, but it’s dangerous and unscalable — the agent inherits everything you can do, including destructive actions.

The “agent-as-app” model in practice

Here’s how it works better:

The agent has its own OAuth identity (client ID/secret).

When it needs access to Gmail, Slack, Jira, etc., it requests the minimal scopes.

At runtime, when the agent calls a tool, we check: can this user, using this agent, perform this action on that resource?

If authorization hasn’t been granted yet, trigger an OAuth flow.

The agent never stores credentials. It only executes what’s allowed.

Because agents are apps, all your existing security tooling (IAM, OIDC, policies) can stay in place.

If you’re building agents or evaluating agent platforms, I’d love your thoughts:

Are you pushing for non-human identity in your work or your org?

How have you structured agent permissions — more like apps or something else?

What trade-offs have you seen between convenience and security in agent auth?
by dpe82 | 2025-10-13 17:54:40+00:00
At first I questioned your assertion, but after reading the most recent FAA AC revision (https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...) I found:

13.5.3 In most cases, not all wind turbine units within a wind turbine farm need to be lighted. Obstruction lights should be placed along the perimeter of the wind turbine farm so that there are no unlit separations or gaps more than 1/2 SM (0.80 km) (see Figure A-26). Wind turbines within a grid or cluster should not have an unlighted separation or gap of more than 1 SM (1.61 km) across the interior of a grid or cluster of turbines
by peelar | 2025-10-13 17:54:55+00:00
I am working on a weekly smart home tours newsletter. My pitch is: imagine if nerds were allowed into MTV Cribs. The format will be similar to workspaces.xyz newsletter.

I'm currently collecting submissions for the first editions. So if you would be interested to feature your smart home, that would be awesome.

https://www.smartcribz.com
by adrr | 2025-10-13 17:55:07+00:00
Its easy to convince the world that Americans are special because we won WWII singlehandedly and invented gas cars that we can output 3x more CO2 than anyone else. they should be grateful and change the way they live not us. They should focus on reducing their emissions so I can keep driving my ford F150 on my 20 mile commute to work.
by boston_clone | 2025-10-13 17:55:18+00:00
Delightfully appropriate article for a Monday morning.

The constancy of ads, popups, dark patterns, and general “enshittification” genuinely pushes me towards a Luddite mentality.

As a cybersecurity professional, I enjoy not having any smart devices in my home. It’s not worth the hassle of initial configuration and maintenance, but the peace of mind from reducing impact of inevitable data breaches that reveal just how much telemetry is captured from a simple device is eternally appealing.

Reduce, reuse, recycle; in that order. We must all stop obsessing over the new hot piece of tech that inevitable ends up improperly disposed in landfills.

The profanity in the title is well-applied for the situation, imo.
by recursive | 2025-10-13 17:55:44+00:00
I took a linear algebra class, as well as many others. It didn't work.

Most math classes I've taken granted me some kind of intuition for the subject material. Like I could understand the concept independent from the name of the thing.

In linear algebra, it was all a series of arbitrary facts without reason for existing. I memorized them for the final exam, and probably forgot them all the next day, as they weren't attached to anything in my mind.

"The inverse of the eigen-something is the determinant of the abelian".

It was just a list of facts like this to memorize by rote.

I passed the class with a decent grade I think. But I really understood nothing. At this point, I can't remember how to multiply matrices. Specifically do the rows go with the columns or do the columns go with the rows?

I don't know if there's something about linear algebra or I just didn't connect with the instructor. But I've taken a lot of other math classes, and usually been able to understand the subject material readily. Maybe linear algebra is different. It was completely impenetrable for me.
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-13 17:55:53+00:00
I imagine if you reason about incomplete strings as a sort of “unparsed data” where you might store or transport or render it raw (like a string version of printing response.data instead of response.json()), but not act on it (compare, concat, etc), it’s a reasonably safe model?

I’m imagining it in my mental model as being typed “unknown”. Anything that prevents accidental use as if it were a whole string… I imagine a more complex type with an “isComplete” flag of sorts would be more powerful but a bit of a blunderbuss.
by fdschoeneman | 2025-10-13 17:55:53+00:00
This piece would be more useful if it explained what it means by winning. Early on, it seems to define winning as the amount of taxpayer subsidies going towards it, at least in the US; but then it talks about the growth in the rest of the world without showing, at least before I stopped reading, how much of that growth is driven by tax and regulatory incentives.
by triceratops | 2025-10-13 17:56:05+00:00
> Those who intend to re-invest all returns in to the stock

Sell the stock then use the gains to buy the stock? I'm very confused by this.

> without having to first pay tax for the dividend

Long term capital gains and dividends are taxed at the same rate. The only tax-free way to benefit from a higher share price (that I know of) is to borrow against it.

> get their reward in the proportion of their ownership of the company going up.

Which only matters if the company pays dividends, or the shareholders eventually sell.
by bgwalter | 2025-10-13 17:56:13+00:00
They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m):

"Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones."

In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-10-13 17:56:29+00:00
> Why should Fastmail invest in Thunderbird, an open-source email client run by a completely unrelated organization? Of course they could, out of good will.

It's likely cheaper to submit self-serving patches than to build and maintain your own email client.

> But you can't demand that they do.

Who's demanding anything?
by numpad0 | 2025-10-13 17:56:35+00:00
I think what they think is that power users and above are rounding errors, so damages are always negligible. And one thing I know as a longtime MS "customer" is that things that would allow their employee to collect and display a decapitated head of another employee gets done lightning quick, otherwise never happens. I guess I should be trying to find a way to cause it, weird thing to do, though.
by stackskipton | 2025-10-13 17:56:37+00:00
SRE/Sysadmin/DevOps/Whatever here, while blog didn't talk about doing anything difficult but setting ENVVAR standards, I will point out all replacements are just as frustrating especially when talking about secrets.

Anything involving vaults where Application reaches out to specific secret vault like Hashicorp Vault/OpenBao/Secrets Manager quickly becomes massive vendor lock in where replacement is very difficult due to library replacement and makes vault uptime extremely important. This puts Ops in extremely difficult place when it becomes time to upgrade or do maintenance.

Config files have problem of you have secrets, how do you get them into config file since config files are generally kept in public systems? Most of the time it's some form of either "Template replacement by privileged system before handing it to application" or "Entire Config File gets loaded into secret vault and passed into application". Templating can be error prone and loading entire config files into secret manager is frustrating as well since someone could screw up the load.

Speaking of config files, since most systems are running containers, and unless you are at Ops discipline company, these config files are never in the right place, it becomes error prone for Ops to screw up the mounting. Also, whatever format you use, JSON/YAML/TOML is ripe for some weird config file bug to emerge like Norway problem in YAML.

Getting secrets from Kubernetes Secrets API I've seen done but lock in again. I'd strongly not recommend this approach unless you are designing a Kubernetes operator or other such type system.

I will say I've seen Subprocess thing bite people but I've seen less and less subprocess generation these days. Most teams go with message bus type system instead of sub processing since it's more robust and allows independent scaling.
by gretch | 2025-10-13 17:56:58+00:00
I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going to be huge for national security in a a few years.

Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and you'll lose the war.

It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content. Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-headed by porn sites.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-13 17:57:33+00:00
Likewise, I've lost all of my code from the 8 bit era, no big deal, really, but it would have been fun to read some of it.

One of the more interesting projects was to make an annotated listing of the 6809 version of MS Basic for the Dragon 32. We learned so much just by studying that code. It was only 16K and yet we spent months on that.

And for stuff we wrote ourselves, a real-time 3D renderer for simple 3D models in 6502 assembly was probably the pinnacle.
Show HN: Breadboard – A visual app builder on a Figma-like canvas
by simquat | 2025-10-13 17:57:48+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Simone, and along with Nurie, I'm working on Breadboard[0], an app builder where the UI, logic, and data live on the same canvas. We've been exploring visual and vibe coding tools and noticed that while they are great at generating code, the text-based output can be difficult for non-technical people to understand and modify.

Our idea is to make the underlying complexity more readable by using three simple block types for Logic, Data, and UI. These blocks are then connected with cables, similar to wiring components on an electronics breadboard.

Instead of generating a wall of code, our AI assistant produces these visual blocks and connects them for you. Our goal is to make the output from LLMs more accessible and actionable for non-developers.

How it works:

Start from the demo project[1] or a blank canvas[2]. Add UI elements by dragging/pasting SVGs onto the canvas. Add Logic and Data blocks from the dock. Wire blocks together with cables to define behavior and data flow. Click "Play" to run the app preview. – or – Ask our AI rubber‑duck assistant to create and connect blocks for you (free, login required).

This is a very early preview, and we would love to get your feedback and hear your impressions.

[0] https://breadboards.io/ [1] https://app.breadboards.io/demo [2] https://app.breadboards.io/ (login required)

Thanks
by kragen | 2025-10-13 17:58:15+00:00
Mine was a 01983 air-cooled Vanagon with an aftermarket camper conversion. Similarly I had to spend a lot of the available storage on tools, but that didn't really help when I overheated the head and cracked it. Twice. I'm lucky that the leak in the fuel line that sprayed the underside of the van clean with gasoline didn't catch the whole thing on fire before we fixed it. That improved the gas mileage significantly! I hope yours is better than that.

Emacspeak has enabled at least some blind programmers to work efficiently, so I think its auditory code formatting abilities are usably good, which probably isn't the case for all screen readers.
by paganel | 2025-10-13 17:58:16+00:00
There’s also almost the entire economics-related work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. From his Wikipedia page:

> He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
by dangus | 2025-10-13 17:58:27+00:00
The first thing I thought when I read this article was how raspberry pi’s just make this kind of thing more difficult and annoying compared to a regular normal PC, new (e.g. cheap mini PC) or used (e.g. used business workstation or just a plain desktop PC).

And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32 and that a raspberry pi is essentially overkill for many of those use cases.

The Venn diagram for where the pi makes sense seems smaller than ever these days.
by Zarathruster | 2025-10-13 17:58:28+00:00
> I think I'm still a bit confused... so, in the languages which cannot produce understanding and consciousness, you mean to include "machine language"? (And thus, any computer language which can be compiled to machine language?)

It's... a little more complicated but basically yes. Language, by its nature, is indexical: it has no meaning without someone to observe it and ascribe meaning to it. Consciousness, on the other hand, requires no observer beyond the person experiencing it. If you have it, it's as real and undeniable as a rock or a tree or a mountain.

> On your interpretation, are there any sorts of computation that Searle believes would potentially allow consciousness?

I'm pretty sure (but not 100%) that the answer is "no"

> ETA: The other issue I have is with this whole idea is that "understanding requires semantics, and semantics requires consciousness". If you want to say that LLMs don't "understand" in that sense, because they're not conscious, I'm fine as long as you limit it to technical philosophical jargon.

Sure, if you want to think of it that way. If you accept the premise that LLMs aren't conscious, then you can consign the whole discussion to the "technical philosophical jargon" heap, forget about it, and happily go about your day. On the other hand, if you think they might be conscious, and consider the possibility that we're inflicting immeasurable suffering on sapient being that would rightly be treated with kindness (and afforded some measure of rights), then we're no longer debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That's a big, big "if" though.
by ptero | 2025-10-13 17:58:35+00:00
Fair, but there are so many things pushing the Bitcoin price up and down: approvals and rejections of various ETFs, tax law changes around the world, corporate adoption and lack thereof, successes and failures of L2 networks, etc. And each of those can cause comparable long-term movement in the BTC than tether's or altcoin's adoption or collapse.

As a long-term BTC holder my primary reason is protection against debasement. It is a volatile asset, historically with 50-80% drawdowns from time to time. But as long as I think it still serves as a hedge against debasement I am happy to hold a portion of my net worth it in.

Growing up, I have seen fiat go worthless twice in my life: once the government zeroed out previous money overnight, once it hyperinflated fiat by over 1000x in two years. An 80% temporary drop is peanuts compared to that.
by pdpi | 2025-10-13 17:58:36+00:00
> ignore current warnings - I’m using a MacBook Pro charger + cable and still got the warning that I need a 5V/5A PSU.

You need to be careful with this one.

The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support a custom, out-of-spec 25W (5A) mode.

Using an Apple charger gets you the standard 15W mode, and, on 15W, the Pi can only offer 600mA for accessories, which may or may not be enough to power your NVMe. Using the 25W supply, it can offer 1.6A instead, which gives you plenty more headroom.
by triceratops | 2025-10-13 17:58:56+00:00
Right they're gonna continue using as much coal they were already using. Because they have coal. People like the commenter I responded to repeat the talking point about "more coal plants". Because that automatically makes others think China is burning more and more and more coal and we're the only suckers who try to "go green". When in reality China's manufacturing prowess is responsible for solar power becoming so cheap in the first place and they're the biggest users of it by far.
by 0xEF | 2025-10-13 17:59:11+00:00
I'm pretty interested in following the progress of your MUD server, if you have any way for me to do that. I was a heavy player back the day, mostly Circle/Diku MUDs, and still try one out from time to time.

Lately, I have been considering creating my own as a "something to do in my downtime" project, using Coffee or Evennia, but if you're creating a full server environment that makes rolling out a playable world more convenient, sign me up.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-13 17:59:24+00:00
Automobile was improvement over the horse because things needed to get places. To improve on current automobile will require either massive government investment and regulation in the sense of flying cars, or full electrification with paradigm shifts in transportation, like induction charging roads or battery hot swaps or whatever else. The modern Corolla Hybrid is pretry much the peak optimal point of transportation.

What do humans need right now to improve their lives substantially?