MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hshdhdhehd | 2025-10-13 20:51:35+00:00
Interesting one.

My first thought is why is rolling out a new system to prod that is not used yet an incident? I dont think "being in prod" is sufficient. There should be tiers of service and a brand new service should not be on a tier where it having teething issues is an incident.

> what part of our process led to a multiweek test effort that would greenlight a tool that does nothing that it is required to do

would be interested to see the doc, but imagine you'd branch off the causes, one branch of the tree is: UAT didnt pick up the bug. why didn't UAT pick up the bug? .... (you'd need that teams help).

I think that team would have something that is a contributing cause. You shouldn't rely on UAT to pick up a bug in a released product. However just because it is not a root cause doesnt mean it shouldn't be addressed. Today's contributing cause can be tomorrow's root cause!

So yeah yiu dont blame another team but you also dont shield another team from one of their systems needing attention! The wording matters alot though.

The way you worded the question seems a little loaded. But you may be paraphrasing? 5 whys are usually more like "Why did they papaya team not detect the bug before deployment?"

Whereas

> what part of our process led to a multiweek test effort that would greenlight a tool that does nothing that it is required to do

Is more emotive. Sounds like a cross examiners question which isn't the vibe you'd want to go for. 5 whys should be 5 drys. Nothing spicy!
by nyeah | 2025-10-13 20:51:36+00:00
Demand tends to push price up. Investors don't really know who's buying until later.

But yes, of course it's a toy example. I should probably have made the buybacks drive the price from $1.10 to $1.20 or something, with a much smaller reward for the founder & CEO. I got bored and kept it simple. (Or I got greedy for that $1 profit, maybe.)

All the working parts of the example are on display. You can make other examples that seem better to you.
by adamelk16 | 2025-10-13 20:51:37+00:00
The bottleneck for coding agents is planning. Cursor, Claude, Factory are great at coding, but weak at architecturally aware planning. Enter pre.dev’s Architect API with deep-spec and fast-spec endpoints to produce fine grained plans for agents. A perfect source of truth to keep agents on track. Available now on npm and pip, MCP coming soon…
by yencabulator | 2025-10-13 20:52:04+00:00
Okay, that looks really funky. Like, libraries explicitly state what access they have ambient authority to use, and then callers can be constrained by an access control list, or something like that. Really weird design.

I'd love to see someone put genuine thought into what it would take to say that e.g. a Rust crate has no ambient authority. No unsafe, applied transitively. For example, no calling std::fs::open, must pass in a "filesystem abstraction" for that to work.

I think the end of that road could be a way to have libraries that can only affect the outside world by values you pass in (=capabilities), busy looping, deadlocking, or running out of memory (and no_std might be a mechanism to force explicit use of an allocator, too).

(Whether that work is worth doing in a world with WASM+WASI is a different question.)
by exmadscientist | 2025-10-13 20:52:46+00:00
I agree with a lot of the statements at the top of the article, but some of them are just nonsense. This one, in particular:

> If we analyse accidents more deeply, we can get by analysing fewer accidents and still learn more.

Yeah, that's not how it works. The failure modes of your system might be concentrated in one particularly brittle area, but you really need as much breadth as you can get: the bullets are always fired at the entire plane.

> An accident happens when a system in a hazardous state encounters unfavourable environmental conditions. We cannot control environmental conditions, so we need to prevent hazards.

I mean, I'm an R&D guy, so my experience is biased, but... sometimes the system is just broke and no amount of saying "the system is in a hazardous state" can paper over the fact that you shipped (or, best-case, stress-tested) trash. You absolutely have to run these cases through the failure analysis pipeline, there's no out there, but the analysis flow looks a bit different for things that should-have worked versus things that could-never-have worked. And, yes, it will roll up on management, but... still.
by D13Fd | 2025-10-13 20:53:06+00:00
But that 1600x1200@75hz is awful by today's standards. I'm typing this on a 120Hz 4K monitor, and my other monitor is a 240hz 4k monitor.

I'm not saying they are better because the numbers are bigger, either. The subjective feel of using the screens is much improved, plus just about everything surrounding it (the menus, the colors & calibration, the interfaces).

And the comparison to the LCD at the time is irrelevant -- I was making the comparison between modern high-DPI LCD and OLED monitors and CRTs.
by Lerc | 2025-10-13 20:53:28+00:00
The comment beside the first chart

>Our main measure of progress. Bits per byte is, per Karpathy, "a much better measure than just the typical cross-entropy loss, because it further normalizes the loss on each token by the number of bytes of that token, making the metric tokenizer-invariant".

Is so blindingly obvious, that I'm ashamed to think that I didn't think do it when trialing my own tokenizer approach on tinystories. I might go back and have a look at how well my tokenizer compared to how well I imagined it compared.
by sounds | 2025-10-13 20:53:34+00:00
The writeup on phys.org is troublesome at best. Starting with the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it buries the rest of that sentence in paragraph 5: USC (University of Southern California) and the Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.

This team has made a nonlinear lattice that relies on something they call "Joule-Thomson-like expansion." The Joule-Thomsen effect is the ideal gas law in beginning science. PV=nRT. Compression heats a gas, expansion cools a gas.

Why they're studying the equivalent photonics principle [1] is that it focuses an array of inputs, "causing light to condense at a single spot, regardless of the initial excitation position." Usually the problem is that light is linearly independent: two beams blissfully ignore each other. To do useful switching or compute, one of the beams has to be able to act as a control signal.

A photon gas doesn't conserve the number of particles (n) like beginning physics would suggest. This lets the temperature of the gas control the output.

The temperature, driven by certain specific inputs, produces the nonlinear response. I didn't see a specific claim what gain they achieved.

This paper is more on the theoretical end of photonics research. Practical research such as at UBC Vancouver [2] where a device does "weight update speed of 60 GHz" and for clustering it can do "112 x 112-pixel images" - the tech doesn't compete well against electronics yet.

TSMC and NVidia are attempting photonics plays too. But they're only achieving raw I/O with photons. They can attach the fiber directly to the chip to save watts and boost speeds.

Basic physics gets in the way too. A photon's wavelength at near UV is 400 nanometers, but the transistors in a smartphone are measured at 7 nanometers ish. Electrical conduction is fundamentally smaller than a waveguide for light. Where light could maybe outshine electrons is in switching speed. But this research paper doesn't claim high switching speed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_gas

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53261-x
by titusjohnson | 2025-10-13 20:53:49+00:00
I'm a big fan of tasteful remakes/remasters/updates. I don't mind paying again. I liked the Monkey Island update, System Shock, Myst, and Oblivion. They hit the right balance of QOL changes to take advantage of modern control schemes and polishing up the gfx to match my rose-colored memories. Oblivion on my HDTV looks so much like how I remember it looking on my 15" Compaq my nostalgia bones vibrate.

> About 60 percent thought 5-8 years is the ideal amount of time between versions. Only 11 percent thought 10 years or more was preferable.

This I don't understand. 5-8 years old is the ideal age to remaster? So Skyrim should have had a full-blown remaster by now, if not 2?

I want to see 20 year old stuff get this treatment. Homeworld 1, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Max Payne, Mech Warrior.
by divegeek | 2025-10-13 20:53:57+00:00
It's unfriendly to developers and power users, but very friendly to the other 99.999% of users.

I used to work for Google, on Android security, and it's an ongoing philosophical debate: How much risk do you expose typical users to in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users? Both are important but at some point the typical users have to win because there are far, far more of them.

The article implies that this move is security theater. It's not. I wasn't involved in this decision at all, but the security benefit is clear: Rate limiting.

As the article points out, Google already scans all the devices for harmful apps. The problem is knowing what apps to look for. Static analysis can catch them, dynamic analysis with apps running in virtual environments can catch them, researchers can catch them, users can report them... all of these channels are taken advantage of to identify bad apps and Google Play Protect (or whatever it's called these days) can then identify them on user devices and warn the users, but if bad actors can iterate fast enough they can get apps deployed to devices before Google catches on.

So, the intention here is to slow down that iteration. If attackers use the same developer account to produce multiple bad apps, the dev account will get shut down, requiring the attackers to create a new account, registered with a different user identity and confirmed with different government identification documents.

Note that in the short term this will just create an additional arms race. In order to iterate their malware rapidly, attackers will also need to fake government IDs rapidly. This means Google will have to get better at verifying the IDs, including, I expect, getting set up to be able to verify the IDs using government databases. Attackers will probably respond by finding countries where Google can't do that for whatever reason. Google will have to find some mitigation for that, and so on.

So it won't be a perfect solution, but in the real world, especially at Google scale, there are no perfect solutions. It's all about raising the bar, introducing additional barriers to abuse and making the attackers have to work harder and move slower, which will make the existing mechanisms more effective.
Show HN: Detect visitor emotions from mouse movements (emotional inference)
by sentientiq | 2025-10-13 20:54:14+00:00
I built a system that detects visitor emotions in real-time from mouse telemetry - no surveys, no tracking pixels, zero PII.

The Problem: Your analytics tell you what happened (user bounced), but not why (they were confused, frustrated, or priced out).

How it works: - JavaScript captures mouse movements, click patterns, scroll behavior - Emotional inference engine (Claude Sonnet) analyzes behavioral signatures - System detects: frustration, confusion, hesitation, confidence, exit intent - Context-aware interventions deploy in milliseconds - Feedback loop learns from outcomes

The Stack: - 20 microservices on EC2 (emotional inference, cross-vertical ML, intervention engine) - NATS for real-time message streaming - Supabase for persistence - Rate-limited and hardened for production

What makes this different: - No surveys (real-time behavioral inference) - No PII (emotional states only, no identity tracking) - Spatial awareness (interventions match page context) - Self-improving (learns from conversion outcomes)

Demo: Visit https://sentientiq.ai - you'll feel it working on you. The interactive demo shows what we detect.

Technical Deep Dive: Open the browser console on https://sentientiq.ai and watch:

Telemetry stream (mouse movements, clicks, patterns) Emotion detection (curiosity → overwhelm → confidence) Intervention deployment (contextual responses) Full architecture: 20 microservices, NATS streaming, Claude inference (Haiku→Sonnet escalation), rate-limited to 10 Sonnet calls/min/session. Detailed docs coming soon. Happy to answer technical questions here.

Built this solo over 6 months. Nearly died twice. Would love feedback from the HN crowd.
by stouset | 2025-10-13 20:54:53+00:00
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job. But for practical purposes the pay needs to be in line with still being able to price your products competitively in a global marketplace.

Even $10,000/yr more might not be enough to move the needle all that much on a job that’s backbreaking, monotonous, and with little prospects for career growth. Especially if you have a limited pool of applicants due to your location.
by walkabout | 2025-10-13 20:55:03+00:00
> This might be controversial, but I personally think that distro repos being the assumed first resort of software distribution on Linux has done untold amounts of damage to the software ecosystem on Linux.

Hard agree. After getting used to "system updates are... system updates; user software that's not part of the base system is managed by a separate package manager from system updates, doesn't need root, and approximately never breaks the base system (to include the graphical environment); development/project dependencies are not and should not be managed by either of those but through project-specific means" on macOS, the standard Linux "one package manager does everything" approach feels simply wrong.
by bigfishrunning | 2025-10-13 20:55:10+00:00
> they either get told to use a bizarre workaround or get a snarky response about submitting a PR or something.

Generally, those sort of responses are given to people who didn't pay or contribute in any way, and want something for nothing. OSS developers don't work for you; they're generally solving problems that they're having, and if you happen to be having the same problems, then they may get attention. If you'd like some piece of open source software changed, you are free to change it or to hire someone to change it; that's the deal. Expecting work for nothing is ridiculous.
by marxism | 2025-10-13 20:55:12+00:00
I'm curious: could you give me an example of code that AI can't help with?

I ask because I've worked across different domains: V8 bytecode optimizations, HPC at Sandia (differential equations on 50k nodes, adaptive mesh refinement heuristics), resource allocation and admission control for CI systems, custom network UDP network stack for mobile apps https://neumob.com/. In every case in my memory, the AI coding tools of today would have been useful.

You say your work is "very specific" and AI is "too stupid" for it. This just makes me very curious what does that look like concretely? What programming task exists that can't be decomposed into smaller problems?

My experience as an engineer is that I'm already just applying known solutions that researchers figured out. That's the job. Every problem I've encountered in my professional life was solvable - you decompose it, you research up an algorithm (or an approximation), you implement it. Sometimes the textbook says the math is "graduate-level" but you just... read it and it's tractable. You linearize, you approximate, you use penalty barrier methods. Not an theoretically optimal solution, but it gets the job done.

I don't see a structural difference between "turning JSON into pretty HTML" and using OR-tools to schedule workers for a department store. Both are decomposable problems. Both are solvable. The latter just has more domain jargon.

So I'm asking: what's the concrete example? What code would you write that's supposedly beyond this?

I frequently see this kind of comment in AI threads that there is more sophisticated kinds of AI proof programming out there.

Let me try to clarify another way. Are you claiming that say 50% of the total economic activity is beyond AI? or is some sort of niche role that only contributes 3% to GDP? Because its very different if this "difficult" job is everywhere or only in a few small locations.
by echelon | 2025-10-13 20:56:48+00:00
- my understanding of nonlinear optical mediums is negligible. Something like the crystals that cause quantum entanglement and emitting photon pairs?

- what is a "photon gas"? Is this a state of matter? What is the matter if photons aren't matter?

- ideal gas law, PV=nRT not obeyed? Due to ionization or something? Photon pressure?

- Joule-Thompson Effect?

- Building computers out of light?

- Which thermodynamic properties or laws are being obeyed? Is this something like a Carnot cycle, but with photons?
by uncompressed | 2025-10-13 20:56:57+00:00
I love Fastmail, but I don't understand why they chose Electron for this. It's totally fair that they want to keep it web-based, but why ship a 318 MB memory hog? Why not something lighter like Tauri or a custom wrapper like Fastmate [1] did?

[1] https://github.com/joelekstrom/fastmate
by jamesblonde | 2025-10-13 20:57:12+00:00
Here's a good performance study by OneHouse comparing Clickhouse, StarRocks, Trino:

https://www.onehouse.ai/blog/apache-spark-vs-clickhouse-vs-p...

Druid is real-time analytics, similar to Clickhouse. StarRocks is best at Joins - Clickhouse is not good for joins.
by h45gJaqk | 2025-10-13 20:57:47+00:00
The timing is weird, just after Trump's latest escalation with China. Using The Netherlands to fall into the sword would fit with the general tactics of dumping the Ukraine war on the EU and trying to sour their relations with China.

That way, the U.S. is free to control all oil resources in the Middle East and conquer new ones in Venezuela. The EU gets nothing but enemies and higher oil and gas prices.

In principle I'm against outsourcing or technology transfers to China, but please do it on you own schedule.
by kulahan | 2025-10-13 20:58:16+00:00
This is the right question to ask. You can reason your way around things, but occam's razor reigns supreme. Injured people can still do lots of work, as our most important tools were our brains, not our bodies. It's not hard to watch for predators near camp while sitting at the campfire, or to keep an eye on children - even if you can't resolve issues yourself. You could sit around making crafts for the tribe, repairing clothes, and more.

There's just way too much benefit to keeping the injured around. We don't need everyone working at top physical condition... ever.
by alphazard | 2025-10-13 20:58:38+00:00
> As about SEL4 - it is so elegant because it leaves all the difficult problems to the upper layer (coincidentally making them much more difficult).

I completely buy this as an explanation for why SEL4 for user environments hasn't (and probably will never) take off. But there's just not that much to do to connect a server application to the network, where it can access all of its resources. I think a better explanation for the lack of server side adoption is poor marketing, lack of good documentation, and no company selling support for it as a best practice.
by SigmundA | 2025-10-13 20:59:07+00:00
My Wrangler JK is 10 years old with almost no issues, its a relatively simple vehicle compared to most, easy to work on as well. The Pentastar V6 is well proven engine and the issues with it are well understood.

I really like the vehicle, it has served me well and taken me many interesting places across the country, along with daily driving. I tow it with a RV and its one the few that can do so now days, plus its extremely capable offroad.

The 4XE is very alluring, much more fun to drive (I have rented one) and I could charge it off home solar and still tow with RV (the only PHEV thats possible to do so). If only it was reliable...
by kkfx | 2025-10-13 20:59:11+00:00
Nowadays many like 100-1000× leverage, with no real stoploss strategy and with significant portion of their capitals.

The pump of ZCash also prove some like to clean their history (nowadays that Monero was attacked to crash Houthis international trades).

It's business as usual for those who know the business, many are newcomers.
by naet | 2025-10-13 20:59:18+00:00
I think if a country is vehemently an international or foreign website it should be on them to block their citizens access, not on website operators to somehow try to geo-restrict that region from access.

That could lead to tons of countries having their own internet firewalls similar to China, if that's what they want to do. Which I probably wouldn't like.

But the alternative of being liable for any new legislation, fines, etc, from any country in the world just because I operate a small website on the internet seems at least equally bad.
by brailsafe | 2025-10-13 21:00:12+00:00
> The iPhone 17 is the same price as the Pixel 10

I mean, flagship vs flagship idk if one has ever been significantly cheaper, but I've never been in the market for those either. It's very easy to get a higher priced, more interesting, highly specced Android phone. Both iPhones and flagship android phones are way too expensive for what they are capable of compared to any of their own prior generations of themselves, if you ignore tech specs and consider the tangible end-user functionality, but even still.

I've always bought the phone that suits me in the moment, have never budgeted higher than $600CAD, and have simply never been interested in iPhones beyond what used to be nice industrial design. For that, last time I got a brand new Pixel 7 on sale, Pixel 4a, Nexus 5 etc.. and they've all done what I needed and usually came close to matching the fancier versions in some ways in the same year's lineup.

Usually though I have breadth of options to pick from across a range of brands that I can choose between based on whatever the hell I prefer. iPhones are just iPhones, bigger or smaller, more expensive or cheaper, big camera plateau or small, and that's all fine too.

The sideloading aspect for me and a better sense of control is absolutely a component in that preference, and I'll have to consider that going forward, but I'd sooner just dial back my dependence on phones in general than switch to an iPhone.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-13 21:00:23+00:00
If your CyberTruck is airborne something went very wrong.

One isn't the same as the other - the regulatory regime/testing and redundancies on a plane are completely different to a car and not inconsequentially the person operating the plane is rather better trained on what to do when things go "oopsie" than the person loose behind the wheel of the average car.

Also aircraft are serviced in a way far beyond what cars are.
by gherkinnn | 2025-10-13 21:01:03+00:00
Semi-related view from a former oldfag (is that term still used?), I am of the firm opinion that Insta and Twitter are far more damaging than 4chan ever was. Not that it doesn't have its filth, of course. But these image boards are too obscure for broad appeal and do not purposefully mess with people's psyche to show them more ads.