MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troupo | 2025-10-16 21:55:20+00:00
See how you can't even explain what features Youtube wants to implement that they are so hamstrung by Cobalt.

Or why they are hamstrung by Cobalt at all, since it's by definition a TV app that is not expected to implement all the features of a desktop or a mobile app [1]

Instead, you just go for a personal attack.

So, who's insufferable here?

[1] BTW I literally work on one such app, and the number of features we cannot implement on such a constrained platform as a TV is now probably in the hundreds. Doesn't affect the site, or the desktop app, or the mobile apps.

Edit. BTW, if you think that ditching Cobalt (whose features Google literally directly controls) in favor of browsers running on TVs or gaming consoles will somehow give you great modern browsers with standards support, you know even less than nothing (if it's at all possible).

E.g. we still don't use CSS variables because browsers on a significant portion of TVs that are still in use don't support them.
by swyx | 2025-10-16 21:56:07+00:00
(OP here) i posted this old blog actually because i'm working on a similar AI powered feature now. teased a bit here but unreleased https://x.com/swyx/status/1977906767771086898

i feel like HN might be the only place i can explain the "AI syntax highlighting" angle and have somebody get it. the Codemaps UX isnt exactly tuned for the exact form factor of syntax highlighting, but the general idea of "hey you can selectively highlight code based on what you're currently trying to do, and btw also reorganize your filesystem accordingly" is kinda cool and would love ideas on how to best express it.
by Amezarak | 2025-10-16 21:56:17+00:00
> At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle

Is there something wrong with the precautionary principle? It would be one thing if the supposed benefit was something really incredible, like extending lifespan or curing cancer. Then maybe we should be less cautious. But we're talking about adding something to your ice cream to make it look nice for longer.

> it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.

I'm not advocating anyone eat tons of sugar, but sugar consumption and the obesity epidemic are not very well correlated. I would agree that we should eliminate "hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food", but if you were to hypothetically ban basically all non-salt/sugar preservatives, stability agents, flavor enhancers, colors etc. then you almost eliminate this entire product category, because it's no longer practical to produce and sell, easy to consume, or as marketable. Even banning corn syrup in packaged food (as a UPF ingredient) would be a positive move because forcing its replacement by cane sugar (regardless of whatever alleged health problem HFCS s may or may not have) would mean that such products become less economically viable, because its more expensive and less stable.

> the naturalist fallacy.

The naturalistic "fallacy" is approximately true for diets. We are animals that evolved in a way that optimized for the consumption of various foods in our environments. We're some of the most wildly complex chemical systems in the world, and we have remarkably broadly adapted digestive systems with a pretty good tolerance, so you can get away with throwing a lot of stuff down the pipe without anything bad happening. But that's exactly why "eat the same foods people always have and not bizarre lab concoctions" is a useful heuristic for health. It's entirely possible that various additives are perfectly fine or even pro-health, but it's not the way to bet as a general principle, and it's impractical to conduct meaningful long-term nutritional studies to find out with any real assurance.
by HeavyStorm | 2025-10-16 21:56:52+00:00
There's a lot of conspiracy in the article subtext.

It's my own opinion that windows enforcement of TPM while retiring Windows 10 is a rough direction, but I also get the executive decision. Support for old software is costly, and Windows 10 is very old at this point. Add that to how many security issues Microsoft has been having, and this seems like the only sensible decision.
by trhway | 2025-10-16 21:56:58+00:00
On the other hand - the baby will from the beginning develop an instinct to keep track of 6 hands flying around instead of just 2. Will help in future street fights :)

In general, looking at the AI coding agents i think we all either already feel or soon will feel disabled. And honestly i think human race with its perception of itself as the "top of the Creation" is due for a modesty lesson to help speed up the evolution. We're spending tremendous resources unproductively, be it wars or just ineffective economies, etc. We don't feel the urge to develop our civilization and to evolve ourselves in all aspects - from mental and biological to cyber-integration. The Mother Nature doesn't like such relaxed species.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-16 21:57:41+00:00
Can I say something: could you all please stop inserting contaminated tool back into a jar of food? You use a clean tool to take out the amount you eat, and that's it.

You can put it back if the tool had touched nothing but: air, the food in the jar, and your hand at the operating end. Otherwise, that butter knife stays on your dish for the rest of the meal. The exception would be if you cleaned the tool, like bare minimum by wiping with a brand new piece of tissue paper(but that's kind of wasteful).

Is that an outrageous ask? I know it's probably not a huge deal, like free water and such, and my techniques are that of total amateur being never professionally involved in medical and/or bio science fields, but just, how can you stand possible breadcrumbs IN THE JAR!?
by fbd_0100 | 2025-10-16 21:57:52+00:00
There's a thriving community of aerospace startups in the US right now that are eager to snatch these NASA folks up. It won't be the right move for all of them, and it's unfortunate to get displaced from a comfortable, prestigious job like that, but I strongly believe a lot of these people will go on to do great things in industry, and potentially have a far greater impact on aerospace than they ever could at NASA.

Not saying I agree with the cuts, just pointing out there may be a silver lining.
by Ekaros | 2025-10-16 21:58:18+00:00
Seems like obvious end result when incentives are there for it. Simply too much money around and funds which have to invest in something or anything. You won't get paid long if you sit on pile of cash or boring government bonds. Unless you are Buffet... Thus have to find some place to invest. And have to keep numbers looking good.

The inevitable result is misallocation at best or outright fraud at worst...
by emn13 | 2025-10-16 21:58:35+00:00
Yep. Still, I think it's a pretty decent benchmark in the sense that it's fairly short, quite repeatable, does have a quite a few subtest, and it's horribly different from the nebulous concept that is "typical workloads". It's suspiciously memory-latency bound, perhaps more than most workloads, but that's a quibble. If they'd have simply labelled it "lightly threaded" instead of "multithreaded", it would have been fine.

As it is, it's just clearly misleading to people that haven't somehow figured out that it's not really a great test of multithreaded throughput.
by _pdp_ | 2025-10-16 21:58:43+00:00
When your agent performs 20 tasks saving seconds here and there becomes a very big deal. I cannot even begin to describe how much time we've spent on optimising code paths to make the overall execution fast.

Last week I was on a call with a customer. They where running OpenAI side-by-side with our solution. I was pleased that we managed to fulfil the request under a minute while OpenAI took 4.5 minutes.

The LLM is not the biggest contributor to latency in my opinion.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-10-16 21:59:19+00:00
Great point! Similarly, I sometimes use Emacs' excellent (and near-unique) electric-indent as a hint of syntax brokenness. "What do you mean this is getting indented at that lev-- oooh"

The downside with broken syntax highlighting (and electric-indent!) is when the editor's parser is insufficient, as is often the case with basic online editors, and breaks with legitimate constructs (Emacs with certain C macros). Then I can't trust the highlighter and also I have less-legible code.
Show HN: BankToBudget – Instantly turn your bank exports into a monthly budget
by arondeparon | 2025-10-16 21:59:22+00:00
I built a small tool that turns any bank export (CSV, Qif, etc.) into a clear monthly budget summary.

https://banktobudget.com

It automatically detects:

- recurring income and expenses - variable costs (like groceries, parking, etc.)

No account, no subscription.

I use GPT-5 under the hood to interpret messy transaction data and group it intelligently — it works across banks and languages.

Would love feedback on:

- accuracy of the categories - clarity of the results - features you’d expect
by iainmerrick | 2025-10-16 21:59:25+00:00
Making a bed.

You need to manipulate a large sheet, and you probably need to move around, bend down and lean over to reach all the corners. Bonus points for neat hospital corners on a flat sheet.

Putting pillows in pillowcases is another fun one. Usually pretty easy, probably a bronze medal.

Gold medal: put a UK super king size duvet inside a duvet cover. It's huge and awkward, there are buttons, and it's almost but not quite square (why??) so there's a good chance you'll get it round the wrong way and have to rotate it 90 degrees.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-16 21:59:26+00:00
A lot of bus routes suck and people don't like to plan ahead for how they'll get someplace, so they often default to the most general transportation available (personal vehicles) if the transit network isn't good enough for everyday tasks.

As an example, my wife's 15m car commute would take 45m by bus transfer to the nearest stop, which is a couple miles from the destination on a freeway onramp. The transit system is fixing it, but that date is 3 years away. That's still better than the routes some people have.

And lest you think the local transit agency sucks (by American standards), they don't. They just prioritize office workers heading to/from downtown instead of people moving radially through the metro area.
by kazinator | 2025-10-16 22:00:01+00:00
Wow, Claude is quite off the mark here.

First of all, the AI should not take the claim at face value. I would begin by questioning the assumption that "the response here misunderstood my post" and look for reasons why that is false, not just be a servile parrot to my interlocutor, and contrive for them ways their belief might be true.

What happened in the conversation is that CaptainOfCoit obviously understands that the noosphr's post is a general remark about human nature.

CaptainOfCoit is using the (highly popular Internet) debating strategy of presenting anecotal evidence. "Hey, I'm a datapoint against your generalization: I work in a number of areas all affected by AI, and, look at me, I'm not a Luddite. What areas are you working in that you see people turning into Luddites? Why, it can't be art, music or programming!".

There is no misunderstanding, but only the fallacy of using a personal anecdote against a generalization that was never presented as absolute.

It's actually kind of amazing that Claude didn't latch on to this angle.
by measurablefunc | 2025-10-16 22:00:07+00:00
Syntax highlighting is a type of abstract interpretation¹. The author wants to customize it which makes sense & most text editors do have enough programmability to make that possible as long as you are willing to write your own abstract interpreter. Presumably it should also be possible to take the syntax specification along w/ a description of a language runtime & let an AI agent automatically generate custom abstract interpreters. This is not currently possible but might be in a few years if AI labs focus on technical advancement instead of whatever OpenAI has been focusing on recently w/ media synthesis.

¹https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~emc/15817-s11/lect-2011-03-23.pdf
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-16 22:00:39+00:00
> bill that would have set a $35 cap for insulin

Because this worked so well for home insurance.

$35 in 2025 dollars buys as much as $32.92 in 2023 dollars [1]. At what point does it become unprofitable for anyone to manufacture and deliver? (Not the out-of-patent stuff nobody wants to take that can be made for $3/vial. The long-acting and ultra-fast formulations people actually use when given a choice.)

And unlike with home insurance, in an insulin shortage, people die. You need a CalFIRE mechanism, a seller of last resort, who will purchase the insulin at any price on the market and sell it at $35 for such a scheme to work.

State-controlled production removes that surprise factor. It's a much better system than price regulation.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com
by darkteflon | 2025-10-16 22:01:16+00:00
I see this criticism of Apple all the time and it’s completely at odds with my experience.

Our family iPad Pro is older than my 8-year old son, and still gets security patches. My wife’s phone is an XS Max, launched in 2018; iOS 26 is the first release that doesn’t support it - it will continue to receive security patches for the foreseeable future. My son’s school laptop is my old 8gb 2020 M1 Air, which continues to have stellar performance and battery life and could run Tahoe if I was crazy enough to want to upgrade it. My work machine is a 2021 M1 Pro that runs just as great as the day I bought it (thanks, Al Dente!). My 3 Apple TV 4Ks are I-have-no-idea-how-old but they are still being updated and just get out of the way like a TV box should.

I have no particular love for Apple (or any other company), but they’ve always treated me well as a customer. I can’t really think of another tech co that seems to make people as irrationally angry. Is it their marketing? I hate their marketing too. But their products and support are great.
by dathinab | 2025-10-16 22:01:19+00:00
there is currently a lot of ongoing discussions about "easier light weight clones" not just in the context of the RFC but in general.

And from all the discussions I have seen this RFC is one of the less promising ones as it mixes up the concept of "implicitly doing an operation before moving something into a closure scope" and "light weight clones" in a confusing ambiguous way.

So I don't expect it to be accepted/implemented this way, but I expect something similar to happen.

Like for "light weight clones" use is a pretty bad name and new syntax isn't needed, if we start shortening a `.clone()` to `.use` because it saves 4 letters then we are doing something wrong. Similar if argue for it for niche optimization reasons instead of improving generic optimizations to have the same outcome we are doing something wrong IMHO.

And for the the scoping/closure aspect (i.e. a rust equivalent of C++ closures `[]` parts (e.g. [&x](){...}) then it also seems a bad solution. First it's a operation which relates to the closure scope not the call inside of it, so attaching it to the call inside of it isn't a grate idea. Especially given that you might have multiple places you pass a clone of x in and this leading to a lot of ambiguity not highlighted with any examples in the RFC. Secondly for this concept it isn't limited to "cheap clones" sometimes you have the same pattern for not-so-cheap clones (through it mainly matters for cheap clones). And lastly if we really add ways to define captures, why not allow defining captures.

Now sure if you have a good solution for more compact way to handle "not-copy but still cheap" sharing (cloning of handles/smart pointers) of values there it maybe could make sense to also allow it to happen implicitly outside of closure capture scope instead of the invocation scope. But I would argue it's an extension of an not yet existing handle/smart pointer ergonomic improvement and should be done after that improvement.

(yes, I'm aware they use `use` because it's already a keyword, but making a non-zero cost copy of a handle/smart pointer isn't exactly "use it" but more like "share it" :/)
by wishfish | 2025-10-16 22:01:55+00:00
The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was the last time I used it. My main problem is how they've locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and didn't mind the DRM because it was easily breakable. Amazon was also helpful about helping you download the book file directly. The locks they had in place were essentially bathroom door locks. And they seemed chill about it.

That's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.

At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.

It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/UX with various plugins without the need to jailbreak. Kobo (the company) is perfectly happy to let you do whatever you want with your own device. That's such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.
by bigiain | 2025-10-16 22:02:46+00:00
You've probably seen this already, but just in case... You might be interested in Bunny Huang's work on Betrusted and Precursor. He's building a soft-core FPGA based on RiscV instead of i486, but it's a fascinating project:

https://betrusted.io/ - which includes an open source RiscV design that runs on an fpga

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor - an FPGA-based open hardware implementation you can buy and experiment with
by ekelsen | 2025-10-16 22:03:24+00:00
No, but being short is completely disqualifying, so being tall is certainly a component of the physical traits that make you good at basketball. If you're 5'2" , it doesn't matter what other gifts you have -- you will not be a pro male basketball player today.

In tennis, being too tall is clearly net bad, but being too short is also definitely bad. 80% of male pro tennis players are 5'10" - 6'4", which is certainly not the statistics of the general population.
by janice1999 | 2025-10-16 22:03:28+00:00
I think that's an anachronistic view of things - politics and Silicon Valley have always been linked in some way. In-Q-Tel has been funding startups since 1999. Other government programs also helped fund Google. Those political decisions to invest in mapping, data processing and surveillance technology etc helped create the Silicon Valley giants we have today. It also worked the other way, with the USA v Microsoft antitrust kicking off in the late 90s.
by eis | 2025-10-16 22:03:37+00:00
Cloudflare Containers (and therefore Sandbox) pricing is way too expensive. The pricing is a bit cumbersome to understand by being inconsistent with pricing of other Cloudflare products in terms of units and split between memory, cpu and disk instead of combined per instance. The worst is that it is given in these tiny fractions per second.

Memory: $0.0000025 per additional GiB-second vCPU: $0.000020 per additional vCPU-second Disk: $0.00000007 per additional GB-second

The smaller instance types have super low processing power by getting a fraction of a vCPU. But if you calculate the monthly cost then it comes to:

Memory: $6.48 per GB vCPU: $51.84 per vCPU (!!!) Disk: $0.18 per GB

These prices are more expensive than the already expensive prices of the big cloud providers. For example a t2d-standard-2 on GCP with 2 vCPUs and 8GB with 16GB storage would cost $63.28 per month while the standard-3 instance on CF would cost a whopping $51.84 + $103.68 + $2.90 = $158.42, about 2.5x the price.

Cloudflare Containers also don't have peristent storage and are by design intended to shut down if not used but I could then also go for a spot vm on GCP which would bring the price down to $9.27 which is less than 6% of the CF container cost and I get persistent storage plus a ton of other features on top.

What am I missing?
by vvpan | 2025-10-16 22:03:56+00:00
This is tangential, but I worked for a food delivery startup (a conscientious one) for a couple of years and food delivery is a terribly extractive business that kills restaurants. Either order from the restaurant directly or just go there yourself, Doordash et. al. will kill your favorite restaurant with your help. The numbers don't add up in the kitchen's favor.
by m-hodges | 2025-10-16 22:04:12+00:00
> “It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired.”

More:¹

> Conway wrote that in recent days, he had “expressed candidly” and repeatedly to Benioff that he was “shocked and disappointed” by his “willful ignorance and detachment from the impacts of the ICE immigration raids of families with NO criminal record, efforts to gerrymander elections, attacks on freedom of speech, and other unlawful policies.”

> “Your obsession with and constant annual threats to move Dreamforce to Las Vegas is ironic, since it is a fact that Las Vegas has a higher rate of violent crime than San Francisco,” Mr. Conway wrote. “San Francisco does not need a federal invasion because you don’t like paying for extra security for Dreamforce.”

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/us/salesforce-resign-beni...
by GoatInGrey | 2025-10-16 22:04:15+00:00
It's the fact that a collection of files are tied to a specific task or action. Prompts are only injected context, whereas files can be more selectively loaded into context.

What they're trying to do here is translate MCP servers to something more broadly useable by the population. They cannot differentiate themselves with model training anymore, so they have been focusing more and more on tooling development to grow revenue.
by LolWolf | 2025-10-16 22:04:19+00:00
Hmm, how does this compare to things like

https://github.com/cjdoris/LogarithmicNumbers.jl

or

https://github.com/cjdoris/HugeNumbers.jl

(Apart from the PyTorch impl)

In particular, it feels like storing the complete complex number is a bit silly since we know, a priori, that the number exponentiates to ±1, so, wouldn't this mean that we have wasted 31 bits? (=32-1 since only one bit is needed for the sign.)

That being said, this representation is very useful for certain scenarios, of course, when you know that the dynamic range of your number is very large, but, as far as I can tell, it's not exactly super novel, unless I'm missing something!
by hatthew | 2025-10-16 22:04:38+00:00
Almost all progress at doing tasks reliably has been made with 2 massive caveats:

1. Force. Walking, running, fighting, doing backflips, etc. all allow for large amounts of force, without a lot of dynamic precision required. Many common tasks require precise and dynamic force. E.g. for washing a window, pushing too hard breaks the glass while pushing too softly will leave streaks.

2. Environment interaction. Most reliable humanoid robots do minimal environment interaction beyond self-balancing. They walk/run/jump in environments that are largely open, with usually convex blocky obstacles. The real world has lots of tasks that require processing beyond low-resolution maps of solid/open space. E.g. I'd want to see a robot that can walk through a forest: jumping/stepping over thin branches that are hard to see, ducking under fallen logs, pushing though bendy branches without breaking them, avoiding ground that is muddy, and seeing through the current obstacle to determine if the obstacle beyond is traversable.

Just to reiterate, I don't see fast progress being made on doing these tasks reliably. It's easy to show 1/N success rate, and much much harder to show ~N/N success rate on these dynamic tasks.