MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wishfish | 2025-10-16 14:26:06+00:00
It's not the size of a backpack but my wife did home hemo dialysis with a machine that had a handle and was portable. We even took it on trips a few times. I forget the weight, but, from memory, was around 10 pounds / 4.5 kg I think. Wife has had a transplant so my home hemo experience is from a few years ago. It may have changed since then.

The machine's portability wasn't the only factor. Needed a clean space to set up. There was a second machine hooked up to the house water lines. It would be used to create dialysate which was pumped into the dialysis machine. You could travel without the water pump, but to replace it, you needed these massive disposable bags of dialysate. Each bag was heavier than the machine itself and they were essential.

I guess with car trips, you could take the pump too to generate dialysate on site but it wasn't designed for portability as much as the main dialysis machine was. Was heavier. We kept it on rollers.

There were other supplies needed too. Saline bags. The dialysis machine had one-time use cartridges that were quite convenient but took up a fair bit of space. All added up to considerable bulk.

We only used the machine at distant locations when we knew we were going to be there for a week or more. One factor that made things a little easier was the the dialysis company was willing to deliver supplies to wherever we were, as long as it was within the US. We didn't have to take weeks worth of supplies. But we did have to take enough supplies to get through the first few days before delivery.

Vacations were rare but doable if we were going by car or if there was a dialysis center at the location. I guess we could have flown with the machine but we didn't trust airline baggage handlers enough to risk it.
by adzm | 2025-10-16 14:26:13+00:00
I'll keep this in mind along with https://www.sometimesredsometimesblue.com/

I actually really love these. k.nyc in particular has a charm to it because of it potentially being the short form of 'okay' ... in fact I'll send it to someone now as a dismissive acknowledgement of something.

also the title should be lowercase. I clicked on it expecting an uppercase K, but it was a lowercase k. These are two completely different 'k's.
by host0 | 2025-10-16 14:26:19+00:00
Run in console:

new WarpSpeed("warpdrive", { "speed": 20, "speedAdjFactor": 0.03, "density": 2, "shape": "circle", "warpEffect": true, "warpEffectLength": 5, "depthFade": true, "starSize": 3, "backgroundColor": "hsl(224,15%,14%)", "starColor": "#FFFFFF" });
by dhruv_ahuja | 2025-10-16 14:26:36+00:00
I find myself exhausted after a time, when I have to switch between 2-3 apps and many more tabs trying to co-ordinate things or when debugging issues with a teammate. And this is with me working professionally for only ~3 years.

I think the tools are nice to use early on but quickly become tough to manage as I get caught up with work, and can't keep up with the best way to manage them. Takes a lot of mental effort and context switching to manage updates or track things everywhere.
by artpar | 2025-10-16 14:26:41+00:00
One shot is pretty much not going to work, both at single step level or if you ask llm to generate workflow in one shot. We haven't measured it as such but even for static websites like hackernews front page it takes a couple tries of to and fro for the llm to get it right. somehow after all the instructions the llm will still "guess" the selector instead of checking the page/dom contents. And then there are lot of other minor details that need to be captured like "you need to wait a couple of second for the auto complete results to show up". If you tell it to just make a workflow, it will generate some garbage and call it a day.
by rufius | 2025-10-16 14:27:09+00:00
For sure. Im the parent of a couple Gen Alpha kids on the younger side. I showed the skibidi toilet videos to my wife and her response was a shrug and “looks like dumb videos we watched in college”.

But as other posters say, not everyone was into that corner of internet culture as millennials. Especially the weirder offshoots.
by veyh | 2025-10-16 14:27:10+00:00
> Windows generally treats running binaries as locked. Any attempt to overwrite a running binary should throw an exception. Again, the Zed source provides a reasonable solution.

While it's true that you can't overwrite a running binary on Windows, you can still rename it.

For example, the updater I wrote for AutoPTT downloads the new update to a temporary directory, renames all old files to ${file}.bak, then moves over the files from the temporary folder, and finally runs the new binary while exiting the old one.
by emn13 | 2025-10-16 14:27:37+00:00
It's not trash - it's quite nice for its niche. It's just not very scalable with cores, so it's best interpreted as a benchmark of lightly threaded workloads - like lots of typical consumer workloads are (gaming, web browsing, light office work). Then again, it's not hard to find workloads that scale much better, and geekbench 6 doesn't really have a benchmark for those.

For the first 8 threads or so, it's fine. Once you hit 20 or so it's questionable, or at least that's my impression.
by lumost | 2025-10-16 14:27:40+00:00
If I have a user facing upload button, why can't I simply have a webserver that receives the data and pushes it into s3 via multi-part upload. Something that can be written in a framework of your choice in 10 minutes with 0 setup?

For uploads under 50 MB you could also skip the multipart upload and take a naive approach without taking a significant hit.
by maxdevai | 2025-10-16 14:28:20+00:00
I’m building VoiceMeetAI, a Chrome extension that helps users during live interviews — it records the question, transcribes it, and gives an instant AI-generated answer. Some users see it as “AI coaching,” others call it “cheating.” Curious how the HN community feels about this — where should we draw the line between assistance and automation in interviews?
by mxuribe | 2025-10-16 14:28:41+00:00
Maybe its simply my personally opinion, but I agree with @tylerflick with the opinion that why not Dennis Ritchie. Sure, Jobs was a ridiculously effective *promoter*, and there is without a doubt a place for that role in the world...But i guess when i think *innovation* i think Ritchie, Woz, Cray, Admiral Hopper, etc...not, like, the business folks...but maybe i'm being too harsh?
by engomez | 2025-10-16 14:28:42+00:00
Generally agree, we're targeting teams who need to make agents accessible to both their developers and non-developers in one platform. There's not really a way to do that as far as I know in any other framework. That said, I do find with multi-agent systems, having good abstraction layers makes things like observability, tracing, etc. cleaner. When the LLMs are driving the execution, normalizing on how the LLMs interact with each other can simplify the stack.
by Qwuke | 2025-10-16 14:28:55+00:00
So for Amazon, I used to work there and not sure I can talk about specifics, but there was AGPL software used outside of the AMIs but they were approved on a case by case basis. Ghostscript is public and used in the AMIs that are shipped standard, and ofc is used sometimes by Amazon. And if any modifications went out, it was of course gladly republished, but I don't think any forks of AGPL software were being maintained to the best of my knowledge.

>I mentioned the base install. Whatever you get by running deboostrap without parameters, or with a base debian docker container. Of course there's AGPL software in main. main is huge.

No, afaik, unfortunately. That might drastically change how you distribute its base. I was a little unclear but I had meant "No but at least the most common distro ships it in their archive" with my first comment.
by throwway120385 | 2025-10-16 14:29:03+00:00
This kinda makes sense. Water vapor diffuses out through the building materials so why wouldn't VOCs diffuse into those materials?

What you're looking for are not HEPA filters but organic vapor filtering. If you were shopping for a respirator it would be easy but organic vapor extractors I think are a lot more expensive than HEPA filters. I looked in to it when I was doing a couple of oil based coatings for a home renovation project.
by cjonas | 2025-10-16 14:29:12+00:00
The second SQL-like version is far more readable. There is just less "syntax noise" and it's far more "declarative" by definition.

The author stating that the lambda is "better" because it's less lines is also silly. It's been a while since I've written C#, but pretty sure the SQL-like version can be formatted to a single line as well:

List<Product> GetExclusiveProducts(List<Product> source) => (from p in source where p.ProductTitle == "iPhone" orderby p.TypeOfPhone select p).ToList();
by qsort | 2025-10-16 14:29:33+00:00
I don't think it's as bad as people make it, and certainly we can't blame non-technical users if they like it, for many tasks it's the only tool that's simultaneously usable by normal people and powerful enough.

It suffers from trying to do too many things at once, though. Excel 3 is enough for those use cases without being a complete nightmare for everyone else. Electronic spreadsheets as a concepts are genius, it's the implementation I hate.
by dh2022 | 2025-10-16 14:30:21+00:00
At Costco TurboTax with Business (or something like that) costs around $79.99 + tax. It has Schedule C [0]. Next time you want to buy TurboTax maybe buy it from Costco - $200 for your usage scenario looks like over-payment.

[0] It also has other things such as RSUs, stock sales, real estate, cash distributions from businesses, etc... For personal taxes I do not see why anyone would pay a tax accountant as opposed to using TurboTax.

[Edited some formatting tags]
by thefroh | 2025-10-16 14:30:30+00:00
not if call #1 is the file + the question, call #2 is the file + a different question, no.

if call #1 is the file, call #2 is the file + the question, call #3 is the file + a different question, then yes.

and consider that "the file" can equally be a lengthy chat history, especially after the cache TTL has elapsed.
by techjamie | 2025-10-16 14:31:03+00:00
OAI is a big fat lawsuit target, plus they can restrict it and still make the money because odds are they'll also have it on API, and someone could verify for the API then offer a wrapper around OAI with less stringent ID verification.

OAI ultimately still makes a ton of money, and gets to wash their hands of much of the liability. It's a win-win.
by brookst | 2025-10-16 14:31:19+00:00
It’s kind of facile to imagine a conspiracy actively working to “convince” people to do the wrong thing. I’ve never seen any evidence of such a thing.

In reality, I think it’s an emergent property of software development, where very few people can make a living using the platonic ideal of a free license. People start projects that are free, then see that they can’t pay the rent, while users (including companies) keep asking for more support and more feature work (for free, naturally).

So the projects evolve, and get closer to business, both to attract contributions from developers who are paid (by big business) and to position project owners to actually make some money.

I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, or if we even need to make such a judgment, but I think the phenomenon is easily explained without resorting to some kind of shadow campaign on behalf of business.
by andai | 2025-10-16 14:31:46+00:00
A few years ago in the Mediterranean I observed what initially seemed like an oil spill. Taking a closer look, it turned out to be millions of tiny dead insects. I guess sometimes they do land in the sea?

At the time, I tried to find information about it online, and all I found was an article about it happening on the other side of the Atlantic several years earlier.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-10-16 14:31:49+00:00
I think what GP means by "user freedom" is that the software acts in the interests of its users rather than the interests of its developers. Some proprietary software does do that, but there's an inherent conflict of interest there since the developer has a monopoly on the ability to control said software. Software that is open to user modification (which is how I would personally define Free Software) protects against this conflict somewhat by creating a free market for patches to the software, and free markets are much better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.

Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment. This cripples that very same market for patches by greatly limiting the resources available to fund it, and cripples the software itself if there's no big commercial interest backing it. The result is that Free Software is often not competitive with proprietary software, except when it does have a big commercial backer (Chromium, AOSP, etc) in which case that developer is often able to maintain a virtual monopoly on patches despite it theoretically being open to competition.
by rco8786 | 2025-10-16 14:31:54+00:00
This tool seems relevant to my interests, but I gotta say I cannot figure out how to use the extension.

It seems like I'm only able to use the pre-existing/canned workflows that are provided under different "Persona"s? And there's no way for me to just create a new workflow from scratch for my specific use case.

Am I missing something obvious?
by jimjimwii | 2025-10-16 14:32:42+00:00
Its a foot in the door. If you dont slam the door shut quickly, you'll find yourself thrown out of your house and locked out (remember what android's safety net was when it got introduced and look at ehat it has become now)

Any kind of restriction, no matter how trevally exploitable will become legally and technically insurmountable if given time to metastasize.
by cudgy | 2025-10-16 14:33:13+00:00
How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”?

Hacker news should not become strictly or dominated by political discussion, but given AI and its impact on society amongst many other technologies like social media, which are intertwined within political discussion these days, some of the “knowledgeable“ people and particularly those whose careers have been impacted by AI are right here on hacker news.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-16 14:33:29+00:00
Excel is fantastic. I love it.

But using a spreadsheet to store data is completely reasonable. We delude ourselves as technically experienced people when we imply otherwise. When Excel fucks up data (perhaps the most unforgivable sin in all of software) with unexplainably bad defaults and UX for auto-formatting (i.e. "trying to be clever"), it's absolutely out of touch to point the finger at the end user.
by bobajeff | 2025-10-16 14:34:35+00:00
Looking at the rust rfc for the lightweight clones feature [1]. It took me a while to sort of understand it. Once I did I was excited for the feature but after awhile I was once again struck by the observation that rust is a very complex language to learn.

To me as someone who's not learned either it looks like all the concepts and features of 'true' modern C++ (as opposed to C + a few extra features) spliced with the features and concepts of Haskell.

Yet people seem to like making useful things in it so it must have gotten something right. So I'll probably get around to attempting to really use it again.

[1]: https://github.com/joshtriplett/rfcs/blob/use/text/3680-use....
by gpm | 2025-10-16 14:34:48+00:00
> rustlang mutability is also a type system construct?

Yes

> I.e. it assumes that all other code is Rust for the purpose of those checks?

Not exactly, it merely assumes that you upheld the documented invariants when you wrote code to call/be-called-from other languages. For example that if I have a `extern "C" fn foo(x: &mut i32)` that

- x points to a properly aligned properly allocated i32 (not to null, not to the middle of un-unallocated page somewhere)

- The only way that memory will be accessed for the duration of the call to `foo` is via `x`. Which is to say that other parts of the system won't be writing to `x` or making assumptions about what value is stored in its memory until the function call returns (rust is, in principle, permitted to store some temporary value in `x`s memory even if the code never touches x beyond being passed it. So long as when `foo` returns the memory contains what it is supposed to). Note that this implies that a pointer to the same memory isn't also being passed to rust some other way (e.g. through a static which doesn't have a locked lock around it)

- foo will be called via the standard "C" calling convention (on x86_64 linux this for instance means that the stack pointer must be 2-byte aligned. Which is the type of constraint that is very easy to violate from assembly and next to impossible to violate from C code).

That it's up to the programmer to verify the invariants is why FFI code is considered "unsafe" in rust - programmer error can result in unsoundness. But if you, the programmer, are confident you have upheld the invariants you still get the guarantees about the broader system.

Rust is generally all about local reasoning. It doesn't actually care very much what the rest of the system is, so long as it called us following the agreed upon contract. It just has a much more explicit definition of what that contract is then C.
by engomez | 2025-10-16 14:35:00+00:00
Yes! This is what I struggled with prior. A Multi-agent system makes a lot of sense to the person who wired it up, less so to other people, even when looking at just code. We architected the SDK so it feels like a declarative ORM - similar to Drizzle for databases. In a way, it is a DSL, just in TypeScript, so you get full typesafety and devex of an IDE.

Being able to handle off and give the same system to other engineers or non-engineers in a visual format for them to own and edit makes it easy to make these agents portable and explainable.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-16 14:35:15+00:00
I'm not mixing up users A and B. Let me try phrasing it better. MIT does not give software freedom to all users of the code. A huge number of users get excluded in practice, far more users than this clause in the liquibase license.

> Laws are supposed to protect individual and collective freedom and interests. They do this by putting limits on what you could do that would prevent others from enjoying their own freedom.

I'm not sure where you're going with this when my example was NDAs. NDAs aren't there to protect freedoms, they only remove freedom. Laws enforce them, but in the same way that laws enforce license restrictions.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-16 14:35:57+00:00
>> it’s a pathway out of poverty for many

I agree with your sentiment, but military service - around the world - is more of an alternative to povery vs. a path out. And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out, or a government more than the next midterm election; what are the odds we find 5+ generations of commanders who can stay aligned?
by rldjbpin | 2025-10-16 14:36:06+00:00
as mentioned already by the others, using opencode [1] helps with this, if you like the cli workflow. it is good enough and does not need to exceed what the leaders are doing.

when combined with the ability to use github copilot to make the llm calls, i can play with almost any provider i need. also helps if you get its access through your work or school.

for example, Haiku is already offered by them and costs a third in credits.

[1] https://github.com/sst/opencode
by miroljub | 2025-10-16 14:36:42+00:00
Good example. Only 1,6% of Americans owned slaves at its peak. Hundreds of thousands even died to free slaves. So no, the majority never supported slavery.

On a side note, do you really think opposing same sex marriage is equivalent of supporting slavery or taking self justice? Better bring Godwin straight ahead, so we can end a discussion right now ;)
by gethly | 2025-10-16 14:37:07+00:00
Haha, true. But not from my experience. Not sure why. Either i just ignored any issues and simply don't remember them or i got lucky with hardware and drivers? Who knows. Either way, I never had issues with Windows. For me, it just always worked. Even now, I am on W10 and after i ripped out all the guts of the Defender out of the system, I'm quite happy with it. I have a TinyWall firewall so there are no background updates or any traffic without me knowing. I am in mostly full control and have no issues.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-16 14:37:22+00:00
I got out of the subscription software pool a number of years ago, for the reasons that this article is presenting.

I also disable (or block, if I can't disable) automatic updates because I realized that I couldn't stand having the software I use change underneath me without warning. Especially when that change involves features being removed or the update breaking things.

I'll only update after I am pretty sure the update won't give me grief.

I miss the days when updates were things I looked forward to rather than dreading them as I do now.
by 827a | 2025-10-16 14:37:51+00:00
Docker images are self-running. Infrastructure systems do not have to be told how to run a Docker image; they can just run them. Scripts, on the other hand, are not; at the most simple level because you'd have to inform your infrastructure system what the name of the script is, but more comprehensively and typically because there's often dependencies the run script implies of its environment, but does not (and, frankly, cannot) express. Docker solves this.

> Docker just wraps what you'd do in a VM.

Docker is not a VM.

> Plus all the downsides of docker.

Of which you've managed to elucidate zero, so thanks for that.
by louthy | 2025-10-16 14:38:43+00:00
I'm the author of language-ext [1] a pure functional framework for C# and have been pushing the declarative programming thing in C# for over decade. C# is a great language for declarative programming and LINQ is awesome. You need to constrain yourself (and your team) so you don't fall into bad habits, but it can really pay dividends in terms of code stability/maintainability.

I have a couple of samples that I think might surprise you if you think C# must look like Java...

* A game of pontoon [2] - I create a Game monad which is an alias for a monad-transformer stack of StateT > OptionT > IO. This shows how terse you can get, where the code almost turns into a narrative.

* Newsletter sender [3] (which I use for my blog) [4] - This generalises over any monad as long as the trait requirements are met. This is about as declarative as you can get in C#. It's certainly pushing the language, but is still elegant (in my eyes anyway).

[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext

[2] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/blob/main/Samples/Car...

[3] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/blob/main/Samples/New...

[4] https://paullouth.com
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-16 14:39:02+00:00
The principles predate modern SaaS by decades. You can see it in the wording of the FAQ you linked. It keeps using the word "distribute" - meaning giving people a copy of the software to put on their own computer - as if that were the only way of commercializing software. Which it pretty much was in the 1980s.

There has been some revision over time, but there's an argument to be made that small revisions are inadequate to keep up with the sea change in how computing works that's happened since the turn of the century. The elephant in the room here is that SaaS, and especially cloud computing, has pretty well undermined the practical foundation for how the Free Software model was supposed to work for people who are trying to make a living selling Free Software.
by jraph | 2025-10-16 14:39:19+00:00
> MIT does not give software freedom to all users of the code

Okay, I would agree more with this phrasing. That's the issue I have with permissive licenses.

> NDAs aren't there to protect freedoms, they only remove freedom.

To be fair, I'm also not a fan of most NDAs indeed.

> Laws enforce them, but in the same way that laws enforce license restrictions.

Yep, I agree with this.