MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andrekandre | 2025-10-24 23:54:22+00:00
> What KMP (and I'm hoping Swift for Android) bring is the possibility to share a Kotlin (respectively Swift) library instead of sharing code with C/C++/Rust/Go. So that an Android/iOS team can keep using Android/Swift without having to introduce a third language for sharing logic.

have gone down this route before, and tbh the biggest issue is dev ux (ios devs cant debug easily, model mismatches vs kotlin e.g kotlin exceptions cant be caught from swift) and in the end even kotlin multi platform isn't the same as kotlin for android, so in a sense you are still introducing a 3rd language after a fashion...

if you can fix the dev issues and have a dedicated team behind the shared logic it could work out, but still then again if you also have a website your re-implementing that logic on the front-end twice...
by yodsanklai | 2025-10-24 23:54:45+00:00
In my company (big tech), the tools are integrated in our environment, and most people use them, and actually a 20-30% of the new code in prod is generated by AI. I was skeptical, and I don't like this new world, but it's happening.

I don't know what will be the final form of this, how our jobs will be impacted, and how much more productive we really are with the tool. But it's not a hype, these tools are here to stay and have changed the way we code. I don't think they will replace coders but they will make the best programmers more efficient.

As you said, it's easy to lose time with the generated slop, but someone who use the tools wisely is more efficient.
by mcdeltat | 2025-10-24 23:55:58+00:00
Agreed, the issue is more that the average person doesn't care about photos. Even now you can tell what is real vs fake in photography and people don't care, they eat it all up. The good, the bad, the fake, doesn't matter because no one gives a fuck. If you actually appreciate the art of photography then you already do and will continue to regardless of AI or whatever.
by mort96 | 2025-10-24 23:56:25+00:00
By buying a Framework laptop I'm signaling to Framework that I don't care about their support of the ideology. My ideal outcome here would be that Framework's support of DHH would directly and unambiguously result in a dramatic loss of sales, which would signal to the world that supporting such ideologies is toxic to your brand.

And, sure, my peers play a role too. What message do I send, for example, to my transgender friends when I demonstrate that I don't mind Framework's public support of DHH's public transphobic rhetoric? What message do I send to my non-white friends when I demonstrate that I don't mind Framework's public support of DHH's public "the UK was better when it was all white" rhetoric? Et cetera.
by sodaclean | 2025-10-24 23:56:39+00:00
With most day to day things being some form of streaming it really hides how painfully slow gigabit is.

Additionally, it's not difficult to fit 10gigabit worth of data munging in a 10-15watt envelope.

Pulling data off of modern professional cameras is an easy example.

Realtek's latest NIC is 10/100/1000/2.5/5/10, has a <2w envelope and has offloading that works (unlike intel).
by tgma | 2025-10-24 23:56:53+00:00
> You mean WSL2.

Yes, indeed.

> I thought it was the coolest thing.

NT was designed to have different subsystems[1]. Win32 subsystem was a layer on top of NT, and was a peer to the POSIX subsystem, and IIRC even OS/2. WSL1 ideas was certainly not new in the context of NT. FreeBSD also has a Linux subsystem.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/Wi...
by cowsandmilk | 2025-10-24 23:57:09+00:00
1. The correction doesn’t invalidate that previous study at all

2. I fail to see how the previous study is an “underpinning” of the new paper. The new paper is a chemistry paper about dissociation of GBCAs in the presence of certain chemicals. Maybe people care because it is a potential explanation for toxicity, but the paper is very focused on the chemistry findings.
by sanswork | 2025-10-24 23:59:57+00:00
I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr.....

You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you.

I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing or a second opinion on possible problems with a module.

> unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable.

The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. Same as the productivity difference between a developer with a good LSP and one without or a good IDE or a good search engine.

When I was a kid I had a text editor and a book and it worked. But now that better tools are around I'm certainly going to make use of them.
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-10-25 00:01:22+00:00
I read that message as "Whoever is the poor soul attempting to fix this system that doesn't boot, (because who otherwise inspects early boot messages?) whoever installed this system is running a known-fragile configuration."

And that's what I expect of systemd? That it should complain loudly whenever me, the daemons I'm attempting to run, or the overall system is doing things in a weird, known-bad, known-fragile way and warn me about it before it breaks if possible.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-25 00:02:13+00:00
> When a highly educated doctor tells you that something is safe, a person is going to assume that means that someone somewhere has proven that the substance is safe.

Contrast agent has been widely studied and determined to be reasonably safe. You’re not going to be administered any routine procedures or compounds that are known to be dangerous without an examination of the risks and benefits.

> If what they really mean is that no one really knows, but so far, no experiments have been able to prove danger, then we should say that instead.

“No experiments have been able to prove danger” is too generic to be usefully different than saying that it’s understood to be reasonably safe.

Even this paper isn’t saying that contrast agent is bad or dangerous in general. It’s exploring a potential effect that we can now detect and study.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-25 00:02:19+00:00
> C coreutils is not in fact modular, reuseable, and easily-comprehensible

It's not. I never said it was. Nor are my bank's systems; I don't want them to fuck them up either. My bank's job is not to rewrite their codebase in shinier, newer languages that look nice on their staff's CVs, their job is to continue to provide reliable banking services. The simplest, cheapest way for them to do that is to not rewrite their software at all.

What I was addressing was two different approaches to "design[ing] software [...] in such a way that it is simply possible to do rewrites"

* One way is evergreen: think about modularity, reusability, and good documentation in the code you're writing today. That will help with any mooted future rewrite.

* The other way, which you implied, is to imagine what the future rewrite might look like, and design for that now. That way lies madness.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-25 00:03:39+00:00
> you should not make a pipe out of a coke can because of the plastic liner

I'm fairly sure it doesn't make much of an health impact considering the hot smoke you pull into your lung, but when I was kid and we made pipes out of cans in "emergencies" we'd use the outside of the can as where you put anything with fire, you don't have to turn it inside out to be able to smoke out of it.
by doublerabbit | 2025-10-25 00:04:00+00:00
My take is that 70/80's built programs from a set of blueprints of what was required. Where each programmer had a set of requirements, knew what were required, when it is needed to be completed by and the tools available to enable the next level in development. If someone lagged behind then the project halted until but the end result was solidity and a completed application. At least during that time other programmers could improve their work and document.

Meanwhile with agile, its always felt like a race to me. If you didn't complete your part then spend a whole week focusing on it while the others carry on with anticipation that the sprint will result in completion of the part required. Enabling for the next part they've built to be integrated.

Vibe coding offers this "make a text box write to a file" code generation and it does. However without any blueprints the code starts to crumble when you proceed to introduce middleware such as authentication.

It was never discussed on how authentication should authenticate because someone is already that far ahead in their work so you end up mashing more code together until it does work. It does and your product holds premise.

The we'll improve, document and fix later never comes because of the influx of feature requests leading it to bloat. Now bogged down in tech debt you then spend resources in wrangling the mess with senior engineers.

The senior engineers are now fixing the mess resulting in their experienced code not integrating with that of the juniors. The seniors now having to tidy that code leave behind the real code they were originally tasked in improving turning the whole codebase in to something that's a diabolical mess, but hey, it works.

Hardware is cheaper than refactoring so instead you then "scale" by throwing more hardware at it until it handles the pressure.

Someone then leaves and knowledge share is lost. Some exec promotes someone from the team who was crazy-sane enough to keep all in check to the senior role while skimping them on pay and are now handling the lost work, theirs and keeping the team in check.

The product starts to fail and new junior engineers are bought in with new naive wisdom, jumping up and down with the newest fancy library tech finally making the process complete causing it to repeat itself indefinitely.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-25 00:04:29+00:00
> I was kind of annoyed I wasn't offered and MRI, and here we are.

This paper isn’t saying that MRI contrast agent is high risk in general.

There’s a risk in misinterpreting these niche papers to overstate their relative risk. This is a common mistake when people start reading medical papers and begin overweighting the things they’ve read about as the most significant risks.
by GMoromisato | 2025-10-25 00:04:45+00:00
I agree with you: indirect causality is what kills people. Directly attributable causes are rare because they are easy to fix.

I also suspect these indirect causes are not easy to fix. It's not like 1 or 2 bugs cause 10,000 indirect deaths. It's more like 10,000 different bugs/design flaws cause 1 or 2 indirect deaths each.
by saulpw | 2025-10-25 00:05:06+00:00
That "a good model (if you know how to operate it well)" is doing a lot of lifting. To be sure, there are a lot of bad books, and you can get negative advice from them, but a book has fixed content that can gain and lose a reputation, whereas a model (even a good one!) has highly variable content dependent on "if you know how to operate it well". So when someone or some group that I respect recommends a book, I can read the words with some amount of trust that the content is valuable. When someone quotes a model's response without any commentary or affirmation, it does not inspire any trust that the content is valuable. It just indicates that the person has abdicated their thought process.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-25 00:05:08+00:00
> anti-AI people think the advice and information you can get from a good model (if you know how to operate it well) is less valuable than the advice and information you can get from a book

Those people exist and they’re wrong.

More frequently, however, I find I’m judging the model less than its user. If I get an email that smells of AI, I ignore it. That’s partly because I have the luxury to do so. It’s largely because engaging has commonly proven fruitless.

You see a similar effect on HN. Plenty of people use AI to think through problems. But the comments that quote it directly are almost always trash.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-25 00:07:54+00:00
> I'm doing all the cutting and welding myself, so needed a heavy duty 220v high amp extension cord. Built my own, but the insulated copper cable for that was a pretty penny.

300V 6/3 SO cord is about 6 bucks a foot, that adds up quick! Just be glad you didn’t have to buy any pin and sleeve connectors ;)
by kragen | 2025-10-25 00:09:27+00:00
> what it’s going to take, from the human side of the equation, to make heat pumps the obvious, accessible, and default choice for millions of American homes.

Well, this has already happened; living in a third-world American country, I've been heating my houses in winter with heat pumps every winter for many years (even though they iced up occasionally) and most air conditioners here are already heat pumps. Frio/calor, they're called.

But, installations strictly for heating are probably never going to happen en masse. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698730 I analyze the costs. It turns out that heat pumps cost around 39¢ per peak watt they save, while low-cost solar panels cost 6.5¢ per peak watt they produce, so it's almost always cheaper to install enough solar panels to heat your house resistively. And that gap is going to continue widening for the foreseeable future.

Our heat pump, a cheap-shit Electrolux mini split assembled in Tierra del Fuego, broke down last winter; somehow the refrigerant escaped. The repairman did a pressure test with nitrogen but couldn't find a link. He pre-emptively soldered shut a pipe that had been crimped shut at the factory, and pointed out that, probably, if we hadn't been using it as a heat pump, it would have been fine. Certainly it would have had many fewer hours of operation. We ended up spending about US$100 on the repair, which is the price of 1500 peak watts of solar panels. I think that brings us to about US$500 total spent on the thing—insignificant to people in the US, but a significant chunk of change in most of the rest of America.

Heat pumps are an energy-crisis-era efficiency measure to conserve energy. But energy is no longer scarce. After 50 years, the energy crisis is, if not ended, at least ending. If your house's solar panels are producing more energy than you can use or sell back to the grid at a decent price, the energy to run a resistive heater is free.
by crote | 2025-10-25 00:09:40+00:00
> The FHS ultimately belongs to the users collectively, not those maintaining it.

I completely agree that regular updates are not a requirement for standards to remain relevant, but it does require the ecosystem to still adhere to them - and the problem is that Linux users are increasingly deviating from the FHS.

The FHS does not accurately describe the situation on-the-ground, there are no plans to update the FHS to accurately describe the situation on-the-ground, and there are no plans to update the ecosystem to accurately implement the FHS.

Like it or not: the FHS is dead, and nobody seems interested in reviving it.
by mrandish | 2025-10-25 00:11:06+00:00
Yeah, as a teenager I was fortunate to get early formal training and direct mentoring in the 'magical arts' from some well-known masters of the craft. While my career as a full-time performing pro didn't outlast my early 20s, that way of thinking and seeing does tend to inform my perceptions in ways I can't really turn off. I used to jokingly refer to it as 'my misspent youth' but training in the creative aspects of magic has also proven surprisingly useful in my tech startup career.

The most valuable part was studying formal magic theory - a rather academic specialty focused on human perception and psychology. Very few magicians ever get into it because the vast majority of magicians don't invent their own tricks. Even David Copperfield buys almost all of his tricks from specialized magical inventors you've never heard of, often under exclusive 'performance rights' contracts (which can be fairly lucrative). Most magical inventors don't actually perform magic professionally themselves, in much the same way that many great song writers and music producers aren't singers. To me, magic theory is still the most fascinating and enjoyable part of magic.
by ssuds | 2025-10-25 00:11:09+00:00
The first point is very valid too. There was an energy commission study a few years ago, and up front cost is pretty consistently one of the biggest barriers to heat pump adoption.

I think there's some nuance to that, though. Even replacing a furnace + AC in California amounts to tens of thousands of dollars! It's not that heat pumps are expensive, it's that construction work in general is expensive.

When you frame it in terms of percentage of home cost, it actually feels a lot more reasonable. Robert Bean is a pretty respected voice in HVAC, and shared this article a few years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20150210053806/http://www.health...). The gist is (and this is focused a bit on new construction, so not entirely apples to apples) that you should budget 3-5% of the home's cost for a bare minimum code compliant HVAC installation. When you look at it in that lens, $20k to replace the most complicated mechanical system in a $3M home is less than 1%.

I recently read a piece about the "Cost disease in services" that was really enlightening (https://growthecon.com/feed/2017/05/15/What-You-Spend.html).

"Productivity growth in the goods sector raises the wage in that sector, but also raises the output of that sector. So the ratio of wage to output - a measure of the cost of a unit of output - stays constant over time. Higher wages in the goods sector put pressure on wages in the service sector, so wages rise over time there. But (taking the exteme position) productivity is not growing in services, and so output is not growing. The ratio of wages to output in services - a measure of costs - is thus rising over time. This is the “cost disease of services”."

While I don't think that's all of it, it is a helpful framing of the economics around these dynamics.

There are some companies out there that are truly price gouging. But many are just pricing around the true cost of labor and to run a construction business. I've done a little writing around this topic too: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/pricing-transparency-peeking-be...

Ultimately, I would love to see upfront prices & operating costs for heat pumps both fall. But there are a lot of tough realities baked into the cost of these systems. They are still a very logical choice for most homeowners at the time of failure. Especially with rebate & incentive stacks in many places, a heat pump actually works out cheaper than a new furnace + traditional AC for many homeowners.
I built an AI tool to recover passwords
by aiipassword | 2025-10-25 00:12:05+00:00
Hi HN, I built aiipassword.com, a small tool for one specific problem: getting back into your own accounts when you no longer have access to the linked email or phone.

How it works, simply: the site asks short, memory‑based questions about habits and patterns you use for passwords (name cues, dates, favorite numbers, job hints, common symbols). An AI model uses those answers and learned human password patterns to generate a short list of likely passwords you might actually have used. I used the list to try plausible combos until one worked.

Privacy and limits: nothing you type is stored long‑term. Inputs are processed transiently and never used for training. The tool is strictly for recovering your own accounts. Do not use it on other people’s accounts.

Threat model and safety: this is a last‑resort recovery aid, not a replacement for proper account recovery, 2FA, or password managers. I want the community to critique the security model, suggest attacks I missed, and help me close gaps.

If you’re a security researcher or HN reader with notes on cryptography, privacy, or ethical concerns, I’d love your feedback. Links, tests, and honest critiques welcome.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-25 00:12:22+00:00
You can save the $700 freight shipping if you live near a distributor. https://www.sunhub.com/ and https://a1solarstore.com/ both have local pickup locations and extremely good deals on panels. Rent a pickup truck (or a trailer), show up and they'll drop a palletized bundle in your bed. It's also nice because you aren't hoping the freight shipping company handled them perfectly or dealing with damage claims. I picked my panels up in New Jersey from two different places, was easy.

Depending on your local area, if you're the homeowner, you can often do most of the electrical yourself (pull permits if needed). Use ChatGPT to look up code requirements and instructions, then look up YouTube videos where professionals show you how to do it all. I think it's much less complicated than figuring out all the solar-specific stuff (tilt angles, voltages, wiring, disconnects, etc).
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-10-25 00:13:25+00:00
> systemd is my hammer having it's own opinions about what nails I hit & where & into what & why.

I feel like the exact opposite. systemd has way too many layers of customization. Things can be in /etc/systemd/system/, /run/systemd/system/, /usr/lib/systemd/system/* and those are just the "basic" override locations. And those edits and masks usually don't clash with each other, so your customizations and quirks stick, even if the rest of your system changes.

Now, if you are in a system that doesn't use systemd, if you mess with the "sacred and sanctioned" system service summoning scrolls, now you're on your own to diff whoever stuff the maintainer did, every time the summoning scroll changes, and to make sure that probably Turing-complete mess still summons a valid, working and safe system component instead of rampaging thru your system.
by mystraline | 2025-10-25 00:13:32+00:00
> I am positive that you were not told that '[gadolinium] is perfectly safe' because there is a well-known complication of gadolinium administration. It's rare, but it's mentioned in every consent form.

Consent is not "Sign this cause its the only course of treatment". And thats what happens almost every time.

And yes, I too have gadolinium retention in my joint. 3 MRIs. And no, was not told this was a complication... But I'm sure the papers I signed included weasel words to that effect.
by kragen | 2025-10-25 00:14:10+00:00
> installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars.

Mine cost US$250 for the machine, refrigerant included, and another US$80 for the installation. We've had to have it fixed twice due to factory defects. Its heat output is 3400W, nominally consuming 941 watts of electrical power. It's not a great machine, but you're smoking crack.
by Avamander | 2025-10-25 00:15:30+00:00
> I don't care that it's hypothetically possible for that to happen with C, I care that practically, I've never seen it happen.

I don't think your anecdotal experience is enough to redeem the disarray that is C dependency management. It's nice to pretend though.

> and tells me the software it could build last week can't be build any more. What. The. Fuck. Cargo, I didn't ask you to fuck up my shit - but you did it anyway. Make has never done that to me, nor has autoconf.

If you didn't get my point in previous comment, let me put it more frankly - it is your skill issue if you aren't fixing your crates to a specific version but depend on them remaining constant. This is not Cargo's fault.

> Make has never done that to me, nor has autoconf.

Yeah, because they basically guarantee nothing nor allow working around any of the potential issues I've already described.

But you do get to wait for a thousandth time for it to check the size of some types. All those checks are a literal proof how horrible the ecosystem is.

> There have been about 100 language versions of Rust in the past 10 years

There's actually four editions and they're all backwards-compatible.

> C programmers see very little reason to adopt "newer" C language editions.

Should've stopped at the word "reason".