MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nelox | 2025-11-27 11:04:28+00:00
The core issue is that the BBC report inflates what the study actually shows. The paper is a small, single-centre RCT of one specific surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy). Its primary outcome is a modest reduction in propofol and fentanyl dose under a very specific anaesthetic protocol. It does not demonstrate broadly faster recovery or an across-the-board clinical benefit. The authors themselves are cautious and explicitly list limitations.

The article strips out that narrow context and generalises. Phrases like “music eases surgery and speeds recovery” and “strongest evidence yet” extrapolate from a sample of 56 people undergoing one procedure to “surgery” in general. The paper doesn’t measure global recovery outcomes, discharge times, or longer-term effects. Satisfaction and pain scores are even reported as comparable between groups (P=0.361 and P=0.07).

There’s also mechanistic speculation in the article (implicit memory, psychological responses, “humanising the operating room”) that isn’t in the study’s data. The paper reports dose differences and perioperative physiological measures—not neuropsychological mechanisms.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-11-27 11:04:42+00:00
Because that’s not a lie; under special circumstances, it can be true.

For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.

Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.

But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.

The choice is yours.
by tssva | 2025-11-27 11:05:13+00:00
I don’t agree with a lot that comes out of this administration but am onboard with this decision. The parks are funded by US tax dollars primarily for the benefit of US citizens and residents, so it makes sense to charge more for non-residents. I have to pay more when visiting some county and state parks within the US for the same reason. Also the parks which these increased fees will apply to are some of the most popular parks which are becoming increasingly difficult to gain entrance to as the number of visitors are limited to preserve the nature of the parks. Increasing the fees should help reduce the demand for entrance among foreign visitors allowing more US residents the opportunity to visit the parks.
by Spare_account | 2025-11-27 11:05:23+00:00
For anyone interested, this is approximately the wait/walk dilemma, specifically the interstellar travel subset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait/walk_dilemma#Interstellar...

I was listening to an old edition of the Fraser Cain weekly question/answer podcast earlier where he described this exact thing. I think he said that someone has run the numbers in the context of human survivable travel to nearby stars and on how long we should wait and the conclusion was that we should wait about 600 years.

Any craft for human transport to a nearby star system that we launch within the next 600 years will probably be overtaken before arrival at the target star system by ships launched after them.
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-27 11:06:28+00:00
Hence the detailed explanation after "don't be rude". And "maintainers have final say" is 1) another otherwise-unwritten rule (it's true regardless), and 2) justifies banning repeat offenders when the maintainers don't have time to keep writing specific rules for them, and there's a vanishingly small chance they're not acting in bad faith.

Also, when people cause social issues, they should be reprimanded referencing specific parts of the CoC, and in most cases given warnings or opportunities to recover. For when the person causing the issue genuinely isn't aware what they're doing is wrong and can learn to be tolerable; and even when the person is completely bad faith, for unaware bystanders to learn what's right and wrong.

Diagnosed autistic people aren't the only ones who suffer from unwritten social cues. Also people from other cultures, e.g. where rudeness is considered more acceptable.
by xmorse | 2025-11-27 11:07:39+00:00
This project is similar to Playwright MCP, but with some important differences and benefits.

---

1. Key differences from Playwright MCP

1. Uses your existing Chrome tabs via an installable Chrome extension instead of launching a new browser window. 2. Exposes only one MCP tool: `execute`, which runs arbitrary Playwright code in a sandbox. 3. The extension communicates with the MCP via Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) over WebSocket.

2. Benefits

1. Less context bloat: the LLM only needs to reason about a single tool instead of many. 2. More capable: the agent can write any Playwright code to control the browser. 3. Fewer resources: reuses your existing Chrome browser instead of spawning a new instance per MCP project. 4. Human–machine collaboration: you can temporarily disable the extension to: * Solve CAPTCHAs * Unstick the LLM * Intervene manually when needed

3. Using it in your own scripts

1. You can connect to the extension from your own Playwright scripts. 2. This lets you automate tasks in your existing Chrome tabs, instead of running a separate browser instance.

4. Non-disruptive browser control

1. The extension does not force-focus Chrome windows during interactions. 2. You can run automation in non-headless mode without Chrome constantly stealing focus and interrupting your work.

5. Security model

1. The extension connects to a localhost WebSocket server started by the MCP. 2. This server proxies MCP commands to the extension. 3. Only tabs where the extension is enabled are accessible to the MCP. 4. Other tabs remain isolated and inaccessible to random agents.

6. Safety considerations

1. The MCP can still cause damage if run unsupervised. 2. You should: * Run it with permissions enabled, and/or * Keep it under active human supervision.
by ahoka | 2025-11-27 11:07:41+00:00
"Yes what? Both oxcaml and ocaml have compatible LGPL licenses so I didn't get your argument."

LGPL is a license for distribution, the copyright of the original authors is retained (unless signed away in a contribution agreement, usually to an organization).

"Are you saying that I cannot learn from a copyrighted book written by some respected and known author, and then apply that knowledge elsewhere because I would be risking to be sued for copyright infringement?"

This was not the case here, so not sure how that is related in any way?
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-27 11:08:23+00:00
Wikipedia covers music very well. It often doesn't include the music itself, but there's a ton of great writing and history about music.

And many artists still publish CDs, vinyl records, and other physical artifacts just like they have for ~most of our collective lifetimes. If you want new generations to experience that kind of thing, then buy some of it for them to experience.

(Or, you know: If that seems like too much work or too much money, then a streaming subscription is only about 10 bucks a month. I spent a lot more than that on music when I was a kid.)
by lelanthran | 2025-11-27 11:08:38+00:00
> But its up to men to do the work.

What work would this be? Any organisation to the benefit of males would instantly be shutdown.

What do you have in mind that won't get backlash? I mean, after all, even just a quantitative study has elicited, in this thread, much anti-male sentiment in the form of strawmen.

So I am curious how you see male-advocacy groups proceeding in a manner that has no or limited backlash.
by pyrale | 2025-11-27 11:08:48+00:00
> There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this

You are the one summoning that spiral by making a cheap gotcha wrt codeberg using Paypal.

The project apparently could and did move because the swith from github to codeberg wasn't that big of an impact, and because, while the new forge is not perfect, they feel the association is less severe. There is no "purity spiral" in that, just a pragmatic choice factoring in ethics.
by nl | 2025-11-27 11:08:50+00:00
Maybe don't say things like this then?

> So there are two reasonable explanations: > A) There is no way to show prompts used when "vibe coding". > B) This claim of "vibe coding" a Prolog is disingenuous.

The actual explanation is that it never occurred to me that this would interest anyone!

There's some more prompts here: https://github.com/nlothian/Vibe-Prolog/blob/main/docs/WORKF...
by ChocolateGod | 2025-11-27 11:09:11+00:00
A game can start up native Linux binaries even when the game itself is running under Proton.

But EAC has a kernel driver and there's no real native way of doing that on Linux that's stable as Linux has no stable kernel API, and measured boot isn't widely adopted so a custom kernel can just lie to the anti-cheat module.

I really hope Valve work on this, whilst it would mean perhaps online play only run on SteamOS in an optional locked down mode, it's better than the status quo.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-27 11:09:12+00:00
Honestly, the ratings on those sites are essentially useless anyway, because people are bad at reviewing.

I generally sample the lowest rating written reviews, to check if people are complaining about real stuff, or are just confused. For instance, if a hotel doesn't have a bar, some of the negative reviews will usually be about how the hotel doesn't have a bar; these can be safely ignored as having been written by idiots (it is not like the hotel is hiding the fact that it doesn't have a bar).

Occasionally some of the positive reviews are similarly baffling. Was recently booking a hotel in Berlin in January, and the top review's main positive comment about the hotel was that it had heating. Well, yeah, I mean, you'd hope so. I can only assume that the reviewer was a visitor from the 19th century.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-11-27 11:09:30+00:00
There are few more photos of this HW here [1] and [2]. Apparently a real HW already exists. Also, it seems there is a storage space inside the box [3] and that the keyboard is foldable..

[1]: https://www.pentagram.com/news/caligra-computers-for-experts

[2]: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPEvytujE4k/

[3]: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPEvytujE4k/?img_index=8
by gruturo | 2025-11-27 11:09:31+00:00
You know you can get a lightning-to-C adapter for very little, right? Here you go, under $2 each: https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-Charging-Transfer-C... (probably under $1 each if you have the patience to look for them in other sites)

And a lot of chargers don't have a cable built-in, they just have a USB-A or -C port - so it's just a matter of replacing the cable. But - again, if you'd rather not do even that, you're welcome to keep using your old cable with a USB-C converter
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-27 11:09:57+00:00
I truly feel like Linus did a lot of damage by normalising his brand of leadership. Younger developers wanting to emulate someone as accomplished as Linus unsurprisingly adopted the habits that are easiest to emulate - name calling, attacking, denigrating, dismissing.

Linus is better now but the behaviour is ingrained into so many people. They now “tell it like it is”, are “straight shooters”, don’t have time to be “politically correct” and so on.
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-27 11:10:48+00:00
But it's the amount and location(?) of the vibes that matters.

If I want to say, create a Youtube RSS hydrator that uses DeArrow to de-clickbait all URLs before they hit my RSS reader.

Level 1 (max vibe) I can either just say that to an LLM hit "go" and hope for the best (maximum vibes on spec and code). Most likely gonna be shit. Might work too.

Level 2 (pair-vibing the spec) is me pair-vibing the spec with an LLM, web versions might work if they can access sites for specs (figuring out how to turn a youtube URL to an RSS feed and how the DeArrow API works)

After the spec is done, I can give it to an agent and go do something else. In most cases there's an MVP done when I come back, depending on how easy said thing is to test (RSS/Atom is a fickle spec and readers implement it in various ways) automatically.

Level 3 continues the pair-vibed spec with pair-coding. I give the agent tasks in small parts and follow along as it progresses, interrupting if it strays.

For most senior folks with experience in writing specs for non-seniors, Level 2 will produce good enough stuff for personal use. And because you offload the time consuming bits to an agent, you can do multiple projects in parallel.

Level 3 will definitely bring the best results, but you can only progress one task at a time.
Show HN: Spikelog – A simple metrics service for scripts, cron jobs, and MVPs
by dsmurrell | 2025-11-27 11:10:51+00:00
Hi all!

I built Spikelog because I kept wanting to track simple numbers over time but every time I looked at proper observability tools, I'd bounce off the setup complexity. I wanted to make something that didn't require a lot of thinking to use.

Spikelog is made to be as simple as possible:

- POST a JSON with chart name + value (you can add some tags as well but I've not tested this part works yet)

- Chart appears automatically

- 1,000 point rolling window per chart (old data expires, no retention config)

- Max 10 charts

That's basically the whole product.

I built it in about a day using Cursor. The API is intentionally minimal so AI assistants can use it too.

I have a prompt that lets your coding agent analyze a codebase and add tracking automatically (after you approve the plan).

I used it to make Spikelog track itself: https://spikelog.com/p/spikelog

There's no alerting yet (that's next), no complex aggregations, no dashboards beyond the auto-generated charts. If you need real observability use something fully featured like Axiom or Datadog. This is for people who just want to see if a number went up or down and don't want to build that themselves. i.e. they want something slightly better than just logging the number.

You can also share the charts publicly and I might add some password protection if there is demand for that.

I haven't battle-tested it under heavy load. The rolling window deletion is naive (deletes oldest points on insert). There are probably edge cases I haven't hit yet.

Would love feedback, especially if you try it and hit something broken.
by nickpp | 2025-11-27 11:11:10+00:00
I've seen mainstream "socialists" (Obama, Sanders, countless Europeans) embracing and sustaining authoritarian communist thugs like Chavez, so...

We've seen here in EU socialist policies cripple our economy to the point we're lagging the USA and we can't even defend ourselves from the blood-hungry psychopath in the east.

> libertarian socialism

Is this a real thing? Any examples of being implemented anywhere? Cause it sounds like a oxymoron to me. Socialism means regulations and confiscation from the productive members of society (taxation). Those must be enforced with the threat of force so less liberty there...

> no one deserves to be able to force you to do things

So I shouldn't be forced to pay my taxes? How would then a socialist government implement its expensive social policies?!
by mzajc | 2025-11-27 11:11:21+00:00
function estimate_method_targets(func_name::Symbol, types::Tuple) # Conservative estimate # In a real implementation, we'd query the method table return 2 # Assume multiple possibilities end

Hilarious. Was this model trained on XKCD [0] by any chance?

[0]: https://xkcd.com/221/
by fennecfoxy | 2025-11-27 11:11:38+00:00
>Chromecast seems so locked down so take AirPlay and make it a standard

Weird thing to say given that AirPlay is also locked down as well...they're both the same. But I agree with the overall sentiment; a common wireless streaming standard would be amazing. It would mean I can use more devices to throw Samsung DEX at.

Hell, if all monitors/TVs/displays came with basic "receive a standard stream from wifi" support that would be so great for consumers, reduces friction so much.
by nottorp | 2025-11-27 11:12:27+00:00
Doesn't seem to work for me. At least until I got tired of refreshing.

A few times i did see a still from the video for a fraction of a second, but then it got overwritten by nothingness.

Well, I wasn't much of a fan of watching videos when the same info can be conveyed in writing in 1/20 of the time. Now I just have more incentive not to bother.
by alecco | 2025-11-27 11:13:31+00:00
https://archive.ph/r4USc

> There is nothing that China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper, nothing for which it wants to rely on foreigners a single day longer than it has to. For now, to be sure, China is still a customer for semiconductors, software, commercial aircraft and the most sophisticated kinds of production machinery. But it is a customer like a resident doctor is a student. China is developing all of these goods. Soon it will make them, and export them, itself.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-11-27 11:13:56+00:00
As your link says, acceleration is 2nd derivative of position, so rate of change of acceleration is 3rd derivative, often called jolt. As you say, you want acceleration to vary slowly, so it's low jolt that you want.

Snap (or jounce), crackle and pop are 4th/5th/6th derivative. They're probably less of a problem.
by antirez | 2025-11-27 11:15:21+00:00
I hope the best for Zig, Loris. But even if Zig will survive and prosper (I hope for both), still I believe this is not a sounding decision and not the right attitude. I hope I'm wrong, but I wanted to share with you my reasoning. Here you are moving away from the open source marketplace AND from your main revenue stream. It's not similar to not posting anymore to Twitter. A better parallel would be not posting anymore on Hacker News anything Zig related, in terms of potential outcome.
by enchanted-gian | 2025-11-27 11:15:21+00:00
Question,whats the problem with a motherboard being from an obscure Chinese company?Is it because its harder to find replacements or some other reason. i ask because i recently built my own homelab like 4 months ago and source all my parts from Aliexpress which as way cheaper than any name brand on amazon an they're all relatively obscure. My homelab is running perfectly though so why the apprehension?
by t-3 | 2025-11-27 11:16:54+00:00
I usually buy used hard drives, but prices are strange for all electronics right now. It's a bad time to buy anything computer-related, but especially used goods which aren't discounted as much as normal are priced higher due to massive inflation (to the point that refurbished drives I bought 5 years ago have a better dollar/GB ratio than refurbs I can buy today).
by debugnik | 2025-11-27 11:17:07+00:00
He apparently pretended to not have written it despite its DNS pointing to his servers, and Certificate Transparency logs and Internet Archive all attributing the page to his domain. Compare the top comment thread in the first link above to his reply there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41838124

I generally like Sourcehut and Drew's writing but I just learned about this and I find it disappointing.
by thisislife2 | 2025-11-27 11:17:14+00:00
No, your idea is perfectly rational. Somebody I know consulted me on what kind of computers to buy for their new small business that would only be used for browsing, email, word processing. I found them a store that sold used Dell and HP workstations. They got 3 Dell machines (CPU + Monitor + Keyboard + Mouse), all Intel Core i5 with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD with Windows 7 Pro, for $75 / each. We spent an additional $25 to purchase a cheap 128 GB SSD and installed Linux (LMDE), Firefox, LibreOffice and GNU Cash on it. (Preserved Windows Dual boot option, just in case they needed Windows for something). This was 2+ years ago and the owner was so happy that I reduced his IT hardware budget by a quarter. I recently purchased a used HP 25" monitor from Craigslist, for $60, in excellent condition and still having a year warranty on it, whose retail price was around $500 on launch. There is so much e-waste being produced ...
by nickdothutton | 2025-11-27 11:17:25+00:00
In the UK the intelligence services spent £120M on an "information sharing platform" (email + intranet), before declaring after 3 years work that "technical challenges" made it impossible and the project was canned.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/mar/06/mi5-gchq-co...
Show HN: SpecX – Workflow Automation for AI Agents
by dhaundy | 2025-11-27 11:18:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm excited to share SpecX, a task orchestration engine for teams using coding agents like Cursor and Claude.

## Motivation

While building projects with AI coding agents, I noticed a few patterns:

* As projects grew in size, writing effective prompts became progressively harder * Agents performed best when requirements were short and well-defined * Many everyday tasks — testing, deployment, documentation, reporting — were structured and repeatable, even across projects.

> The manual translation from goal to prompt felt redundant, lossy, and inefficient.

I decided to remove prompts from the equation entirely. Instead: * For automation, focus on the workflow and break it into steps. * For feature work, focus on requirements and break them into tasks.

## The Core Solution: Reliable Workflow Automation

At the center of SpecX is the Task Orchestration Engine.

You define Pipelines — reusable sequences of actions the agent must perform. Common use cases include:

* Automated compliance or audit checks * Reporting (code coverage, engineering velocity, documentation) * Refactor → test → verify loops

Built on top of the orchestration engine is the Requirement Tree, a structured, AI-assisted way to turn rough, unstructured ideas into well-defined tasks.

You write requirements the way you think; the engine builds them using one of the pipelines.

## Status

SpecX is in preview. I'd love feedback from the HN community — especially on the Pipeline model and the idea of separating goal definition from prompt generation.

* Login required (to protect your project context) * Requires a coding agent (Cursor or any MCP-enabled agent).

Try SpecX: https://redoxsoft.com Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JNYIhoHmbQ

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, design choices, or roadmap.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-27 11:18:21+00:00
> a simple but functional shower with hot water

Sorry, no, not allowed. Hotel showers always have _something_ wrong with them; it's a law of nature.

Potential problems:

- No thermostatic valve (particularly common in the US and Spain, neither of which seems to believe that thermostatic valves exist at all)

- Leaks and/or insufficient drainage

- Overly complex control scheme

- Fixed showerhead, with no handheld shower at all (mostly a US thing)

- Arbitrarily loses pressure.

- Impossible to turn on without getting drenched in cold water

I don't _really_ care about the bathroom door thing that the website is so excited about, but I am constantly irritated by hotel showers.
by roenxi | 2025-11-27 11:19:01+00:00
I would assume by default that billionaires are politically active and causing a problem. However this link doesn't give a lot of hints about how or wherefore. I assume this is a jab at Thiel; but it is a bit light on in the synopsis department.

There are a huge number of threats to democracy and the biggest one is probably the total lack of principles and common sense possessed by the median voter. It is a real problem and a bigger one than some billionaire or even the consensus of the billionaires. Sometimes voters and capital come into actual conflict and generally the voters tend to win Pyrrhic victories when that happens.