MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Flynn's Arcade (Pico8 on Mobile)
by jharohit | 2025-11-06 22:12:14+00:00
https://rohitjha.com/labs/flynns-arcade

Tldr: love pico 8 and needed something that runs it on iphones (can play between meetings or on travel!)

- Play on mobile for best experience

- Retro 8bit mobile emulator based on Pico-8 Fantasy Console with 500+ retro games (reimagined arcade favs)

- Pick your Virtual Cartrige from full list or gallery or Editors Picks (me!).

- Favorite the games you like (will persist on same device)

- Search “pico 8” on youtube and reddit/google to find games you like (should be there!)

- Offline - once game loads, works even on Airplane mode

- Persistent - can leave game in background tab and come back to it

- Virtual Gamepad - most efficient virtual gamepad design based on famous consoles

- on PC/Mac - recommend resizing browser window to mobile form factor (responsive) and use physical keyboard

iOS and Android apps coming soon! (This is a total labour of love so it will happen when it happens)

Issues: - sound on ios mobile browsers dont work when phone is in Focus or DoNotDisturb mode
by zahlman | 2025-11-06 22:12:15+00:00
The above post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840724 links to 71.3 KiB of data; since it's a 5-nybble prefix (20 bits) we may easily estimate a size of 71.3 GiB assuming that's a representative sample. Not unfeasible nowadays, but it seems you do have to make separate requests and would presumably be rate-limited on them.

If you only download the hash pages corresponding to passwords you hold, even supposing that everything else is fully compromised, an attacker would have to reverse a couple thousand SHA-1 hashes, dodge hash collisions, and brute-force with the results (yes, yes: arson, murder and jaywalking) to pwn you.
by tptacek | 2025-11-06 22:12:30+00:00
You can do this. Claude Code can do everything the toy agent this post shows, and much more. But you shouldn't, because doing that (1) doesn't teach you as much as the toy agent does, (2) isn't saving you that much time, and (3) locks you into Claude Code's context structure, which is just one of a zillion different structures you can use. That's what the post is about, not automating ping.
by Maxatar | 2025-11-06 22:12:38+00:00
Why not? I already use LLMs to generate summaries of my emails, search emails, and perform a host of email related operations as do many people. No reason OpenAI couldn't release their own email service that tightly integrates their LLM with email directly.

What's interesting about your comment is that back in 2004 people were like "Google releasing an email service? Why on Earth would they do that, that makes no sense!"
by anonu | 2025-11-06 22:13:14+00:00
> we run on Azure SQL Hyperscale, which we maxed out at 80 cores for almost two weeks

the data challenge is interesting here. there's clearly a lot of data - but really its just emails and passwords you need to keep track of. SQL feels like overkill that will be too slow and cost you too much. are there better solutions?

15 billion records of email+password, assume ~40bytes thats roughly 600GB

should be searchable with a an off-the-shelf server.

of course, im oversimplifying the problem. but I'm not clear why any solution to insert new records would take 2 weeks...
by sodality2 | 2025-11-06 22:13:29+00:00
This is fantastic!!! I've added many results to my want-to-read list, they're very on-point from very few inputs. It would be really cool to import from a user ID, where you can choose some subset of your read list to inspire new suggestions, while excluding all books in your want-to-read and already-read lists. But that's an ongoing scrape to maintain, it's a cat and mouse game you probably don't want to start. I wonder what the legal status of scraped training data is... if you don't reproduce any of the review data I presume you're fine?
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-06 22:14:16+00:00
I know this will seem odd, but there's a skill issue sometimes. Defense companies often have a lot of people, relative to purely commercial companies because the US government likes to have its money go to a lot of constituents. Defense companies are also under equipped sometimes, for the same reason - the gov would rather the money go to voters.

There's the effect of classification too: new tech often doesn't get used in classified programs because it's hard to get new people cleared.

For these reasons and more, folks working in aerospace are often behind the curve.
by MattSteelblade | 2025-11-06 22:14:51+00:00
For password hashing, only short-output or broken hash functions have practical collision concerns. The odds of any random collision with a 256-bit hash, and not with a specific hash, is 50% at 2^128 inputs. Salting is a defense against precomputation attacks like rainbow tables and masking password reuse. Attackers crack password dumps by trying known password combinations, previously compromised passwords, brute force up to a certain length, etc. and using the hashing algorithm to compare the output.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-06 22:16:44+00:00
> The rules are too complex to start a business.

I really don't think this is the reason. It's easier than ever to start a business now that there are so many free, accessible resources to help you through the process.

There are even services like Stripe Atlas that will walk you through incorporating, getting an EIN, and setting up your billing: https://stripe.com/atlas

The reason few people start businesses is that it's really hard to make a good living. Running your own business is highly risky and takes a lot of work. For every success story there are countless failure stories that people don't speak of.

Being an employee, especially in tech, can be an extraordinarily good deal. It can be frustrating like any job, but predictable pay that comes in well above median compensation for work that poses very little risk to yourself is a luxury. A lot of us have gone back and forth between self-employed and being an employee, and you don't really appreciate how nice it is to get a regular old job doing a narrow piece of work until you've dealt with the stresses of running your own business from top to bottom.

> we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.

What does this even mean? Very few business types would even benefit from "forcing" platforms to have open protocols. If regulators came in and forced Facebook or Instagram or even Hacker News to open their protocol and allow other businesses to interoperate (whatever that means) what makes you think individual small businesses would thrive, as opposed to other large companies coming in to take advantage of those forced-open platforms?
by ramezanpour | 2025-11-06 22:17:38+00:00
I recently sat in yet another “alignment” call and started wondering — if we add up everyone’s time, what’s the actual cost of this meeting for a company?

So I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation using public data from Levels.fyi for Amazon.

The result surprised me: a single 1-hour meeting with a few senior people can easily cost €700 — and a recurring weekly call? Over €30,000 per year.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-06 22:17:57+00:00
I think the question of what can be achieved with a small model comes down to what needs knowledge vs what needs experience. A small model can use tools like RAG if it is just missing knowledge, but it seems hard to avoid training/parameters where experience is needed - knowing how to perceive then act.

There is obviously also some amount (maybe a lot) of core knowledge and capability needed even to be able to ask the right questions and utilize the answers.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-06 22:18:32+00:00
> Another thing to notice: we didn’t need MCP at all. That’s because MCP isn’t a fundamental enabling technology. The amount of coverage it gets is frustrating. It’s barely a technology at all. MCP is just a plugin interface for Claude Code and Cursor, a way of getting your own tools into code you don’t control. Write your own agent. Be a programmer. Deal in APIs, not plugins.

Hold up. These are all the right concerns but with the wrong conclusion.

You don't need MCP if you're making one agent, in one language, in one framework. But the open coding and research assistants that we really want will be composed of several. MCP is the only thing out there that's moving in a good direction in terms of enabling us to "just be programmers" and "use APIs", and maybe even test things in fairly isolated and reproducible contexts. Compare this to skills.md, which is actually defacto proprietary as of now, does not compose, has opaque run-times and dispatch, is pushing us towards certain models, languages and certain SDKs, etc.

MCP isn't a plugin interface for Claude, it's just JSON-RPC.
by palmotea | 2025-11-06 22:18:47+00:00
>> According to some calculations, it should in principle be possible to colonize the entire observable universe in less than a hundred million years

> ...what? That doesn't seem right, just from a really quick gut check it looks like the observable universe has a radius of 45.7 billion light years [0].

I guess it depends on whose hundred million years you're talking about: the colonists' or those who stay home's. I don't know how to do the calculations, but it seems plausible that you could traverse the entire observable universe at near light-speed in 100 million years ship time.
by jfengel | 2025-11-06 22:19:29+00:00
The limit to space travel is the Rocket Equation, which says that you require exponential fuel to reach higher speeds. Alpha Centauri isn't going anywhere, but it will take millennia of travel even with wildly optimistic assumptions.

Also note that there isn't any "container" to fill up. It could well be infinite. It's just that we will be forever limited to a finite subset, even in theory.
Show HN: I made a Halloween roguelike where you battle to merge a 1000-line PR
by akshaysg | 2025-11-06 22:20:07+00:00
I originally made this to occupy time while folks were waiting for their reviews to spin up, but thought it would be fun to release as a game for Halloween!

Let me know if I need to make any balance tweaks or fixes, and I'd be happy to do so!
by Sharlin | 2025-11-06 22:20:16+00:00
Oops, yes, I don't know what I was thinking. A total brain fart. The paper I referred to is Sandberg and Armstrong's 2012 "Eternity in Six Hours", and of course they don't claim such a thing. Only that it's possible to start a colonization wave that has plenty of time to spread to everything visible now before they slip outside of our future light cone. The ~100M years refers to the colonization of the Milky Way. Sorry!

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
by jaydestro | 2025-11-06 22:20:24+00:00
Hey everyone, I’m Jay from the Azure Cosmos DB PM team. We’ve got tons of Azure Cosmos DB and DocumentDB sessions coming up at Microsoft Ignite 2025 and I’d love for you to join us. Whether you’re into real-time analytics, AI-driven architectures, or just want to learn how to build apps that scale globally, this is the place to be.

I put together a blog post with all the details you need: sessions, labs, and expert meet-ups.

Come hang out, learn something new, and connect with the team. See you at Ignite!
by costco | 2025-11-06 22:20:27+00:00
Thank you for the recommendations. I didn't try BERT4Rec because I assumed it would perform the same or worse as what I already had after having read https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3699521. The TIGER paper seems interesting - I definitely want to explore semantic IDs in general and also because I think it could allow including more long-tail items.
by throwdbaaway | 2025-11-06 22:21:00+00:00
Somehow that article totally ignored the insane pricing of cached input tokens set by Anthropic and OpenAI. For agentic coding, typically 90~95% of the inference cost is attributed to cached input tokens, and a scrappy China company can do it almost for free: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news0802
Show HN: Tool2agent – a protocol for LLM tool feedback workflows
by klntsky | 2025-11-06 22:21:10+00:00
Hi!

This is a set of conventions and types that streamline some approaches I came up with while building LLM workflows.

LLM tool feedback systems are under-developed, and the reason for that is a lack of well defined interfaces.

tool2agent is a concrete set of such interfaces to build on top of.

If you are an LLM chatbot developer, take a look at this example that leverages a tool2agent-based library:

https://github.com/tool2agent/tool2agent/blob/4cf340f77aa92e...
by TheAlchemist | 2025-11-06 22:21:14+00:00
I recommend to listen to Elon speaking at the meeting today and judge for yourself what the man says.

Sustainable abundance for everybody, universal healthcare thanks to Optimus, 100M Optimuses per year production, already announcing Optimus 5 (2027 apparently), etc etc.

EDIT: Adding some other 'intersting topics' - distributed computing network from Tesla sitting in the garage - in order to prevent AI from getting bored, I kid you not ! Really people, listen to this stuff. Easy to dismiss as a cult. This guy was in the White House not so long ago, and is still the richest guy on earth.

EDIT 2: For those listening - if you think the guys asking questions are random shareholders, you're wrong. These are mostly Tesla influencers, that are part of the show.
by w_for_wumbo | 2025-11-06 22:21:19+00:00
I think we'd get better results if we thought of it as a conscious agent. If we recognized that it was going to mirror back or unconscious biases and try to complete the task as we define it, instead of how we think it should behave. Then we'd at least get our own ignorance out of the way when writing prompts.

Being able to recognize that 'make this code better' provides no direction, it should make sense that the output is directionless.

But on more subtle levels, whatever subtle goals that we have and hold in the workplace will be reflected back by the agents.

If you're trying to optimise costs, and increase profits as your north star. Having layoffs and unsustainable practices is a logical result, when you haven't balanced this with any incentives to abide by human values.
by mrbluecoat | 2025-11-06 22:21:31+00:00
I have a great deal of respect for the sciences but sometimes astronomy just feels like one giant guessing game: age of the universe, big bang starting as a joke and all the "first minute" timelines thereafter, dark energy and dark matter (code for we have no idea what it is) vastly outnumbering everything else, and now questioning the Nobel Prize-awarded universe expansion. Meanwhile, asteroids the size of buses+ keep whizzing by closer than the moon with little or no warning. Sigh.
by solomonb | 2025-11-06 22:21:35+00:00
This work predates agents as we know them now and was intended for building chat bots (as in irc chat bots) but when auto-gpt I realized I could formalize it super nicely with this library:

https://blog.cofree.coffee/2025-03-05-chat-bots-revisited/

I did some light integration experiments with the OpenAI API but I never got around to building a full agent. Alas..
by fidotron | 2025-11-06 22:21:37+00:00
Yep, as a brit abroad I tend to think the brits end up on the side of excessive tightfistedness too often for their own good. Their approach also does not scale up well, since they optimize at too small a size.

One big upside of UK business culture that I don't see much of anywhere else is once your proverbial two guys in a shed are making something useful then people do come out of the woodwork to help. The US seems to do that through investments, but the UK it's often customers deliberately paying more than they might strictly have to. I think everyone that has seen success of this form has stories of customers showing up and writing cheques bigger than the amounts asked for.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-06 22:21:47+00:00
Before the so-called scientific revolution and the later industrial revolution, that may be true - arguably for largely uninteresting reasons - but afterward, this is patently false.

Modern science arose only a couple of centuries ago in Europe. Prior to that, we see a long period of great European intellectual ferment, most notably the Scholastic period, that supplied the intellectual foundations and vocabulary that made modern science possible.

You're also reducing science to technology production, but even here, the sophistication of technology that modern science made possible far outstrips anything pre-scientific.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-06 22:21:49+00:00
> Discoverability is pay to play. There is no townsquare not owned.

And yet anyone can publish a website, like you said. Anyone can create an Instagram or TikTok profile and start selling things. Millions of small businesses do this all the time and grow on these platforms without "pay to play".

> So We can make on own messaging client that communicates with the gatekeepers

What does this have to do with letting people create businesses? Who's going to pay you (one way or another) to use your messaging client to connect to these open services when they can use the official client or anyone else's client?

I think idealists imagine a world where tech giants are forced to open their platforms for free and they can use their own apps to connect to Reddit and YouTube and other platforms while avoiding the ads. It's a pipe dream to imagine that regulators will come in and force businesses to be unprofitable for the good of the public. Platforms need to make money to exist. They can either charge admission or show ads.

There isn't a third option where they're forced to become a public good so that other businesses can freely benefit from their infrastructure.
by steveklabnik | 2025-11-06 22:21:50+00:00
When people say "Rust is just as complex as C++," I think value categories are a great example of why it's actually simpler, even if it also seems complex. C++ has three primary categories: prvalue, xvalue, and lvalue. There's also glvalue and rvalue. Rust has two: a place (which is a glvalue) and a value (which is a prvalue).

C++ needs those extra categories, they exist for good reasons. But it is more complex.
by andrewrn | 2025-11-06 22:21:56+00:00
I think they've just built a ton of momentum around that kind of culture here and its hard to reverse. They just set up some new committee to troubleshoot suicides on campus. If I tried to compare it to other schools with similar prestige (like ivies) I'd be speculating, so I couldn't say if it'd be the same elsewhere.

I do hope its different elsewhere because to me grad school is something one does if they're not satisfied with their career direction, so in that spirit there should be some exploration built in. CMU doesn't include this at all, so its like paying to work even hard than you would in a normal job. I would very much not recommend coming here for a graduate program.

This is something you might consider checking out, all the work is discretionary by definition, so I assume its more joyful and personal: https://www.recurse.com/. Might be hard to get in, idk.
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-06 22:22:15+00:00
Your perspective is more clear now. But I disagree.

The article was not about Mutter exclusively. It explained Mutter dropping X11 made GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments. And GNOME Shell would be tied to Mutter even if the article didn't mention it.

Mutter is a library. GNOME is not the only desktop environment which uses it. I don't know if the Pantheon developers wanted to drop X11. But Mutter dropping X11 imposes this limitation on Pantheon.

Your claim the Transmission discussion was not about GTK was incorrect by the way. The GNOME developer said they hadn't decided if GTK would deprecate GtkStatusIcon. The Transmission developer requested GTK make an abstraction. The last comments were a GNOME developer recommending Transmission change architecture so it could support GNOME and in his words whatever odd desktop people want to use after GTK deprecated GtkStatusIcon.

Libraries and applications are not separate inherently. Apple's application scripting architecture was a great strength when it was more supported for example.
by close04 | 2025-11-06 22:22:18+00:00
> A lot of devices are not compliant though

That's exactly the problem, there was no standard protocol for communication over Zigbee. Manufacturers could implement whatever they wanted on top of it and put the Zigbee logo, like you can put the WiFi logo on a device that speaks a proprietary protocol over WiFi. You bought into an ecosystem and if you wanted a device from outside of it, you needed another hub.

> So your Zigbee light switch will probably workout any fuss

Big "depends". Out of the box it will only work for the few manufacturers who look to be compatible with some other hubs. I tested a lot of basic devices (simple switches or bulbs) with various hubs with little success. Philips, IKEA, Bosch, Tuya, Aqara, Osram, etc. Couldn't discover, add, or control them properly without the corresponding hub.

If you use a device with HA and a Zigbee stick (router/coordinator) then you benefit from a lot of development done in the background to "translate" between all the variations. But that's not something non-techies want to deal with, it's too much of a hassle.

This is the problem that Matter solves. Certified devices must implement the standard communication protocol over the network of choice. So no matter the manufacturer, if I see a Matter logo I know the device will work with my Matter.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-06 22:22:29+00:00
Rightly so. They should have never used it in the first place. What with the US not recognizing the court it always made very little sense to me that they would rely on the infrastructure components to be supplied by the USA. The latest sanctions are just another step in something that was already in motion from day #1.

The world order at the highest level relies on the nations themselves to behave, especially the largest ones because nobody has the practical power to enforce the decisions of the court in case defendants are in places where the court is not recognized. To USA not recognizing the court has always shown that they don't care about the crimes they commit.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-06 22:22:57+00:00
Trijets were mostly a thing to allow operations further away from diversion airports. Until the mid 80s twin engine jets had to stay less than an hour from diversion airports which meant that most stuff over water or remote routes had to be trijet or quad.

The MD-11 was late to that party, and by the time they started flying they were already allowing twins to go farther. Now the limit is all the way up to 370 minutes from the nearest airport for some twins, and most are capable of flying transatlantic.
by melenaboija | 2025-11-06 22:23:17+00:00
> I will never forget Rust for...

Fuck, this made me feel old. It blows my mind that the learning path Rust then Python even exists.

When I started school in 2000, it was C, then C++, and then Java. Oh, and then compilers. It’s impossible for me not to think about allocation when doing anything, it’s just rooted in my mind.
by bdangubic | 2025-11-06 22:23:50+00:00
I always wanted to invent a thing where as people pile in to the meeting they punch in their hourly rate and cost of the meeting was prominently displayed for all eyes to see. figured this would cut down meeting times by 80% :)

I also always compared how much trouble (in most places) you have to go through to purchase some equipment (say for $1k) but you can with a click of a button schedule a meeting that will cost 3x that and no one bats an eye