MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: OverlayFlow– Learn Blender with AI That Points You to the Right Buttons
by gpopmescu | 2025-11-16 15:42:07+00:00
I've been frustrated by how often I need to pause Blender tutorials or dig through documentation just to figure out where a button is. So I built OverlayFlow, a tool that displays on-screen visual hints showing exactly where to click inside Blender’s UI.

Right now it only supports Blender, but I’m planning to expand to other tools if people find this useful.
by donavanm | 2025-11-16 15:42:24+00:00
They tried to do a LOT. An absolutely huge amount of work trying to abstract all of the existing Code* services, big chunks of other AWS services, and then corp (and non corp!) identity. The last part, getting human identity in to AWS, is such a fundamental gap. In the end its unsurprising that they couldnt get to a competitive place against gitlab/github/etc. I do hope theres more success with identity center picking up some of those IdP pieces.
by bccdee | 2025-11-16 15:42:25+00:00
> So much over very simple and primitive thing: John HAS a key vs dog IS an animal. Both are valid and proper.

I don't think so. "Having" vs "being" are descended from an overly simulationist notion of program design. The fact that John has a key in real life does not suggest that this relationship should be represented by an object John which owns an object Key. I think this kind of ontological approach is behind a lot of bad object-oriented design.

> Architecture astronauts do it and I am not one of those

This is the same rationale used to defend memory-unsafe languages. I like that as a point of comparison because we can actually measure the relationship between the use of memory-unsafe languages and the number of dangerous memory vulnerabilities that show up even in highly-scrutinized code bases like the Linux kernel. "I write good code" doesn't fly; bad code is getting written, and the tools we have to correct that are our languages and paradigms.

> Why would I bother. It does not need a defense.

If we take our craft seriously, we need to be able to discuss the merits and drawbacks of our tools without getting defensive and refusing to engage. I'm not saying you have to defend it to me—I'm just some guy online—but if you're disinterested in defending it in general, I think that's a craft issue.
by acka | 2025-11-16 15:42:49+00:00
Dongle-based license management or DRM isn't the same as product tying; each dongle just validates the license for the use of a piece of software. But forcing customers to only use ink cartridges from a specific brand, deliberately rejecting or invalidating third-party refill options? That is a form of product tying, and it is being deemed illegal in more and more countries.
by qwertox | 2025-11-16 15:43:09+00:00
Since I moved my DNS records to Cloudflare (that is: nameserver is now the one from Cloudflare), I get tons of odd connections, most notably SYN packets to eihter 443 or 22, which never respond back after the SYN-ACK. They ping me once a second in average, distributing the IPs over a /24 network.

I really don't understand why they do this, and it's mostly some shady origins, like vps game server hoster from Brazil and so on.

I'm at the point where i capture all the traffic and looks for SYN packets, check the RDAP records for them to decide if I then drop the entire subnets of that organization, whitelisting things like Google.

Digital Ocean is notoriously a source of bad traffic, they just don't care at all.
by txrx0000 | 2025-11-16 15:43:32+00:00
I believe OP's original implied position was "the universe is deterministic, so why even try", but I was able to convince them that trying is worth it regardless. In fact, the universe being deterministic would mean that it's always worth it to believe that you can accomplish something (if you want to increase the probability of accomplishing that thing).

> You mean they have no choice and whichever decision they took is not from their will, but only from their circumstances?

It is from their will, but a person's will is either completely or partially derived from circumstances. If you believe that the universe is deterministic, then a person's will (brain and body state) is completely derived from their circumstances (prior interactions with the rest of the world).
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-11-16 15:43:36+00:00
Earlier today I watched a video[0] that helped contextualize the water situation in Iran. The key takeaway for me was that Iran has been rapidly depleting their water reserves and they don't have any ways to quickly refill them, nor do they have treaties with neighboring countries to guarantee water. That video doesn't mention cloud seeding at all.

How should we think about cloud seeding? Does this technology actually move the needle at all on Iran's water needs or is this just some dubious marketing campaign?

[0] https://youtu.be/n8kSGH4I8Ps
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-16 15:44:21+00:00
This is me. Finally buying some bluetooth headphones 15 years ago changed my life. I finally became a person who cooks every meal, cleans everything, does chores, and exercises daily, even pushes around the house.

I like listening to debates since they are the most stimulating. So long as I can find a good one, I’m about to make dinner and unload the dishwasher.

An audiobook that’s good enough can be so captivating that I run out of things to do while listening to it.

I have pretty extreme adhd which might be related. But I’m just glad I bought those headphones back then.
by gmuslera | 2025-11-16 15:44:31+00:00
Reality is complicated. The future may be unknowable from a strict point of view. But educated guesses are better than just random. Not for lotto numbers, but to take better decisions. Deciding that everything is potentially false, biased, or unreliable and so doing whatever your guts (that are also biased) tell you may have a worse outcome.
by squarefoot | 2025-11-16 15:46:07+00:00
Yes, not normal in a normal context. However if you're fighting against a dictatorship it fully qualifies as heroism. When dictatorship comes to your country (madness is growing everywhere so be prepared) you'll be grateful for anyone fighting against it, or one day you'll be the one writing "... then one day they came for me, but there was no one left to fight for me".
by mekoka | 2025-11-16 15:46:11+00:00
I call it "read-optimized code". Inheritance is biased toward conservative writing. Once your mind becomes so enmeshed with the code base that you can no longer fathom a future where you might fall out of sync with it, inheritance becomes extremely appealing. It's all in your head! You pull the Razzle parent, sprinkle a bit of Dazzle mixin, everything is alchemized into a Fizzle class and abracadabra. Meanwhile newbies in the team have their eyes welling up from having to deal with your declarative mess.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-16 15:47:17+00:00
What your describing would be plausible if this was about exploiting claude to get access to organisations that use it.

The gist of the anthropic thing is that "claude made, deployed and coordinated" a standard malware attack. Which is a _very_ different task.

Side note, most code assistants are trained on broadly similar coding datasets (ie github scrapes.)
Show HN: I built CostLens SDK to cut my AI bills by routing to cheaper models
by j_filipe | 2025-11-16 15:47:20+00:00
My OpenAI bills were getting out of hand - I was using GPT-4 for everything, even simple tasks that GPT-3.5 could handle perfectly.

So I built CostLens. It's a drop-in replacement that automatically routes requests to cheaper models when possible, but falls back to premium ones when quality matters.

How it works: js // Just swap this: const openai = new OpenAI({ apiKey: 'sk-...' });

// For this: const costlens = new CostLens(); const openai = costlens.openai({ apiKey: 'sk-...' }); // Everything else stays exactly the same

Real savings: • Simple tasks: GPT-4 → GPT-4o-mini (95% cheaper) • Complex tasks: Still uses GPT-4 when needed • My bills dropped ~70% with zero code changes

Features: • Quality detection (auto-retries with better models if response is bad) • Works with existing code - no prompt changes needed • Caching with Redis • Instant mode (no signup required)

Try it: npm install costlens

The core SDK is free and works locally. I'm also building a dashboard for teams to track their AI spending.

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/costlens

Anyone else tired of overpaying for AI APIs? What's your biggest cost pain point?
by sleepyguy | 2025-11-16 15:47:48+00:00
I’ve been a member for over 20 years, and it’s just not the same as it used to be. Many items are now more expensive than at other stores, and some of the Kirkland food products have really declined in quality. The produce, in particular, is overpriced and often not fresh — sometimes even half-spoiled.

There’s also less selection and fewer interesting items overall. Something changed after COVID, and it feels like they’ve never fully recovered. They’ll carry an item for years and then suddenly discontinue it with no comparable replacement. Meanwhile, other retailers now match or beat Costco’s prices on many food items.

There are still a few good deals, but I’m not sure it’s worth the membership anymore.
by threeducks | 2025-11-16 15:48:17+00:00
> Fail2ban was struggling to keep up: it ingests the Nginx access.log file to apply its rules but if the files keep on exploding… > [...] > But I don’t want to fiddle with even more moving components and configuration

You can configure nginx to do rate-limiting directly. Blog post with more details: https://blog.nginx.org/blog/rate-limiting-nginx
by idoubtit | 2025-11-16 15:48:19+00:00
Not the Grand Poster, but we use the Debian package "unattended-upgrades" to install security updates automatically on our servers, and send an email if a reboot is required to complete the process (kernel upgrade).

Unattended upgrades could be configured to install more than the security release. Even with the stable release, one can add the official APT source for the Debian backports.
by Closi | 2025-11-16 15:48:45+00:00
> You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:

It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/power-outag...

So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'
by benjiro | 2025-11-16 15:48:57+00:00
> I don't do much AAA gaming and nearly game in my Steam library would run on this just fine.

I think that this is the issue with most people these days... The combination of work, seen it all, and frankly, often disappointing AAA games.

The time spend is often on more smaller studios that do something creative, and those are often not triple A graphical monsters anyway.

> This is going to be a no-brainer for my next upgrade.

Really depends on the price... Do not forget that its going to be released in 2026... At that time we get new Zen 6 CPUs (remember, this Steam Deck is Zen4), what will drive the prices of the old Zen4 down even more. Same with new GPUs.

Like, the Steam deck was incredible pricing for the hardware you got when released and sure, its still a good value for a handheld console, but from a hardware point of view, its really old now (zen2 cores).
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-11-16 15:49:14+00:00
TeX is a typesetting system and not interested in semantics; AM is similar but simpler format meant for more casual use and to be quite readable even when not typesetted. What you're describing is essentially a computer algebra system. There's some overlap but they're different things.

That said, your system kinda exists already (and has been for decades). Mathematica can be written fully in M-Expressions (given any expression can recover the M-Exp with `FullForm[HoldForm[...]]`) and can convert to TeX (given any expression with `TeXForm[HoldForm[...]]`) for each if you want.

| TeX | M-Expression | |--------------+-----------------------------------| | 1 + 2 | Plus[1, 2] | | 1 - 2 | Plus[-1, 2] | | 1 \times 2 | Times[1, 2] | | frac{1}{2} | Times[2, Power[2, -1]] | | a_i | Map[a, Range[0, n]] | (* or better: a[i] *) | \sum_i a_i | Apply[Plus, Map[a, Range[0, n]]] | (* or better: Sum[a[i], i] *) | \int x^2, dx | Integrate[Power[x, 2], x]]] |

Interestingly (didn't know it myself either) internally notation is even simpler than your described system as you can see by minus/frac examples. Note that `a_i` examples can exist in indefinite form, which is why the commented forms are more correct given no other context.

There's also Emmy which is a vastly expanded port of scmutils (from SICM) embedded in Clojure but haven't used it much. Being embedded in Clojure, uses sexps and, when used in Clerk environment, can render to TeX.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-16 15:50:03+00:00
I never got far enough to push that into a production system but I suspect it would have, yes.

I can see a periodic compacting phase could be useful in a system like that.

In the DB world there's good research around similar topics. e.g. LeanStore and Umbra -- Umbra in particular does some nice things with variable sized buffers that I believe are expected to help with fragmentation https://db.in.tum.de/~freitag/papers/p29-neumann-cidr20.pdf
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-16 15:50:17+00:00
If you invest in battery and storage tech you'll get reliable storage long before the first "baseload nukes" start contributing to the grid.

Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
by EGreg | 2025-11-16 15:50:18+00:00
Why? It’s because of AI. It enables attacks at scale. It enables more people to attack, who previously couldn’t. And so on.

It’s very explainable. And somehow, like clockwork, there are always comments to say “there is nothing new, the Internet has always been like this since the 80s”.

You know, part of me wants to see AI proliferate into more and more areas, just so these people will finally wake up eventually and understand there is a huge difference when AI does it. When they are relentlessly bombarded with realistic phone calls from random numbers, with friends and family members calling about the latest hoax and deepfake, when their own specific reputation is constantly attacked and destroyed by 1000 cuts not just online but in their own trusted circles, and they have to put out fires and play whack-a-mole with an advanced persistent threat that only grows larger and always comes from new sources, anonymous and not.

And this is all before bot swarms that can coordinate and plan long-term, targeting specific communities and individuals.

And this is all before humanoid robots and drones proliferate.

Just try to fast-forward to when human communities online and offline are constantly infiltrated by bots and drones and sleeper agents, playing nice for a long time and amassing karma / reputation / connections / trust / whatever until finally doing a coordinated attack.

Honestly, people just don’t seem to get it until it’s too late. Same with ecosystem destruction — tons of people keep strawmanning it as mere temperature shifts, even while ecosystems around the world get destroyed. Kelp forests. Rainforests. Coral reefs. Fish. Insects. And they’re like “haha global warming by 3 degrees big deal. Temperature has always changed on the planet.” (Sound familiar?)

Look, I don’t actually want any of this to happen. But if they could somehow experience the movie It’s a Wonderful Life or meet the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, I’d wholeheartedly want every denier to have that experience. (In fact, a dedicated attacker can already give them a taste of this with current technology. I am sure it will become a decentralized service soon :-( )
by j_filipe | 2025-11-16 15:51:13+00:00
Hey everyone!

I'm the dev behind this. Started as a weekend project because I kept getting sticker shock from my OpenAI bills. I'd use GPT-4 for literally everything - even "fix this typo" type requests that cost 20x more than they should.

The breakthrough was realizing most requests don't actually need the expensive models. So I built quality detection that tries the cheap model first, then upgrades only if the response is garbage.

Been using it in production for 3 months now. Went from ~$400/month to ~$120/month with zero changes to my actual prompts or code. The quality detection catches about 15-20% of requests that need the premium models.

Works with both OpenAI and Anthropic - Claude Opus → Claude Haiku saves even more than the OpenAI routing since the price gap is bigger.

Happy to answer any questions! The trickiest part was getting the quality scoring right - too aggressive and you get bad responses, too conservative and you don't save money.

Also working on a team dashboard, but wanted to get the core SDK out there first since it's been so useful for me.
by fzaninotto | 2025-11-16 15:52:29+00:00
Hi, author here.

I love reading the posts in this thread. It seems the waterfall vs Agile debate is still vivid in the HN community, which surprises me.

I know that developers have different experiences with SDD, and there is no one-size-fits-all methodology anyway. It's interesting to read the feedback of people who really like it, especially when they describe their background and the type of project they use it for.

In my experience, SDD doesn't bring any value as I'm already using Plan mode before going to implementation. I have also never seen instances of a coding agent doing exactly what I had in mind in the first try (except for very simple cases), so there must be iterations, which defeats the purpose of the Big Design Up Front.

Finally, I really think coding agents pave the path for a new way to develop digital products, more productive and closer to the users' expectations. But I doubt that SDD lies anywhere in this path.
by snowwrestler | 2025-11-16 15:52:30+00:00
There’s a big jump between “the attack came from China” and “the attack was sponsored by the Chinese government.” People generally make this jump in one of three ways.

1) Just a general assumption that all bad stuff from China must be state-sponsored because it’s generally a top-down govt-controlled society. This is not accurate and not really actionable for anyone in the U.S.

2) The attack produced evidence that aligns with signatures from “groups” that are already widely known / believed to be Chinese state sponsored, AKA APTs. In this case, disclosing the new evidence is fine since you’re comparing to, and hopefully adding to, signature data that is already public. It’s considered good manners to contribute to the public knowledge from which you benefited.

3) Actual intelligence work by government agencies like FBI, NSA, CIA, DIA, MI6, etc. is able to trace the connections within Chinese government channels. Obviously this is usually reserved for government statements of attribution and rarely shared with commercial companies.

Hopefully Anthropic is not using #1, and it’s unlikely they are benefiting from #3. So why not share details a la #2?

Of course it’s possible and plausible for people to be using Claude for attacks. But what good does saying that do? As the article says: defenders need actionable, technical attack information, not just a general sense of threat.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-16 15:52:39+00:00
The Russian Revolution you are probably thinking of is the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks. But the tsar had already been overthrown by the February Revolution earlier that year, and some of the initial steps towards improving Russian literacy like the drafting of an orthography reform were already accomplished under that regime. Russia may well have seen major strides regardless, and the Bolsheviks are widely seen as one of those revolutions that did more harm than good.
by rixed | 2025-11-16 15:52:54+00:00
I was currious to see what that data consisted of and aparently that's a lot of translations, like the name of all possible calendar formats in all possible languages, etc. This seems useless in the vast majority of use cases, including that of a JS interpreter. Looks to me like the typical output of a comitee that's looking too hard to extend its domain.

Disclaimer: I never liked unicode specs.
by greedo | 2025-11-16 15:53:01+00:00
It's dangerous to extrapolate much from the performance of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea. While Ukraine has had remarkable success in almost completely shutting down Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, it's not all due to the superiority of drones. Russian incompetence, both in naval strategy as well as operations is endemic, and the fate of the Moskva and other systems isn't indicative of a widespread vulnerability of surface vessels to drone systems. The Moskva was sunk with cruise missiles, primarily ones developed from Soviet era missiles (Kh-35). Much has been written about the materiel state of the Moskva, as well as operational decisions/inadequacies that lead to its demise.

Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.

Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).

Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.

Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
by tromp | 2025-11-16 15:54:07+00:00
> Christopher Wadsworth analyzed different properties of numeral systems and the requirements they have to fulfill to be useful for arithmetic.

> Specifically, he calls a numeral system adequate if it allows for a successor (succ) function, predecessor (pred) function, and a zero? function yielding a true (false) encoding when a number is zero (or not).

A numeral system is adequate iff it can be converted to and from Church numerals. Converting from Church numerals requires functions N0 and Nsucc so that

Church2Num c = c Nsucc N0

while converting to Church numerals requires functions Nzero? and Npred so that

Num2Church n = Nzero? n C0 (Csucc (Num2Church (Npred n)))

with an implicit use of the fixpoint combinator.

An interesting adequate numeral system is what i call the tuple numerals [1], which are simply iterates of the 1-tuple function T = λxλy.y x

So N0 = id, Nsucc = λnλx.n (T x), Npred = λnλx.n x id, and Nzero? = λnλtλf. n (K t) (K f).

These tuple numerals are useful in proving lower bounds on a functional busy beaver [2].

[1] https://github.com/tromp/AIT/blob/master/numerals/tuple_nume...

[2] https://oeis.org/A333479 (see bms.lam link)