MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-26 13:19:48+00:00
Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07209

> 20 GeV halo-like excess of the Galactic diffuse emission and implications for dark matter annihilation

> Fifteen years of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data in the halo region of the Milky Way (MW) are analyzed to search for gamma rays from dark matter annihilation. Gamma-ray maps within the region of interest (|l|≤60∘, 10∘≤|b|≤60∘) are modeled using point sources, the GALPROP models of cosmic-ray interactions, isotropic background, and templates of Loop I and the Fermi bubbles, and then the presence of a halo-like component is further examined. A statistically significant halo-like excess is found with a spectral peak around 20 GeV, while its flux is consistent with zero below 2 GeV and above 200 GeV. Examination of the fit residual maps indicates that a spherically symmetric halo component fits the map data well. The radial profile agrees with annihilation by the smooth NFW density profile, and may be slightly shallower than this, especially in the central region. Various systematic uncertainties are investigated, but the 20 GeV peak remains significant. In particular, the halo excess with a similar spectrum is detected even relative to the LAT standard background model, which contains non-template patches adjusted to match the observed map. The halo excess spectrum can be fitted by annihilation with a particle mass mχ∼ 0.5-0.8 TeV and cross section ⟨συ⟩∼ (5-8)×10−25 cm3s−1 for the bb¯ channel. This cross section is larger than the upper limits from dwarf galaxies and the canonical thermal relic value, but considering various uncertainties, especially the density profile of the MW halo, the dark matter interpretation of the 20 GeV ``Fermi halo'' remains feasible. The prospects for verification through future observations are briefly discussed.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-26 13:20:15+00:00
I'd be interested to see how AI code review would do with this PR. This would be a great test to see if AI code review can properly identify the concerns that the humans have here (way too much code, PR creator can't answer basic questions about it, strange copyright header mentioning someone unrelated, etc.) I'll bet AI code review would fail miserably, only focusing on how the PR is formatted and if it "looks" like a typical PR (which, was also the AI's goal when creating it).
by sussmannbaka | 2025-11-26 13:20:37+00:00
They don't! Layout grids are less about the rows and columns and more about the lines separating them (which is why those get a lot of attention in CSS grid). Take a look at how layout grids are used in design and you will quickly find examples that are extremely inconvenient to realize with HTML tables. I'm sure it can be done and I'm sure some poor email marketing dev had to, but the result would be entirely static and not able to reflow.
by joshstrange | 2025-11-26 13:20:50+00:00
Kagi user, personally I don’t care what they spend my subscription money on as long as they provide a good service (which they do). That said, Kagi has to be the poster child for not staying in their lane. I mean that mostly as, they keep going off and trying random things and I worry it will distract them from the core product(s).

This rings of the whole t-shirt factory thing all over again. Get an office, that’s fine I guess if you will use it but the coworking aspect is just odd.
by kafkaesque | 2025-11-26 13:20:52+00:00
Am I the only one who sees "content boxes"/divs with content displayed in different widths as poor design? At least in the example given, I would think you would want the image and its associated content box to be the same size for all four and not have its content vary in width based on how much content it has.

But in terms of functionality, I'm sure there are plenty applications for this!
by phantasmish | 2025-11-26 13:21:04+00:00
If you think our ability to measure developer productivity is bad, look into what we can do to measure manager productivity.

TL;DR your realistic options are snake oil that doesn’t work, or nothing.

Keep that in mind next time anyone’s talking about managing through metrics & data or whatever bullshit. All that stuff’s kayfabe, companies mostly run on vibes outside a very-few things.
by XorNot | 2025-11-26 13:21:20+00:00
Reminds me of how the discovery of giant viruses - like truly huge viral particles - was immediately also followed by discovering "virophages" which parasitized them.

Which of course makes sense to some degree: if an adaptive strategy is successful enough, then parasitizing something which successfully implements it is going to be resource favorable (and likely, presumably by being a member of that species and just shedding components you don't need if you take them).
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-26 13:21:32+00:00
A tablet, keyboard and mouse together with a cheap plastic clip can substitute for a laptop whenever you can sit at a table. If you have a fast internet connection (hotel WiFi, phone tethering in a good location) you can connect to a home or work computer or rent whatever size cloud instance you want —- connect with RDP or an ssh client.

It turns heads when you go to a hackathon and everyone else has a samey laptop or a gaudy gaming laptop. Sleeker and lighter and you’ve got 4x the RAM and cores.

Granted the laptop hinges is good if you are in the passenger seat of a car but you can use a tablet like that as a tablet in those cases so you lose some utility but can still do a lot. This weekend I was traveling and usually used my tablet the ordinary way but I RDPes into my home computer whenever I wanted.
by Havoc | 2025-11-26 13:21:42+00:00
After getting burned by consumer drives I decided it’s time for a zfs array from used enterprise ssds. Tons of writes on them but full mirrored config and zfs is easier to backup so should be ok. And the really noisy stuff like logging im just sticking into optanes - those are 6+ dwpd depending on model which may as well be unlimited for personal use scenarios
by tripflag | 2025-11-26 13:22:41+00:00
Just to clarify that the 8 security announcements are not open issues; they are announcements that a new release has been made which fixed something security-related. I'm doing my best keeping a good track-record for fixing such issues in a timely manner, and the turnaround time for severe issues has so far been <=4 hours.

As for the open issues, 140 are feature suggestions, and 36 are currently classified as bugs. I'm hoping to start popping the list of bugs soon after I'm back home from my vacation which will be soon (am typing this from the airport waiting to board!)
by grumbel | 2025-11-26 13:24:00+00:00
> This is just not happening anywhere around me.

Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. AI is brand new bleeding edge technology right now, and adaption always takes time, especially when the integration with IDEs and such is even more bleeding edge than the underlying AI systems themselves.

And speaking about the future, I wouldn't just worry about it replacing the programmer, I'd worry about it replacing the program. The future we are heading into might be one where the AI is your OS. If you need an app to do something, you can just make it up on the spot, a lot of classic programs will no longer need to exist.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-26 13:24:03+00:00
> Otherwise they are simply two completely different objects.

That's where you're wrong. Both objects reflect the same mathematical operations in their structure.

Even if those were inscrutable alien artifacts to you, even if you knew nothing about who constructed them, how or why? If you studied them, you would be able to see the similarities laid bare.

Their inputs align, their outputs align. And if you dug deep enough? You would find that there are components in them that correspond to the same mathematical operations - even if the two are nothing alike in how exactly they implement them.

LLMs and human brains are "inscrutable alien artifacts" to us. Both are created by inhuman optimization pressures. Both you need to study to find out how they function. It's obvious, though, that their inputs align, and their outputs align. And the more you dig into internals?

I recommend taking a look at Anthropic's papers on SAE - sparse autoencoders. Which is a method that essentially takes the population coding hypothesis and runs with it. It attempts to crack the neural coding used by the LLM internally to pry interpretable features out of it. There are no "grandmother neurons" there - so you need elaborate methods to examine what kind of representations an LLM can learn to recognize and use in its functioning.

Anthropic's work is notable because they have not only managed to extract features that map to some amazingly high level concepts, but also prove causality - interfering with the neuron populations mapped out by SAE changes LLM's behaviors in predictable ways.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-26 13:24:07+00:00
It's one of those things that will obviously be used to boil the frog over time via beurocratic rules.

Year 1 a minimum viable effort manual process will be fine. But they'll say "not good enough" to someone every now and then and the minimum can do in order to get a) permission b) enforcers not crawling up your ass (IDK if it will be permission based or enforcement after the fact based) will ratchet up.

By year 10 or 20 "everyone" will have an API or a portal or whatever.

And worse, by creating a compliance industry they create a whole suite of business and people who will ask for more, more, more more.
by Ensorceled | 2025-11-26 13:24:33+00:00
Oh they TRY to ... it's just that the "non-technical unqualified people" get brought to heal (usually) by regulations. I've been in the room where people have tried to force a decision and a PEng, Lawyer, or CA/CPA had to say "absolutely not". It happens all the time, which is why you NEED regulations.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-26 13:24:40+00:00
> HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years.

My feeling is that this story has barely anything to do with AI. AI was rather a "socially acceptable" welcome excuse for firing lots of people (which may be necessary or be a bad idea; we'll see).
by thyristan | 2025-11-26 13:25:41+00:00
It is true that the heat can be used if it is there anyways. But usually not in a big city-wide network. Instead a more localized, larger consumer is far better, because running the hot water network is far too expensive. For example, large producers of heat like data centers, dairy processing or chemical plants around here deliver their heat to public swimming pools, schools or greenhouses that are intentionally built nearby.

Even the grandparent's article says so if you read carefully: "A large portion of the town’s own buildings, including the municipal school, town hall, and library, are connected to the district heating network.". They didn't even attach all of the public buildings. Not to mention about the rest of the town.
by bgro | 2025-11-26 13:27:29+00:00
This is a direct result of using leetcode in interviews instead of any other, more legitimate tests like winning a tekken 1v1. Have you ever seen a good developer who’s not good at real video games?

If companies had hired real developers instead of cosplayers who are stunlocked with imposter syndrome as the only candidate pool with time to memorize a rainbow table of arbitrary game trivia questions and answers, things would actually work.
by meheleventyone | 2025-11-26 13:27:40+00:00
Perhaps because the AI assigned copyright in the files to the author of the library it copied from and the person prompting it told it to look at that library. Without even getting into the comedy AI generated apologia to go with it which makes it look worse rather than better.

From a pragmatic viewpoint as an engineer you assign the IP you create over to the company you work for so plagarism has real world potential to lose you your job at best. There's a difference between taking inspiration from something unrelated "oh this is a neat algorithmic approach to solving this class of problems" to "I need to implement this specific feature and it exists in this library so I'll lift it nearly verbatim".
by derrikcurran | 2025-11-26 13:27:52+00:00
Something I've always found mildly interesting is the general perception of the Windows 8 start menu changes. Folks often talked about the start menu being "removed" in Windows 8 and "re-added" in 8.1. Thing is though, it was never really removed. It mainly just went full screen and then back to a small menu in the corner. The actual functionality didn't change much. While I didn't like it, I wasn't nearly as bothered as others seemed to be. I was just kind of like, "Oh, it's full screen now. Meh."
by webstrand | 2025-11-26 13:28:16+00:00
From my testing, as far as I've been able to tell it no longer has any impact on accessibility. The element itself does not appear in the tree, this makes sense display:contents is non-interactive. But all of the children correctly appear in the accessibility tree as if they did not have that shared parent element. But I am by no means an expert at operating screen readers, do you know of any specific issues with it?
by adrian_b | 2025-11-26 13:28:27+00:00
Nowadays both Intel/AMD CPUs and Arm-based CPUs guarantee that a certain subset of the instructions are executed in constant time.

For an example of a list of such instructions see:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

However, cooperation from the operating system is necessary, as the constant-time execution mode may need to be enabled by setting certain CPU-control bits in protected registers (e.g. IA32_UARCH_MISC_CTL[DOITM]).

See for instance:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

CMOV is on the list of instructions with constant-time execution, but the list is valid only with the corresponding control bit set correctly.
Show HN: Better Agents CLI
by jangletown | 2025-11-26 13:28:43+00:00
Hello HN!

Better Agents is a CLI tool and a set of standards for agent building.

It supercharges your coding assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, Kilo Code, etc), making it an expert in any agent framework you choose (Agno, Mastra, etc) and all their best practices and agent building best practices we collected over this past two years.

Better Agents brings an opinionated folder structure to your agent application:

my-agent-project/

├── app/ (or src/) # The actual agent code, according to the chosen framework

├── tests/

│ ├── evaluations/ # Jupyter notebooks for evaluations

│ │ └── example_eval.ipynb

│ └── scenarios/ # End-to-end scenario tests

│ └── example_scenario.test.{py,ts}

├── prompts/ # Versioned prompt files for team collaboration

│ └── sample_prompt.yaml

├── prompts.json # Prompt registry

├── .mcp.json # MCP server configuration

├── AGENTS.md # Development guidelines

├── .env # Environment variables

└── .gitignore

The structure and guidelines on AGENTS.md ensure every new feature required for the coding assistant is properly tested, evaluated, and that the prompts are versioned.

The `.mcp.json` comes with all the right MCPs set up so you coding assistant becomes an expert in your framework of choice and know where to find new tools.

`scenarios/` tests guarantee the agent behaves as expected, which simulates a conversation with the agent making sure it does what expected.

`evaluations/` notebooks holds dataset and notebooks for evaluating pieces of your agent pipeline such as a RAG or classification tasks it must do

Finally, `prompts/` hold all your versioned prompts in yaml format, synced and controlled by prompts.json, to allow for playground and team collaboration.

We defined it and built the CLI after seeing many of our customers having to adapt their codebases and ways of working to add scenario tests and more structure to their agent apps. We are hoping to shift-left the industry and already start new agent projects the right way.
by phyzix5761 | 2025-11-26 13:28:54+00:00
I wonder how much software project failure comes from lacking clear processes. Many teams, whether in companies or open source projects, never define step by step procedures for common tasks like feature development, bug triage, code review, or architectural decisions. When six developers each follow their own approach, even with consistent code style, the team can’t improve the system in a predictable and systematic way. Clear procedures don’t guarantee success, but without them teams often end up with chaos and inconsistent delivery. This lack of structured methodology seems far more common in software engineering than in other engineering disciplines.
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-26 13:29:10+00:00
It was fascinating to me for a bit but it gets old fast...

consumer: I want to fill my content hole with content someone made through hard work right now and for free and how dare they delay that by 5 seconds after which I can press Skip. I will employ sophisticated tricks and run untrusted code in my browser to work around that delay.

also consumer: I will totally not be pissed at all if there is no free content for me anymore. Their business model should fail because I did not consent to ads. How dare anyone consider and live within an objectively true reality that things have costs?

Is not you since you said you don't use youtube. but it is what many youtube users seem to think.
by supermatt | 2025-11-26 13:29:28+00:00
> I’m not in the US...

You seem to be a different person than I was replying to

> My point is...

No, that is your opinion. There is no evidence that this will ever be "forced" through in any form that would erode current rights.

> I would rather take my chances...

By all means do, although you may want to brush up on how legislation in your own country works...
by saubeidl | 2025-11-26 13:30:29+00:00
> The EU was created as an economic and trade institution. How has it morphed into a wierd political institution, which NATO was already supposed to be?

That is not the case.

The 1957 Treaty Establishing the European Community contained the objective of “ever closer union” in the following words in the Preamble. In English this is: “Determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe …..”.

> The root question: how did an organization that ushered in things like the Euro become a body that decides whether Europeans are allowed to have personal privacy?

Sensationalist framing aside, how does any government become a body that decides anything?
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-26 13:31:06+00:00
Indeed. Well deduced.

Inevitability of Genetic Parasites Open Access Jaime Iranzo, Pere Puigbò, Alexander E. Lobkovsky, Yuri I. Wolf, Eugene V. Koonin https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/8/9/2856/2236450
by srean | 2025-11-26 13:31:08+00:00
Data science solutions are different in the sense they rarely ever get done and dusted in a sense a sorting library might.

There's almost always something or the other breaking. Did the nature of data change. Did my upstream data feed change. Why are these small set of examples not working for this high paying customer.

You would need resources to understand and fix these problems quarter after quarter.

A rich network of data dependencies can be a double edged sword. Rarely are upstream code and data changes benign to the output of the layer you own.

There are two cases where AI solutions are perfect. They are so good that they are fire and forget. The second is that your customer is a farmer not a gardener. Individual failing saplings mean little to him.

If a single misbehaving plant can cause commercially significant damage then when choosing opaque tools you must consider the maintenance cost you may be signing up for.

Say I have a ton of historical data that is being continuously added to. It's a real temptation to replace the raw data with a model that uses less number of parameters than the raw data. In a sense lossy compression. Can be a very bad idea. Data instances where the model does not fit well may be the most important pieces of art information. Model paints with a broad brush stroke. If you are hunting faults, you have been aware that a lossy compression can paper them away. You are also potentially harming a future model that could have been trained but you have thrown away a decade of useful data because storage costs were running so high.

No easy solution. General recommendation would be to compress but losslessly simply because you know not what may be valuable in the future. If it's impossible, then so be it, you have to eat that opportunity cost in the future, but you did your best.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-26 13:31:23+00:00
> which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.

I checked this out and was amused to see that wikipedia notes:

> Birkin used the bag initially but later changed her mind because she was carrying too many things in it: "What's the use of having a second one?" she said laughingly. "You only need one and that busts your arm; they're bloody heavy. I'm going to have an operation for tendonitis in the shoulder".

In my experience it's pretty common to carry stuff in backpacks. They put a lot of weight on your spine, which can take it. Jane Birkin's comment reminded me of the idea in Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need that frequent travelers are always on the lookout for luggage that can hold more than it can actually hold.
by the_af | 2025-11-26 13:31:35+00:00
Like I said, I didn't brush my teeth at work. When I went to the office, I tried to go in and out of the restroom as fast as possible, touching as few things as possible, and didn't linger to do things like brush my teeth, eat or play chess.

I didn't keep anything at my office, there were no lockers, no drawers, and the desk itself was messed with by the night cleaning crew.

> and miles cheaper than paying for dental treatments

You don't need to brush your teeth after every meal, that's a cultural thing. As long as you brush when you wake up and before you go to bed, that's ok.
by djoldman | 2025-11-26 13:31:48+00:00
From the paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651781v1

> ... we report the discovery of Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, a novel archaeon with an unprecedentedly small genome of only 238 kbp —less than half the size of the smallest previously known archaeal genome— from a dinoflagellate-associated microbial community.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-11-26 13:31:56+00:00
"big software project"

there you are why its failling, the fact that these system is overly massive and complex that sometimes the original creator and architecture that design this system cant foresee the future needs and etc

You could says its incompetence but the fact that software change so much is last 20 years make it most people cant really design a "future proof" system in a way that it cant cause trouble in the future
by balamatom | 2025-11-26 13:32:25+00:00
Yes.

I imagine on the level of any individual's participation in society, culture, economy, whatever you want to call it - it's always started out more or less like "here, you have these 100-150 places in your memory which nature gave you to know other apes; turns out you can also use them to store abstract concepts, which take 7-8x less neural bandwidth before compression; here are some: ..."

And it's due to some general agglomerating drive of systems - perhaps the same principle that made multicellular life preferable - that it ended up working out like "half of who you consider yourself to be is determined by the metanarrative undertow of the first language you were taught, and the rest by the last movie you watched."

Ain't that a life.