MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by loandbehold | 2025-12-08 22:47:31+00:00
Most of software work is maintaining "legacy" code, that is older systems that have been around for a long time and get a lot of use. I find Claude Code in particular is great at grokking old code bases and making changes to it. I work on one of those old code bases and my productivity increased 10x mostly due to Claude Code's ability to research large code bases, make sense of it, answer questions and making careful surgical changes to it. It also helps with testing and debugging which is huge productivity boost. It's not about its ability to churn out lots of code quickly: it's an extra set of eyes/brain that works much faster that human developer.
by michaelt | 2025-12-08 22:48:03+00:00
When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism.

If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.
by dqmeedan | 2025-12-08 22:48:08+00:00
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by pton_xd | 2025-12-08 22:48:31+00:00
> And they can't even write a single proper function with modern c++ templating stuff for example.

That's just not true. ChatGPT 4 could explain template concepts lucidly but would always bungle the implementation. Recent models are generally very strong at generating templated code, even if its fairly complex.

If you really get out into the weeds with things like ADL edge cases or static initialization issues they'll still go off the rails and start suggesting nonsense though.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-08 22:48:42+00:00
The US is aligned with the US. We don't have significant cultural ties with Europe on either the DNC or the GOP side anymore.

The pivot to Asia began under Obama 16 years ago. Russia simply isn't viewed as a threat worth expending resources on given that China is across the Pacific. And the era of European born-and-raised foreign policy advisors like Kissinger, Albright, or Brzezinski is over. Most Americans in the 2020s either never had or lost close blood ties to Europe, so the sympathy that allowed Atlanticism to form instead of the more heavy-handed approach used in Asia doesn't exist anymore.

A lot of Europeans (from policymakers all the way down to citizens) really overestimate how Americans view ties with Europe. We have stronger soft power relations with Asia or Latin America than we do with Europe now.

If European nations like France, Germany, or the UK shift right, then when the Dems return to power they would also be cold-to-hostile to Europe.
by Tepix | 2025-12-08 22:48:50+00:00
> these agents are trained on bad code - which is open source.

This is doubtful and not what I've seen in over 30 years in the industry. People who are ashamed of their source code don't make it Open Source. In general, Open Source will be higher quality than closed source.

Sure, these days you will need to avoid github repositories made by students for their homework assignments. I don't think that's a problem.
by furyofantares | 2025-12-08 22:48:55+00:00
Scroll through and read only the section headers. I would be shocked if this wasn't at the very least run through an LLM itself. For sure the section headers are, I'll skip the rest unless someone posts that it's worth a read for some reason.

It doesn't appear to be section headings glued together with bullet lists so maybe the content really does retain the author's perspective but at this point I'd rather skip stuff I know has been run through an LLM and miss a few gems rather than get slopped daily.
by baxtr | 2025-12-08 22:49:08+00:00
> Conclusions and Relevance: US physicians assigned a median 25.5% probability to preservation retaining neural information under ideal conditions in a manner potentially compatible with future patient revival. The majority support for pre-mortem anticoagulation and substantial support for pre-cardiac arrest initiation indicate that many physicians would consider accommodating patient requests for preservation-enhancing interventions. These findings may inform development of clinical guidelines, though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.
by etothet | 2025-12-08 22:49:12+00:00
From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."

Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.
by andrewchilds | 2025-12-08 22:49:18+00:00
My hope is this will lead to the reversal of the insane "HDR auto-brightness" behavior that causes any photo marked as HDR to go extreme brightness mode while the rest of the screen darkens:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254050878 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/436949/why-are-som...
by btown | 2025-12-08 22:49:32+00:00
Among the various potential uses of a toast, IMO:

- quick, in response to a clicked button -> why not just show feedback on the button?

- quick, in response to a keyboard shortcut -> ok

- seconds or more after an action, say, if your import/export is done -> fine, but have a more persistent notifications inbox or send the user an email too, because if you dismiss the toast, how do you get back to that result?

- when you've just navigated to a page, as a way to present an alert or advisory about the new page -> if it's important enough, why not show it as a persistent alert on the page itself?

Far too many toasts are used for the last use case. Part of the reason for this, I think, is because if you detect something weird in a React callback, you'd need to wire up a whole new state variable to show it, vs. just calling a global toast() function at the time where you learn about the weird thing. But is it really much more work than toasting to roll something like const {alertElement, addAlert} = useAlerts()? And have it speak your design language?

Your 50-tabs-open multitasking users will appreciate you.
by tkiolp4 | 2025-12-08 22:50:00+00:00
I think it’s all about balance. In my free time I do “slow” programming: I read the timeless books of our craft (e.g., TAOCP), I spend lots of time writing code by hand, debugging, using pen and paper to think, etc. I love it. All the crap we have now (AI everywhere , technofeudalism, etc.) doesn’t get to bother me. Now, at work, I use AI , I get things done and call it a day. I can do that because I have fun outside work.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-08 22:50:07+00:00
This is assuming the marketplace works perfectly... Which is an incorrect assumption. Reality is that the marketplace is highly controlled by algorithms. New platforms will struggle to get exposure... No exposure, no credibility, no word of mouth, no users, catch 22... You think the big players will allow small SaaS projects to gain traction on their platforms? Have you seen how centralized the Internet is these days? Have you seen how afraid people are of betting on no-name platforms? If they choose the wrong no-name platforms and tools, they will lose their (increasingly precious) jobs. As the saying goes "Nobody lost their job for choosing IBM." As for B2C; it's dead, consumers don't have money and will have less of it in the future; the mass-market game is over.

My bet is if there were a lot of great apps being built, even excellent quality, nobody would even hear about them. The big players would copy them before anyone even found out about them.

IMO, the market is not even a playing field anymore, this is why everyone is getting into politics now, though politics is also somewhat monopolized, there is still more potential for success because there is such an abundance of dissatisfied people willing to look outside of mainstream channels. It's much easier to sell political ideologies than to sell products.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-08 22:51:19+00:00
Regarding Steve Jobs, that's unfortunate for him because even my grandmother in Poland used to say "sugar causes/feeds cancer" when she tried to get us to stop sweetening our tea back in the 80s before we left.

Somehow she knew what several doctors and researchers are now documenting, that cancer cells have a much harder time growing without ample amounts of glucose.
by deniscoady | 2025-12-08 22:51:47+00:00
If Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die ...

I can't think of a better place for longevity of open source projects than Apache (maybe I'm out of the loop?).

Compare it to the Linux Foundation where everything is a single commercial vendor sponsored project. At lease Apache requires independent governance and a diverse ecosystem before the project graduates.

Am I missing something with the Apache Foundation?
by AngryData | 2025-12-08 22:52:22+00:00
The customer only wins if the customer is the one using the tools directly, otherwise it leaves all the power in the hands of businesses who's only real goal is maximum profits. And without already possessing domain knowledge to be able to guide, judge, and correct AI along the way, its existence will be of limited use to consumers and business will not feel much pressure to make anything cheaper, it just leaves more margin to funnel to the top.
by sixtyj | 2025-12-08 22:52:27+00:00
Have you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk?

In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.

Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…

It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
by krupan | 2025-12-08 22:52:28+00:00
"Now, with LLM-generated content, it’s hard to even build mental models for what might go wrong, because there’s such a long tail of possible errors. An LLM-generated literature review might cite the right people but hallucinate the paper titles. Or the titles and venues might look right, but the authors are wrong."

This is insidious and if humans were doing it they would be fired and/or cancelled on the spot. Yet we continue to rave about how amazing LLMs are!

It's actually a complete reversal on self driving car AI. Humans crash cars and hurt people all the time. AI cars are already much safer drivers than humans. However, we all go nuts when a Waymo runs over a cat, but ignore the fact that humans do that on a daily basis!

Something is really broken in our collective morals and reasoning
by mal10c | 2025-12-08 22:52:29+00:00
I don't understand how to use this, but it does touch on an interesting topic. I want to create interactive and animated diagrams. I normally use either Draw.io or plantuml. My goal is to better teach folks about the systems I'm building, through better visualizations. Something like IcePanel (which is way too expensive) sort of shows flows, but I'd like to have full control. Does this tool claim to support something like that? If not, are there options out there that I don't know about?
by hnuser123456 | 2025-12-08 22:52:34+00:00
A manga book published in 1999 randomly predicted a disaster in March 2011, which seemed to come true with Fukushima. The manga was re-published in 2021 predicting a M8.8 in July 2025, but nothing happened. This is the dumb prophecy part, it was not based on seismology studies, just a shot in the dark to try to seem prophetic again. Countless works of fiction are published every year which predict some future disaster at an arbitrary date. Every once in a while, one of those thousands of random predictions can be interpreted as coming true when something bad happens on that day, which retroactively drives interest in that work of fiction, and less scientific minds believing the author has actual future predicting power beyond the abilities of science.

A relatively major (but not M8.8) quake has now hit in December 2025. It is intelligent to expect there may be aftershocks in the days after a significant earthquake actually happens, which can sometimes be larger than the initial quake. This is a well-accepted scientific fact born out of large amounts of data and statistical patterns, not whimsical doomsdayism.

Fukushima's M9.0-9.1 was around a 1-in-1000-year scale event. The last time Japan saw such a powerful earthquake was in the 869 AD. It would be reasonable to expect one of that scale to not happen again for another 1000 years.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-12-08 22:52:42+00:00
> Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.

n00b question, but if consciousness is a quantum effect[1], would mere atomic recombination really be enough to bring you back? Also, isn't entropy ripping the universe apart into a big glass cloud with energy equally distributed?

[1] I once asked somebody with a doctorate in neuroscience/biology about this and promptly received an eyeroll, so I'm playing theoretical here
by toss1 | 2025-12-08 22:52:53+00:00
True, they are less intrusive than double-parked cars, and maybe vs some bikes, but that does not mean it is still not corporations trying to take private profit from using a public space.

The videos of those particular bots show them taking up a substantial portion of the width of a sidewalk (and definitely the full width in tight spots next to trees & fences) and moving and positioning themselves very clumsily and discourteously. They just sit in the middle occupying something like half the sidewalk width trying to decide what to do next, forcing people to walk to both sides in ~1/4 of the width. These things are not even close to ready for prime-time.

It is rude as a human to just stop in the middle of the sidewalk and unfold your map to figure out where you are going.

Programming in this kind of rudeness is just stupid, and will rightly generate backlash that will not be good for the companies. Of course safety is first, but it'd be more safe and courteous to have it hug one side of the walk. And if you cannot do that safely, not only are you not ready for prime-time, you aren't ready for public Alpha tests.
by SyzygyRhythm | 2025-12-08 22:53:05+00:00
Indeed.

Aluminum is actually a (far) superior conductor to copper per unit mass. It would be used on transmission lines even if it was the same price as copper, because the towers can be cheaper and farther apart. It's in increasing use in EVs due to the lower mass.

Copper is still used when the conductive density matters, like the windings of an electric motor. But if copper prices increase further, manufacturers will make sacrifices to efficiency and power density in order to save cost. And they'll figure out how to better balance the use of Al vs. Cu, perhaps using Cu only for the conductors closest to the core.

We also use copper for transformers, which are fairy "dumb" in their usual design. Solid-state transformers exist, which use much less copper, but are currently more expensive. They will no longer be more expensive if the price of copper goes up too much. And they'll probably get cheaper in the long run anyway, regardless of copper price, in the same way that switch mode power supplies have totally replaced linear supplies in the consumer space.

I've seen increasing use of copper in fairly mundane uses, like computer heat sinks, that used to be aluminum. The performance is a little better, but it won't be worthwhile if copper gets way more expensive. They'll just go back to aluminum, or use some other innovation (carbon heat spreaders, etc.) if price becomes an issue.
Show HN: Chrome Extension and Spreadsheet that replaced our $10k/y support desk
by mareksotak | 2025-12-08 22:53:10+00:00
We’ve been testing an internal tool I vibe-coded to replace our support desk workflow. It’s a Chrome extension that runs on top of Gmail's delegated inbox (neglected by Google and missing some features to make it useful) and uses a single Google Sheet in Drive as the data store. No backend, no server, no external services.

It’s been running internally for ~2 weeks and has held up well enough that we’re considering replacing our existing $10k/year SaaS vendor.

Why I built it

Gmail and Google Workspace have had the primitives for a proper shared inbox for years - labels, filters, threads, roles, Groups, Drive, and robust APIs.

But the delegated mailbox/shared inbox capability has remained largely untouched and, in practice, isn’t particularly useful for teams. It solves only a small fraction of the actual collaboration problem.

That gap led me to build something lightweight on top of Gmail itself.

Our support workflow didn’t require the full weight of a dedicated support desk platform. We needed a shared inbox, internal notes, assignment, and basic ticket metadata.

The goal wasn’t to rebuild Zendesk. It was to build the minimum useful set of features inside Workspace, without forwarding emails or sending customer data through more vendors.

How it works

Chrome extension - sidebar - displays current thread info if any

Auth uses chrome.identity → Google OAuth

Sheet (Drive-owned) stores ticket metadata, shared with the team

Attachments saved to a Drive folder

Labels control assignment + status (Pending/Closed)

Footer with internal ticket ID (searchable via Gmail)

“People in thread” resolver + quick history lookup

Everything happens client-side. There is no backend.

Why a spreadsheet?

For an MVP, it worked surprisingly well:

version history

no schema migrations

trivial rollback

owned by the Workspace admin

If this ever evolves, I’d use a proper database, but for now the Sheet keeps everything simple and contained.

A fun exploration of what you can assemble quickly within Google Workspace.
by accrual | 2025-12-08 22:53:15+00:00
Very cool project! I had a couple ideas during the read:

* A ceiling-based pully system could help take the physical load off the users and may allow for increased sensor density. Some large/public VR setups do this.

* I'm sure you considered it, but a double-converting UPS might reduce the noise floor of your sensors and could potentially support multiple booths. Expensive though, and it's already mentioned that data quantity > quality at this stage. Maybe a future fine-tuning step could leverage this.

Cool write up and hope to see more in the future!
by robrtsql | 2025-12-08 22:53:27+00:00
Is Spotify "featuring" the AI band clone, or did they just put it on their platform because some opportunist uploaded it to CDBaby / DistroKid / some other music distribution service? Feels like we're trying to make a headline about Spotify when something much more mundane is happening.

Maybe the headline is that there is absolutely no curation happening, so if KGATLW remove their music from Spotify, you can probably get a few streams from unwary listeners by uploading song covers under a similar moniker. This has been happening forever though--lots of people identify music that isn't on Spotify and then release their own covers to try to capitalize on the vacuum (this is especially common with video game and anime music, which doesn't always have a label release).

Not that Spotify is innocent of all wrongdoing. I don't know how if this has been proven but there is theorizing that Spotify loads their own featured playlists (specifically ones like 'ambient study music' which people might consider to be fungible) with bogus, probably-AI 'artists' who don't need to get paid at all.
by scythe | 2025-12-08 22:53:42+00:00
>This seems to be trying to say that we can't make aluminum without copper, but that seems nonsensical.

The far better argument is that, if it were simple to replace copper with aluminum, this would create a ceiling on the price of copper. However, this hasn't happened. Many applications of copper can theoretically be replaced by copper, but in practice the reactivity and thermal performance issues of aluminum can be challenging. Aluminum wiring in homes, for example, has a very bad reputation.

This isn't fatal, but it is a problem. And if society doesn't plan for it, it could become a more painful problem.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-08 22:54:33+00:00
Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure.

What you've listed are the easy parts that are within people's control. You didn't list the most critical part, the actual bottleneck which is not within people's control.

The market is now essentially controlled by algorithms. I predict there will be amazing software... Which will end up ignored by the markets completely until their features are copied by big tech and nobody will know where the idea originated.

Building is absolutely worthless in the context of a monopolized marketplace.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-08 22:55:03+00:00
I don't think most people worry about the huge amounts of time after they have died. They worry about the 1-120 seconds while they are really dying and aware.

My college gfs dad died after trying to accompany her on a hike, because I was too busy to go and he didn't want her to go alone. So he drove down on the weekend and went with her. He was an overweight man that never moved.

~24 hours after the hike, which he skipped most of and waited mid trail, he started having a heart attack in his home office. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what he was thinking those last minutes or seconds.

And I wish I just went on that hike with her.