MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-14 15:28:52+00:00
For me the point of splitting commit is not for documentation (though it can be an added benefit). It is so that you can easily rollback a feature, or cherry pick, it also makes the use of blame and bisect more natural. Anyways, that's git, it gives you a lot of options, do what you want with them. If a big end-of-day commit is fine for you, great, but some people prefer to work differently.

But that's not actually the reason I use "git add -p" the most. The way I use it is to exclude temporary code like traces and overrides from my commits while still keeping them in my working copy.
by pxc | 2025-12-14 15:29:39+00:00
I used the old CUE-based version when it came out, and was really excited about it. I liked it, and enjoyed working with CUE, but the API was clunky and incomplete.

Then they completely abandoned not just the CUE frontend, but CUE altogether (while strenuously denying that they were doing so) for a GraphQL-based rewrite that focused on letting people use popular general-purpose languages to construct their workflows. The initial rollout of this was not feature complete and only supported imperative languages (Python and TypeScript, IIRC), which I didn't like.

Instead of porting everything over to all their new interfaces, I hopped off the train and rewrote all of our portable pipeline scripts in Nix, via Devenv. At the time, I'd never used Devenv before, but getting the work done that time still took maybe a tenth of the time or less. More than anything else, this was due to not having to fuck around with the additional overhead Docker entails (fussing with mount points, passing files from one stage to another, rebuilding images, setting up VMs... all of it). I got the reproducibility without the extra bullshit, and got to work with interfaces that have proven much more stable.

I still think there's a place for something like Dagger, focused just on CI, perhaps even still using Docker as a deployment/distribution strategy. But I no longer trust Dagger to execute on that. I think a proper external DSL (probably special-purposw but still Turing-complete, e.g., Nickel) is the right fit for this domain, and that it should support multiple means of achieving repeatability rather than just Docker (e.g., Nix on bare metal and Podman, to start). An option to work on bare metal via reproducible environment management tools like Nix, Guix, or Spack is a valuable alternative to burdensome approaches like containers.

I haven't looked at Dagger in several months, but the other big piece that is missing for portable CI workflows is a library that abstracts over popular CI platforms so you can easily configure pull/merge request pipelines without worrying about the implementation details like what environment variables each platform exposes to indicate source and target branch.

Idk anything about all the AI horseshit; I was off the Dagger bandwagon before they took that turn. I don't know if it's serious or a nominal play to court investors. But that kind of pivot is another reason not to build core infra on top of the work of startups imo. If the product is 70% of what you want, you have no way of knowing whether filling that 30% gap is something the maintainers will suddenly pivot away from, even if their current direction looks aligned with yours.

I'd recommend considering tools in this space only if (a) they're already close to 100% of what you need and (b) they're open-source. Maybe you can relax (a) if it's really easy to extend the codebase (I find this to be true for Devenv's Nix modules, for example.)
by adwn | 2025-12-14 15:30:05+00:00
Thank you for actually running the numbers. I think the data is quite convincing that overprovisioning won't be the solution to the seasonal storage problem, or at least not the major factor in it.

Personally, I have high hopes for flow batteries. Increasing storage capacity is so easy with them, liquids can easily be stored for a long time, and it would even make long-distance transport by ship feasible. If only we can find a cheap, suitable electrolyte.
by deburo | 2025-12-14 15:30:09+00:00
You know, 1.5x for overtime seems great until it is enforced for everybody (like it's done in Quebec) and so it is forbidden by company leadership unless it is deemed a necessity. So for people with more time on their hands than responsabilities, they usually can't (voluntarily) work more in their main job to boost their pay, and so they get side jobs, which are usually not declared.

Mandated 1.5x overtime has consequences.

Another side effect (that I know happens in manufacturing jobs) is that people will deliberately slow their work during the week to work overtime on the weekend. I'd wager this is very common in jobs with frequent overtime opportunities.
by amelius | 2025-12-14 15:30:22+00:00
> Why so long?

Because in the beginning of a new technology, the advantages of the technology benefit only the direct users of the technology (the programmers in this case).

However, after a while, the corporations see the benefit and will force their employees into an efficiency battle, until the benefit has shifted mostly away from the employees and towards their bosses.

After this efficiency battle, the benefits will become observable from a macro perspective.
A keyboard ring capable of alphanumeric output
by SEMIPREMIUM | 2025-12-14 15:30:29+00:00
Hello,

Testing the waters here, as I just scored technical feasibility on this after working on it for a 2-3 years. Have to be shallow about the details as it is being patented.

I have designed a keyboard ring capable of silent typing using HID only. The raw data is processed by an AI system delivering the complete sentences to the host device clipboard or in the companion app. I got the hardware working, but have not yet decided on the software layer.

The product while worn was originally meant to enable capturing and describing thoughts with no barrier to "start recording", a problem I've been having as an inventor while working on multiple projects and having multiple steps either to get a piece of paper and pencil in place or through a smartphone with authentication, finding the app, opening the correct note and so forth. Often when it is inappropriate or when cycling, walking or driving. When in position, the good stuff is already gone and cannot be recalled as it was. The purpose is to be able to catch and record trains of thoughts from they appear in consciousness or surface, with no latency. And this is the solution I thought of, which now will be prototyped.

It enables alphanumeric output in any situation, such as meetings or when going on a hike. You can probably text while driving without anyone noticing, and you can write text into your AR glasses with no gestures.

There are multiple use cases with this one.

Short summary:

- BLE and HID over GATT - Requires no vision - Operable with one hand - Silent - No gestures

I'm a hardware guy, and looking for feedback on what to do with it in relation to the various interfaces out there in the software world.

If a ring capable of typing complete sentences or single words with one hand and without looking existed and this reliably pushed the output from the ring peripheral to the host device, where to go from there?
by zbentley | 2025-12-14 15:30:30+00:00
> some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable.

That correctly identifies the problem. Now why is that, and how can we fix it?

It seems fixable; native GUI apps have COM bindings that can fairly reliably produce the text present in certain controls in the vast majority of cases. Web apps (and "desktop" apps that are actually web apps) have accessibility attributes and at least nominally the notion of separating document data from presentation. Now why do so few applications support text extraction via those channels? If the answer is "it's hard/easier not to", how can we make the right way easier than the wrong way?
by doubled112 | 2025-12-14 15:30:35+00:00
Last summer traveling down a rural road in southwestern Ontario, Apple maps told me to return to the route. We hadn't turned in 10 kilometers, but it was showing that we were 200 meters into a cornfield.

I don't think I could have ended up there if I tried in the Golf we were in. Nice try.

My kids thought it was the funniest thing, but it's a good technology lesson.
by gary_0 | 2025-12-14 15:31:29+00:00
I've been using lazygit [https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit] which is a friendly TUI that makes selecting which lines to commit relatively painless. As a heavy user of hunk-by-hunk or line-by-line commits, I used to use tortoisehg, but on my current distro its showing some bitrot, so I decided to try something else.
by jghn | 2025-12-14 15:32:34+00:00
Not only this, but depending on which season of which show of his, there may have been other reasons for why spots were chosen. For instance there was at least one season of No Reservations where episodes were themed with the location as a backdrop. The episode he had in my hometown caused a lot of locals to complain that he wasn't choosing the best spots, but the point was the whole episode was a narrative and the spots chosen fit the narrative.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-14 15:32:58+00:00
> There’s been tons of studies

Such as?

> You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.

Toronto had an average of 12,270 daily active listings in 2019 [0]. Toronto had a population of around 2.7 million in 2019. The majority of this impact was caused by people leaving the cities to buy in the suburbs, move in with family, or return to their country of origin.

[0]: Page 7 https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundf...
by metalman | 2025-12-14 15:33:28+00:00
My dad has described the process for cutting sections to be viewed under microscopes, including electron microscopes. Sharpening the special blade prior to this was routine and he offered to give the sharpening rig, which I declined, as I can achive any practical edge by hand, for a wide variety of uses, and generaly have to be carefull with any blade that I fuss with at all, there's sharp, and theres dont fuck up with this. So I always wonder at peoples drive to get things sharp, frozen sections have an absolute need for a very very clean cut, but nothing else I know needs that.
by drewmate | 2025-12-14 15:33:29+00:00
I'm not sure what the answer is for housing, but there are tons of factors that go in to the growth of cost there. For one, the people making the buying decision aren't comparing DR Horton to Lennar. Usually, they're thinking along two lines: monthly mortgage cost and location.

Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.

For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.

Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)
by nickpsecurity | 2025-12-14 15:33:51+00:00
It's true. I used to promote high-assurance kernels. They had low odds of coding errors but the specs could be wrong. Many problems Linux et al. solved are essentially spec-level. So, we just apply all of that to the secure designs, right?

Well, those spec issues are usually not documented or new engineers won't know where to find a full list. That means the architecturally-insecure OS's might be more secure in specific areas due to all the investment put into them over time. So, recommending the "higher-security design" might actually lower security.

For techniques like Fil-C, the issues include abstraction gap attacks and implementation problems. For the former, the model of Fil-C might mismatch the legacy code in some ways. (Ex: Ada/C FFI with trampolines.) Also, the interactions between legacy and Fil-C might introduce new bugs because integrations are essentially a new program. This problem did occur in practice in a few, research works.

I haven't reviewed Fil-C. I've forgotten too much C and the author was really clever. It might be hard to prove the absence of bugs in it. However, it might still be very helpful in securing C programs.
Show HN: PassDetective – Scan your shell history for leaked passwords and secret
by runtimepanic | 2025-12-14 15:33:53+00:00
Hi HN, I built PassDetective after realizing how often passwords, tokens, and secrets accidentally end up in shell history during debugging or quick tests. PassDetective is a small CLI tool that scans shell history files using pattern matching to flag potential secrets before they get committed, backed up, or shared. It currently works on Kali Linux and NixOS, and is meant to be a lightweight, local-first check rather than a full secret scanning solution. I’d appreciate feedback on false positives, missing patterns, or how people approach this problem in their own workflows.
by kevinmchugh | 2025-12-14 15:34:23+00:00
I almost exclusively use add -p. It's another moment to review my changes and it saves me from having to type out the names of the files I've changed. I don't know if I've ever committed a file unintentionally since adopting it.

I like it especially in concert with git commit --amend, which lets me tack my newest changes onto the previous commit. (Though an interactive rebase with fixup is even better)
by lucasoshiro | 2025-12-14 15:34:37+00:00
> Maybe consider putting your energy into a good documentation inside the repository.

Commit messages are documentation.

If you have a good commit history you don't need write tons of documents explaining each decision. The history will contain everything that you need, including: when and who changed the code, what was the code change and why the code exists. You have a good interface for retrieving that documentation (git log, perhaps with -S, -G, --grep, -L and some pathspecs) without needing to maintain extra infrastructure for that and without being cluttered over time (it will be mostly hidden unless you actively search that). You also don't need to remember to update the documents, you are forced to do that after each commit.

And that's not a hack, Git was made for that.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-14 15:34:50+00:00
I'm not exactly sure what's going on with this article and whether it's just the language barrier or something else, but... it doesn't make an awful lot of sense?

'Tricks' like 'not including too many comments' were already well-known from day one of the ZX line (which started around 1980) because, well, you had 1K, 16K or 48K or RAM to work with, so every character counted!

Also, you were painfully aware of the performance of inner/outer loops, because, absolutely, a sub-3 MHz clock speed doesn't leave many other options. Other than to migrate to assembly coding, which was where most serious Sinclair coding took place.

The article is right about one thing, though: the Sinclair BASIC interpreter was a work of minimalist art, as was the hardware. "Sure, let's multiplex the audio-in line with the video sync signal, so we can save a pin on the ULA" is not something that gets a lot of consideration these days...
by wat10000 | 2025-12-14 15:35:20+00:00
Your conclusion falls victim to the same conflation you’re calling out. If some sectors become drastically more efficient, society has become wealthier in terms of money, but not necessarily in terms of real resources.

For example, consider a case where finance becomes much more productive (in terms of $ per employee-hour) and raises wages to attract smart people, leading to fewer people becoming doctors because finance is much more attractive. Is society wealthier? The money says yes. The line goes up. But finance doesn’t set a broken bone or treat cancer. This may well have made society less wealthy in terms of what ordinary people actually care about.
by bspammer | 2025-12-14 15:35:27+00:00
Given that all the stolen credentials were made public, I was hoping that someone would build a haveibeenpwned style site. We know we were compromised on at least a few tokens, but it would be nice to be able to search using a compromised token to find out what else leaked. We’ve rotated everything we could think of but not knowing if we’ve missed something sucks.
Metot – Using LLMs for structural argument mapping (not just summarization)
by hkcanan | 2025-12-14 15:35:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm actually a lawyer by trade, not a full-time developer.

I built Metot because generic AI summaries are often useless for academic rigour. They gloss over the logic. As a lawyer, I needed to see the skeleton of an argument, not a blurb.

So, I spent the last few months iterating on system prompts and structured output constraints to force LLMs to act as analytical engines rather than creative writers.

The "AI" difference: Instead of asking the model to "write about this," Metot uses a multi-stage prompting pipeline to:

Deconstruct Logic: It extracts the Thesis -> Premises -> Evidence chain (Argument Mapping).

Analyze Metadata: It identifies methodological contributions and citation networks (Lit Review).

Review Tone: It acts as a strict academic referee for style and consistency (Text Review).

The Output (Screenshots): I tested it on Judith Thomson’s The Trolley Problem to show it works outside of law. You can see how the tool extracted the specific "Distributive Exemption" argument structure and the "Loop Case" analysis in these screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/1EMysz1

Why I’m posting here: Since my background is strictly legal, I need feedback from researchers in STEM and Social Sciences:

Does this "Argument Mapping" structure hold up for your field's papers?

Where do the LLM hallucinations creep in for your specific domain?

Privacy Note: No user data is used for model training.

Invite Code: Use HACKERNEWS to skip the waitlist.

Link: https://metot.org
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-14 15:35:49+00:00
Then how can we exist around large magnetic fields without them affecting us mentally - no forgetting, no dropping unconscious, no trippy psychedelic experiences - seemingly nothing at all? How come our mains electricity does not not act on our minds analogously to a blowtorch on our skin, or a hydraulic press on our bones?

MRI machines at 3 Tesla field strength are 100,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and pulsed very fast. They affect the spin of the nucleus of the Hydrogen atoms in the body, but apparently have no effect on the person's brain or consciousness (or biomagnetite)? We wear headphones with electromagnetic coils pulsing music on the sides of our heads for hours at a time, with no effect. We use machine's powerful electric motors, work near them, we're surrounded by alternating currents in wires, some people experiment with Tesla Coils, MagLev capable of lifting trains, wireless power delivery...

(PS. Red / Arctic Foxes might be able to see the Earth's magnetic field and use it to help find mice to hunt; they listen for mice they can't see and jump-pounce into the snow and their jumps are successful at getting the mouse 80% of the time when they are facing North-East and only 18% of the time when they aren't - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/foxes-use... )
by philo23 | 2025-12-14 15:36:41+00:00
My two favourite bits of git add -p that aren't mentioned here:

the / (search) command to search unstaged hunks for a specific keyword rather than having to jump through all the individual changes you've made when there's lots.

and the e (edit) command to manually split out two changes that end up in one hunk that I'd rather have in individual commits.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-14 15:36:54+00:00
If a tool craps out after 30 minutes every day, and someone knows they can't rely upon it to work when you needed it, they tend to change workflow to avoid the tool entirely.

Context switching between AI-assisted coding and "oops, my tool is refusing to function, guess I'll stop using it" is often worse for productivity than never using the AI to begin with.
by binary132 | 2025-12-14 15:37:46+00:00
It’s actually comical watching the AI shills trot out the same points in every argument about the utility of LLMs. Now you’re supposed to say that after 10 years of digital, the only people sticking with film were the “curmudgeons”.

I for one hail the curmudgeons. Uphold curmudgeon thought.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-14 15:38:12+00:00
> Colors don't bleed much these days. Some might, e.g. on handmade clothing such as tyedye but most commercial colors don't.

Sadly, with fast fashion, we've regressed to the point places like Shein/Fashion Nova sell pool attire vs swim suit that is not meant to get wet due to the dyes not holding when wet.
by BeFlatXIII | 2025-12-14 15:38:26+00:00
The kids don't hate classroom reading because of the reading; they hate it because of the associated curriculum. “Why were the curtains blue?” is a skill wasted on children. I only gained an appreciation for such meta-reading during a weeks-long TV Tropes bender during a spat of unemployment after getting fired from my first big-boy job.
by stingraycharles | 2025-12-14 15:38:37+00:00
Well yes, but asking the model to ask questions to resolve ambiguities is critical if you want to have any success in eg a coding assistant.

There are shitloads of ambiguities. Most of the problems people have with LLMs is the implicit assumptions being made.

Phrased differently, telling the model to ask questions before responding to resolve ambiguities is an extremely easy way to get a lot more success.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-14 15:39:36+00:00
I have TOR enabled in my firefox (in a container) just for that. It just seems madness for me (as a non-spaniard) that 2 links of the HN startpage are blocked for football. We are not talking the regular terrorism, abuse/illegal content whatnot. No, censorship to protect football IP.
by kragen | 2025-12-14 15:40:28+00:00
I think the claim was not that the NS* API of NextStep was "10× more productive" but that the Objective-C programming language was. Objective-C is fantastic at calling existing C APIs. It's even easier than doing it in C# or LuaJIT, and much easier than doing it in Python, Perl, Tcl, Java, JS, etc.

You're right that there are programs that are just a thin layer of glue over existing C APIs, and the existing C API is going to largely determine how much effort that is. But there are other programs where calls to external APIs are only a small fraction of the code and effort. If OO was the huge productivity boost Jobs was claiming, you'd expect those programs to be much easier to write in Objective-C than in C. Since they made the choice to implement Objective-C as part of GCC, people could easily write them on other Unixes, too. Mostly they didn't.

My limited experience with Objective-C is that they are easier to write, just not to the extent Jobs claimed. OO makes Objective-C code more flexible and easier to test than code in C. It doesn't make it easier to design or debug. And, as you say, other languages were OO to a similar extent as Objective-C while similarly not sacrificing efficiency, such as C++ and (many years later) Java and C#.