MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A tool to visualize and map dependency hell in legacy COBOL codebases
by NabilChiheb | 2025-12-05 13:47:22+00:00
We built this tool after years of frustration working on massive, undocumented COBOL systems. The core problem is that simple maintenance tasks turn into high-risk, multi-day exercises because there is no clear, automated way to map program dependencies or control flow.

The Challenges We Solve:

Dependency Sprawl: A single program change often ripples through dozens of Copybooks, which themselves include others. Our tool performs a full static analysis of the codebase to generate an accurate, visual dependency graph of every program and copybook included.

Obscured Control Flow: PERFORM blocks and deeply nested IF statements make control flow difficult to trace manually. The tool generates a clear, interactive control flow graph (CFG) for any selected program. Clicking a node in the CFG jumps directly to that line in the source.

Variable Tracing: Debugging is painful when variable usage is scattered across a 5,000-line file. We map the entire lifecycle of any variable: definition, modification, and usage points, streamlining the debugging process.

The goal was to move tribal knowledge out of people's heads and onto the code itself. The tool supports adding annotations and notes directly onto the flow graph nodes, linking critical business context directly to the source of truth.

We focused on generating highly accurate, navigable visualizations that senior developers can use to quickly understand and safely refactor complex logic.

We'd appreciate any feedback from others who have wrestled with legacy systems.
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-12-05 13:47:26+00:00
I'm not sure how likely it is that an answer would fall outside of the top-p of 0.95 (used in the paper). A random number generator would also need an unreasonably high number of samples to get a correct answer. I think figures 17 and 18 are interesting for this discussion too, they show performance at various sampling temperatures. I think the point of the paper is that RL "sharpens" the distribution of non-RL nets, but it does not uncover any new reasoning paths - non-RL nets already had multiple decently high probability paths of answering questions to begin with, and RL reuses a subset of those.
by hbn | 2025-12-05 13:47:29+00:00
I only use light themes for the most part, and HDR videos look insane and out of place. If you scroll past an HDR video on Instagram you have a, eyeball-searing section of your screen because your eyes aren't adjusted to looking at that brightness, and then once you scroll it off the screen and you have no HDR content, everything looks dim and muted because you just got flashbanged.
by woodylondon | 2025-12-05 13:47:33+00:00
100% agree. Sadly, I have realised fewer people actually give an F than you realise; for some, it's just a paycheck. I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce.

I also think they tend to be the older ones among us who have seen what happens when it all goes wrong, and the stack comes tumbling down, and so want to make sure you don't end up in that position again. Covers all areas of IT from Cyber, DR, not just software.

When I have moved between places, I always try to ensure we have a clear set of guidelines in my initial 90-day plan, but it all comes back to the team.

It's been 50/50: some teams are desperate for any change, and others will do everything possible to destroy what you're trying to do. Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option.

The trick is to work this out VERY quickly!

However, when it does go really wrong, I assume most have followed the UK Post Office saga in the UK around the software bug(s) that sent people to prison, suicides, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

I am pretty sure there would have been a small group (or at least one) of tech people in there who knew all of this and tried to get it fixed, but were blocked at every level. No idea - but suspect.
by jbjbjbjb | 2025-12-05 13:47:41+00:00
I was reading this the other day when I came across this feature because I’m stacking PRs recently which I don’t usually do

https://andrewlock.net/working-with-stacked-branches-in-git-...

Another commenter posted this link which was a bit more succinct

https://blog.hot-coffee.dev/en/blog/git_update_refs/

There isn’t much to it though, you just go to the branch and run git rebase with the update refs flag.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-05 13:48:21+00:00
> Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist.

You've shifted from "market" to "unregulated market". Your point is against markets in general and you haven't explained what's your understanding of "market" is (it seems at the very least unclear to you).

Trying to abolish "the market" can only lead to Stalinism, or whwtever you can to call it, because, again, since a market is the expression of people's actions, needs, and desires abolishing it has to mean abolishing individuals' freedoms. This is not absurd or "ideological propaganda", this is factual (and common sense, really) and proven again and again through the 20th century.
by piva00 | 2025-12-05 13:48:51+00:00
Agree that green hydrogen is still in its infancy but I don't think it can be considered a "black hole", it's a new technology which requires, as any novel technology not yet proven commercially, government investments for research and further development.

I believe it ties quite well with the build out of renewables, the necessary plan for renewables is to overprovision since it can fluctuate, energy storage is one way to use the excess production, and another is to further develop hydrogen technology to be better suited for industrial processes requiring natural gas.

Without government investment there won't be any private enterprise developing it, it's quite known that capitalism doesn't help in taking massive risks with not-yet-proven technology, it can work for scaling, and getting into economies of scale but before that I don't think it's a black hole to bet on the future of it. At some point it will be needed to be done, rather develop the technology early, and export it rather than wait until China does it anyway (because the USA will definitely not be the first mover in this space).
by nayroclade | 2025-12-05 13:49:29+00:00
If a US company operates in a different country as well, it has to abide by the laws of that country, or leave it. For example, Adobe's acquisition of Figma was blocked by the UK and EU regulators, despite them both being US companies headquartered in San Francisco. They could have chosen to leave the UK and EU markets entirely, in which case their merger would have been able to proceed, but they wouldn't have been able to sell anything to UK/EU citizens.
by ptx | 2025-12-05 13:49:36+00:00
How? I tried recreating the scenario from the article (the section "First rebase –onto") and ran the first rebase with "--update-refs":

$ git checkout feature-1 $ git rebase --update-refs main Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/feature-1. Updated the following refs with --update-refs: refs/heads/feature-2-base

But all it did was update feature-2-base. It still left feature-2 pointing to the old commits. So I guess it automates "git branch -f feature-2-base feature-1" (step 3), but it doesn't seem to automate "git rebase --onto feature-1 feature-2-base feature-2" (step 2).

Presumably I'm doing something wrong?
by sumtechguy | 2025-12-05 13:49:57+00:00
Heard of one production needing to do a one day reshoot on something. Something that could easily have been done in LA. It was cheaper to fly everyone out to some European country for 3 days and do the pickups.

The business side of Hollywood has been imploding for the past few years. It just costs too much to film there vs other places. Tariffs will not change that. The tax incentives are gone and the must have on set is too high.

Not sure how netflix is going to digest that pill they just swallowed. 83 billion is a lot. Is is about 3x their total gross per year. I do not think they can raise prices too much with out shedding subscribers. WB has already taken out AOL, ATT (recovering), and Discovery. Netflix could be next.

The deal also spins out the linear TV into a different company. Can that company survive? Its going to be tough going. Havent looked but I would bet a good portion of the debt they took on to do the divestiture from AT&T is being pumped into that company.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-05 13:49:58+00:00
Ex-historian here, now an engineer. Ben is one of the few historians really thinking in depth about the implications of LLMs for historical research and teaching: both the good (wow, they are really great at transcribing difficult handwritten documents now; you can use Claude Code to vibe code up quick visualizations for your research or teaching that would have taken weeks of work before), and the bad (students submitting AI-generated essays). Highly recommended reading.

It's also nice to see a working historian who posts to HN. (If there are any others, please raise your hand!) Our community is richer for the wide variety of non-engineering professions represented here, from medical doctors to truckers to woodworkers to pilots to farmers. Please keep posting, all of you.
Show HN: Losselot – See if your FLACs are fibbing, catch encoding audio relics
by rhgraysonii | 2025-12-05 13:50:23+00:00
A friend posted:

"Very niche question for my audio pals: I know there are tools to check if a WAV has ever gone through an MP3 conversion. Is there a way to check if an MP3 has been transcoded from another MP3?"

I got curious, and, well, made a thing for them. I figured I might as well package it up nicely and see what others thought.
by mystraline | 2025-12-05 13:50:25+00:00
At this point, when I look at ANY electric vehicle, I'm seeing basically what Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow warned about.

Its a DMCA DRM hellscape, full of equipment that was sold (with a state registration no less), and these car companies still maintain remote control and real ownership indefinitely.

Mercedes EQS won't "let" owners open the hood.

BMW "rented heated seats" bullshit.

GMC Hummer EV Requires dealer-level authentication to reset the 12V battery or perform certain repairs.

Tesla uses proprietary diagnostic tools and encrypted software.

Volvo has explored payment-based bricking.

Even the EFF warned about this 12 years ago in 2013 : https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-co...

Will I consider an EV? Sure. Am I going to place primary buying decision on reparability and full ownership? Damn straight I will. If that means I buy hybrids and/or ICE vehicles. I want something I can maintain without running to the vendor to ask permission, or even "giving" them the ability to say no.
by roxolotl | 2025-12-05 13:50:31+00:00
Yea this is true of virtually all problems today. It's one of the blind spots of the AI acceleration crowd. Cancer vaccine discovered by GPT-6? You still have to convince people it's safe. Fusion reactor modeled by Gemini? Convince people it's not that kind of nuclear power. Global Engineering solution for climate change? Well it might look like chemtrails but it's not. Implementation of all of these things in a society is always going to be hard.

I think this is a large factor in the turn towards more authoritarian tendencies in the Silicon Valley elites. They spent the 2000s and 2010s as a bit more utopian and laissez faire and saw it got them almost nowhere because of technology doesn't solve people problems.
by mattmanser | 2025-12-05 13:50:43+00:00
Seriously?

The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
by tomrod | 2025-12-05 13:50:57+00:00
Abstract:

"Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to nonusers, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare from two social media platforms: TikTok and Instagram. Incentivized experiments with college students indicate positive welfare based on the standard measure but negative welfare when accounting for these nonuser externalities. Our findings highlight the existence of product market traps, where active users of a platform prefer it not to exist."
by stego-tech | 2025-12-05 13:51:06+00:00
I’ve thought about it, but that’s still technology trying to solve a societal problem, and my experience is that doesn’t work (it just makes someone a lot of money by giving them data to exploit). Don’t get me wrong, I am still all for said services existing as an option for parents to leverage, but it’s not my thing.

My soapbox is addressing the crux of the social problem: we have built a society where both parents in most families have to work full-time jobs to have a chance at making ends meet, increasingly taking on extra overtime or gig work to improve their odds of paying the bills. This means children have no consistent adult available in their lives to engage with them: nurture, monitor, teach, mentor, demonstrate, assist, etc.

I want to build a society where only one parent has to work, and the other (whoever they are, I am not advocating a return to “traditional gender role” bullshit) can stay at home full-time. This way someone is always available to engage with the child and ensure their safety at home, with the suite of knock-on benefits that entails for the child’s development.

I don’t want to make a child-safe planet at the expense of children lacking present and available parents; I want a world where parents aren’t so wiped from working multiple jobs and struggling to pay rent or buy food that their children become a forced secondary concern.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-05 13:51:37+00:00
Neutral here: I subscribe to neither.

I found out that there's a backlog of content going back over 100 years (a lot of it at the public library) and have been happily consuming that for about 6 or 7 years now.

(I still have about 4 decades to go to catch up with today—which will probably take me another 3 years or so).
by tgv | 2025-12-05 13:51:39+00:00
I'd really be curious to see any substantial proof for that claim.

The first time pupils encounter pi isn't when measuring angles. At least over here, that's still done in degrees, which is much easier to explain, and also latches onto common cultural practice (e.g. a turn of 180 degrees). So I suppose that already makes them good engineers.

But the first time pupils encounter pi is when computing the circumference and surface of a circle. While the former would look easier with the radius (tau * r), it looks just as weird when using diameter or when using it for the surface.
by Hendrikto | 2025-12-05 13:52:09+00:00
I agree about sentinel values. Just return an error value.

I think the fib example is actually cool though. Integers are not the only possible domain. Everything that supports <=, +, and - is. Could be int, float, a vector/matrix, or even some weird custom type (providing that Nim has operator overloading, which it seems to).

May not make much sense to use anything other than int in this case, but it is just a toy example. I like the idea in general.
by tow21 | 2025-12-05 13:52:19+00:00
Yeah, I know - but an antenna embedded within a small box is going to be much less effective than a big old directional Yagi antenna like https://www.satshop.fi/en/4g/4g-5g/4g-antennas.html

Seems weird to cripple the product by not allowing me to (optionally) disable the internal antenna and instead use and tune an external antenna. And I suspect that is likely to make a difference when you are on the edge of coverage, but you know exactly where the relevant cell tower is, a few km away.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 13:52:41+00:00
- Click "Start Writing"

- Start typing, nothing happens

- Editor apparently didn't focus, I try clicking anywhere on the page to give text editor focus

- Editor doesn't focus when you click on it?

For being an experience "all about writing", I sure don't understand how to get started? I click in the middle of the page, but nothing is focusing? Using Firefox 145.0.1.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-05 13:53:17+00:00
Sony bought Crunchyroll + Funimation but I have to admit that I'm sick of normie anime like Bleach and I crave the kind of things that you find on HDIVE like Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World. [1]

[1] If the Anime News Network finishes reviewing it doesn't make the cut
by augiefra | 2025-12-05 13:53:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built PastScreen because I was tired of taking screenshots of code bugs and losing the context (which file? which line?).

The app works like a standard screenshot tool but detects if you are capturing from a dev environment (VSCode, Zed, Cursor, Xcode). If so, it automatically grabs the file path and line number, putting them into your clipboard alongside the image.

It’s fully native (Swift).

The code is open source here on GitHub. If you want the convenience of auto-updates and signing (or just want to support me), it's available on the Mac App Store for the price of a coffee: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/pastscreen/id6755425479

Feedback is welcome, especially on the file path detection logic!
by Noaidi | 2025-12-05 13:53:19+00:00
> for some, it's just a paycheck.

What is wrong with just wanting to work for money?

> I am not sure what has happened over the decades regarding actually being proud of the work you produce.

Maybe if wages kept up with inflation people would still care. You know, when I was young, I was able to rent an apartment while being a cashier in a grocery store.
by wccrawford | 2025-12-05 13:53:21+00:00
What happened is that most companies do not care about their employees, and their employees know it.

If anything happens, the company will lay off people without a care for what happens to them.

Even when they do care, such as in a smaller company, their own paycheck is being weighed against the employees, and they will almost always pick themselves, even if they caused the problems.

CEOs making millions while they lay off massive amounts of people is the norm now, and everyone knows it.

You can't blame the employee for not caring. They didn't start it.
Show HN: Kronos – Type-safe trading framework in Go with terminal UI
by lkwtsn | 2025-12-05 13:53:51+00:00
I built Kronos because existing algo trading frameworks lack type safety and require rewriting strategies for different exchanges.

Kronos is an opinionated framework in Go (think Laravel/Spring for trading). Write your strategy once, run it in backtest, paper, or live with zero code changes.

Key features: - Type-safe (catch errors at compile time) - Exchange-agnostic (same strategy works on Hyperliquid, Binance, etc.) - Real-time orderbook visualization in terminal - Handles WebSocket management, order routing, position tracking

Currently supports Hyperliquid, adding more exchanges soon.

Looking for feedback from traders and quants. What features would be most valuable?
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-05 13:54:12+00:00
>Did anyone think politicians are there for a common good?

The problem is that a whole bunch of people who know the politicians are not concerned with anything in the same ballpark as the common good will lie to your face about it when the thing the politicians are pushing suits them for the next 5min even if the long term consequences are obvious.

The politicians behavior is just a symptom of the problem.
by quacked | 2025-12-05 13:54:16+00:00
For small-to-medium size data sets, you can use Power Query/BI to essentially run a relational database and metrics/dashboards on it inside an Excel spreadsheet plus a web page, minus all the features that a real DB has in terms of version control and backups.

I can't leave Excel for that. I can set up a "data integration" in 3 hours that has a highly customizable and (relatively) bug-free front-end, and maintain it myself. The amount of work and knowledge it takes to get the same thing spun up in a proper language with a proper server is 1-3 orders of magnitude more.
by Fang_ | 2025-12-05 13:54:30+00:00
Is there any reason besides merge commits ending up in history to not do this with merges instead? ie merge main into feature-1, then feature-1 into feature-2.

Sounds like using --update-refs would let you do all that in a single operation, but you still need to force-push and don't maintain an explicit merge/conflict resolution history, both of which could be considered sub-optimal for collaborative scenarios.
by IanWoodfill | 2025-12-05 13:55:00+00:00
Cassidy (Series A) - Senior Full Stack Software Engineer / AI Product Engineer - NYC

Cassidy (https://cassidyai.com) is a no-code platform that allows businesses to build custom AI assistants that automate complex business processes, powered by internal company data. By connecting to a company’s knowledge (docs, wikis, calls, etc.) and leveraging major AI models, Cassidy aims to be the “AI colleague” for every team—helping them work 100x faster without heavy engineering overhead. We're well funded, growing incredibly fast and have an insane distribution advantage in a growing market. ----

If building powerful and reliable automation primitives for non-technical users sounds interesting to you, I'd love to chat! Reach out to ian@cassidyai.com or apply at https://cassidyai.com/careers.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-12-05 13:55:17+00:00
How much of this is just because the market as a whole is going up.

This same kind of mentality happened pre-2008. People thought they were great at being day-traders, and had all kinds of algorithms that were 'beating the market'.

But it was just that the entire market was going up. They weren't doing anything special.

Once the market turned downward, that was when it took talent to stay even.

Show me these things beating a downward market.
by nake89 | 2025-12-05 13:55:49+00:00
Out of the Privacy Not Included list of car manufacturers it is the third not-worst: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/cate...

It is still very bad: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl...

Overview: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-05 13:55:53+00:00
It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.

That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film

https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408

Sony created KPop Demon Hunters and sold the streaming rights to Netflix .

If you look at any of their popular back catalog TV content, it is all being streamed on other services.