MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maccard | 2025-12-19 22:33:27+00:00
Does it?

I use AI as a smart auto complete - I’ve tried multiple tools on multiple models and I still _regularlt_ have it dump absolute nonsense into my editor - in thr best case it’s gone on a tangent, but in the most common case it’s assumed something (often times directly contradicting what I’ve asked it to do), gone with it, and lost the plot along the way. Of course when I correct it it says “you’re right, X doesn’t exist so we need to do X”…

Has it made me faster? Yes. Had it changed engineering - not even close. There’s absolutely no world where I would trust what I’ve seen out of these tools to run in the real world even with supervision.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-12-19 22:34:25+00:00
> To be honest the Roomba sucked

I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best appliances. It’s a work horse!

We’re had it for five-six years and it still works great. Nowadays it sometimes needs to charge twice to finish, but I only notice if I’m home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isn’t a tinkerer.

Maybe I just don’t know what I’m missing - I’ve never had others - but I love my Roomba.
by abnercoimbre | 2025-12-19 22:35:30+00:00
A next-gen [0] terminal emulator. It's in Early Access, but watch the 3-minute landing trailer for the gist of the vision.

The difficult "grunt work" is in keeping the native binary small (~5MB or less) and working on Windows, Mac and Linux at feature-parity.

[0] https://terminal.click
by FloorEgg | 2025-12-19 22:35:44+00:00
Okay, I'm pretty sure we would heavily agree on a lot of this if we pulled it all apart.

It really boils down to who is using the LLM tool and how they are using it and what they want.

When I prompt the LLM to do something I scout out what I want it to do, potential security and maintenance considerations, etc. I then prompt it precisely, sometimes with equivalent of multi page essay, sometimes with a list of instructions, etc. the point is I'm not vague. I then review what it did and look for potential issues. I also ask it to review what it did and if it sees potential issues (sometimes with more specific questioning).

So we are mashing together a few dimensions, my GPC was pointing out:

- A: competent developer wants software functionality produced that is secure and maintainable

- B: competent developer wants to produce software functionality that is secure and maintainable

The distinction between these is subtle but has a huge impact on senior developer attitudes to LLMs from what I've seen. Dev A more likely to figure out how to get most out of LLMs, Dev B will resist and use flaws as excuse to do it themselves. Reminds me a bit of early AWS days and engineers hung up on self hosting. Or devs wanting to built everything from scratch instead of using a framework.

What youre pointing out is that if careless or inexperienced developers use LLMs they will produce unmaintainable and insecure code. Yeah I agree. They would probably produce insecure and unmaintainable code without LLMs too. Experienced devs using LLMs well can produce secure and maintainable code. So the distinction isn't LLMs, it's who is using them and how.

What just occured to me though, and I suspect you will appreciate, is the fact that I'm only working with other very experienced devs. Experienced devs working with JR or careless devs who can now produce unmaintainable and insecure code much faster is a novel problem and would probably be really frustrating to deal with. Reviewing a 70k line PR produced by an LLM without thoughtful prompting and oversight sounds awful. I'm not advocating this is a good thing. Though surely there is some way to manage that, and figuring out how to manage it probably has some huge benefits. I've only been thinking about it for 5 min so I definitely don't have an answer.

One last thought that just occured to me: the whole narrative of AI replacing junior devs seemed bonkers to me because there's still so much demand for new software and LLMs don't remotely compare to developers. That said, as an industry I guess we haven't figured out how to mix LLMs and Jr developers in a way that's net constructive? If JR+LLM = 10x more garbage for SR to review, maybe that's the real reason why JR roles are harder to find?
by GZGavinZhao | 2025-12-19 22:35:45+00:00
Does it handle math expressions (those rendered from LaTeX) well? I've been looking for a good OCR model to transcribe my math textbooks into markdown (obviously ignoring the images and figures) with LaTeX as math expressions, and none of the current OCR models work reliably enough.

EDIT: you can try it yourself for free at https://console.mistral.ai/build/document-ai/ocr-playground once you create a developer account! Fingers crossed to see how well it works for my use case.
by realityfactchex | 2025-12-19 22:35:48+00:00
> As someone who is a huge IDE fan, I vastly prefer the experience from Codex CLI compared to having that built into my IDE, which I customize for my general purposes

Fascinating.

As a person who *loathes VS Code* and prefers terminal text editors, I find Cursor great!

Maybe because that I have zero desire to customize/leverage Cursor/VS Code.

Neat. Cursor can do what it wants with it, and I can just lean into that...
by arjie | 2025-12-19 22:35:51+00:00
With Wikipedia, most things are less erasure and more incompleteness. I looked at the Rodney Brooks article and couldn't find an easy way to introduce the Roomba into it without sounding stilted[0] since I don't know how involved he was in the creation of the device and I don't know enough about the company to make an educated guess. If you know how he was involved perhaps you could share some links to news and so on that says so. I don't mind fixing the Wikipedia article to appropriately link.

0: The best effort I could make would be to edit "He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot" to say "He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot (manufacturer of the Roomba)"
Show HN: Merview – OSS Mermaid and Markdown Editor and Viewer
by mickdarling | 2025-12-19 22:35:55+00:00
Hi, I'm Mick.

This is a side project I built over the last couple months. We've been using it internally at as we've been building http://dollhousemcp.com to view all the markdown documents with Mermaid diagrams that AI tools love to generate. They're all quite good at building these diagrams. It's a great way to visualize workflow for complex systems, but I couldn't find a good way to render them locally.

GitHub renders them fine, but only after you push. The VS Code extensions for inline Mermaid rendering weren't intuitive and broke on my system several times. The various online tools want you to create accounts, hand over login credentials, connect to services, and often have limitations. That was enough friction for me to just build my own. And, it turns one month old this Saturday.

I wanted simple: drop a markdown file in, see it rendered with working diagrams. No login, no setup.

What it does:

- Renders markdown with full Mermaid diagrams (flowcharts, sequence diagrams, ER diagrams, state machines, etc.) - Drag-and-drop or paste markdown directly - Load a file from the drop down - Load a remote files by pasting in a URL or link directly with a parameter (?url=path/to/file.md) - Double-click and zoom in on diagrams for fullscreen view - Mermaid snippet dropdown (Ctrl/Cmd+M) for quick diagram insertion / edits - Lots of theming: - Markdown syntax highlighting - Markdown preview - Code syntax highlighting - Mermaid diagram theming - Upload custom CSS for complete styling control - Print/PDF export - Use horizontal rules for visible page breaks in a PDF print (I use this for quick slide decks)

Self-eating dogfood – the homepage and all documentation are markdown files rendered by Merview itself.

It's entirely client-side, no backend, no tracking. Clone it and run it locally or host it yourself.

I also worked hard to make sure it has robust safety, and significant tests for my benefit and anyone else modifying it.

It is AGPL-3.0 licensed, so anyone can use it, and modifications can make their way back into the Open Source community. If you have issues, notes, comments, requests, please feel free to add them to the repo.

I know it still has rough spots, but I am proud of it, and wanted to show it off.

Curious what folks think, and happy to answer questions.
by hoss1474489 | 2025-12-19 22:36:05+00:00
I like this. I more generally look for reduces chaos.

I’ve seen the pursuit of disambiguation employed to deadlock a project. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do—the project sponsor doesn’t know what they want. But many times the senior needs to document some assumptions and ship something rather than frustrating the calendars of 15 people trying to nail down some exact spec. Knowing whether to step on the brake or the gas for the benefit of the team and company is a key senior trait.

This is a yes, and to the article; building without understanding the problem usually will increase chaos—though sometimes the least effort way through it is to build a prototype, and a senior would know when to do that and how to scope it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-19 22:36:18+00:00
What is the value of Wikipedia? Hard to value public goods, because the value of HN comes from its mods. I suppose if one must, start at whatever gains YC has seen on its investments during HN's lifetime, with some discount for the fact that ZIRP is unlikely to occur again and the future will not be like the past wrt the startup ecosystem. There is no guarantee a new owner would cultivate the same forum participants who might consider being a founder or employee of a YC portfolio company. The product is YC portfolio company stock; HN is machine to leverage curious, driven people as fuel for VC gains, with the consumer excess being brain tickles for the rest of us.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pulling-back-the-curtain-...

https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report
by ajkjk | 2025-12-19 22:36:27+00:00
er? No we are talking about the attribution of blame. If you're saying "what a shame that iRobot is being sold to Chinese competitors" and then you "...because of the FTC" you're essentially lying; it's because of incompetence and capitalism and then also maybe a little bit the FTC (although I'm very skeptical of that as well, because in this whole narrative the FTC is the only party that can be even claimed to be acting prosocially).
by yongjik | 2025-12-19 22:37:56+00:00
Chomsky Hierarchy pertains to "languages" defined in the theory of computation: i.e., it is a subset of the set of all finite sequence of alphabets (for some fixed notion of "alphabets"). If a sentence (a particular finite sequence of alphabets) is in the subset, then it is a "valid" sentence of the language. Otherwise it is invalid.

It should be already clear from this that this notion of language is rather different from natural languages. For example, if there is a formal language that contains "Good morning" and "My hovercraft is full of eels" as valid sentences, then nothing distinguishes these sentences any more. (Of course you could add annotations and build semantic values but they are not essential to the discussion of formal languages.)

It gets a bit more ridiculous when you try to connect LLMs to the Chomsky hierarchy. Modern LLMs do not really operate on the principle of "is this a valid sentence?" yet provide vastly superior results when it comes to generating naturally sounding sentences.

I think LLMs have put an end to any hope that formal language theory (in the style of Chomsky Hierarchy) will be relevant to understanding human languages.
by themafia | 2025-12-19 22:38:31+00:00
> closing off their escape route and de-facto enforcing the sell-off to the Chinese.

There was only one escape route? And it happened to be the one they selected themselves? That seems dubious.

> organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies

We literally have laws which _require_ them to do this. This isn't ideological targeting it's the consequence of the "due care clause" of the constitution. You should ask why previous iterations of the FTC have ignored this responsibility not why the one in question actually tried to live up to it.

> A simple "Request For Evidence".

These are publicly traded corporations not hapless individuals.

> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.

You've tried to obscure yours but I suspect the same thing of you.

> You operate in the fog of war.

This is goalpost shifting to the level of propaganda. You operate in a market. If you fail your assets will be auctioned off. The death of a corporation is a natural consequence of the system we've developed. It's required. It caries none of the weight of the death of an individual or of war.

> We could easily be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.

> In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made.

This seems contradictory. We could easily be telling a different tale if the 2010s played out differently; however, as you say, one cannot go back.
by slwvx | 2025-12-19 22:38:51+00:00
Two things that are as (maybe more) important to me as server location are the data use restrictions and the profit model of the site. If (for example) Kamunity explicitly said that data would not be sold, and was explicitly a non-profit I'd be more interested. Wikipedia and Mastodon have their problems, but at least there's not an obvious need for them to exploit their users to make money.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-19 22:39:24+00:00
That's my take. I break the DRM off books I've bought. I own those copies. I'll format shift them for my own convenience. Bought on Kindle but want to read on my Kobo? It's impossible to make me feel guilt about that.

But I don't read books I haven't legally acquired, whether through a paid bookstore, or temporarily borrowed via Libby, or Standard Ebooks or whatever. I won't yell at other people for doing that, but I don't do it myself. In a nutshell, I follow the same rules as with physical books I own (or temporarily possess).
by ksenzee | 2025-12-19 22:39:31+00:00
> We trained users to treat their devices like unruly animals that they can never quite trust. So now the idea of a machine that embodies a more clever (but still unreliable) animal to wrangle sounds like a clear upgrade.

I wish I didn't agree with this, but I think you're exactly right. Even engineers dealing with systems we know are deterministic will joke about making the right sacrifices to the tech gods to get such-and-such working. Take that a step further and maybe it doesn't feel too bad to some people for the system to actually not be deterministic, if you have a way to "convince" it to do what you want. How depressing.
by okushigue | 2025-12-19 22:40:32+00:00
TNI Navigation System v2.0 - Validated for Operational Use

A revolutionary navigation system for spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) achieving sub-meter accuracy through innovative use of the Starlink mega-constellation. Key Achievements

Position Accuracy: 3.62 m (99.7%) - Exceeds target by 13.8× Velocity Accuracy: 0.280 m/s (99.7%) - Exceeds target by 7.1× 100% Success Rate: 1,000 Monte Carlo trials GDOP: 2.89 (median) - Excellent geometry Economic Impact $390,000 saved per rendezvous operation 260 kg propellant conserved per mission 54% ΔV reduction vs GPS-based approach Performance

Median: 8 cm position, 8 mm/s velocity Contents

Complete Python simulation code 40-page technical validation report Monte Carlo results (1,000 runs) Publication-quality figures Status: All requirements PASSED - Ready for flight demonstration
by gizmondo | 2025-12-19 22:42:12+00:00
Why the price would be lower? Presumably the price was already agreed upon. Having a provision in the contract that the price is reduced if this argument is made to the antitrust authorities makes no sense.

I now realized that I recently saw some old tweets from this guy where he first opposed this merger and then celebrated the cancellation of the deal. So it seems he's just grasping at straws to look less like an idiot.
by resfirestar | 2025-12-19 22:42:43+00:00
On the art part at least, there's an analogy to Unity. No one liked low effort asset-flip games, and they gave Unity a bad name because they all showed the logo on startup due to using the cheapest license. But no one noticed or complained when good games were made with Unity, or even when they selectively used off the shelf assets. Similarly, we're going to go through a period where every terrible game is going to be full of assets with the stable-diffusion slop look, but no one will notice the AI-generated textures in good games that have actual standards for art.

On the other hand, I think I'd personally vote "somewhat negative" on quests and dialogue. Many games have too much pointless filler dialogue and unmemorable sidequests. Maybe if you don't care enough to actually write it, it shouldn't be there at all.
by smeej | 2025-12-19 22:42:51+00:00
I mean, you're citing goodereader.com as though that's somehow an authoritative source and not just a blog by a guy who likes ereaders, but has no special legal knowledge.

Much more useful would have been if you had linked to an archive of the original Kindle Store Terms of Use, which state:

> Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.[0] (emphasis mine)

Notice that "or as authorized by Amazon" is part of the clause with "solely on the device," not a separate clause that somehow might be interpreted to apply to the "right to keep a permanent copy" part.

Does it also say that it is considered licensed to you? Sure. But the "license" is the "right to keep a permanent copy."

It's one thing for Amazon to say, "Shit, we sold you a book we weren't authorized to sell. We have to undo the whole transaction." It's quite another to do what the GGGGGGGP comment (I didn't count the G's) is complaining about and delete your permanent copy of a book for which they did validly sell you a license to keep a permanent copy.

Amazon has meaningfully changed the license agreement now. In 2025, it says:

> Use of Kindle Content. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. Upon your download or access of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you subject to the terms of this Agreement, including without limitation those in “Changes to Service; Amendments” below, a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content (for Subscription Content, only as long as you remain an active member of the underlying membership or subscription program), solely through Kindle Software or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Kindle Content. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict. Some Kindle Content, such as interactive or highly formatted content, may not be available to you on all Kindle Software.[1]

They've eliminated the right to keep a permanent copy that was originally part of the license sold. That change matters. Deleting content sold under that license is a violation of the terms of the agreement on their part.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110109000847/http://www.amazon... [1]https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
by magmostafa | 2025-12-19 22:43:13+00:00
This is exactly why network segmentation is critical for IoT devices. I always recommend putting all smart cameras and IoT devices on a separate VLAN with no direct internet access - only local network access through a firewall with strict egress rules.

For anyone concerned about their TP-Link cameras, consider: 1. Disable UPnP on your router 2. Use VLANs to isolate IoT devices 3. Block all outbound traffic except specific required endpoints 4. Consider replacing stock firmware with open alternatives when available 5. Regularly check for firmware updates (though as this article shows, updates can be slow)

The hardcoded keys issue is particularly troubling because it means these vulnerabilities persist across the entire product line. Thanks for the detailed writeup - this kind of research is invaluable for the security community.
by vablings | 2025-12-19 22:43:20+00:00
I think there is something to be said for companies putting their money where their mouth is. Getting behind Gaming on Linux with a hardware launch is pretty substantial and Valve have been explicit since 2013 that they think it's the way forward.

They also continue to have first class support for BOTH windows and Linux without forcing it down anyone's throat which is not the strategy for literally every tangent related market. There are no super annoying layers to this strategy Valve could have done a number of things to force users to use Linux such as. - Linux game exclusives and Linux discounts. - Preventing the steam machine from running on a windows machine by dropping certain hardware - Making windows users second class by not releasing the latest updates and features. - Making other hardware incompatible with windows e.g. Valve Index, Steam Controller etc
by 79a6ed87 | 2025-12-19 22:43:30+00:00
As a user of DOMPurify, I have to bring attention to the new HTML Sanitizer API[1].

Not the same, I know, but it's relevant still.

Also, there's a post from less than 2 weeks ago about it[2]

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTML_Saniti...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198606
by sodapopcan | 2025-12-19 22:44:08+00:00
I do have a blog post about this sitting around along with all my other mostly completed posts. Finishing this one would be great as it's a topic I'm very passionate about!

Our stories were broken up to take worst-case-scenario 5 days, the ideal was 1-3, of course. Maybe would be multi-day stories so yes, if something ended up taking 5 days it was possible the whole team could have touched it (our team was only 6 devs so never more than 6).

In short, there are the usual hurdles with pairing, the first one being that it takes some time to catch your stride but once you do, things start flying. It is of course not perfect and you run into scenarios where something takes longer because as a new person joins the ticket, they want to tweak the implementation, and it can get pulled in different directions the longer it takes. But this also gets better the longer you keep at it.

There are lots of pros AFAIC but a couple I like: you develop shared ownership of the codebase (as well as a shared style which I think is neat), ie, every part of the app had at least a few people with lots of context so there was never any, "Oh, Alice knows the most about that part of so let's wait until she's back to fix it" kinda thing. There is no "junior work." When a junior joins the team they are always pairing so they ramp up really quickly (ideally they always drive for the first several months so they actually learn).

Another downside would be it's bad for resume-driven-development. You don't "own" as many projects so you have to get creative when you're asked about big projects you've led recently, especially if you're happily in an IC role.

And also yes, if there is a super small task that is too small to pair on, we'd have a reviewer, but often these were like literal one-line config changes.

We'd also have an independent reviewer whenever migrations were involved or anything risky task that needed to be run.