MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hkpatel | 2025-12-20 22:06:19+00:00
I built this because tools can consume massive amounts of context when you load them all upfront. Anthropic came up with a really smart solution to this problem - Tool Search (dynamic tool discovery), Programmatic Tool Calling (orchestrate multiple tools without API round-trips), and Tool Use Examples (improve accuracy with few-shot examples).

The problem? These features only worked with Anthropic's models. So I created Advanced Tools, a TypeScript library that makes these features work with any LLM provider - through Vercel AI SDK. Same codebase, same benefits, different models.
by Verdex | 2025-12-20 22:06:34+00:00
For example:

The output is correct but only for one input.

The output is correct for all inputs but only with the mocked dependency.

The output looks correct but the downstream processors expected something else.

The output is correct for all inputs with real world dependencies and is in the correct structure for downstream processors, but it's not being registered with the schema filtered and it all gets deleted in prod.

While implementing the correct function you fail to notice that the correct in every way output doesn't conform to that thing that Tom said because you didn't code it yourself but instead let the LLM do it. The system works flawlessly with itself but the final output fails regulatory compliance.
by mycall | 2025-12-20 22:06:45+00:00
I think taking key points from a session and making a new skill is less useful than "precaching" by disseminating the key findings and updating related or affected skills, eliminating the need for a new skill (in most cases).

On the other hand, from a pure functional coding appeal, new skills that don't have leaking roles can be more atomic and efficient in the long run. Both have their pros/cons.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-20 22:07:02+00:00
I assume in most cases they're literally the same files. Youtube runs "topic" channels for music that distributors have sent it.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOa-hi751OKY2zGJJv6V2A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSxnv1_J2g (same thing, but on an official channel instead)
by joefourier | 2025-12-20 22:07:10+00:00
There’s a few more considerations:

- You can use the GPU for training and run your own fine tuned models

- You can have much higher generation speeds

- You can sell the GPU on the used market in ~2 years time for a significant portion of its value

- You can run other types of models like image, audio or video generation that are not available via an API, or cost significantly more

- Psychologically, you don’t feel like you have to constrain your token spending and you can, for instance, just leave an agent to run for hours or overnight without feeling bad that you just “wasted” $20

- You won’t be running the GPU at max power constantly
by exasperaited | 2025-12-20 22:07:46+00:00
Neat-ish.

I don't really see why that code is better, more logical, more readable or more robust than the equivalent quite trivial parametrics in more or less any GUI CAD program, and I think the geek discourse is really harmed by people who don't understand the value of the things that OpenSCAD can't ever offer.
by Mawr | 2025-12-20 22:07:55+00:00
That past criticism was and is correct, proven by the fact new Java GCs like ZGC were deliberately designed to offer few knobs.

Go isn't getting any new knobs, there are only two; that's nothing compared to 100's of options that old Java GCs had. Completely incomparable.

> and turns out various GC algorithms are actually useful.

I don't know what you're trying to say here, but I think I know why — you don't know either. Stop spitballing.

There are no "various GC algorithms" at play here at all. There is just a new algorithm that performs better. You can read all about it here: https://go.dev/blog/greenteagc. It's not an optional alternative GC, but a successor.
by haberman | 2025-12-20 22:08:17+00:00
A long time ago I read that CadQuery has a fundamentally more powerful geometry kernel than OpenSCAD, so I dropped any attempt to try OpenSCAD.

Years later, I never actually got the hang of CadQuery, and I'm wondering if it was a mistake to write off OpenSCAD.

I am pretty new to CAD, so I don't actually know when I would run into OpenSCAD's limitations.
by diamondap | 2025-12-20 22:09:17+00:00
> Humans are objectively quite cheap.

I disagree with that statement when it comes to software developers. They are actually quite expensive. The typically enter the workforce with 16 years of education (assuming they have a college degree), and may also have a family and a mortgage. They have relatively high salaries, plus health insurance, and they can't work when they're sleeping, sick or on vacation.

I once worked for a software consultancy where the owner said, "The worst thing about owning this kind of company is that all my capital walks out the door at six p.m."

AI won't do that. It'll work round the clock if you pay for it.

We do still need a human in the loop with AI. In part, that's to check and verify its work. In part, it's so the corporate overlords have someone to fire when things go wrong. From the looks of things right now, AI will never be "responsible" for its own work.
by manuelmoreale | 2025-12-20 22:10:34+00:00
The Indie Blog Crusader

A digital preservationist who wages a one-man war against the AI-slop apocalypse by manually indexing every human-written blog post in existence while playing Unreal Tournament 99 on a secondary monitor.

——-

I have to say, if that’s my future I’m kinda cool with it.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-20 22:10:49+00:00
Indeed. Losing the contents of (lots of) fridges is cheaper, as a whole, than incidentally burning the countryside. We all ultimately pay for the result no matter what, so that seems like a reasonably-sensible bet.

On the fridge itself: You may find that the contents are insured against power outages.

As an anecdote, my (completely not-special) homeowner's insurance didn't protest at all about writing a check for the contents of my fridge and freezer when I asked about that, after my house was without power for a couple of weeks following the 2008 derecho. This rather small claim didn't affect my rate in any way that I could perceive.

And to digress a bit: I have a chest freezer. These days I fill up the extra space in the freezer with water -- with "single-use" plastic containers (water bottles, milk jugs) that would normally be landfilled or recycled.

This does a couple of things: On normal days, it increases thermal mass of the freezer, and that improves the cycle times for the compressor in ways that tend to make it happier over time. In the abnormal event of a long power outage, it also provides a source of ice that is chilled to 0F/18C that I can relocate into the fridge (or into a cooler, perhaps for transport), to keep cold stuff cold.

It's not a long-term solution, but it'll help ensure that I've got a fairly normal supply of fresh food to eat for a couple of days if the power dips. And it's pretty low-effort on my part. I've probably spent nearly as much effort writing about this system here just now as I have on implementing it.
by mrj | 2025-12-20 22:10:51+00:00
Congrats! I could see the value of this, for sure. I handle this problem by spinning up a preview environment in a namespace. Each branch gets its own and a script takes care of setting up namespaces for a couple of shared resources for staging (rabbit and temporal).

It was a lot of work setting that up though. Preview environments based on a helm deploy makes sense. I wish this had been available before I did all that.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-20 22:11:59+00:00
FreeCAD is definitely parametric but I hear you that the interface doesn't make it obvious. It might be worth another look particularly since it's interoperable with OpenSCAD and can work on CSG trees within the interface

At least you've inspired me to try it and see if it's "worth writing home about"

https://wiki.freecad.org/OpenSCAD_Workbench
by umpalumpaaa | 2025-12-20 22:12:41+00:00
What I like about objective-c’s error handling approach is that a method that can fail is able to tell if a caller considers error handling or not. If the passed *error is NULL you know that that is no way for a caller to properly handle the error. My implementations usually have this logic:

if error == NULL and operationFailed then log error Otherwise Let client side do the error handling (in terms of logging)
by fullstackchris | 2025-12-20 22:12:55+00:00
this is basically supabase. their entire stack (and product) can be hosted as a series of something like 10+ docker containers:

https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting/docker

however, like always, 'complexity has to live somewhere'. I doubt even Opus 4.5 could handle this. as soon as you get into database records themselves, context is going to blow up and you're going to have a bad time
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-20 22:13:25+00:00
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/images/straw-man-arguments

What the music/movie industry was claiming in court was not theft. There is no statute that identifies piracy as theft. They were claiming copyright violation and wanted to collect damages for lost revenue.

You are bringing up “identity theft” which is also not theft. If you post your PII here and I use it to open a credit card in your name and then spend a bunch of the money using that card on buying goods and services, you are not the victim. What I do in that case is defraud the bank. They are the ones who are the actual victim and in the ideal world they would be the ones working with the authorities to get their money back.

Of course they would rather not do that so they invented a crime called identity theft and convinced everyone that it is ok for them to make you the victim. They make your life hell since they can’t find the actual criminal while you spend thousands of dollars trying to prove that you don’t owe thousands of dollars. But in reality you were not any part of the fraud. It is on the bank to secure their system enough to prevent this. But they have big time lawyer money and you don’t so here you are.
by WillAdams | 2025-12-20 22:13:38+00:00
The notable limitations for OpenSCAD are:

- functional programming model --- some folks find not having traditionally mutable variables limiting

- output is as an STL, or DXF using polylines

- native objects are spheres, cylinders, cubes, with functions for hull and Minkowski, so filleting and other traditional CAD operations can be difficult
by mmooss | 2025-12-20 22:13:52+00:00
Someone on HN once pointed out that there's a lot more graffiti around: It's printed, in a typeface, well lit, scaled much larger, and pollutes the landscape far more the spraypainted kind.

People call it 'advertising'. It's someone's or some company's tag and their design, and this graffiti is all over the place in the city (and some in the country too), and nobody likes it. I've never seen advertising that I would keep there if I had a choice, and it fills cities - just imagine a city without it.

Why should the wealthy, already with enormously loud voices, get to 'graffiti' the city and kids trying to express themselves and have any voice at all get criticized and arrested? I know the literal answer is property rights. In this case, that system excludes 99.x% from any voice or public expression; the real question is about justice and public good. (It's a philosophical question to explore the issues, not a policy proposal.)
by vhanda | 2025-12-20 22:13:52+00:00
Could you please elaborate on how this is different than the other python based modeling tools - build123d[0] and CadQuery[1].

I recently also got annoyed with OpenSCAD and its limitations and therefore started experimenting with Build123d. I'm very much a beginner in the CAD space and would love to understand what inspired you to build sdf.

My basic understanding is that STL files are essentially like Bitmap images and store a list of triangles and their positions, whereas STEP files are more like Vector art where there is a list of instructions on how to build the model. Most CAD GUI programs also operate on a similar model to vector art where they record a list of operations one on top of another. It's why STEP files are a standardized format and can be imported / exported from most GUI based CAD builders. I think.

Given that SDF also seems like it builds only STL files (I could be wrong), wouldn't learning build123d or CadQuery work better if one cares about compatibility with existing GUI based CAD modeling software?

Additionally, atleast build123d offers a similar conceptual model to using Fusion360 and FreeCad - I have limited experience here - but essentially you sketch something in 2D on a particular plane, and then apply some operations to convert it to 3d in a particular manner - the simplest being extruding. This means the mental modeling of how to construct something is very similar across both GUI based CAD programs and Build123d, and that makes it easier for me to jump between GUI based and code based CAD modelling.

I'd love to understand your point of view, and learn more.

[0] - https://github.com/gumyr/build123d

[1] - https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery
by creakingstairs | 2025-12-20 22:15:00+00:00
> You spend so much time fighting macOS animations and keyboard layouts that I am surprised you have any time left to actually use the computer you keep threatening to replace with a Framework

Yep that’s me.

As for 2026 prediction:

> You will write a 4,000-word HN essay arguing that Silksong’s difficulty curve is a direct allegory for the South Korean 'Hagwon' education system.

Yeah I can see that happening.
by RossBencina | 2025-12-20 22:16:01+00:00
I was curious about the long-term stability of the cited HAKMEM sin/cos generator. I found an overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3111501 (EDIT: I'm still not sure about stability, apparently it is stable in exact arithmetic under certain conditions.) Coincidentally it is related to the Verlet integration video I posted last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253592
by runako | 2025-12-20 22:16:05+00:00
You are right that a lot of systems at a lot of places need 24x7. Obviously.

But there are also a not-insignificant number of important systems where nobody is on a pager, where there is no call rotation[1]. Computers are much more reliable than they were even 20 years ago. It is an Acceptable Business Choice to not have 24x7 monitoring for some subset of systems.

Until very recently[2], Citibank took their public website/user portal offline for hours a week.

1 - if a system does not have a fully staffed call rotation with escalations, it's not prepared for a real off-hours uptime challenge 2 - they may still do this, but I don't have a way to verify right now.
by krackers | 2025-12-20 22:16:29+00:00
No, it can still be modeled as a finite state machine. Each state just encodes the configuration of your memory. I.e. if you have 8 bits of memory, your state space just encodes 2^8 states for each memory configuration.

Any real-world deterministic thing can be encoded as a FSM if you make your state space big enough, since it by definition there has only a finite number of states.
by orlp | 2025-12-20 22:17:15+00:00
The person you replied to stated:

> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools

There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.

I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.

I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
by avidiax | 2025-12-20 22:17:29+00:00
https://github.com/AGWA/snid

So you basically have a cloud server and a domain with a wildcard record, and you then forward IPv4 through IPv6?

I think this somewhat proves my point that IPv6 doesn't solve much for self-hosting. You still need some kind of working IPv4 setup. You are using IPv6 in place of either a reverse proxy or something like tailscale, which I suppose is more convenient.
by nodja | 2025-12-20 22:18:08+00:00
> Reportedly the inter-layer transfer sizes are in kilobyte ranges and PCIe x1 is plenty or something.

Not an expert, but napkin math tells me that more often that not this will be in the order of megabytes—not kilobytes—since it scales with sequence length.

Example: Qwen3 30B has a hidden state size of 5120, even if quantized to 8 bits that's 5120 bytes per token. It would pass the MB boundary with just a little over 200 tokens. Still not much of an issue when a single PCIe lane is ~2GB/s.

I think device to device latency is more of an issue here, but I don't know enough to assert that with confidence.
by tylervigen | 2025-12-20 22:18:14+00:00
I’ve used OpenSCAD for 3D printing random objects for years. It’s the perfect tool for designing super simple geometric objects, because it giant demands that you remember hardly anything about his the interface works. Contrast with Fusion 360 or any other more powerful tool, which are fantastic if you use them daily but a slog of you only boot them up a few times a year.

Also with OpenSCAD, you can feed the documentation to your favorite LLM and ask it for a starter design of whatever you are building. (Or you can skip the documentation; it is in the trading data after all.) Maybe in the future that SVG Pelican on a bike test will be a 3D model in OpenSCAD.
by mrj | 2025-12-20 22:18:27+00:00
Some winners in the 2035 HN predictions:

Show HN: A Python 4.2 framework that transpiles to Go but still lets you use circular imports(github.com) Microsoft 365 Audit: Now requiring a literal DNA sample for volume licensing compliance(theregister.com) Zulip 15.0 adds 'Boomer Mode' to hide markdown from non-technical users(zulip.org)

eh?

Ask HN: Best audiologist for tuning hearing aids to filter out 'Notification Blindness'?
by transcriptase | 2025-12-20 22:18:33+00:00
The basic thing proponents don’t understand is that nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses because they look like MAC addresses with trisomy and are a pain in the ass to remember or type for absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer. And there are infinitely more people with home routers and a few dozen devices than there are people running ISPs, fortune 500s, and data centres. Play with your convolution all you want, in 20 years the rest of us will still be happily assigning 192.168.x.x and ignoring it. V4 space running out is no more the average persons problem than undersea cables or certificate authority.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-20 22:18:36+00:00
>>>but I love building real world products with software.

> Then your advice to these interview problem is to learn some CS - the useful parts of it?

Theory was not my advice.

My advice was to do practical things with trees; I felt it would fit his love of building real things.

I mean, I didn't recommend doing problems out of a textbook, did I?
by romanleeb | 2025-12-20 22:19:20+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Roman and I've been working on Billpal, a tool I built to do my bookkeeping for me.

Started as a personal thing, but I ended up building a product around it so others can use it too.

I'm a freelancer myself and always had a strong dislike for accounting, so I started to automate things bit by bit.

After testing a lot of accounting tools, I realized that a) they have many features I don’t need, and b) I was still faster using a spreadsheet.

So I built this tool to focus only on the essentials: finding invoices in my inbox and matching them to bank transactions.

What it does:

- Imports bank transactions via Open Banking APIs

- Collect invoices from the user’s inbox

- Using an IDP/OCR provider for document extraction

- Extracts basic info like date, supplier name, and line items, as well as specifics like whether it's reverse charge or various tax rates (e.g. from restaurants)

- Matches invoices to expenses based on params like amount, currency (FX conversion), and similarity to supplier names / line items (that's the only agentic part)

- Can also handle credit card statements (this part still needs improvement though)

- Users can then export a CSV with matched records

- Also built a whatsapp bot to make it super simple for users to upload receipts (photo or pdf)

Currently supports banks in the EU and UK, but planning to add US banks down the line.

Focusing on expenses right now but will also add income shortly (outgoing invoices from sent emails).

I would love to get your feedback on it. Check it out here: https://billpal.io

Looking forward to your thoughts / suggestions,

Roman
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-20 22:19:34+00:00
See my other comment. Identity theft is the bank being defrauded and passing the problem onto you. They are the victim, not you and it is their money that’s gone, not yours.

IP theft is more like espionage and possibly lost hypothetical revenue. Again, it isn’t larceny, burglary, etc. You still have the knowledge, it’s just that so does the perpetrator.

Moreover discussions of IP gets into whether it even makes sense to be able to patent algorithms which are at their core just mathematics. So before you can talk about stealing the quadratic formula you need to prove that the quadratic formula is something that can be property.
by bob778 | 2025-12-20 22:20:12+00:00
I want to like Zoo but the rendering engine is so buggy currently that it’s not really usable for more than simple shapes. The text-to-CAD feature they highlight is slow and error-prone, so much so that they explicitly use a “prebuilt” version in the tutorial, and each time I tried it, it gave tool errors or took so long I just did it manually.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-20 22:20:27+00:00
I think I understand this — I mean, OpenSCAD was my brief gateway to parametric CAD, and then I got to FreeCAD via brief stepping stones of CadQuery and other packages.

But OpenSCAD isn't really parametric CAD. It's a programming language; it's parametric for that reason. But it's not really CAD, at another level, in the sense that it does nothing to "aid" your design work. It has no interim abstraction for generated geometry; everything must be explicitly described.

FreeCAD, though, is profoundly parametric, through and through, and really always has been. Indeed the parametric aspects are the main thing that made it workable before the TNP mitigations were added. It is not a limited CAD package, by any means. It's just a somewhat unfriendly one with a CAD kernel that has some limitations. Really it's almost better understood as a 3D IDE with some workflow affordances.

If you are stuck trying to get your head into how FreeCAD works, there are now three really good ways on Youtube: the Mango Jelly Solutions videos are incredible, the Shawn Hymnel/Digikey FreeCAD and 3D Printing course is good, and there are great recent videos by Deltahedra.

But what you will be able to make with it, once you get your head into it, is night and day different to what is possible with OpenSCAD. Because your parametric work in FreeCAD (or other CAD packages) can operate on the geometry of the result of previous operations.

Give it a try in the New Year with FreeCAD 1.1 when it is released.

If you want another stepping stone from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD or any other package, I really recommend you look at CadQuery/Build123D. This will give you a similar coding approach but it will introduce you to operations on the true faces, edges and vertexes of the output of other operations.

(FWIW I would not say that Sketchup is not high end, either. It's not to my tastes but it is quite powerful)
by chickensong | 2025-12-20 22:21:23+00:00
I hope you're right and that it remains that way, but TBH my hopes aren't high.

Big pharma corps are multinational powerhouses, who behave like all other big corps, doing whatever they can to increase profits. It may not be direct product placement, kickbacks, or bribery on the surface, but how about an expense-paid trip to a sponsored conference or a small research grant? Soft money gets their foot in the door.