MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmaaz | 2025-12-30 02:45:49+00:00
To provide some additional context: the algorithm being used by QEPCAD is cylindrical algebraic decomposition, which has a time complexity 2^2^n (yes, doubly exponential). So, while in theory many problems could be solved by tossing them into CAD, this is often not tractable. This isn’t a knock against CAD: imo it is one of the most fundamental and under-appreciated algorithms and I devoted a big chunk of my PhD thesis to it.

By the way, to my knowledge QEPCAD is essentially the only complete open-source implementation of it. Mathematica also implements it. I wrote one of the few open-source implementations of it, although it does not do quantifier elimination; it only returns the truth of a given statement. https://github.com/mmaaz-git/cad.
by majormajor | 2025-12-30 02:45:52+00:00
> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

for simple stuff, sure, React was ALWAYS inefficient. Even Javascript/client-side logic is still overkill a lot of the times except for that pesky "user expectations" thing.

for anything codebase that's long-lived and complex, combinatorics tells us how it'll near-impossible to have good+fast test coverage on all that.

part of the reason people don't roll their own is because being able to assume that the library won't have major bugs leads to an incredible reduction in necessary test service, and generally people have found it a safe-enough assumption.

throwing that out and trying to just cover the necessary stuff instead - because you're also throwing out your ability to quickly recognize risky changes since you aren't familiar with all the code - has a high chance of painting you into messy corners.

"just hire a thousand low-skilled people and force them to write tests" had more problems as a hiring plan then just "people are expensive."
Show HN: ScreenCraft – Screenshot and PDF API Without the Puppeteer Headaches
by RobTheFrog | 2025-12-30 02:46:02+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a REST API for capturing screenshots and generating PDFs from URLs.

Why: I got tired of managing Puppeteer/Playwright in production. Memory leaks, zombie processes, Docker issues. So I wrapped it in an API.

Stack:
- Node.js + Fastify
- Playwright (more stable than Puppeteer in my experience)
- Self-hosted on Hetzner

Features:
- Screenshots: PNG, JPEG, WebP
- PDFs: A4, Letter, custom sizes
- Full-page capture, custom viewports
- Cookie consent auto-accept
- Lazy-load handling

API example:

curl -X POST "https://www.screencraftapi.com/api/v1/screenshots" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com"}'

Free tier: 250 requests/month
Docs: https://www.screencraftapi.com/docs

Would love technical feedback. What's missing? What would make this useful for your projects?
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-30 02:46:15+00:00
My personal idea revolves around "can I run it on a basic smartphone, with whatever the 'floor' for basic smartphones under lets say $300 is for memory (let's pretend RAM prices are normal).

Edit: The fact this runs on a Smartphone means it is highly relevant. My only thing is, how do we give such a model an "unlimited" context window, so it can digest as much as it needs. I know some models know multiple languages, I wouldnt be surprised if sticking to only English would reduce the model size / need for more hardware and make it even smaller / tighter.
by danpalmer | 2025-12-30 02:46:37+00:00
Same position, different results. I'm maybe 20% faster. Writing the code is rarely the bottleneck for me, so there's limited potential in that way. When I am writing the code, things that I'd find easy and fast are a little faster (or I can leave AI doing them). Things that are hard and slow are nearly as hard and nearly as slow when using AI, I still need to maintain most of the code in my head that I'd need to without AI, because it'll get things wrong so quickly.

I think what you're working on has a huge impact on AI's usability. If you're working on things that are simple conceptually and simple to implement, AI will do very well (including handling edge cases). If it's a hard concept, but simple execution, you can use AI to only do the execution and still get a pretty good speed boost, but not transformational. If it's a hard concept and a hard execution (as my latest project has been), then AI is really just not very good at it.
by opello | 2025-12-30 02:47:47+00:00
> I'm assuming it's to prevent moisture from corroding a port of some kind.

The primary value discussed in the talk was electrical isolation since there's mains voltage in the appliance and the potential for shorts or inadequate isolation would require some kind of isolation, so a path that optically isolates the communication makes quite a bit of sense.

I'm also curious if other devices have gone this route.
by bluGill | 2025-12-30 02:47:52+00:00
why would I? Either the code works either way or I'm glad to know I broke things when the seemingly unrelated tests breaks. Remember if a test fails the fault is almost always the last thing I changed.

now I do take care to avoid writing tests that depend on other code's results that would be likely to change. This hasn't proven to be the problem I've so often been warned about though.
by wahern | 2025-12-30 02:48:33+00:00
> People frequently have choices between jobs that are easier or otherwise more pleasant and jobs that pay more. For example, long-haul truck drivers get paid significantly more than short-haul drivers, but they also sleep in their trucks and don't get to see their families most nights. Likewise, a lot of jobs require you to get a degree or certification, which can be a lot of work, which people may not be willing to do if they don't need to.

That's a slight of hand. There's value in choice, and that value is being reaped by the worker precisely because of poverty programs make it possible.

But let's go with that example. You're assuming the number of truckers and trucker-hours would remain constant. But they wouldn't. That's just not how dynamic systems work. There are other people for whom short-haul trucking is the less desirable choice than what they're doing now, or who work fewer hours than they're doing now. Without the welfare subsidies, the supply of short-haul trucking labor would increase--more people working more hours. Similarly, you're assuming the demand for short-haul trucking would remain the same at higher wages. But demand in economics not the same thing as "I would like" or even "I need".

The whole argument is the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, and it's sold by throwing contrived complexity at people and hoping they don't think it through. Like perpetual motion or free energy machines, at the most miniscule scale there are exceptions and caveats, but those exceptions don't scale to a systems level. That doesn't stop con-artists from selling their Rube Goldberg machines, though, knowing the vast majority of people won't think it through.
by esperent | 2025-12-30 02:49:45+00:00
It's illegal to protest outside of abortion centers for very good reason, because it targets vulnerable women going through a difficult medical procedure. These people were arrested for protesting outside an abortion clinic. They can go and "pray in their heads" literally anywhere else in the entire country and they won't get arrested. They can even stage full on peaceful protests against abortion and they won't get arrested. They just can't do it next the actual clinics.
by bentt | 2025-12-30 02:50:35+00:00
You’re in a tough spot. Loneliness can make people act in ways that others are put off by. You can end up trying to pull people in to help salve the pain you feel. It can perpetuate itself despite your effort.

I heard a saying once that is a hard truth that stuck with me. “If you want to be loved, be loveable.” Take stock of yourself and your confidence. Choose some areas for growth and accomplishment that you can get after independently. You’re in college so it’s a great time to build yourself with intention.

For example, learn to play music. Get into a sport. Find your interests and get after them with gusto.

Skills and interests will give opportunity for connection not just with people but with yourself. You can be so much more than you are today.
by GreyPhoenix11 | 2025-12-30 02:50:40+00:00
I work a corporate job and have also made a folder on my computer where I have about 10 HTML "tools". All with a specific purpose that helps me with a niche use. Mostly written by me, though, of course with some vibe coding. For instance, I have a custom GANTT chart project tracker with many oddities that I felt too confined with Excel. Though, I am weary of persistent storage only and am looking into exploring with Netlify to at least host them via a static website, maybe with a little storage. Can anyone offer any advice on how to host by literally adding the HTML text or files? Not looking to use an FTP or anything really complicated.
by bigiain | 2025-12-30 02:50:46+00:00
I do that on my phone. It's almost as easy to tap an ocr-ed url in my photos app as it is to click a link on a web page.

(On my laptop, I'm just as likely to spend half a day writing a scraper or reverse engineering the javascript and apis to collect a dozen or two urls that I should have just jotted down in my notebook...)
by ok_dad | 2025-12-30 02:50:51+00:00
No offense intended, I don't even know you at all, but I see people claim things like you did so often these days that I begin to question reality. These claims always have some big disclaimer, as yours does. I still don't know a single personal acquaintance who has claimed even a 2x improvement on general coding efficiency, not even 1.5x in general efficiency. Some of my coworkers say AI is good for this or that, but I literally just waste my time and money when I use it, I've never gotten good results or even adequate results to continue trying. I feel like I am taking crazy pills sometimes with all of the hype!

I hope you're just one of the ones who figured it out early and all the hype isn't fake bullshit. I'd much rather be proven wrong than for humanity to have wasted all this time and resources.
by bflesch | 2025-12-30 02:51:21+00:00
Now it is loading. You are still in violation of GDPR rules by including a SVG file with the google logo from the clerk.com domain and a css file from tailwindcss.com - both are tracking users. There is no privacy policy on your page. The privacy policy should include a list of companies you share my visitor data with and what kind of data is shared, and how I can deny sharing that data.
by godelski | 2025-12-30 02:51:33+00:00
> the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.

I've usually found complaints about abstraction in programming odd because frankly, all we do is abstraction. It often seems to be used to mean /I/ don't understand, therefore we should do something more complicated and with many more lines of code that's less flexible.

But this usage? I'm fully on board. Too much abstraction is when it's incomprehensible. To who is the next question (my usual complaint is that a junior should not be that level) and I think you're right to point out that the "who" here is everyone.

We're killing a whole side of creativity and elegance while only slightly aiding another side. There's utility to this, but also a cost.

I think what frustrates me most about CS is that as a community we tend to go all in on something. We went all in on VR then crypto, and now AI. We should be trying new things but it more feels like we take these sides as if they're objective and anyone not hopping on the hype train is an idiots or luddite. The way the whole industry jumps to these things just feels more like FOMO than intelligent strategy. Like making a sparkling water company an "AI first" company... its like we love solutions looking for problems
by maxdo | 2025-12-30 02:51:36+00:00
I can see lots of tools explode around CC, but majority still use Cursor, cursror supports multiple agents, branching, multimodels etc.

It is really hard to justify tools like these, where you need CC+this tool+ some other tools to make it more productive , and you need to deal with billing where cursor gives you access to all models possible + BYOK.

Not trying to be negative ... but why hustle?
by willturman | 2025-12-30 02:51:55+00:00
I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word properly used.

That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage.

It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination).

[1] https://www.nps.gov/places/petroglyphs-pueblo-loop-trail-sto...

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/25229906@N00/4056975591/
by mmooss | 2025-12-30 02:53:21+00:00
No. I generally like Bluetooth speakers - it's nice to share some music and someone's energy, and I mind panhandling less than all the advertising I see in my web browser. At least the panhandler needs the money and doesn't track me, and usually they're pretty friendly and neighborly.

Seriously, what's the big deal? People are looking to confirm all the anti-city hate. Maybe if these people make you uncomfortable, the lack of trust is in the mirror.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-30 02:53:45+00:00
I'm a proponent of adding tax brackets.

We currently have 7 brackets capping out at $609,351 (37%) [1]. I say we add brackets at $2mm (39%), $10mm (41%), $100mm (43%) and $1bn (45%).

Then take away the stepped-up basis past 10x the median American's wealth (about $6mm [2]).

If you do it right, you could actually (increase) the thresholds on the lower brackets, thereby bringing the median voter's taxes down.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-american-net-worth-62...
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-12-30 02:53:51+00:00
> Show of hands for anyone using ChatGPT to shop. Be honest.

I recently used ChatGPT to compare headphones before buying them, although the workflow there was a bit manual; I took some headphones that I had in mind off a cursory search off Amazon, had ChatGPT produce a summary of the differences and then picked the "best" one.

I'd assume this happens a lot more, I can easily someone doing, produce a list of [product category X] under < $Y, then use follow-up queries, etc.

> As a new sales channel, young people are buying content off of TikTok and Instagram directly now.

I assume this would only work for the things that influencers can directly sell, e.g. selling makeup to women that way is apparently a thing; for other products that are not impulse-buys, ChatGPT is a perfectly reasonable way to shop.
by bsder | 2025-12-30 02:54:13+00:00
> to splice a 20 second mention of something into a stream

I'm seeing the start of this already, AFAICT. There have been a couple of YouTube videos with embedded ads that YouTube flipped over to a YouTube ad at exactly the point the sponsor part started.

Google is almost certainly getting ready to use AI to splice out in stream ads and replace them with Google ads.
by remich | 2025-12-30 02:54:52+00:00
Please do. I'm trying to help other devs in my company get more out of agentic coding, and I've noticed that not everyone is defaulting to Opus 4.5 or even Codex 5.2, and I'm not always able to give good examples to them for why they should. It would be great to have a blog post to point to…
by majormajor | 2025-12-30 02:55:04+00:00
That makes sense.

My basic problem is: "first-run" LLM agent output frequently does one or more of the following: fails to compile/run, fails existing test coverage, or fails manual verification. The first two steps have been pretty well automated by agents: inspect output, try to fix, re-run. IME this works really well for things like Python, less-well for things like certain Rust edge cases around lifetimes and such, or goroutine coordination, which require a different sort of reasoning than "typical" procedural programming.

But let's assume that the agents get even better at figuring out the deal with the more specialized languages/features and are able to iterate w/o interaction to fix things.

If the first-pass output still has issues, I still have concerns. They aren't "I'm not going to use these tools" concerns, because I also sometimes write bugs, and they can write the vast majority of code faster than I can.

But they are "I'm not gonna vibe-code my day job" concerns because the existence of trivially-catchable issues suggests that there's likely harder-to-catch issues that will need manual review to make sure (a) test coverage is sufficient, (b) the mental model being implemented is correct, (c) the outside world is interacted with correctly. And I still find bugs in these areas that I have to fix manually.

This all adds up to "these tools save me 20-30% of my time" (the first-draft coding) vs "these agents save me 90% of my time."

So I'm kinda at a plateau for a few months where it'll be hard to convince me to try new things to try to close that 20-30% -> 90% number.
by wolvoleo | 2025-12-30 02:55:33+00:00
Not directly because of climate change no. Some areas will be fairly unaffected or might even improve for human use (eg Siberia).

However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change which nature can't handle, and it will change which areas are viable for human habitation and agriculture. Meaning many many people will have to move.

And of course mass forced migration combined with shrinking resources is a recipe for global war. See how popular migrants are now in many countries, and consider half the world having to migrate to survive. Poor people living in areas that become uninhabitable (and who never caused the problem in the first place) will move to a better place where it's likely the current inhabitants will protest.

And a global war is very likely to lead to extinction with the WMD tech humanity has now.

All we need to do is stop trying to be richer than everyone else and to work together :(
by tempest_ | 2025-12-30 02:55:36+00:00
For real I basically don't even read cover letters any more and I don't blame the applicants for generating them with LLMs. Unless you are applying for a higher level position a cover letter used to just be a mild heuristic for this person took an extra 10 minutes to alter their standard cover letter and include a different related paragraph. Now its just wasted text.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-30 02:56:45+00:00
I thought there is such a thing (although probably some TV sets do not have) as "film maker mode" to do it according to the film maker's intention (although I don't know all of the details, so I do even know how well it would work). "Dolby Vision Movie Dark" is something that I had not heard of.

(However, modern TV sets are often filled with enough other junk that maybe you will not want all of these things anyways)
by levocardia | 2025-12-30 02:57:18+00:00
I just take a grug brain approach. I do touch CLAUDE.md and then just explain how the code/files/project spec work, like I'm writing a slack message or email to a really smart colleague, and then let it rip, always using biggest model with thinking on. If something consistently goes wrong I add more to CLAUDE.md or even better, have Claude Code just update CLAUDE.md itself with the new issue explained. I'm probably 3 months behind what you could get with absolute SOTA practices but it still works so well that I'm amazed and amused on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
by rich_sasha | 2025-12-30 02:57:39+00:00
My take is there are not really any reasonable Tesla investors left. Due to a steady supply of Real Believers, anyone with a short bet got burnt time after time.

So these people are no longer shorting. Sane long-only people, likewise have been out for a long time. You're left with a clique of people who won't sell regardless, and when Elon promises to make ice cream with robotaxies, they'll buy a bit more stock.

When only irrational people trade something, the price and market for it are irrational too.
by hamstergene | 2025-12-30 02:58:00+00:00
I feel like many people in the comments aren't aware that Karpathy is an ML scientist for whom programming is a complementary skill, not a profession. The only reason he came up with "vibe coding" is because maximum complexity of his hobby projects made it seem believable. Maybe take his opinions about fate of programming with a grain of salt.

He is brilliant no doubt, but not in that field.
Tell HN: No Scrollbar on Google Gemini UI
by albert_e | 2025-12-30 02:58:42+00:00
There is no visible scrollbar for https://gemini.google.com on Chrome and Edge -- though I see it on Firefox. (desktop)

I also checked the smartphone apps -- Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, NotebookLM -- none of them show a scrollbar (even as an obligatory visual indicator of yor position in the scroll)

Are we regressing in acessible design and standards?
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-30 02:59:29+00:00
Their revenues last quarter were $57B and by all accounts that’s still increasing! If they hire asian locals to cut costs, then they’re within spitting distance of US Military spending, adjusted for purchasing power.

Keep in mind they won’t need to pay for nuclear weapons maintenance, veterans, etc… so there’s hundreds of billions in savings right there.

They could also just issue more shares and raise a trillion or two through the capital markets.
by saghm | 2025-12-30 02:59:56+00:00
> Ironically some people will do schemaless but use a statically typed lang for regular backend code, which doesn't buy you much. I'd totally do dynamic there.

I honestly feel like the opposite, at least if you're the only consumer of the data. I'd never really go out of my way to use a dynamically typed language, and at that point, I'm already going to be having to do something to get the data into my own language's types, and at that point, it doesn't really make a huge difference to me what format it used to be in. When there are a variety of clients being used though, this logic might not apply though.
by albert_e | 2025-12-30 03:01:14+00:00
Look's cool. Like the no-nonsense design.

I have been juggling an idea that is close to this -- making a personal radio that cycles through favourite playlists from youtube. Interested in seeing how this is implemented.

PS: on a second thought - artist/track name optional display would be good -- I liked a track but now i dont know what it was :)
by dlenski | 2025-12-30 03:01:17+00:00
> I expect it won't be long until someone deploys the first proxy service that handles the initial CONNECT payload in the kernel before offloading packet forwarding to an eBPF script that will proxy packets between hosts at layer 3, making this fingerprinting technique obsolete.

https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle basically works like this. I've used it for many years. I don't think it'll be possible to detect using this technique.