MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rossjudson | 2025-12-13 05:17:32+00:00
I did the same thing (roughly) with Gemini 3.0 Pro.

Prompt: "Analyze the mathematics in the paper. Find mistakes, note instabilities (if present) and generally criticize as needed."

https://gemini.google.com/share/6860fdaea334

The mathematics here are far beyond me, but it's interesting that Gemini more or less concurs with chatgpt with respect to "load bearing reliance on other preprints".

Gemini's summary (there's much more in the link above that builds up to this):

The mathematics is largely robust but relies on heavy "black box" theorems (Iritani's blowup formula, Givental's equivariant mirror symmetry) to bypass difficult geometric identifications in the non-archimedean setting. The primary instability is the lack of a non-archimedean Riemann-Hilbert correspondence, which limits the "enhanced" atoms theory. The core results on cubic fourfolds hold because the specific spectral decomposition (eigenvalues $0, 9, 9\zeta, 9\zeta^2$) is robust and distinct22, but the framework's extension to finer invariants (integral structures) is currently obstructed.
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-13 05:18:09+00:00
Formula One teams are known to throw money (and lots of it) at problems. It works for them because:

- 2 drivers/cars per team. - ~2 hour race on a weekend every ~2 weeks per season.

They don’t need to solve every problem and the solutions just need to work well during the race (at least for the pit crew).

The hospital needs to do this for hundreds of patients every day. They need solutions that can scale (cost less per person). This was about one specific problem (handover) but different patients could bring with them different complications and add new constraints.

Still very cool though. Glad they got some actionable insights.
by bavent | 2025-12-13 05:19:19+00:00
I don’t think you actually read the article then. The first few paragraphs go into how many pages a git repo can actually be. In fact, you had to actually click on an entirely different link to read about them being a furry, meaning you purposefully went looking for something to complain about, rather than having an argument based on the merits of the post alone.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-12-13 05:20:40+00:00
What law is preventing Best Buy from telling TVManufacturer that a credit card with these last 4 digits bought the TV with this exact serial number?

And once the SIM connects near your house, what is preventing the phone company from telling TVManufacturer the rough location of the SIM, especially after that SIM is found to have used too much data?

Then use some commercially available ad database to figure out that the person typically near this location with these last four digits is 15155.

That's just a guess, but there is enough fingerprinting that they will know with pretty high certainty it is you. Whether all this is admissible in civil court, idk.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-13 05:21:24+00:00
Speaking of programming languages...

Just saw your profile and it reminded me of a book my mentor bequeathed to me which we both referred to as "the real blue book":

Starting FORTH[0]

Thanks for bringing back fond memories.

0 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2297758.Starting_FORTH
by kxrm | 2025-12-13 05:22:47+00:00
> I'm a bit of a control freak so I'll usually explicitly direct claude to "load the wireframe-skill" and then do X.

You shouldn't do this, it's generally considered bad practice.

You should be optimizing your skill description. Often times if I am working with Claude Code and it doesn't load I skill, I ask it why it missed the skill. It will guide me to improving the skill description so that it is picked up properly next time.

This iteration on skill description has allowed skills to stay out of context until they are needed rather predictably for me so far.
by somat | 2025-12-13 05:23:32+00:00
That web version is very neat. Solvespace is by far my favorite cad, it ls hard to explain exactly why because it really is quite limited compared to other cad packages, but I think it is mainly because of the fluidity and shear joy of operation while expressing constraints.

One of these days I need to dive into the code and figure out a replacement for the modal "can not create constraint" dialogs as those are the worst part of the whole experience.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-13 05:24:27+00:00
I "blame" Quantamagazine for this.. upselling string theory via Kontsevich, because I don't think there's anything in this work related to string theory other than the Hodge diamond + related "elementary" symmetries (see my other unedited comment in response to a geometer)

It was probably not intentional, though, and might trigger noone besides snobs like us :)
by minitech | 2025-12-13 05:25:23+00:00
Weirdly, what’s currently linked in the article is https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/16/oliver-sacks-c..., which doesn’t exist.

Unrelated(?) classiness:

> In his own journals, Sacks admitted he had given his patients "powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have." Some details, he acknowledged, were "pure fabrications."

— post

> But, in his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.”

— New Yorker article
by pityJuke | 2025-12-13 05:25:36+00:00
Wanting to know what I'm missing r/e: licensing costs.

Wikipedia [0] states:

> VESA, the creators of the DisplayPort standard, state that the standard is royalty-free to implement.

And VESA's website [1] lists Samsung, Sony and LG as being members already, so they've already paid. What am I missing here?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Cost

[1]: https://vesa.org/about-vesa/member-companies/
Show HN: Browser4 – an open-source browser engine for agents and concurrency
by galaxyeye | 2025-12-13 05:25:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I’d like to share an open-source project we’ve been working on for a while: Browser4.

The motivation came from a recurring frustration: most browser automation tools (Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer) are excellent for human-written scripts, but start to show friction when used as a core execution layer for AI agents or at very high concurrency.

So instead of building “another wrapper around Playwright”, we experimented with a different direction: designing a browser engine where AI agents are first-class citizens.

### What Browser4 is

Browser4 is a browser automation engine built on native Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), with a focus on:

* Coroutine-safe concurrency (designed to run many browser sessions in parallel)

* Agent-oriented APIs (navigation, interaction, extraction as composable actions)

* Hybrid extraction: ML agent driven extraction + LLM extraction + structured selectors + an SQL-like DOM query language (X-SQL)

* Low-level control without Playwright-style abstraction overhead

It’s written in Kotlin/JVM, mainly because we needed predictable concurrency behavior and long-running stability under load.

The project is fully open-source (Apache 2.0).

### What it’s not

* It’s not a drop-in Playwright replacement.

* It’s not a no-code RPA tool.

* It’s not “LLM magic” — LLMs sit outside the browser engine.

Browser4 intentionally stays close to the browser execution layer and leaves planning/reasoning to external agent loops.

### Current use cases we’re testing

* Large-scale web data extraction

* Agentic workflows (search → navigate → extract → summarize)

* Price / content monitoring with frequent revisits

* High-concurrency crawling where browser startup and context switching are bottlenecks

On a single machine, we can sustain very high daily page visits, though we’re still validating benchmarks across different workloads.

### Open questions (where I’d love feedback)

* For agentic systems, does it make sense to bypass Playwright entirely and work closer to CDP?

* Where do you see the biggest pain points when combining LLMs with browser automation today?

* Is JVM a reasonable choice here, or is Python still the better tradeoff despite concurrency limits

* What abstractions would you want in a browser engine built for AI agents?

### Links

* GitHub: https://github.com/platonai/browser4

* Website (light overview): https://browser4.io

Happy to answer technical questions or hear criticism — especially from people running browser automation or agent systems in production.

Thanks for reading.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-12-13 05:25:58+00:00
If you wanted to avoid <string.h>, you could use the poor man's strlen(), snprintf(0,0,"%s",argv[1]). For full input validation without adding any more statements, the best I can get (in ISO C) is

uint8_t number = (argc<2||sscanf(*++argv,"%*[0123456789]%n",&argc)||argc--[*argv]?printf("bad\n"):argc[*argv])-'0'; // No problems here

Though with either function you may run into issues if the OS allows arguments longer than INT_MAX. To be defensive, you could use "%32767s" or "%*32767[0123456789]%n" instead, at the cost of failing inputs longer than 32KiB.
by laserbeam | 2025-12-13 05:27:18+00:00
Someone needs to design a super dumb and robust system where I can safely store all my keys on all devices I use an account. The fact that whatsapp, signal and other platforms tend to have a primary device for keys is bonkers to me. A primary device that can randomly die, get stolen or fall in a lake.

I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.

I don’t even want to think about pgp when I have to manually take care of this problem. Not because of my own skills, but because I could never make it reliable for my family and friends on their side.
by ro_bit | 2025-12-13 05:27:20+00:00
> But officers can also make emergency data requests, or EDRs, in cases involving a threat of imminent harm or death. These requests typically bypass any additional verification steps by the companies who are under pressure to fulfill the request as quickly as possible.

How do companies decide which EDRs to fulfill and which ones require a judicial subpoena? Are companies ever even under the obligation to fulfill an EDR?
by spike021 | 2025-12-13 05:27:33+00:00
Apologies for not reading all of your blogs on this, but a follow-up question. Are models still prone to reading these and disregarding them even if they should be used for a task?

Reason I ask is because a while back I had similar sections in my CLAUDE.md and it would either acknowledge and not use or just ignore them sometimes. I'm assuming that's more of an issue of too much context and now skill-level files like this will reduce that effect?
by godelski | 2025-12-13 05:27:53+00:00
You're right, but until the laws change we should be telling everyone how and make these tools better. If we can't change the laws we can make the cat and mouse game too expensive for them to continue.

Plus, I'm pretty confident they are already doing illegal things. On my Samsung TV it wants to force update. There is no decline option, there is no option to turn off updates, only to take it completely offline. There's no way in hell these kinds of contracts would be legal in any other setting. There's no meaningful choice and contracts that strongarm one party are almost always illegal. You can't sign a contract where the bank can arbitrary change the loan on you (they can change interest but they can't arbitrarily charge how that interest is determined. Such as going from 1% to 1000% without some crazy impossible economic situation).

Someone needs to start a class action. Someone needs to push that as far as the courts will go
by rstuart4133 | 2025-12-13 05:28:08+00:00
I don't know a lot about this, but for example an would app side loaded or delivered via F-Droid be subject to this policy?

F-Droid notwithstanding using an alternative app is not a very attractive option right now as there no good alternatives. But if Valve can create an Android app store that competes with the Play store, the in principle situation is very different.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-13 05:30:30+00:00
I quite strongly disagree; a Dockerfile is a fairly good way to describe builds, a uniform approach across ecosystems, and the self contained nature is especially useful for building software without cluttering the host with build dependencies or clashing with other things you want to build. I like it so much that I've started building binaries in docker even for programs that will actually run on the host!
by mindcrime | 2025-12-13 05:31:27+00:00
When I was a kid I saw an ad for Feigenbaum's 3-volume "Handbook of AI" and got a used copy years later

There was a Volume IV added as well at some point[1]. I've had this entire set sitting on my shelf for ages now, intending to read the entire thing "one of these days" but somehow "one day" keeps not showing up. Still, if I live long enough, I still want to read it all eventually.

Hell maybe I'll pull Volume 1 off the shelf later tonight and read a few pages, just to put a stake in the ground and say I started it at least. :-)

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Artificial-Intelligence-IV/d...
by brainless | 2025-12-13 05:32:12+00:00
The skills approach is great for agents and LLMs but I feel agents have to become wider in the context they keep and more proactive in the orchestration.

I have been running Claude Code with simple prompts (eg 1) to orchestrate opencode when I do large refactors. I have also tried generating orchestration scripts instead. Like, generate a list of tasks at a high level. Have a script go task by task, create a small task level prompt (use a good model) and pass on the task to agent (with cheaper model). Keeping context low and focused has many benefits. You can use cheaper models for simple, small and well-scoped tasks.

This brings me to skills. In my product, nocodo, I am building a heavier agent which will keep track of a project, past prompts, skills needed and use the right agents for the job. Agents are basically a mix of system prompt and tools. All selected on the fly. User does not even have to generate/maintain skills docs. I can get them generated and maintained with high quality models from existing code in the project or tasks at hand.

1 Example prompt I recently used: Please read GitHub issue #9. We have phases clearly marked. Analyze the work and codebase. Use opencode, which is a coding agent installed. Check `opencode --help` about how to run a prompt in non-interactive mode. Pass each phase to opencode, one phase at a time. Add extra context you think is needed to get the work done. Wait for opencode to finish, then review the work for the phase. Do not work on the files directly, use opencode

My product, nocodo: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo
by AnonC | 2025-12-13 05:32:29+00:00
> I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.

As per Signal’s diehard proponents, losing chat history is a feature, not a bug (I’m not being facetious when saying this, and you can see comments of this kind in Signal related threads here).

Edited to add: I don’t agree with that premise and have long disliked losing chat history.
by Gud | 2025-12-13 05:32:42+00:00
Very common.

I work for a factory that produces a type of heavy machinery that is in extreme demand. Any person with any semblance of foresight, would understand that in the near to medium term, this will be the case.

During COVID, there was a large dip(~30%) of orders. In the infinite wisdom of our business leaders, it was decided to shut us down. Coincidentally, our equipment was (supposed to be) transferred to our step-sibling factory, where most of the upper management is from… I say step sibling, although we make similar products, we come together due to a merger.

6 months after our supposed shutdown, after a lot of equipment has been transferred and a lot of good people have gone, suddenly demand was back to normal, and our customer are no longer asking how much our product costs, but if they can have one… and it turns out, our step-sibling can’t make our product very well.

It’s all politics, short-sightedness and personal greed, in upper management, UNLESS MAYBE, they founded the company(and still a big IF).
by pfooti | 2025-12-13 05:33:16+00:00
I have had an apple id problem myself, for the past N years. Mine is an old mac.com account, which has my Gmail address as the backup email (and the primary one now that mac.com isn't doing email anymore). Because of this, I cannot sign up for a new account with my Gmail (it is tied to the older mac.com account).

I've managed to reset the password, but I must answer a security question to log in. I mean, I answered those security questions probably a decade ago and I do not know what they are anymore. You can reset your security questions, but to do that you need to use an iPhone (last one I owned was a 4) that is still logged in, or, answer a security question. Which is as we established, the problem.

So every couple of months I log in, try a few other possible answers, get them wrong, and get locked out for a bit.

Anyway, I need to get this fixed my march, due to apple being the formula one streamer in my country now, so I have to actually solve the problem of logging in to my apple account. Or, I guess, making another random email just so I can watch f1. Sigh.

But if anyone knows how to reset security questions, I'd love to know. I would way rather pay apple actual money than go back to torrenting the races.
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2025-12-13 05:33:45+00:00
> “This was an email address that looked like the real thing,” says Exempt, explaining the mechanics of how he tricked Charter Communications. “The real domain of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in Florida is jaxsheriff.org. We purchased jaxsheriff.us and then spoofed our number as the department’s, so that when we called them to verify receipt of the legal process, when they searched the number, it would come back to the sheriff’s office, giving them no reason to doubt it. We use real badge numbers and officer names as well.”

I'm honestly impressed. It's an interesting situation where the companies can only verify the same information that the hackers have access to
by lazarus01 | 2025-12-13 05:34:37+00:00
>> But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

This is exactly how I use it. I prefer Gemini 3 personally.

I try to learn as much as I can about different architectures, usually by reading books or other implementations and coding first principals to build a mental model. I apply the architecture to the problem and the AI fills in the gaps. I try my best to focus and cover those gaps.

The reason I think it is inconsistent in nailing a variety of tasks is the recipe for training LLMs, which is pre-training + RL. The RL environment sends a training signal to update all the weights in its trajectory for the successful response. Karpathy calls it “sucking supervision through a straw”. This breaks other parts of the model.
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-13 05:36:05+00:00
> The lead "researcher" on that paper is a climate change denier who also claims covid didn't exist. He also used racial slurs against a former colleague.

I invite you to read another important Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

No doubt Denis Rancourt holds false and reprehensible beliefs. But you can defeat his claims without attacking his person.
by baby | 2025-12-13 05:36:42+00:00
oh man, I started with iTunes Match because that's the only service that I could use to backup all my MP3s, and now it's all messed up and so much music has just disappeared from my playlist... so sad.

Unfortunately I still don't know a service I can use that will allow me to sync my current MP3s / what I have in Apple Music, and export it if I need it. There's really an issue of owning data and being able to take it elsewhere :/
by dataviz1000 | 2025-12-13 05:39:10+00:00
> they had to rely more on human beings and less on state-of-the-art technology.

They would do better to look at the Michelin starred kitchens starting with leaning to keep their work spaces organized and clean no matter how fast they are moving. Here is a good example of an engineered kitchen. "Oui" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfxQuXT66s
by josephg | 2025-12-13 05:40:21+00:00
My point is the argument against apples monopolistic practices isn’t a technical argument. It’s a legal / social one.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the argument that if I buy a computer it should let me run arbitrary code. But there’s no laws against that. There are laws about monopolies. I see that as a much stronger way to attack Apple over their behaviour here.
by on_the_train | 2025-12-13 05:40:56+00:00
Thank you for bringing reason to this topic where everyone is losing their mind when it comes up. Cosmic rays are sexy, They're sciency, but they're not a good explanation when you actually run the math.

Random but flips are pretty much always bad hardware. That's what the literature says when you actually study it. And that's also what we find at work: we wrote a program that occupied most of the free ram and checked it for bit flips. Deployed on a sizeable fleet of machines. We found exactly that: yes there were bit flips, but they were highly concentrated on specific machines and disappeared after changing hardware.
by ccwu9999 | 2025-12-13 05:41:49+00:00
Really nice walk down memory lane. I remember fidgeting with HyperCard in college. It actually was not released when I got my Mac SE and I had to go back to the campus computer store with a certificate to get the box. It really was the first UI oriented language for the masses, so much it messed up with my mind as I was learning Pascal style programming and this weird notion of resource forks and other minutiae to create a program. So programming was trapped in the realm of the “console” but with HyperCard it was graphical from the beginning. Unfortunately, I had the artistic skills of a rock.

The platform that most makes me think of HyperCard now is not the web but PowerPoint. You can point on objects and they can go to other slides IIRC.

We really haven’t progressed that much more have we?
by pcthrowaway | 2025-12-13 05:44:27+00:00
> Proton is a notable exception.

Proton doesn't provide public APIs for retrieving the public GPG keys associated with their users' accounts, nor do they provide a way to send encrypted mail to their users' accounts without using their official apps.

Ergo, Proton is not really working to further the state of cryptography for email, they're only working to compel users to use their proprietary software (and ultimately their paid services).

If services which do automated sending of emails to their subscribers/users have no way to encrypt those emails for its users who are on proton mail, I don't understand how Proton can claim to care about encryption.